Voices from the Dark Years

by Douglas Boyd

  A few weeks later, a party of Germans arrived to search the farm and outbuildings thoroughly. Nothing was found but Rambaud was arrested on the grounds that he ‘received too many visitors’ and driven away to Libourne prison, where he spent several weeks before being released for lack of evidence against him.21

  NOTES

  1. Ragache, La Vie des Ecrivains, p. 108.

  2. Chabrier’s history is from the author’s conversations with the Chabrier family and Colonel Rémy, La Ligne de Démarcation (Paris, LAP, 1966), pp. 153–62.

  3. Nossiter, France and the Nazis, p. 89.

  4. For Laporterie’s full story, see J. Bacque, Just Raoul (Toronto: Stoddart, 1990).

  5. Ragache, La Vie des Ecrivains, p. 120.

  6. Referring to the colour car headlamps had to be painted.

  7. Burrin, Living with Defeat, p. 53.

  8. Webster, Pétain’s Crime, p. 124.

  9. Arrested December 1941 but released in February 1942.

  10. Le Boterf, La Vie Parisienne, Vol. 1, p. 37.

  11. Pechanski, Collaboration and Resistance, p. 98.

  12. Pryce-Jones, Paris, p. 63.

  13. Unpub. MS on Prefect François Martin loaned to the author by Madame Gouzi: ‘Puisse le Maréchal Pétain avoir une vie suffisamment longue pour nous soutenir alors de sa haute autorité et de son incomparable prestige. Nous sommes totalement dévoués à l’œuvre du Maréchal.’

  14. Quoted in a privately printed justification by the son of Prefect François Martin, loaned to the author by Madame Gouzi: ‘Nous estimons que le mouvement de de Gaulle est une erreur. Nous sommes convaincus qu’on défend mieux son pays en y restant qu’en le quittant. Autour du Général de Gaulle sont rassemblés maints éléments indésirables. En résumé, le MLN n’a aucun lien avec le gaullisme et ne reçoit de Londres aucun ordre.’

  15. H. Michel, The Shadow War (London: André Deutsch, 1972), p. 123.

  16. Originally Deuxième Bureau, it became Service de Renseignements and eventually le Bureau Central d’Action et Renseignements.

  17. All the Gaullist intelligence officers chose noms de guerre that were names of Paris Metro stations.

  18. Col Passy, Souvenirs: 2e Bureau London (Paris: Éditions Raoul Solar, 1947), pp. 70–1.

  19. Ibid., p. 173.

  20. K. Doenitz, Memoirs (London: Cassell, 2000), p. 409.

  21. Rémy, La Ligne de Démarcation, pp. 141–52.

  12

  OF CULTURE AND CROPS

  On 15 March 1941 the SS pulled off a political coup, fusing Deloncle’s MSR with Marcel Déat’s Rassemblement National Populaire, a far-right party to which Laval gave some undercover financial support because it made him look like a liberal.1 On 1 April, with Darlan officially installed as deputy prime minister, one of the first laws that passed across his desk undid the loophole through which Reynaud had hoped to find marital bliss with the late Comtesse de Portes. In keeping with the importance attached to the family as a social institution by Pétain, and to reward the Church for its support, divorce was made more difficult once again.

  There was an ominous foretaste of future violence in the report dated 9 April by the gendarmerie commandant in Blainville-sur-Orne in occupied Normandy: ‘Immoral behaviour by wives of POWs is to be seen wherever German troops are stationed. Girls younger than twenty are becoming prostitutes. This behaviour is difficult for officers to control, given the German protection certain women enjoy.’2

  Apart from promiscuity, women’s motives varied. Although one of the marshal’s slogans was ‘I keep promises, even those made by others’, it was now evident that his undertaking to ‘bring the boys home’ was empty talk and the wives and families were suffering: while a factory worker earned 1,200 to 1,800 francs per month, the allowance to a POW’s wife with one child was a mere 630 francs; it increased to 830 francs for two children and to 1,060 for three children, but was still insufficient as inflation bit.3 With military personnel enjoying better rations than the civilian population, hunger alone motivated some women to find a German boyfriend, even before the adult bread ration in the Occupied Zone was reduced on 14 April from 350g a day to 275g.

  Along the Channel coast, nightly bombing raids by the RAF added to the misery. Yet most public opinion blamed the Germans for making the ports strategic targets. Throughout the Occupied Zone, people who listened to the BBC passed its news on. A spate of V signs chalked on walls provoked frightened house owners to hastily scrub them off. Convinced Pétainists – and the vast majority of the population still supported the marshal – took to carrying a chalk in their pocket, ever ready to add two more strokes to a V and turn it into M, meaning Vive le Maréchal!

  The screw of anti-Semitism in the Occupied Zone was given another turn on 26 April with the proclamation by General Otto Von Stülpnagel of the second anti-Jewish ordinance. On 9 May the first of Vichy’s scapegoats for the defeat were brought to trial at Riom near Clermont-Ferrand in a courtroom packed with 300 enemies and with no chance of a fair hearing from a military tribunal headed by a judge who had been a member of Action Française. Only six witnesses appeared for the defence, including serving officers who courageously confirmed that defendant Pierre Mendès-France had been ordered to go to North Africa. One of the seven judges had the moral courage to dissent from the judgement that Mendès-France be stripped of his parliamentary privileges and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. A second Jewish defendant from the Massilia, Jean Zay, was sentenced to deportation. Of two gentile ministers who had been serving officers when travelling with them to North Africa, one was given a suspended sentence and the other acquitted.

  That month, Darlan travelled to Berchtesgaden for secret talks with Ribbentrop and Hitler, seeking a reduction in the crippling occupation costs as a quid pro quo for help in Syria – in defiance of France’s neutrality, French airfields there had been placed at the disposal of the Luftwaffe flying support missions in Iraq for the uprising led by Rashid Ali against the British occupation of his country. Darlan’s second, economic, argument was that only 1.5 million German personnel were garrisoned in France, not the 4 million men originally budgeted for. Hitler’s Delphic reply indicated a possible 25 per cent decrease in daily occupation tax of 400 million francs a day, which was enshrined in a protocol signed at the end of May in the Paris embassy. It was indeed reduced to 300 million francs a day, but increased to 500 million after German occupation of the southern zone in 1942 – and to a crippling 700 million francs after D-Day.

  Hearing a BBC broadcast in May, during which President Roosevelt expressed disbelief ‘that the French people was collaborating with its oppressor’, a group of theological students at a seminary in Lyon wrote a simple statement: ‘The French people does not collaborate.’ Signed with their initials only, it was to be posted or handed in at the US embassy, but became duplicated as a tract, inciting the Vichy paper Action to ask, ‘But who is financing all this?’

  On 22 May Herbert von Karajan celebrated Wagner’s birthday by conducting Tristan und Isolde at the Palais de Chaillot. Karajan was a frequent visitor during the occupation, as were Eugen Jochum, Wilhelm Kempff and many other conductors, along with soloists of the quality of Elizabeth Schwarzkopf and Lore Fischer. A new event was added to the cultural calendar when the Berlin Chamber Orchestra performed in the courtyard of the Palais Royal for Mozart Week, held in July. Of German conductors, only Wilhelm Furtwängler refused to come, saying that he preferred to conduct in Paris at the invitation of the French and not the Wehrmacht.

  On 23 May, together with eight members of his network, Gaullist naval intelligence agent Comte Henri Louis d’Estienne d’Orves was condemned to death by a military court. Betrayed by his radio operator shortly after returning to France from London in December, he had been arrested in Nantes on 21 January. Before his execution at Mont Valérien on 29 August, he pleaded for clemency to be shown to the Breton sailors implicated in his arrest on the grounds that they had been motivated purely by patriotism. They were all
transported to Germany. His last letter to a service comrade ended with the explanation that he had to cease writing because he and the two men to be shot with him were too busy telling each other jokes. On the reverse of a photograph of his wife and five children, taken at Quimper in Brittany, he wrote: ‘To my dear children I return this photo which gave me such joy in August 1941.’4

  With the Red Army observing German preparations for Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, the PCF and the communist parties in Holland and Belgium were brought into play by the Comintern, although still officially supporting the Franco-German friendship. A strike – ostensibly over wages, introduction of new technology and poor food – spread from the Belgian coal mines into France like a powder trail sparking from pit to pit in May and early June. German military governors reacted severely, deporting 224 activists and taking ninety-four hostages, of which nine were shot.5 A pay increase of 18 francs per day was conceded before the last men eventually went back to work on 9 June.

  On 2 June 1941 Pétain issued a second Statut des Juifs, obliging heads of Jewish families in both zones to register with the local town hall, which records later proved invaluable to the Milice and the SS in scooping up victims. The list of professional activities barred to Jews was now so long that it effectively left them unable to earn a living. The only statutory exceptions were for those who had rendered exceptional service to the French state (an ambiguous term by then) or whose family had been in France for at least five generations and rendered exceptional service to the French state during this time. Other restrictions were reflected in letters all account holders received from their bank managers in the week of 13 June, requiring them to send an attestation of racial purity. Failure to do so for any reason resulted in seizure of the account.

  The doyen of the Paris bar, Maître Pierre Masse, replied to Pétain on learning that Jewish citizens might no longer be officers in the armed services:

  I should be obliged if you would tell me how I withdraw rank from my brother, a lieutenant in 36th Infantry Regiment, killed at Douaumont in April 1916; from my son-in-law, second-lieutenant in the Dragoons, killed in Belgium in May 1940; from my nephew, J.F. Masse, lieutenant in 23rd Colonial Regiment, killed at Rethel in May 1940. May I leave with my brother his Médaille Militaire, with which he was buried? May my son Jacques, second-lieutenant in the Chasseurs Alpins, wounded at Soupir in June 1940, keep his rank? Can I also be assured that no one will retrospectively take back the Saint Helena medal from my great-grandfather?6

  Courage availing nothing, Masse was transported in 1941 and later died in Germany.

  These and other heart-rending appeals for protection by the state they had well served were forwarded from Vichy to Pétain’s avidly pro-German official delegate in Paris, Fernand de Brinon. How many letters were actually seen by the marshal is an unresolved question. The probable answer is not very many, since Ménétrel personally sorted all mail to ensure nothing untoward arrived on his master’s desk. A later letter that was acknowledged came from Victor Faynzylber, who also sent a photograph of himself wearing both the Croix de Guerre and Médaille Militaire and standing with the help of the crutches he needed since losing a leg in the 1940 defeat. With him in the picture are his two children, the daughter of seven bearing her yellow star in conformity with the German ordinance. The plea was not for the veteran himself, but for the release of his wife, held at Drancy. It went unheeded, both she and later her husband being killed after transportation to Germany.7 On 11 August 1941 a group of eighteen veterans wearing a total of seventy medals came to Vichy to request that anti-Semitic propaganda be dropped in official army publications, but no one listened. Not even when Pétain himself had signed the citation did a medal protect – as in the case of André Gerschel, dismissed as mayor of Calais.8 Retired General Staff Officer Jacques Helbronner had personally lobbied for Pétain’s advancement in the First World War, but his appeal to the marshal did not save him or his family, transported and gassed at Auschwitz in 1943.

  For some tastes, the anti-Semitic laws were far too lenient. Le Petit Parisien commented:

  The Jews wanted this war and have thrown the world into a hideous conflict, in the light of which crime the present measures seem benign. It seems impossible that these people, running 80 per cent of the black market should spend their money so shamefully earned while the great majority of the French people have a very hard life of it at the moment.9

  The reference to the black market was echoed in a contemporary poster that showed two caricature Jews swapping a loaf for cash.

  In Paris, Hauptsturmführer Danneker’s fan mail after the second ordinance included a letter from ‘The Group of Anti-Semitic Friends’ asking him to do something to stop Jews riding in cyclo-taxis pedalled by Aryans, having their baggage carried by Aryan porters or their shoes shined by Aryans. Whatever one’s race, with new shoes meaning wooden soles, rather fittingly the annual Grenoble Fair was declared the ‘first fair of the Ersatz’, introducing among other delights street signs that were no longer made in enamelled metal but Bakelite, first of the plastics family.

  At the beginning of June, eleven young women and nine young men from various walks of life were shipped off to Drancy for mocking the yellow star ordinance by wearing either stars marked ‘Jew’ or ‘French’ or similarly shaped yellow objects on their clothing. Hailed as heroes by the other detainees, they were held in the camp for three months to give them a taste of what it actually meant to be Jewish. On 21 June, convinced that his captors intended to kill him eventually, Pierre Mendès-France escaped from Clermont-Ferrand prison. Refusing to go with him for fear of reprisals against his family, cell-mate Jean Zay was murdered by the Milice in June 1944.

  News of the escape was overshadowed by events of greater import. On 21 June a handful of Germans in the know suggested with a wink to French friends that they should listen to the radio next day, when the hot news was the launch of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s invasion of the USSR. On 30 June 1941 Pétain severed relations with the USSR, but most French people were far more worried by the introduction of clothes rationing the next day, with a national appeal for them to hand in unwanted or outgrown garments, in return for which they would be given extra clothing coupons. This fell on deaf ears, anyone with surplus clothes preferring to trade them for a few eggs or a loaf of bread.

  That summer’s Paris fair boasted footwear of wood, straw and synthetic leather, fashion designers backing the skirt-culotte as the smart garment for chic Parisiennes to wear on their bicycles, with the advantage that they could bend down to pump up their tyres and cycle home without fear of an importunate breeze revealing intimate secrets to male eyes. And cycles there were, everywhere. By the end of the occupation, 2 million were registered in Greater Paris, where new ones cost the price of a car before the war.

  On 13 July de Gaulle asked every patriot over the radio to go out the next day sporting the national colours of red, white and blue. In the seaside town of Arcachon, Rénée de Monbrison did so, her children similarly dressed. A less courageous stranger sidled up to her, whispering, ‘Salut, bonne Française.’ In Paris a handful of men wearing tricolour handkerchiefs poking out of their breast pockets were arrested. More prudent folk preferred not to show in public they were listening to the BBC. Just how many did is illustrated by a current joke:

  Françoise de Brison’s pass to cross the line.

  Question: What would you say if I told you a Jew killed a German in the street at 9.30 pm and ate his brain? Answer: First, a German has no brain. Second, Jews don’t eat pork. And third, no one’s in the street at 9.30. Everyone’s listening to the news on BBC.

  The Church disapproved, with Cardinal Liénart of Lille saying, ‘Do not listen to London or [the German station in] Paris. Listen to Lyon and Toulouse’,10 in other words, the voice of the Church hierarchy.German propaganda attempted to discredit the BBC with a poster campaign showing it as a maiden aunt, La Tante BBC, whose initials stood for Bobard-Boniment-Corporation – the
Corporation of Lies and Humbug.

  On the surface, everyday life was still normal in some respects. Although Renée was technically Jewish under the German ordinances, her husband’s family was an old Huguenot one. The children had been brought up as Protestants and were not legally Jewish. Thus, a pass to be had for the asking enabled her daughter Françoise to cross the Demarcation Line in order to attend the convention of the Protestant Scouts in Nîmes.

  Strip-searched when crossing the line between Langon and La Réole, Françoise was already naked and about to take off her second sock, in which was hidden a letter she was bringing across for an old family friend, when the German policewoman told her she could keep her socks on. Unknown to Françoise, among the vines exactly 2km away on the line was an unguarded door, through which several hundred local people had simply walked unmolested into the Free Zone.

  Now that the Germans allowed only the owners of houses situated in the coastal zone to stay there, Baboushka had fled inland to the village of Sablé, still in the Occupied Zone, and was surprised how hard it was to find a hotel room. With the coast off-limits for holidays, inland hotels were full, any empty rooms taken by German soldiers billeted on the hoteliers. The couple running Baboushka’s hotel were both Pétainist and anti-Semitic, yet business was business, so they made a point of always addressing her by the non-Jewish part of her name, ‘Madame Robert’.11

  On July 11 Déat and Doriot launched La Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchevisme (LVF), with Deloncle as president. Recognised by Darlan on 3 August, the movement had the support of the Institut Catholique, Monseigneur Jean Mayol de Lupé going so far as to enrol himself as chaplain-general with the SS rank of Sturmbannführer, greeting his Sunday congregation with, ‘Heil Hitler! Et pieux dimanche, mes fils!’ (‘Heil Hitler and a devout Sunday!’). Among his spiritual sons were Abbés Verney and Lara, who volunteered as chaplains to accompany into Russia the LVF units hailed by Cardinal Baudrillart as ‘the finest sons of France’. Mistrusting the idea of French soldiers in German uniform, Hitler limited LVF numbers to 15,000. He need not have worried because although 173 recruiting offices were opened, of the 10,788 who volunteered in the next two years, only 6,429 passed the medical, such was the toll of food shortages on general health.12 Doriot departed for the eastern front, doing his political career irredeemable harm by absenting himself from France for eighteen months.