by Douglas Boyd
The English bookshop on the rue de Rivoli had an enormous sign, Frontbuchhandlung, tacked in front of ‘W.H. Smith’ and everywhere Man spricht deutsch replaced English spoken. At Longchamp and Auteuil the racing set in all its furs and finery, now swollen by Germans in and out of uniform, watched the horse races and placed its bets. The Jockey Club welcomed back its elite members and if the president’s box was now reserved for the Kommandant von Gross-Paris and his high-ranking compatriots, it troubled no one.
For officers preferring the other kind of horseflesh, the Folies Bergères reopened with a new review of scantily clad dancers on 1 August, featured in the French-language edition of the propaganda magazine Signal to show how normal life now was in France. The revue was to become less erotic as the autumn drew into a coal-less winter and goose pimples on the girls’ shivering bodies were hard to disguise beneath sequins glued on strategic places. Nightclubs like Don Juan, Chez Elle, Le Tabarin and the Lido were doing a roaring trade, the management of one Montmartre dive sticking up a large notice outside: ‘The staff and performers in this establishment are all Aryan.’ Outside Le Moulin Rouge, soldiers queued to see the high-kicking dancers expose their frilly knickers, unaware that the Cancan music had been composed by a Jewish composer.
With ‘Paris By Night’ now ‘Paris bei Nacht’, Sacha Guitry and Maurice Chevalier had no qualms about performing for the occupying forces. Nor did Édith Piaf spurn their money. Like Maurice Chevalier and Charles Trenet, she also accepted tours in Germany. Life was harder for the chansonniers in cabarets, who had to word their satirical ditties carefully. Stand-up comedians with no wish to offend either the occupation authorities or their own humourless government targeted poor performance by Mussolini’s troops during the invasion. Everyone appreciated the joke about the Italian airborne attack when a Forza Aerea plane invaded French airspace carrying twelve strong men, all highly trained to throw the single reluctant parachutist out when over the drop-zone! More risky was the story of Mussolini asking the Führer what the German eagle signified. Hitler replied, ‘The head of the eagle with its piercing eyes, is me – the brains of the Third Reich. The heart is Goebbels, who guides the soul of the great German nation. The two wings represent Reichsmarschal Goering, master of the Luftwaffe. The belly is Dr Funk, in charge of food production.’ At this point Italian Foreign Minister Comte Galeazzo Ciano clutches the Duce’s sleeve: ‘Let’s leave now, before he reaches the arse-hole. That’ll be us!’5
If theatres and the opera had to advance the start of performances by an hour or more to ensure the curtain came down in time for the last Metro train, priority given at the cloakroom for those with a connection to make, in nightclubs many clients were deliberately distracted by the hostesses until they had no choice but to continue drinking and paying for the ladies’ drinks until 5 a.m., when they could depart with lightened wallets. Typically Parisian, système D – the initial being for débrouiller, or ‘wangle’ – saw curfew-exempt Post Office vans taking routes that enabled the drivers to collect patrons from nightclubs and drop them off at home for cash.
Guitry, in between buzzing around town sometimes in a little electric car to get around the shortage of petrol, said in his film Donne-moi tes yeux, ‘Before these marvels (of Impressionist art and music created despite the occupation of France by Germany in 1870) we have the … right to consider that such creations are equal to a victory.’ Intended as a justification for business-as-usual in the arts and entertainment industry, this and other indiscretions were to cost him two months in prison after the Liberation.6 Maurice Chevalier tried to play it both ways, photographed in Signal singing for POWs at the same camp where he had been imprisoned 1914–18 but also protesting a blind obedience of the marshal that got him into trouble after the Liberation.7
At the top end of the cultural scale were the senior officers, whose personal interest in Paris lay in her artistic riches. The Hague Conventions imposed on the victor in war the duty of safeguarding works of art. This enabled General Keitel at OKW to order the first military commander of Paris, General von Vollard-Bockelberg to take possession of all works of art belonging to the French State and those of émigré Jews and other runaways. Using the logic that all the paintings, statues and smaller valuables were being taken under the protection of the Wehrmacht, the fight began despite an ordinance of 15 July signed by the Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich:
1. No work of art may be removed from its present place nor modified in any manner without the written authority of the military administration;
2. Removal of any work of art must be authorised by me in advance;
3. Works of art whose value exceeds 100,000 francs must be registered in writing by their owners or present holders before 15 August 1940.
There were always conflicting chains of command emanating from the Führer. Thus, Ambassador Abetz acted on instructions from Ribbentrop when informing Gen Vollard-Bockelberg on 6 July that the responsibility of looking after the works of art fell to the embassy. Accordingly, Gruppe 540 of the Geheime Feldpolizei (GFP) was charged with entering private homes and art galleries belonging to Jewish runaways and placing everything valuable under Abetz’s care. Within hours the Paris home of Baron Edward de Rothschild was a shell, empty frames hanging on all the walls, furniture, tapestries and even curtains disappearing into the ‘protective’ maw of the Reich. Army trucks pulled up in front of the art galleries with famous names – Seligman, Bernheim, Rosenberg – while they too were emptied of their treasures.
Before the afternoon was out, Abetz had been over-ruled. Lieutenant-Colonel Hans Speidel, acting directly for OKW, invoked the Hague Conventions – under which the Kunstschutz or Wehrmacht art protection service was to take charge of all works of art in the conquered territory. Museum curator Comte Franz Wolff Metternich was placed in charge of the operation and carried it out so conscientiously that he was dismissed in the summer of 1942, and was later the only German of the occupation administration to be awarded a French decoration.
On 17 July a counsellor at the Legation, SS-Sturmbannführer Baron von Kunsberg arrived with a team of Foreign Ministry ‘experts’ to restart the official looting. He was soon replaced in the game by Dr Carl-Theo Zeitschel, also an SS-Sturmbannführer and an officer in the GFP, who outranked Abetz both in age and seniority as member of the Nazi Party.
Dr Kummel, whose authority as director-general of the Berlin museums stemmed from Reichsminister Josef Goebbels, next appeared at the head of a commission charged with ‘recovering’ the works of German artists. If Dürer and Cranach were among them, so also were Rubens, van Dyck and many others who had not previously been German. While this was ongoing, a Dr Posse from Dresden made his entrance, charged directly by the Führer to seize the best pieces for the greatest art collection in the world at his planned European capital of Linz.
By now the embassy was out of storage space, with canvases and statues and furniture stacked all over. So the Jeu de Paume museum in the Tuileries gardens was requisitioned to serve as a holding area where works could be assembled and sorted. Yet another agency, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), was later estimated to have looted 21,903 major works of art.8 Rosenberg, the Nazi ideologue and author of The Myth of the 20th Century – a fictitious elaboration of the origins of the German race – had been placed in charge of the nascent party by Hitler when in prison after the Munich Beer Hall Putsch because he was too stupid to be of any danger. The ERR representative in Paris was Dr von Behr, formerly head of the German Red Cross. He was now supposed to be collecting ‘cultural property’ for an institute where all the intellectual works of Jews and others would be kept and analysed, but was able to stretch the definition to include, for example, a Vermeer looted from a de Rothschild residence.
No one, however, outdid arch-collector Hermann Goering. In civilian clothes, the head of the Luftwaffe – then supposedly destroying the RAF prior to a sea-borne invasion of Britain – spent whole days in the Jeu de Paume, looking like
a mobile tent in his ankle-length overcoat as he ambled among the works of art. With a shopping list including ten Renoirs, ten Degas, two Monets, three Sisleys, four Cézannes and five Van Goghs,9 he returned nine times, chalking on the works that took his fancy a large ‘G’ if he wanted them for his personal collection at his private palace named Karinhall (in memory of his first wife), or an ‘H’ if he decided they should go to the Führer, no matter who else might have selected them. He also bought on the open market, endearing himself to dealers by spending 100 million francs in cash from his apparently bottomless briefcase stuffed with untraceable notes.10
To support Metternich’s Kunstschutz, the Wehrmacht sought to prevent exportation of works of art by making no transport available, a measure that Goering circumvented by commandeering Luftwaffe trucks to convey his loot to his personal train named Kanada, in which it travelled eastwards. When a courageous Luftwaffe officer explained that exporting works of art was contrary to military law, Goering simply retorted that he was the ultimate authority on the law11 and as such was empowered to grab pictures by Goya, Rembrandt, Rubens, Franz Hals, Degas, Renoir, Manet, Sisley, Cézanne, Van Gogh and others.
One courageous woman was quietly observing all the pillagers. The sentries at the Jeu de Paume took no notice of the bespectacled, plain-faced and modestly dressed Rose Valland, a young curator at the Louvre who had taken the risk of hiding certain works of art there behind false walls. Each day, she crossed the gravelled courtyard between her office and the Jeu de Paume, surreptitiously compiling an inventory of the looted works of art, with details of who had seized them and when and whither they had been despatched. Her log was the principal tool used in recovering thousands of state and privately owned works after the war, a labour for which she received several decorations.
Vichy was also doing its best to limit the looting. Many private collectors had gifted their favourite pieces to the new French state in the hope of protecting them. Pétain’s government now declared that all works of art belonging to runaways, whether Jewish or not, automatically became state property. However, where the original owners were Jewish, the German ruling was that they were German property because transfer of ownership was due to Wehrmacht force of arms. As to the provisions of the Hague Conventions, these did not apply because Jews and their property were not protected by any laws.
What the Nazis called entartete Kunst, or degenerate art, presented a different problem. Berlin had sold off works of despised ‘un-Germanic’ artists during the 1930s through Swiss galleries for foreign currency. Similarly now pictures by Picasso, Braque, Pissarro and other modern artists were sold off at a fraction of their true value to French intermediaries, while five or six hundred others were simply taken outside the Jeu de Paume and burned on the terrace. Works of Klee, Miro, Susanne Valadon, Miró, Max Ernst and Picasso were reduced to a pile of ashes, as so many books had been in Germany. Typically, Goering obtained works of Jewish or other ‘degenerate’ artists by arrogating to himself the decision of who was Jewish and what was degenerate. The looting continued until the last train of thirty-seven trucks, whose contents included a Van Dyck, a Rubens and several Renoirs, was immobilised just outside Paris by the Resistance in August 1944.
The German expression wie Gott in Frankreich means more or less ‘as good as it can get’. Certainly the rear-echelon military, the administrators, the Gestapo and other functionaries who arrived in Paris in the wake of the Wehrmacht were delighted to be on the west bank of the Rhine where, to begin with, shop windows were filled with so many things unavailable in Germany. Many were genuine francophiles, like Ribbentrop’s ambassador Otto Abetz, whose elegant French wife immediately drew up lists of the great and good to invite to her lunch parties. The smooth-talking, Scandinavian-looking career diplomat Ernst Achenbach, who had been en poste in Paris before the war, estimated that most of those invited were patriotic French people trying to accommodate the occupiers, yet they included far-right activists like Eugène Deloncle. With financial backing from Eugène Schueller, owner of the L’Oréal cosmetic empire, Deloncle formed the Mouvement Social Revolutionnaire (MSR) in September. MSR, pronounced aime-et-sert, or ‘loves and serves’, was to have much blood on its hands by the end of the occupation.
Abetz, a reluctant Nazi who joined the party in 1937, adored quoting from his favourite French authors and had made many visits to France in the 1930s, courting influential people and arranging youth congresses so successfully that he had been banned from entering France in 1939 on the accusation that he was fomenting a fifth column. The same civil servants at the Quai d’Orsay who had banned him then now had to court him as the most important diplomat in Paris. That his post existed at all was due to Foreign Minister Von Ribbentrop’s insistence on having his own man among all the others scrabbling for power in Paris, for the role of German ambassador in a city that was not the seat of government was unclear to everyone, according to Hans Speidel, the first Wehrmacht officer to enter Paris and eventually become commander of NATO Land Forces Central Europe. Initially confined to dealing with the German military command in Occupied France, only later did Abetz’s remit include dealing with the French themselves. Meeting Laval on 19 July, while his wife Suzanne was still busy buying curtain fabric and furnishing their apartment in the embassy, Abetz was completely taken in by the dark, dynamic Laval hammering home his personal vision of Franco-German collaboration.
The embassy staff was divided between non-Nazis like Achenbach and die-hard followers of Hitler like SS liaison officer Dr Zeitschel, of whom Achenbach said, ‘Now that was someone we didn’t trust.’ According to Speidel, Schleier’s impeccable party credentials made him politically more powerful than Abetz. Gertsner, too, was considered by the diplomats an out-and-out Nazi, but became a mayor in communist east Berlin after the war, like many Nazis who found no problem in changing allegiance from one totalitarian regime to another.
On 8 July Dr Carl Schaeffer was ex-officio appointed co-director of the Banque de France as Director of the Bankenaufsichtsamt, overseeing all French banks, with powers to access and freeze any account. Resistance to what is today normal state intrusion in the banking sector vanished when twelve senior managers of Crédit Lyonnais were imprisoned for protecting clients’ accounts from scrutiny.12 Schaeffer also appointed commissioners to run the Jewish- and British-owned banks. Unlike many occupation authorities, Schaeffer’s operation was amazingly efficient, with two German officials sufficing to police 80,000 obedient bank employees. His failures included the seizure of all foreign currency in France for the Reich. The Bank of England immediately invalidated all its banknotes held abroad unless stamped by a British consulate before a certain date, with the numbers duly noted. Schaeffer’s next move was to open up the safe deposit boxes of British citizens and confiscate the contents. French citizens needing to open their boxes could only do so in the presence of an official of the Bankenaufsichtsamt or another German officer. Family heirlooms were not seized but uncut gems and shares in foreign companies were ‘taken into protective custody’.
Publisher Thomas Kernan returned to Paris in mid-July, to find the offices of Vogue on the Champs Elysées had been ransacked and its photographic studio and darkroom requisitioned for production of propaganda photographs. One of the proliferating German organisations, the Propaganda Staffel, had moved into National City Bank Building at 52 Champs Elysées to control the French press, radio, cinema and theatre. Its boss, a pleasant, overweight lieutenant named Weber, who married a dancer at the Lido nightclub, had been the pre-war Paris manager for German news agency Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro. Kernan had known him well, but when he walked along the deserted Champs Elysées to ask Weber’s permission to resume publication – the US being still neutral – he was surprised to find himself interviewed by an underling whom he also knew. A former freelance Paris fashion photographer named Maier, whose work had never been good enough for Vogue, was now wearing SS uniform with the grand title of ‘Sonderführer for illustrated magazines
’.
Kernan was obliged to declare that Vogue’s US parent company Condé Nast had no Jewish capital or interests, but each time he filled in one questionnaire he was given another, with Maier inventing one set of problems because the French edition was produced and published by a French company and another because the parent company was American. Meanwhile, the editor of a Vogue clone entitled Art et la Mode, which had enjoyed a circulation of less than a tenth of the real Vogue, went around openly telling the fashion houses that she had been given the mission of replacing Vogue.13
It was traditional in France for intellectuals, especially writers, to be politically active. Notwithstanding three wounds suffered in the First World War, author and pamphleteer Drieu la Rochelle had supported Franco during the Spanish Civil War and also attended the Nuremberg rallies alongside delegations of British fascists. He also edited Dernières Nouvelles, which folded for reasons unknown after a few months, leaving him free to run the well-established publishing house Nouvelle Revue Française until 1943. Collaboration came naturally to him, as it did to many younger writers such as Robert Brasillach and Lucien Rebatet, who contributed to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Je Suis Partout.
Hermann Eich, a journalist in his mid-twenties who had been on the staff of Berliner Tageblatt, arrived in Paris on 20 June also with the title of Sonderführer to find himself working for Weber on the preparation of guidelines for the French press as to what it could and could not do. His Wege der französichen Presse was the bible, of which readings were given each week for editors, who sent their deputies, who swiftly dwindled in number until replaced by a handful of secretaries, who jotted down shorthand notes to be shared between several papers. Editors who transgressed Eich’s guidelines were out of a job.