His best-known plays, Les Mouches (The Flies) and Huis Clos (No Exit) were first published and performed during the Nazi Occupation. The premiere of Les Mouches was held in 1943 in a theatre owned by a Frenchman whom the Germans considered deutschfreundlich, a venue that had been called Le Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt until the Nazis renamed it because she was Jewish. The play received a glowing review in the Nazi newspaper Pariser Zeitung, which shows just how politically unthreatening it was.
Sartre redeemed himself by claiming that his works were allegories of resistance, and by joining the Comité national d’écrivains (the National Writers’ Committee), which busied itself naming other writers as collaborators. His fellow existentialist Albert Camus, who had at first been amongst the politically dubious stay-at-homes, preferred to climb off the fence and take up arms in the Resistance.
Sartre’s partner, Simone de Beauvoir, was equally ambiguous during the war. She was sacked from her job as a lycée teacher, but not for anti-Nazi activities – it was because the mother of one of her female students, a girl called Nathalie, had complained that de Beauvoir had slept with her daughter.
After this, de Beauvoir worked for Vichy’s national radio, a station that was vital to the Nazis because it gave French people an alternative to tuning in to the BBC. It used to broadcast non-sensitive programmes alongside propaganda to give it a veneer of respectability,* and de Beauvoir presented a historical show that wasn’t in itself pro-Nazi, but was effectively helping to boost the audience figures for propaganda. To get this job, she had to sign a form attesting that she was not a Jew, thereby openly accepting the regime’s racist stance, even more so than Sartre with his teaching job.
Meanwhile, de Beauvoir was writing, and her first novel, L’Invitée (She Came to Stay), was published in 1943. She was touched when it was praised by the leading pro-Vichy writer Ramon Fernandez, and she expressed hopes of winning France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, even though it was common knowledge in literary circles that the committee were overt collaborators.
In short, it is hardly surprising that much of Sartre’s and de Beauvoir’s post-war writing was about reinventing moral codes.
Some French painters were no more laudable. André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck went to Germany as part of an artists’ group visit, to much trumpeting by the Nazi propaganda machine. The sculptor André Maillol came up to Paris from the south of France to visit an exhibition of Nazi-approved art, and was entertained by the Germans after the show – all this while Expressionist paintings were being stolen from murdered Jewish collectors and either destroyed as ‘degenerate art’ or sold off to fund Hitler’s war effort.
Other hugely famous names in French culture came out of the war just as tarnished. The crooner Maurice Chevalier, who had been something of a Hollywood star in the 1930s, stayed in Paris for the duration and enjoyed a successful career – though he refused to sing on Vichy radio. Édith Piaf also stayed on, singing for Nazi officers and even inviting them over to her place for drinks.
Of course it could be said that singers provided a valuable morale boost to the downtrodden French public, but it sounds as though occupying Wehrmacht troops got just as much of a kick out of their songs, and no doubt returned to the front whistling ‘Je ne regrette nichts’.
Amongst the worst offenders, though, was the fashion designer Coco Chanel. Today, the Chanel brand is as impeccably clean as the lines of Coco’s classic dresses, and her name conjures up everything quintessentially French: effortless elegance, classy simplicity, the smell of luxury.
When war broke out in 1939, however, Chanel closed her fashion house, sacking her 4,000 seamstresses in the kind of mass redundancy that French unions make almost impossible these days. Perhaps she sensed that a European war would make it difficult to stage international fashion shows. She was also old enough (fifty-six) to remember that there had been a serious fabric shortage during World War One. Either way, she declared that she was going to devote all her energies to marketing her successful Chanel No. 5 perfume.
Although, to be exact, it wasn’t her perfume. She had created it in 1921, but sold most of the rights to a pair of businessmen called Pierre and Paul Wertheimer. They were Jewish, and took refuge in the USA as soon as France was occupied, although not before setting up an Aryan-run umbrella company – wittily called Bourjois (‘bourgeois’ with a J in the middle) – to prevent the Nazis seizing their business interests.
Chanel knew about this manoeuvre and informed the Nazis about Bourjois’s fake Aryan credentials, hoping that she would be able to regain control of her perfumes. She was well placed to do the informing, because it was common knowledge that her lover was a prominent SS intelligence officer called Hans Günther von Dincklage. Not only that, but she was living at the Ritz Hotel, one of the Nazis’ headquarters in Paris. She wasn’t only sleeping with the enemy, she was spending her days chez him, too.
In 1943, Coco became involved in a bizarre attempt to bring peace between Britain and Germany. It was apparently the brain-wave of another SS man, called Walter Schellenberg, a close aide of Himmler’s and the officer responsible for drawing up a list of dangerous Britons to be arrested as soon as the Nazis won the war – not the kind of man most people would credit with a plan to secure world peace.
The scheme involved Coco taking a message to Winston Churchill, a vague acquaintance whom she had met once or twice during her love affair with an English duke in the 1920s. To arrange this, she contacted an old high-society friend called Vera Bate Lombardi, a cousin of the Duke of Windsor (the abdicated King Edward VIII). Vera had introduced Coco’s designs to the British upper classes before the war, and the Nazis were sure she had access to Churchill.
On Schellenberg’s orders, Coco tried to lure Vera to Paris, supposedly to join her newer, bigger Chanel operation, but Vera, who was living in Rome, refused to have anything to do with her. The Nazis promptly had Vera arrested as an English spy.
Churchill did eventually help Chanel, though, because when she was arrested after the Liberation on charges of collaborating with the Nazis, it is said that Winston himself intervened in her favour. She was allowed to sneak away to a comfortable exile in Switzerland with her Nazi lover, Hans Günther.
The Wertheimers returned to France and, to avoid a messy legal battle, agreed to pay Coco off with $400,000 in cash, plus 2 per cent royalties on all Chanel products, as well as a monthly payment. No danger that Coco was going to suffer from post-war food rationing.
Sex ‘crimes’
Famous collaborators may have been able to escape unscathed, but women guilty of so-called collaboration horizontale weren’t so lucky. As soon as a town was liberated, the reprisals would begin, and any woman who had been openly giving a Nazi sex in exchange for food and luxuries had her head shaven and was often subjected to a public beating.
Well, almost any woman, because yet again, the French establishment closed ranks to suppress embarrassing details.
Napoleon’s brothels played host to the enemy with little or no threat of interference. In Paris, thirty-one bordels were reserved for the Wehrmacht, as well as 5,000 women working the streets who were told to cater for Nazis only. Others were free to choose their clients without asking for details of their nationality or political views. In 1941, a new Vichy law was passed, assimilating brothels with ‘third category entertainment’, with the same status as horse and cycle racing. In 1942, the system went even further by making brothels just another part of the hotel industry, presumably so the girls wouldn’t have to time their clients’ performances quite so accurately.
After the war, while everyday collaboratrices horizontales were humiliated for the newsreel cameras, the prostitutes simply switched over to French and Allied clients. A French policeman noted in 1945 that some local authorities had ‘refused to condemn prostitutes because their conduct was professional and not political’. Reading between the lines, the reason for the leniency is obvious. The Nazis weren’t the o
nly ones frequenting brothels – the local dignitaries were regulars, too, and didn’t want the secrets of their wartime amours coming to light, especially when said amour had been obtained in establishments protected or used by the Nazis.
Retribution came only later, in 1946, when the political wing of the Resistance movement pushed through a law outlawing brothels. The irony was that the law bore the name of an ex-prostitute called Marthe Richard, who had been giving parties for Paris’s high-ranking Nazis throughout the war, and who tried to clear her name by coming over all moralistic once the game was up.
Interestingly, it was a combination of this law and the struggle for power in post-war France that inspired Ian Fleming to write his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale. Not that anyone is suggesting that Fleming might have felt any personal nostalgia for the bordels, of course.
Pourquoi pas forgive et forget?
It may seem malicious to rake up all these memories of collaboration. It is, after all, an easy target, like reminding a football fan of a humiliating cup final defeat. And there were, of course, some Resistance heroes – Jean Moulin, for example, who was arrested in Lyon (sadly, during a meeting to organize de Gaulle’s Conseil national de la Résistance) and died under Nazi torture; or Pierre Brossolette, an SOE agent who, although handcuffed, threw himself out of a top-floor window to his death rather than risk revealing anything to the Gestapo; or Guy Môquet, who was shot by the Germans when aged only seventeen, and whose farewell letter to his family is studied in French schools.
But there were skeletons in the cupboard – Guy Môquet, for example, was arrested by French policemen for illegally distributing leaflets – and after the war, France tried to keep many of them locked in there. There were plenty of show trials and head-shavings, but these mainly involved people who were either too obviously Nazi to get away with it, or who just lacked the power and friends to avoid trouble.
After 1945, the rot in the French establishment was too deep to be cut out without undermining the whole fabric of the country. François Mitterrand, who was elected President of France in 1981, was a perfect example of this. After a spell in a German POW camp, he returned to France in 1941 and worked for the Vichy government. He was undoubtedly active in the Resistance, especially later in the war, but was also a good enough servant of the Pétain regime to be awarded the Ordre de la francisque, a Vichy order of merit. Some of his contemporaries suspected him of playing two hands simultaneously, waiting to see which side would come out on top. And in 1992 it was revealed that he had secretly arranged for wreaths to be laid on Pétain’s tomb ever since the old collaborator-in-chief’s death in 1951.
One common French retort to all this talk of collaboration is that the Anglo-Saxons ‘l’ont échappé belle’ – had a narrow, or in French ‘beautiful’, escape. The Brits and the Americans were never faced with the moral dilemmas of Occupation. Would a London policeman have handed General de Gaulle over to the Gestapo? We will never know.
Although that might not be exactly true, because of course a small part of Britain was occupied by the Nazis …
Living with the Nazi ‘visitors’
As France was spiralling towards surrender in 1940, the Brits decided that the Channel Islands weren’t worth defending. They announced that they would evacuate anyone who wanted to escape, and then leave the islands to the Germans. This begged the question: in that case, why had Britain hung on to them for so many centuries? The answer, of course, was obvious: just to annoy the French.
The announcement also gave the islanders very little time to make their decision. Should they leave their homes to the Nazis for the foreseeable future, or stay on and hope for the best?
Most men of military age who weren’t already in uniform went to England to join up, and in all, around 30,000 people, a third of the islands’ population, opted to leave. The rest decided to wait for the inevitable, and not a shot was fired when the islands surrendered one by one in early July 1940.
So how did the islanders behave during their five years of occupation? In his book The British Channel Islands under German Occupation, 1940–1945, Paul Sanders gives an incredibly detailed account of life under the Nazis in Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark. He paints a morally complex, often sordid, but occasionally uplifting picture.
There were collaborators (horizontal and upright), paid informers, black marketeers and fraternizers, and the wartime Bailiff of Jersey, Alexander Coutanche, was accused by some of being a Pétain-like traitor for agreeing to serve under the Nazis.
But there were subtle differences to what happened on the French mainland. The most important was that, in fact, no equivalent of the Nazi-pandering Vichy government was set up. The island was administered, yes, but not by people who secretly welcomed the Nazis’ presence or wanted to implement any of their ideas.
It is true that Hitler’s anti-Jewish laws were introduced on the islands. Jews had to register, and were eventually prevented from owning businesses. But the laws were not zealously applied as they were in France, and Bailiff Coutanche refused to force anyone to wear a yellow star.
Tragically, three Jews were deported from Guernsey to Auschwitz. It seems they were singled out by the Nazis because they were refugees from Austria. Auguste Spitz, Marianne Grunfield and Therese Steiner never came back. The Guernsey police did take part in their deportation, but only to inform them of the Germans’ order that they had to pack a suitcase and report to the Nazis the next day. This doesn’t alter the women’s ultimate fate, of course, and no one stepped in to save them, but neither were they grabbed by the local police and handed over, as might have happened in France.
Most of the islands’ other Jews were sent to internment camps (as opposed to concentration camps) in 1942 and 1943, as part of a group of some 1,300 deportees that included anyone not born in the Channel Islands and all men who had served as officers in World War One. They were all deemed by the Nazis to be ‘undesirable influences’ and shipped off to Germany in reprisal for a British commando raid on Sark. Most of them survived the war.
There was little or no Resistance movement, although the islands’ first wartime administrator, Sir Ambrose James Sherwill, was imprisoned and then interned for aiding a commando raid, and a few escaped prisoners were hidden and helped to freedom. Most islanders remained passive, and contented themselves with daubing Churchill’s ‘V for Victory’ sign on walls and listening to the BBC, a common crime for which all radio sets on the islands were confiscated in 1942. Not very disruptive, one might argue, but it would have been hard to organize an underground army when there was pretty well one Nazi soldier to every two residents, almost all of the occupiers billeted in the locals’ homes.
This cohabitation predictably led to fraternization, usually to obtain food – once the shops had sold their stock, severe rationing kicked in. Fishing boats were forbidden to go out, and most people had little more than oats, potatoes and milk to eat, whereas the Germans had ample supplies that they were willing to sell or trade. The trading was, inevitably, often for things other than carved seashells and local handicrafts – many women went in for horizontal collaboration, and were dubbed ‘Jerry-bags’ by the disapproving islanders. As in France, the worst offenders were young girls who liked the smart, well-fed men in their uniforms, and upper-class ladies who fell for the officers’ old-school Prussian charm. And there were also real love affairs. But the phenomenon was apparently much less prevalent than on the French mainland, partly because the community was so small that it was impossible to be discreet and partly because the islands were effectively in the front line and the garrison had little time for partying, but also because there was a well-run, health-inspected brothel available, entirely reserved for the troops. It was managed by a French madam and employed French prostitutes. Yes, the Nazis imported collaboratrices horizontales.
Artists lick the Nazis
Like their colleagues in Paris, the Germans occupying the Channel Islands were not deprived of entertainment
. There were theatre performances, concerts (some mixing local and German musicians) and art exhibitions. But cultural life on the islands seems to have been characterized by some quirky acts of artistic resistance.
Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore were two French women artists who had settled in Jersey before the war. When the Nazis arrived, the pair accepted invitations to parties with the occupiers. However, they didn’t do so just to drink Champagne and snaffle canapés, and given their sexuality, it is unlikely that they were interested in sleeping with the enemy. In fact, they would get themselves invited to social occasions and then slip anti-Nazi leaflets into German soldiers’ pockets. These weren’t simple propaganda sheets – they were works of art, such as anti-Fascist poems or cut-and-paste texts listing Nazi atrocities.
Unsurprisingly, Cahun and Moore were caught in 1944 and sentenced to death, although their executions were never carried out and they ended the war in prison. Had they been doing the same thing in France, it could have been much worse for them, as they were both Jews.
A Jersey artist who was much more mainstream was Edmund Blampied. When the war broke out he was fifty-three, an internationally renowned illustrator and one of the island’s leading cultural lights. He chose not to leave the island in 1940, even though his wife was Jewish. Neither he nor his wife were mistreated by the occupiers, and he could even be accused of collaborating in that he accepted the commission to design wartime currency and stamps. A Nazi sympathizer, perhaps?
Not really. Blampied took the considerable risk of incorporating the letters ‘GR’, for King George VI, in his stamp designs, so that, during the whole occupation, every time an islander licked a stamp, they were poking their tongue out at the Nazis.
1000 Years of Annoying the French Page 50