When Paris Went Dark (15 page)

Despite all the signs, Parisians were still caught flat-footed by the surrender of their city, and it would be months before they realized what a military occupation really meant. A young Parisian wrote in her journal:

The time of year—late spring, summer, and fall—helped lull Parisians into a sense of well-being. Food was still easily available; despite the relentless shopping by the occupiers, the stores were still stocked, and there was no need for coal or large amounts of electricity. The Germans had immediately put France on Berlin time, so there were even more daylight hours available well into the autumn. Curfews were generally later and predictable, and the Métro was running after a brief stoppage. Apartment windows were being unshuttered as those who had left during the exodus returned (in fact, the state railroad system was activating more trains to accommodate the returning hordes, even offering free passage back home to Paris). Maybe this Occupation would not be so onerous. After all, suggests a historian of the period, once the Brits signed their own armistice or surrendered, life would return to normal. The Germans would go back over the Rhine, and a “new Europe” would bring order and prosperity:

The German war machinery—panzers and paperwork—was quite happy to insist to the French and the world that their presence would be as unobtrusive as possible, except for political immigrants and Jews. Still, it was impossible to “miss” the Occupation if one stayed in Paris during that period. The Germans were visitors, wandering curiously with guidebooks in hand, who would not leave for home. They “were everywhere, and they had purposefully selected the most sumptuous buildings, the best-known mansions; they intervened, directly or indirectly, in all the city’s activities; people spoke, sotto voce, of the Gestapo, but they scarcely were aware of the inner workings of the machine that was controlling them.”
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This new administration of Paris was a confusing one, and not only to the occupied. The Reich’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, as well as the Gestapo, the Wehrmacht, and other military services, were all vying to control aspects of Parisian life and the French economy.
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They were also competing for Berlin’s attention. The Occupiers—innocently and purposefully—collided and often duplicated efforts. Recently, the historian Max Hastings has succinctly addressed the contradictions that hampered German administration of both the Reich and its occupied countries:

We’re only tourists.
(Musée de la Résistance nationale)

The Germans were nothing if not planners. Even before the Occupation their spies had long been at work in Paris, and Berlin had been studying the public records of the city of Paris’s architectural office for months in advance. They knew who lived in which apartment houses, which buildings were publicly owned, and which were private. They knew the location of every bank, art gallery, record-keeping depot, insurance company, and warehouse. They had studied blueprints and site drawings so they knew which buildings had multiple entrances. They knew the sewer system and the underground railroad and even
understood the labyrinthine nature of Paris’s mined-out limestone quarries. They knew the specialties and locations of all major hospitals and clinics. They had learned which lycées and schools had extensive playing fields. They had a list of all of the bordellos of Paris and had already selected those that would be reserved for their own men. They had decided which restaurants and which cinemas would be open only to German authorities. They had the names of every wealthy Jewish family and which bank vaults contained their most valuable belongings. They knew which works of art had been removed from which museums and in most cases where those works had been taken. They knew of the census that the French had taken of foreign immigrants. They knew the numbers of rooms that each hotel contained. They knew the telephone and pneumatic-tube systems of the city. They knew who had telephones and where the switchboards were. They knew the intricacies of the river that passed through Paris, its docks and warehouses.

This sight of the Occupier living and working in their city, rather than the much rarer scenes of force, continuously disturbed the Parisians. Appropriators of familiar spaces, the Germans made the City of Light
unheimlich
(uncanny) for its longtime residents. There was no “ordinary,” and as a consequence the Parisian had to take unfamiliar measures to deflect a regular interruption of daily routines and expectations. Many observers of this period—both French and German—remark that Parisians soon assumed a sort of blindness toward the innumerable uniformed men in their midst. Here begins the myth of
Paris sans regard,
the
Stadt ohne Blick
—the city without a face—discussed in the next chapter. Yet we must be careful not to assign a monolithic response on the part of the Parisian populace. Many Parisians benefited from the German presence in their city. Not all Germans were Nazi thugs; they needed entertainment, food, clothing, and other comforts, including human contact. For propaganda purposes, for morale, and for the economy (which the Germans had to support if they were to skim hundreds of millions of francs off the French GDP every month), Paris barely skipped a beat in maintaining a vibrant entertainment industry (films, theater, vaudeville, cabarets,
bordellos, radio variety shows, even an incipient television industry). Horse racing was a major divertissement again by the second year of the Occupation; the fashion industry, even under severe material shortages, still prospered. The bimonthly German guidebook
Der Deutsche Wegleiter für Paris
included pages of advertisements for fashionable designers and what remained of luxury items in the occupied city.

Looking for a good deal.
(Musée de la Résistance nationale)

Every major economic, political, and military unit needed a place to work and to collect; countless Parisian buildings were used for this purpose. The traumas of the Occupation were entombed in the apparent banality of these mostly Haussmannian edifices, clad in the
pierre de taille
(carved or freestone masonry) that gives Paris its character. The authorities chose most of these buildings, too, because they were conveniently located at the intersection of two or more streets, thus providing multiple entrances and exits. They served multiple functions: “The same spot could be a place of torture, of pleasure, or of business.”
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But no structure was too small or insignificant to escape
Nazi attention. They even requisitioned newspaper kiosks to ensure the distribution of their newspapers and magazines. (Other kiosks, the significant remnants of Haussmann’s “street furniture,” were often removed for fear they might be too close to official buildings.) The military constructed concrete blockhouses at key junctions and before key buildings throughout the city. Massive underground bunkers were constructed under the streets and rail stations of the city. They set up warehouses everywhere, especially near major train stations, in which to store the household goods they had “appropriated” from Jewish and “foreign” families. These goods would be sent to Germany to replace what had been destroyed by Allied bombing.

The Germans and their outposts were in almost every Parisian quarter and neighborhood. Every district had an office of the Occupation authorities or an apartment building that had been totally or partially requisitioned by the Germans; the city was dotted with Jewish businesses and residences that had been seized. Wherever she looked, there was a reminder of France’s complete subservience to the Occupier. Hundreds of buildings were requisitioned or “Aryanized”; thousands of apartments were turned over to new owners, either Germans or their sympathizers. Later, changing the purpose of a building, putting a new sign on it, or even razing it rarely erased the memory of its former use, no matter how innocuous that use might have been.

Like the minuet, a dance with precise moves but little touching, the Occupation involved two parties—the Parisian and the German—trying to avoid stepping on each other’s toes. That does not mean that there were not strong feelings individually expressed on both sides. Small signs of resistance—teenagers on their bikes whistling when they passed Germans in uniform, graffiti on the city’s walls, stony stares—cropped up against the inevitable arrogance of the conqueror: pushing ahead in line, making bad jokes, speeding carelessly in their cars on the city’s arteries. Such early signs foreshadowed what was to become a much more bitter interaction.

Soon after the army and the bureaucrats arrived, German women auxiliary workers—Red Cross nurses, secretaries, telephone and
telegraph operators—began to appear on Parisian streets. Dressed in gray uniforms, with perky little caps on their carefully coiffed heads, they soon became known as the “gray mice,” or “little maids.” They walked through the streets with the same patronizing purposefulness of their fellows, eschewing any of the stylishness that defined so many young French women, even in a time of austerity. Parisians gossiped about their “real” purpose, given the large number of men in the German contingent, but, at least for this early period, German couples were rarely seen on the street. These young women lived in hotels that were like dormitories (and even in actual dormitories, such as the one at the recently built Cité internationale universitaire, in the 14th arrondissement); they frequently ate in separate canteens and, like nuns, walked in pairs or groups while shopping. Their presence might have softened the image of the hard soldier whose main task was to impose order, but they also tended to remind the Parisian of the permanence of the German Occupation authorities.

Probably the first major adjustment, in July and August following the Occupation, had to do with automobile transportation. Parisian owners of large cars (in particular, models from 1938, 1939, and 1940) were ordered to take them to the Vincennes hippodrome, on the outskirts of the city, for evaluation and “purchase” by the Occupation authorities. Buses were transformed from gasoline power to wood and charcoal power (
gazogène
), which was provided by large containers atop the vehicles, giving them the look of some sort of humpbacked exotic animal escaped from the zoo. (The mature trees of some arteries had to be trimmed radically in order for these contraptions to pass.) New tires and retreads could no longer be sold to civilians; driver’s licenses were parsimoniously issued. Professions that had lived by the gasoline engine become dead ends: taxi driver, bus driver (many city and intercity bus lines were canceled or shortened), deliveryman, and moving man. The bicycle—soon de rigueur for anyone not walking—became even more prevalent, and in the Occupied Zone every one of them had to be registered; they carried small yellow tags on their rear mudguards. (After two more years of
the Occupation, with an aluminum shortage, license plates would be issued in heavy cardboard and were no longer required to be posted.) It was obvious that bikes would be used increasingly for harassing the Occupiers, but there was no way to forbid them, or Paris would have ceased to function. Still, all bicycles were carefully monitored, and rules became more stringent: hands must be kept on handlebars at all times, feet on the pedals; no second riders; no latching on to passing trucks or cars; no riding abreast, only in single file.