by Douglas Boyd
Paris was heavy with occupation forces. The new Supreme Commander in France, or Militärbefehlshaber Frankreich, General Otto Von Stülpnagel had his headquarters in the Hôtel Majestic on the Place de l’Opéra. The Hôtel Meurice on the rue de Rivoli was the seat of the Kommandant von Gross-Paris – responsible for Paris and the neighbouring départements of Seine, Seine-et-Marne and Seine-et-Oise. The Chambre des Députés, festooned with swastika banners, was requisitioned as offices for his twin staffs, both commanders having a military and a civilian staff, or Verwaltungsstab. The confusion of demarcations was infinite, Parisian prisons like La Santé and Fresnes being divided into separately governed French and German wings, while the Germans took over other jails for their exclusive use, together with the forts at Vincennes and Mont Valérien – where so many résistants were to die in front of firing squads. Filling the cell blocks was no problem because the joint headquarters of the German security services at 11 rue des Saussaies had previously been the home of the Surêté Nationale, whose archives had been handed over to the Germans largely intact.
By contrast with Laval’s ostentatious lifestyle, Pétain lived abstemiously in Vichy’s Hôtel du Parc because it was more convenient for meetings than his official residence in the luxury mini-palace of that prolific seventeenth-century letter-writer the Marquise de Sévigné. Gravely acknowledging the acclamation of the public on his morning constitutionals, he was always guarded by the sinister Dr Bernard Ménétrel, whose three young daughters were pressed into service for photo-calls showing the marshal smiling at them with grandfatherly benevolence – which may have been the case, for rumour had it that Ménétral was Pétain’s illegitimate son by the wife of Dr Louis Ménétrel, who had been his personal physician until his death in 1936.
Bernard Ménétrel had been called up as a reservist captain in May 1940, but on his return from Madrid Pétain arranged for him to remain a civilian, ostensibly in order to look after his uncertain health: he needed daily injections from the man whose powers extended far beyond those of physician and private secretary. In the course of time, one in ten of all recipients of the Vichy regime’s medal called the Francisque would owe their awards directly to Ménétrel.
On his travels and even when making speeches on the balconies of public buildings, Pétain always kept his faithful retainer near him. The 400 men of the Gendarmerie Nationale in the marshal’s personal bodyguard were ordered by Ménétrel to allow no one near their charge unless approved by the doctor personally. Even Pétain had to circumvent his vigilant watchdog from time to time, once bending down to peer through the keyhole of his office door to make sure he was not outside before talking off-the-record to a man he knew to be in the Resistance. After appointing the one-legged and one-eyed First World War veteran Xavier Vallat Minister for Jewish Questions because he was a lawyer known for his anti-Semitism, Pétain on one occasion sought to restrain him, but used an intermediary to pass on his instructions because he knew Ménétrel would be furious if he found out.
With one exception, introduced to give the illusion that the new government was drawn from all parties, Pétain’s entourage was of the political right. But even this small group of men he had known for years was rarely taken into the marshal’s confidence. He mistrusted everyone around him, reasoning that they and the top civil servants had been collectively responsible for weakening the army he loved and bringing the country to misery and shame. As a career officer, the marshal was accustomed to changing one aide-de-camp for another without any personal feelings for any of them. On meeting his newly appointed chef de cabinet Henri du Moulin de Labarthète, he said, ‘I don’t trust anyone, du Moulin – not even you. But at least I can put a name to your face.’12
As with all totalitarian states, paranoia reigned from the outset in Vichy, with even humble secretaries in government office being followed by plainclothes detectives. In the Occupied Zone, arrests were soon taking place of people who refused orders from their new masters. One strange case was that of Rudier, the brass founder who had cast all Rodin’s statues and now refused to make armaments in his workshop. From Fresnes prison he smuggled out a note on a scrap of paper, which an unknown friend took to Berlin and handed to Arno Breker.
After acting as the Führer’s guide on the lightning tour of Paris, Breker had already refused an invitation to return to France from Jacques Benoist-Méchin, who was to become Minister of State charged with Franco-German relations. At the time Rudier’s plea arrived, pro-German intellectual Pierre-Eugène Drieu la Rochelle was in Berlin trying to persuade Breker to mount an exhibition in Paris. To help the old craftsman in prison, Breker accepted Drieu la Rochelle’s invitation and told Albert Speer that he could not cast his work in Germany because all the foundries had been diverted into war work. Could Speer help? In the usual way of the Third Reich, strings were pulled, Rudier was released, his team of ninety skilled workmen exempted from war work, and Speer allocated 30 tons of precious bronze to the casting of Breker’s statues for the exhibition.
Hitler’s favourite sculptor moved into a large requisitioned suite in the Paris Ritz, enjoying the hospitality of 37-year-old Ambassador Abetz and his French wife, née Suzanne de Bruycker, as well as haute cuisine at restaurants recommended by Rudier. He became a lifeline for French artists in trouble. When fellow sculptor Aristide Maillol’s Jewish mistress was arrested, Breker went straight to Müller, the head of the Gestapo, to get her released. And when in 1943 Pablo Picasso was finally caught red-handed by SS Hauptsturnführer Theo Danneker feathering a bolt-hole in Russia, it was Breker who intervened and saved his skin too – which did not stop Picasso from financing his son’s studies in Switzerland by giving his ex-wife Olga Koklova a sketchbook for her to sell in Geneva for hard cash.
But all this lay in the future. In the summer of 1940, more urgent than the wellbeing of a few artists was the restoration of normal life in those parts of France that had been devastated by the fighting. With 2,500 bridges destroyed and 1,300 railway stations rendered unusable by German action and demolition by the retreating French army, evacuated Parisian railway workers were summoned back to get trains running again in the capital and suburbs, but it took eight days for men who knew the railway network intimately to accomplish what should have been a journey of only 385km. They left Clermont-Ferrand at midday on 28 June and eventually arrived in Paris at midday on 5 July after a zigzag journey avoiding demolished bridges and German-occupied stations, with the blackout regulations making night travel difficult. In the general chaos, they had difficulty finding anything to eat after their provisions ran out.
Things were better on 18 July, when a train left Bordeaux for Paris carrying 1,700 railway workers, 728 employees of the Peugeot car factory and 450 employees of the aircraft industry, whose journey took only eighteen hours, instead of the usual five. Travel priority was also given to civil servants, factory workers and farmers needed back on their land to bring in the harvest. Not until the end of July could the general population return home by train. With a million people then travelling north, the congestion and discomfort in the summer heat can be imagined.
Paris’ pre-war population of 5 million stood at less than 2 million on 27 July. Between then and 8 August, another half-million refugees returned, unaware that from 29 June to 29 July their archbishop had been under house arrest, denied both food and the spiritual comfort of the Mass13 as a way of teaching him who was master. That Cardinal Suhard learned the lesson well and performed the balancing act familiar to many churchmen entrusted both with the spiritual welfare of their flock and the property of the Church, was to earn him Pétain’s support and de Gaulle’s enmity.
For those with anything to sell the Germans, business was better than usual. After years of living under Goering’s dictum that guns were better than butter, off-duty soldiers flocked to street markets and the Paris flea market, buying anything that could be sent home as ‘a present from France’, edible or not. Intellectuals of all ranks discovered the joys of browsing
in the boxes of the bouquinistes along the embankment of the Seine and finding books in many languages long banned in Germany.
Amateur painters in field-grey set up their easels in the streets of Montmartre. Military bands gave open-air concerts of German music with an extract of Bizet’s Carmen as a sop to the natives. At the upper end of the musical scale, the Paris Opéra indulged those with a taste for Wagner so richly in the next four years that his works would be excluded from the repertoire for half a century after the war. The Berlin Philharmonic under Wilhelm Fürtwangler was among the first of the German orchestras to play in the conquered former capital of France and pianist Walter Gieseking was acclaimed by Parisian critics for his interpretations of Debussy and Ravel.
The accountants were also literally having a field day. From the Banque de France down, every financial establishment was required to draw up statements of all balances held on behalf of clients in gold, paper money, foreign exchange and jewellery. Even neutral foreigners were unable to open their own safe deposit boxes to remove documents or riches secreted there. Before the end of July, property of Jews and the absent, including POWs, were seized against paper receipts stamped with Gothic script.
A major attraction of war has always been loot. Yet, in the villages of eastern France, the invaders of 1940 were considered less prone to pilfering than their fathers in 1914 and their grandfathers, who in 1870 had looted all the clocks and watches. However, in the now German areas of Alsace and Lorraine all industrial premises belonged to the Reich. June, July and August saw the beginning of organised looting throughout France, with the 7th Army ‘liberating’ from warehouses in the port of Bordeaux 5,718 tonnes of coffee plus 2,315 tonnes of cocoa, 450 tonnes of rice and 4,544 hectolitres – equivalent to 6 million bottles – of wine.
The evacuation of German troops from Lyon, which lay in the Free Zone, was scheduled for 25 June under the Armistice agreement but was delayed by five days to permit the seizure and removal to the Reich of 162 locomotives and 2,800 railway trucks and carriages, 2,500 tonnes of various foodstuffs, 2,000 tonnes of fuel, 310 tonnes of chemicals and 9,600 tonnes of variegated metals. Altogether, one third of all French rolling stock headed east and never came back.14 Before the end of the month, entire oil refineries and rolling mills had been dismantled and were rolling eastwards to enhance the Reich’s manufacturing capacity, along with 22,000 machines from state factories and 3,000 from private enterprise.
If all this was in the tradition of conquering armies, it was also in flagrant contravention of the Hague Conventions forbidding confiscation of civilian property except in conditions of military necessity.
NOTES
1. The slang for ‘profiteer’ was ‘bof’, standing for beurre, oeufs, fromage – butter, eggs and cheese being the three staples from which money was most easily made.
2. H.R. Kedward, Resistance in Vichy France (Oxford: OUP, 1978), p. 36.
3. ‘Vivre dans la défaite est mourir tous les jours.’
4. Amouroux, La Vie, Vol. 1, pp. 384–7.
5. H. Diamond, Women and the Second World War in France (London: Longman, 1999), p. 32.
6. S. Berton, Allies at War (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2001), p. 46.
7. D. Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich (London: Collins, 1981), p. 148.
8. More details in Pryce-Jones, Paris, p. 150.
9. 1940: La Défaite, p. 512.
10. Pryce-Jones, Paris, pp. 24–5.
11. H. Le Boterf, La Vie Parisienne sous l’Occupation (Geneva: Famot, 1979), Vol. 3, p. 7. ‘Pour certains, le renom de Paris est tributaire de la beauté de quelques croupes joliment arondies.’
12. 1940: La Défaite, p. 513.
13. R. Bédarida, Les Catholiques dans la Guerre 1935–1945 (Paris: Hachette, 1998), p. 45.
14. Kernan, France, p. 23.
9
OF CHEESE, PLAYS
AND BOOKS
Posted to Paris as Kriegsverwaltungsabteilungschef, or department head of General Otto von Stülpnagel’s administrative staff, Helmut Rademacher later recalled his boss returning from shopping trips incognito to ask awkward questions like, ‘Why is the price of cheese so high?’ His multifarious duties embracing the live theatre, Rademacher once ordered Sacha Guitry, who was being courted as an example of französiche Kultur, to remove patriotic speeches from his production of Pasteur. It opened at the Madeleine Theatre on 31 July as an antidote to all the comedies playing elsewhere.
Rademacher’s spicier duties included the inspection and licensing of forces’ brothels, which could only employ girls holding a permit from his office. There were forty-five establishments in Paris where la collaboration horizontale was officially available – forty for German rank-and-file, four for officers below general rank and one for the generals. Rules for the inmates were strict: no Jewesses or Blacks, condoms obligatory and regular medical checks. Off the premises, the girls were watched to ensure they did not work ‘on the side’. Business boomed, German regulations taxing brothels at the same rate as boxing matches – a loop-hole that was slammed shut by fisc inspectors after the Liberation, when they demanded four years’ arrears with interest.1
Although One-Two-Two, the capital’s most expensive maison de tolérance never ran short of caviar or champagne, it was out of bounds for German military personnel. Any officer found there or in any other unauthorised brothel was immediately transferred from France for having ignored the obligatory notice outside the entrance: Das Betreten dieses Lokales ist deutschen Soldaten und Zivilpersonen strengst verboten. All ranks, on leaving a brothel, were given a card bearing the name of the establishment, the date and the girl’s working name, for medical follow-up if necessary. It was forbidden for military personnel to have any relationships with the whores, to divulge personal details or give them photographs or other keepsakes.
Between 5,000 and 6,000 street and bar girls also had bilingual ID cards declaring them reserved for German use, but the Kriegsverwaltung estimated that in addition to them and 1,600 to 1,800 licensed whores in the maisons closes, there were at least another 80,000 unauthorised female sex-workers in greater Paris alone, constituting a permanent source of venereal infection.2 Nevertheless, the Wehrmacht’s unhypocritical policy paid off: there was no epidemic of gonorrhoea and syphilis such as followed the GIs’ arrival after the Liberation.
So many officers managed to wangle a posting to France that some wag invented the apocryphal JEIP travel agency, the initials standing for Jeder Einmal in Paris, meaning, ‘everyone gets to Paris once’. For newcomers, Pariser Zeitung listed places to avoid and hints on ‘what to do if …’ In Montmartre, nightclub settlements between the Corsican Mafia and the carlingue – thieves’ slang for the Gestapo’s hired gangsters – were so frequent that officers were advised to draw their side-arms at the start of a fight and form a human fence around the dance floor, weapons pointed outwards at the clientele until the police arrived. With SD identity cards in their pockets, the carlingue risked nothing in these fracas.
Pariser Zeitung also carried paid publicity for nightclubs, restaurants and brothels where German money was welcome, but not all officers came for les girls: during the four years of occupation German opera-lovers purchased tickets to the value of 6.5 million francs. For them, the Opéra Garnier reopened on 24 August. Its first production, selected to celebrate the marriage of French and German culture, was Gounod’s Damnation of Faust inspired by Goethe’s Faust. Bookings were ten times better than for the last performance on 5 June.
White Russian ballet-master Serge Lifar had taken refuge during the German entry into the capital with a part-Jewish patroness of the arts, Marie-Laure de Noailles, who had remained in her town house to defend her collection of Goyas by waving at any approaching German a letter from US Ambassador Bullit stating that her house and contents were American property. Emerging when he thought it safe, Lifar directed the ballet company of the Opéra in an anodyne choice: Coppélia opened on 28 August. Later, he would even invite Baldur von Sch
irach – head of Hitler Youth – to open an exhibition.
Within days of the German arrival, gourmet restaurants like Fouquet’s and La Tour d’Argent saw takings soar through the roof. Maxim’s was quietly taken over by the Berlin restaurateur Otto Horcher, whose colleague Walterspiel also ‘administered’ forty or so bistros requisitioned from racially unacceptable owners. Another function of Rademacher’s office was approving their orders for champagne and fine wines, although everyone was aware that monthly consumption was systematically over-estimated so that the surplus purchased at the regulated price of 5 marks per bottle could be sold off on the black market at 20 marks a bottle.3
Over a succulent Châteaubriand steak at his table in Le Catalan restaurant, Pablo Picasso held court for writers and artists like Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Braque and Albert Camus. Throughout the occupation, he was left alone by the Gestapo, despite having a Jewish mother and known communist sympathies. Abetz even sent a lackey offering a supplementary coal allocation, which was refused by the man who had exposed worldwide the Condor Legion’s bombing of civilians in his painting ‘Guernica’. There is a story that one German officer looking at a copy of it asked the artist, ‘Did you do that?’ Picasso is said to have replied, ‘No, you did.’ Yet, those who look for any evidence of the Second World War in his work during the occupation, look in vain. Expressing contempt for the critics, he said afterwards, ‘Perhaps an art historian will demonstrate how my painting was influenced by the war. I don’t know.’4