Undoubtedly, there was now more than the usual crowd of spies and double agents at smoky corner tables. Everyone was watching and waiting to see what the fallout would be and who was going to be implicated.
Frank was waiting and wondering also. The German insurgents they knew best—those who had lived at the Ritz among them—had gambled and lost terribly. The plot had failed. But for a few fleeting hours the night before, Paris had been liberated, even if they were the only ones who knew it. He hoped that Blanche would be able to keep silent until the next liberation came. He hoped that they all would keep each other’s secrets. Tonight, the bar would close at nine o’clock sharp, as always, and that was enough to focus on for the moment.
But whatever the thoughts running through the head of the barman, to those watching him, Frank of the Ritz looked just the same as always, dapper and impassive.
8
The American Wife and the Swiss Director
Blanche Auzello.
EFFICIENT AND ENDURING INTIMIDATION CAN ONLY BE ACHIEVED EITHER BY CAPITAL PUNISHMENT OR BY MEASURES BY WHICH THE RELATIVES OF THE CRIMINALS DO NOT KNOW THE FATE OF THE CRIMINAL. . . . A. THE PRISONERS WILL VANISH WITHOUT A TRACE. B. NO INFORMATION MAY BE GIVEN AS TO THEIR WHEREABOUTS OR THEIR FATE.
—Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, “Nacht und Nebel” order, 1941
On the heels of the failed assassination attempt a new proclamation came from Berlin ordering all military salutes throughout the territories of the Third Reich to be replaced with an outstretched arm and a robust “Heil Hitler.” Even the sentries at the Hôtel Ritz entrance obliged; no one would have dreamed of flouting an edict from Berlin that bloody week in Paris.
The show of fresh zeal for the Führer didn’t change the coming reality, however. Throughout July, the Allied ground advance had been thwarted, but by August 1 the tide had turned at last in their favor. The fall of Paris was inevitable. Across the capital, the Nazi officers threw themselves into a fever of activity. The Germans who remained were busy getting as much loot out of the capital as they could before anyone could arrive to stop them.
By the beginning of August, one downed American pilot was also looking forward eagerly to the arrival of the Allies and watching the Germans taking their last pleasures in Paris. United States Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Henry Woodrum, from Redding, California, had been behind enemy lines for weeks. The young lieutenant colonel’s Martin Marauder B-26 had been shot down in a daytime combat raid over the capital.
At the beginning of August, he was still free in the French capital. Thanks to the bravery of a local family, Henry watched the occupying forces gathering up their final memories of Paris. Many of the “tourists were German soldiers . . . men in their forties and fifties . . . snapping pictures.” There was a cheeky acronym used by the officers in the German army: “JEIP.” It stood for Jeder einmal in Paris, meaning “everyone should see Paris once.” “I was thinking privately,” Henry chuckled, “that Paris wasn’t going to be the German treasure much longer.” Already, the roads heading east out of the city were clogged.
The staff at the Hôtel Ritz was well aware, however, that the Germans were taking plenty of treasure with them. It was the job of the quiet and commanding Hans Elminger to make sure that the exodus went ahead smoothly. The Ritz was celebrated for its impeccable service under any circumstances and for its implacable Swiss neutrality.
Like the other luxury hotels in the capital, the Ritz was buzzing with movement at the beginning of the month. The last Luftwaffe officers, “taking their cue from Göring, loaded trucks with fancy women, chaise longues and other booty, and headed for the German frontier.” What annoyed Hans Elminger was the fact that he spent his days trying—mostly unsuccessfully—to stop them from loading up the expensive furniture from their rooms at the Hôtel Ritz along with the rest of their booty.
They hadn’t seen Hermann Göring at the Ritz since before Christmas, so the Reichsmarschall’s cue was long distance. With the war floundering and Adolf Hitler enraged, Göring fled to his remote country retreat in Germany and was pleading the return of his debilitating illness. The Führer was inclined to hold his Luftwaffe commandant responsible for the failure of the war’s progress, and Göring had seen firsthand what happened to people who earned Hitler’s displeasure. When Göring warned Hitler that winter that the war couldn’t be won, the Führer snarled, “One more move in this direction, Göring, and I’ll have you shot.” The Reichsmarschall didn’t doubt that he meant it. Göring later confessed that, in those last months, “things got so crazy that I said to myself: let’s hope it’s all over quickly so I can get out of this lunatic asylum.”
In August 1944, Hermann Göring still had his trusted agents in Paris. Like Hitler, Göring was a voracious and unscrupulous art collector. He wasn’t done trying to get his loot out of the capital—and neither were the other German officers.
Except for the new sense of urgency, from where Hans Elminger sat this looting was all just business as usual. The Hôtel Ritz had been at the center of some of the war’s most underhanded art dealing for years. Hitler’s personal agent, the elite German art broker Karl Haberstock, made the celebrated hotel his home in Paris and made a great show of living sumptuously among his collected works.
So did his archrival, the Swiss art dealer Hans Wendland. According to the spies at the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the precursor to today’s Central Intelligence Agency—Wendland was the “unofficial ‘king’ of the Paris art world” and, it was whispered, another one of the Nazi covert operatives living in their midst there on the Place Vendôme. Once, Wendland and Haberstock had been allies in the high-stakes world of art dealing. A dispute over Karl’s wife had ended the friendship back in the late 1920s. Now the two were ruthless competitors. During the last summer of the occupation, both dealers were among those scrambling to cash in on the looting of Paris.
By the summer of 1944, it was mostly the “minor” works of art and some nice bits of furniture that were still left in the capital. What counted as minor to the Germans now seems richly ironic. Pablo Picasso often came to lunch at the Hôtel Ritz during the war, but throughout the occupation the Nazis publicly reviled the work of Pablo Picasso as “degenerate” and dangerous.
Adolf Hitler, who fancied himself a promising artist, reportedly opined, “Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized.” By the 1940s, Picasso was doing more than imagining blue fields; he was making portraits in which women had multiple faces and contorted perspective.
The Germans mostly left the celebrated Spanish painter alone, but they banned him from exhibiting his works during the occupation. Privately, however, many in the German art world recognized the value of his work on the international markets. That week the official Nazi art-looting operation, the ERR—the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg—packed up more than sixty of Picasso’s paintings as part of the last shipment out of the capital. They would fetch a good price for the officers. Within days, the headquarters of the ERR would be abandoned, “the staff having effected a somewhat disorderly and hysterical evacuation of the premises.”
Many of the confiscated objects would ultimately find their way to the art market in Switzerland, where experts suspect many of them remain still. It was an immensely lucrative trade, and Hans Elminger surely knew that a senior member of the Hôtel Ritz had been helping Karl Haberstock and Hans Wendland.
That man was named Süss, suggesting the possibility of German-Jewish heritage. His first name isn’t listed anywhere in the surviving records. He was born forty years earlier, in 1905. He was a Swiss citizen, from the city of Brunnen, and worked at the Ritz as Hans Elminger’s assistant director. It is possible that he and Hans were related.
In the OSS archives, a file from 1944 on art looting reads: “Suess. Paris, Hôtel Ritz. Director of the Hôtel Ritz during the occupation. Acted on Haberstock’s behalf as middleman and informer. Arranged contacts with other Germans visiting Paris for Habe
rstock.”
Acting as a middleman and informer was a dicey proposition during the occupation. Part of the challenge was remaining relevant. By 1943, with the ERR a well-oiled machine and the major private collections already confiscated, Süss knew enough to be a liability unless he could prove his continued usefulness to the Germans.
And it wasn’t just the American OSS agents who had the Hôtel Ritz under surveillance. The Germans had been watching all the employees carefully since early in the war, and in Berlin there were details in classified files on all of the key staff members. By the beginning of August in 1944, both the French Milice and the French Forces of the Interior (Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, or FFI) were watching the hotel closely as well. Sometimes it was hard to tell who was on which side at any given moment. That month, a spy and black-market agent named Rebattet, who had worked earlier in the war for the German public works and civil engineering outfit known as the Todt Organization, turned coat and joined the communists. Operating under the cover name “Colonel Renard,” he set up an observation post at the Ritz and was running an intelligence network from offices on the nearby boulevard des Capucines.
Downstairs in the rue Cambon bar, Frank Meier had more reasons to be worried than he yet realized. The Third Reich already knew that he was an active wartime British agent and classified him as a “fanatic enemy of Germany.” They were watching him constantly. The managing director of the hotel, Claude Auzello, was “urgently suspected of working for the enemy intelligence.”
The general manager of the hotel, Hans Elminger, the Germans more or less trusted. It was ironic, considering that he and his wife, Lucienne, were even now hiding several refugees in a cluster of concealed maids’ rooms, accessible through a hidden door on a second-floor corridor. One man was a friend whom they had helped with the bribe he needed to escape from a train bound for the feared transit camp at Drancy. Throughout the hotel, there were rooms like this, “wedged between false ceilings and corridors.” It was another unexpected wartime advantage of César Ritz’s passion for “modern” built-in—and now built-over—closets.
If Hans Elminger wasn’t in the resistance exactly, he wasn’t without a keen sense of conscience, either. Neutrality was how he managed to fly under the radar, and he guarded the pose carefully. With the Germans, it had been a smart and successful strategy: “as far as we could observe,” the file in Berlin read, Monsieur Elminger has “acted correctly toward German officers and civilians” and maintained an appropriately neutral attitude. It helped that his uncle was president of the Hôtel Ritz board of directors and that his grandfather, the aristocratic baron Maximilien von Pfyffer d’Altishofen, had been one of César Ritz’s earliest mentors and supporters.
The Pfyffer d’Altishofen family was at the heart of the founding of the Hôtel Ritz in the 1890s. German intelligence files characterized Uncle Hans von Pfyffer, quite simply, as “one of the most influential people in Switzerland.” Rumor had it that Marie-Louise Ritz had been having an affair with Uncle Hans for decades. Hans von Pfyffer and Marie-Louise Ritz shared something else: they both despised Blanche Auzello.
Blanche’s wartime activities were more convoluted and courageous than almost anyone knew. She had kept it all a dark secret even from her husband, Claude, for everyone’s protection. Unfortunately, Süss was one of the few people in a position to know about them. It was likely that he had caught her in action.
It wasn’t just that she and Lily Kharmayeff had been arrested in early June 1944 for showing tipsy disrespect to German officers, as one version of the story had it. It wasn’t just that she had been helping the odd fallen airman out of the occupied city. The Germans had been watching Blanche since the summer of 1940. She had been imprisoned on at least one earlier occasion, and in the spring of 1943, there had been an incident at the hotel. The Germans discovered that someone had turned on the lights in a kitchen basement on the Place Vendôme side of the Hôtel Ritz during the air raids. The lights illuminated the front of the hotel, which faced the Ministry of Justice—and gave the Allies a perfect way to orient themselves in the skies above a darkened Paris and to locate targets.
Berlin was furious. Someone needed to be held accountable for the gross violation. “[I]n the interest of the reputation of the German Wehrmacht,” the Third Reich’s foreign office recommended a severe and “exemplary” punishment of the culprit. It was code word for torture and execution. The report went further. It recommended a “staff cleansing . . . as soon as possible.”
Those on the watch in Paris deeply suspected that the guilty party was Blanche Auzello.
The Germans didn’t act immediately against her, however. She was left free to run her wartime operations for the moment. In time, one supposes, there must have been the expectation of bringing down not just Blanche Auzello but a whole network of conspirators.
Finally, in June 1944, the Germans had run out of patience with the brash American. She disappeared into the machinery of the Gestapo, and by August there had been no word of her fate. That was not surprising. Since 1941, troublesome civilians across occupied Europe simply disappeared into “night and fog” in a stated policy of terrorism known as Nacht und Nebel.
Then, one day in the third week of August, someone at the hotel switchboard got a disturbing phone call. A man had found an emaciated, barefoot woman stumbling through the streets of his neighborhood, barely able to stand any longer. Could someone at the Hôtel Ritz come and get her? She said that her name was Madame Auzello.
Claude was out of the door in an instant. Was it possible that somehow Blanche had escaped the Gestapo? What might be required to save her still?
And—as Frank Meier had feared—she had cracked under the interrogation.
For those who had passed the occupation in the capital, what happened in the police offices and prisons across Paris was no great secret. Jean Cocteau remembered later what Jean-Paul Sartre said, about how the sense of fear in the capital was infectious: “When women went to the Gestapo headquarters on the avenue Foch or the rue des Saussaies to find out what had happened to their men, they were received with courtesy. . . . Yet people who lived . . . near the headquarters heard screams of pain and terror all day and late into the night. . . . [N]ot a single person in Paris [passed the war] without a friend or relative who had been arrested or deported or shot.” And sometimes those interrogated were women. Those lucky enough to survive often returned home disfigured by cigarette burns to the breasts and sadistic mutilation. It was part of the reason why being involved in the resistance or asking too many questions, harboring a fallen pilot or hiding a Jewish woman in cupboards beneath a hotel staircase, was so dangerous.
Those torture centers ranged all over the city, from rooms on rue des Rosiers in the Jewish quarter of the Marais to the notorious chambers at 84, avenue Foch, in the sixteenth arrondissement; at 11, rue des Saussaies, in the eighth, the Gestapo conducted interrogations, using brutal beatings, gang rape, and their signature “bathtub” torture, a particularly vicious variation on waterboarding.
In the basements under some of the prison centers were vast ovens where people were burned, slowly, feetfirst, for punishment and the pleasure of the guards. In underground cells, infested with huge, hungry rats, prisoners with broken bodies were thrown into solitary confinement and forgotten. On the walls throughout Paris, the liberating soldiers would later find heartrending graffiti scratched into the stone: “I am afraid” and “Believing in yourself gives you the power to resist despite the bathtub and all the rest,” “Guillaume loves Marianne,” or simply “Revenge me.”
Blanche had been in custody for months. Her interrogators pressed her to confess that Lily Kharmayeff was a Jew and a member of the resistance. “In my lucid moments,” Blanche said, “I was sure I’d never get out of there alive and would be dead in a day or two.” She was dragged limp into some of the repeated interrogations.
Pushed to the point of despair, Blanche finally told a German agent the truth. “I am
a Jew, not Lily,” she blurted out. “I was born on the east side in New York, the Jewish section. My name is Rubenstein. My parents came from Germany.”
“Madame Auzello! I warn you!” the German had admonished her sternly.
She told her interrogator about her fake name and her fake passport. He warned her again that, if she continued in this manner, he would take her outside and shoot her. She insisted wildly that she was Jewish. Perhaps she told him, as well, about the kitchen lights in the Hôtel Ritz and the air raid sabotage. About the downed airmen she had helped escape the city. She expected execution.
After a long pause, the exasperated German at last ordered his subordinate to take her outside into the courtyard.
He then ordered the officer to release her. “Let the damned French take care of her,” he said, wearily.
When she cracked under their interrogation, by some miracle the officer either hadn’t wanted to execute her or simply hadn’t believed her. Logically, it can only have been the former. The German files on Blanche Auzello already contained all the information being wrung from her.
In the end, the Gestapo simply opened the doors to the prison. Blanche found the strength somehow to walk through them, onto the streets of Paris. It was an amazingly lucky escape by any measure. All Blanche had to do now was keep quiet, and soon the last days of the occupation would be over.
Blanche had more than cracked under interrogation, though. Her time in Gestapo custody had broken something essential in her. She was forty pounds lighter, and her mental health was shaken.
The Hotel on Place Vendome Page 11