When Paris Went Dark (54 page)

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The French Communist Party was the best-organized political group on the political left. Its support of the leftist
Front populaire
government in 1936–37 and again in 1938, and of the Spanish Republic during that country’s civil war (1936–39), had given it much moral authority as an antagonist of fascism. Its membership growing in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Party had been hog-tied by Hitler’s cynical 1939 nonaggression pact with Stalin, signed just weeks before the invasion of Poland. Nevertheless, it continued to organize. The largest anti-fascist organization in France, it was also the most feared by the new, collaborationist Vichy government.

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Because a census of the dead was not taken immediately after the debacle, estimated numbers have bedeviled historians seeking certainty about the human cost of the Battle of France on the French army. Death figures have ranged between fifty thousand and ninety thousand. For details, see Jackson,
The Fall of France
, and Azéma,
1940: L’Année noire.

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“Fifth column” was a term that had originated during the Spanish Civil War, when a rebel general remarked that when he took Madrid his four columns would be supported by a virtual fifth—civilian supporters and guerrillas inside the city.

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Again, estimates vary according to which historian is doing the figuring and whether or not Paris per se (ca. three million inhabitants) or the entire Paris region (ca. five to seven million inhabitants) is being considered. The point is that millions of families took to roads already crowded with a retreating army. For details, see Diamond,
Fleeing Hitler
, and Leleu, et al.,
La France pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale: Atlas Historique
.

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Mattresses, always mattresses—the sight is so attached to images of refugee flight that we have become used to it. There is probably no action more symbolic of leaving home in distress. What prompts refugees, even today, to load themselves down with their bedding? Refugees in 1940 may have brought their mattresses with them as pitiful protection against strafing planes or, especially, as temporary bedding. But it also makes sense that when being forced to leave home, one clings to some symbol of the private life that has been upended. An uncertain future demands a secure place in which to wait for it. (See O. F. Bollnow,
Human Space.
)

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The concept of an “open city” has an ambiguous place in international jurisprudence. It relies on two opposing armies to agree that a major conurbation will not be defended and thus not bombarded. The agreement has a logic for both sides: the attackers will not have to waste time, materiel, and men to take a heavily fortified metropolis, and the retreating army saves its citizens, its nation’s patrimony, and leaves a potential thorn in the side of the occupying forces. Of course, delicate negotiations have to precede such an arrangement, and such situations are rife with the possibility of misunderstandings.

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It is hard to believe, but it was only in March of 2013 that the last street in France named for Pétain was “debaptized.” Christened Rue du Maréchal Pétain in the 1930s, before he became associated with the Vichy government, the little avenue is in Belrain, a village of about forty inhabitants in the northeast of France, about twenty-five miles from Verdun. The town will rename the avenue, most likely after someone who resisted the Vichy government.

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The Gestapo (short for Geheime Staatspolizei, or secret state police) was a political police arm of the Third Reich, founded by Hermann Göring and greatly enhanced and led by Heinrich Himmler. It operated both in Germany and in the occupied countries.

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Billy Wilder, the Austrian-born American director (who had left Paris in 1933 for the United States), is reputed to have suggested that her performances were throwbacks to “those far off happy days in Paris when a siren was a brunette, and when a man turned off the light, it wasn’t on account of an air-raid” (cited in Hammond and O’Connor,
Josephine Baker
).

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Though hard to believe, confusion still surrounds the exact date of this visit. For years the date was thought to be Sunday, June 23, right after the signing of the armistice, but subsequent historians, especially Kershaw and Fest, have generally coalesced around the later date, Friday, June 28, though the former remains the most often cited.

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The Führer knew well the world’s most famous urban thoroughfare. He had remarked as early as 1936 that “the Champs-Élysées is 100 meters wide. In any case we’ll make our avenue [Berlin’s Unter den Linden] 20-odd meters wider.” Albert Speer writes that he was ordered to measure the width of the avenue during Hitler’s tour (Speer,
Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs
[New York: Macmillan, 1970], 76).

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Some have suggested that the Führer got out of his car again to walk along the Boulevard Saint-Michel, the famous Boul’ Mich’, which runs beside the Sorbonne and the prestigious Lycée Saint-Louis, but most accounts do not confirm this.

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It was built to house, and still does, the chief commercial law court of the city of Paris.

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I know of no other example of Hitler having passed through what he feared and despised the most, the ghetto, filled with undesirable non-Aryans.

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This strange-looking building was built at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, funded in large part by individual donations from all over France. The government had passed a “national vow” to build a church as penance for national “sins” committed during the Franco-Prussian War, especially for the brief Paris Commune (the first ever communist government) that had followed in 1871 the siege of Paris. So the church had its own peculiar connection to Franco-German history.

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“Weimar” Berlin—that is, Germany’s capital during 1919–33, that nation’s brief period of robust democracy—had been just as “decadent” as Paris had ever been. But the Nazis had cleaned up the city, brutally.

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Almost immediately, it was translated into French and published in 1930 as
Dieu est-il français?
(Is God French?), with a lengthy and critical afterword by its editor, Bernard Grasset. Its title refers to the German aphorism “Wie ein Gott in Frankreich leben” (to live like a god in France)—that is, to have the best possible life. It was published in the United States as
Who Are These French?
in 1938.

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In May of 1938, Mussolini had organized an elaborate tour of Rome and Florence for his friend from Germany. The preparations actually changed aspects of the cityscape to present a new facade to the curious Führer. An amusing account of that visit may be found in the journal of art historian Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, part of which was recently published in Paris as
Quelques jours avec Hitler et Mussolini
.

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The First World War had already introduced the practice of very long military occupations; northern France, but not Paris, was in German hands for almost four years, and Allied—especially French—forces had occupied Germany’s Rhineland and the Ruhr Valley until 1925.

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A still-remembered and much-repeated story tells of a French family, primarily known for its optical shops, that placed advertisements in French newspapers attesting that their name was Lissac, an old, respected French family name, and assuredly not Isaac, or newcomer Jews. The shops can still be found all over France.

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One of my interviewees, a pharmacy student during this period, opined with a sardonic smile that there was less obesity, less diabetes, fewer STDs, less asthma, and so forth during this time.

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Since the early nineteenth century, the western sections of Paris had become the haven of the wealthy Parisians. As a consequence, many large mansions had been built in the 8th, 16th, and 17th arrondissements, where the most prestigious hotels were located. The Germans confidently—and shamelessly—appropriated many homes (especially those owned by wealthy Jews) and most hotels in this area. The Latin Quarter, on the other hand, though with pockets of affluence, remained a warren of student housing, church property, and schools and colleges, affording much less hospitality to the selective Occupiers.

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Studying this period is frustratingly complicated by the plethora of acronyms used by both German and French bureaucracies, both as shorthand and as a means of covering up nefarious activities. ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg), MBF (Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich), OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht), Sipo-SD (Sicherheitspolizei Sicherheitsdienst), not to mention the better-known Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei) and SS (Schutzstaffel), festooned official posters and documents, along with the acronyms of dozens of their co-occupying agencies. Acronyms can be, and often are, a means to make banal the shameful.

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The internal political machinations of the Vichy government were byzantine. The government was divided between those who saw themselves as allies of the Germans and those who were faithful and traditional French patriots, though quite conservative. Laval was in the former group and had enemies in the latter cohort influential with the doddering Pétain. For a variety of reasons, Pétain fired Laval, his prime minister, in December of 1940. But in April of 1942, Laval, like an unsavory phoenix, rose again to that position and would remain head of the government until the end of the war.

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Otto Abetz was officially the German ambassador to France, both occupied and unoccupied. He had substantial authority over all aspects of French politics and culture and served in Paris throughout the Occupation.

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The symbolism of honoring Georges Clemenceau was evident: he was “the Tiger,” “the father of victory,” who had stood fast against the last Teutonic invasion of France; he had helped devise the Treaty of Versailles, which had devastated Germany diplomatically and financially.

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For reasons that are still unclear, Hitler did not attend the 1937 exposition, though most of his closest advisers did, basking in the light of French respect.

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This information, on the numbers of Germans assigned to Paris during the Occupation, has been most resistant to resolution in my research. Estimates vary widely, especially because the demands of the Russian front and, later, the Normandy front, meant that reassignments were continually being made. The types of units and the quality of personnel changed as well.

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MBF—the German Military Command in France, which had policing responsibility for the civilian population, an arrangement that would not change until late 1942, when the Gestapo would take over that job.

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I have found no archival or other support for this premise, though it is an oft-repeated assumption in accounts of the initial Occupation.

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Amazingly, the
Wegleiter,
the German guide to Paris, repeatedly printed advertisements for cabarets featuring “Gypsy” music and bands. As the Romanies were being murdered in eastern Europe, their compatriots were entertaining SS troops in the City of Light.

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With the invasion of Russia, many of these young men left for the Eastern Front—reportedly a great loss for the
maisons closes
(bordellos) of Paris.

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In eastern Europe, the Wehrmacht and the SS created their own bordellos, using Jewish and other “undesirables” as “comfort women,” an irony almost too bizarre to believe.

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Cynically, we must remember that Jünger’s journal was not published until 1949, after he had had the chance to edit his entries as well as his memories.

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The French refer to this sense of alienation as
dépaysement
—not feeling at home, or feeling like a fish out of water.

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In his work on the “personality” of urban spaces, the architectural historian Anthony Vidler argues: “The uncanny [is]… precisely the contrast between a secure and homely interior and the fearful invasion of an alien presence…, [a space] of silence, solitude, or internal confinement and suffocation” (Vidler,
The Architectural Uncanny
, 4, 39).

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Hessy Taft was one of about two dozen persons I interviewed both in the United States and France about their memories of the Occupation. These generous persons are listed in my acknowledgments.

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There is a stunning homemade film in the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam that shows how a group of Jewish residents (in the end, caught and deported) used their hearths and chimneys as secret passageways, enabling them to move between apartments and secret rooms.

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The opening scenes in Roberto Rossellini’s great film
Roma, città aperta
(1945) make use of what was common knowledge: escaping from an urban apartment house, across roofs into labyrinthine streets and alleys, had become a survival tactic in many European cities.