If ‘modernizers’ had usurped ‘traditionalists’ in the control of Vichy’s economic policy, this was largely due to the force of circumstances. The dire economic situation required interventionism and this gave the modernizers their opportunity: they saw themselves as realists. But the gap between rhetoric and reality was as great for the modernizers as for the traditionalists. It was an illusion to believe it would be possible to organize a massive overhaul of the French economy when it was hard to fulfil the most basic tasks—feeding the population, providing industry with the raw materials to keep going.
Bichelonne hoped that the COs would facilitate the modernization of the economy by closing outdated factories, but when in December 1941 Lehideux passed a law on these lines, it was because the cold winter and lack of fuel made it impossible to keep all factories running. Bichelonne admitted that the closures had nothing to do with modernizing the economy.69 The leaders of some COs shared the modernizing perspectives of the technocrats. The automobile industry embarked upon research into the construction of an aluminium car—but there was no bauxite—and the COs of the electricity and steel industries drew up ambitious production and investment plans for the post-war period.70 All this was for the future. In the short term, the ambitions of the modernizers were as much of a fantasy as the National Revolution of the traditionalists. But while the traditionalists, inspired by an inward-looking vision of ‘la France seule’, acted almost as if there were no Germans in France, the technocrats believed that the transition between the short-term penury and long-term modernization would come not by ignoring the Germans, but by negotiating with them. This was the sense in which they saw themselves as realists. To see how misguided they were, it is necessary to turn to the realities of collaboration.
8
Collaboration
Jean Moulin: Collaborator
On 25 June 1940, Jean Moulin, prefect of the Eure-et-Loir, had his first formal meeting with the occupying authorities. Moulin was no ordinary prefect. Unlike some who had joined the Exodus, leaving the population to fend for itself, Moulin was at his post when the Germans arrived in Chartres on 17 June. On the next day, a German officer instructed him to sign a declaration condemning alleged massacres of civilians by French Senegalese troops. Moulin refused to comply since he knew the deaths had been caused by German bombing. The Germans, surprised at such scruples when it came to protecting the reputation of black soldiers, beat Moulin up and incarcerated him for the night. Unsure if he could withstand more of this treatment without caving in, Moulin found some broken glass in his improvised cell, and cut his throat. Bleeding, but still alive when the Germans arrived the next morning, he was taken to a German doctor. The affair was embarrassing to the Germans who wished to portray a benevolent image—hence the attempt to shift responsibility for civilian deaths on to the Senegalese—and they let Moulin free.1
Once Moulin had recovered and resumed his duties, it fell to him, as to every prefect in the Occupied Zone, to mediate between the French population and the Germans. He was inundated with appeals from the 426 mayors of the département. The mayor of Gué-de-Longroi reported the arrival of 400 Germans who were commandeering lodgings without permission: were they entitled to do this? The mayor of Farvil wrote that the Germans were requisitioning local produce: how should he respond? The mayor of Jouy asked how to react to a German demand that he pay 52 marks (1,040 francs) for two photographs of Hitler and Goering.
Moulin responded as best he could, intervening with the Germans to resolve these situations amicably. On 12 September 1940 he instructed the sub-prefects and mayors of the département how to behave towards the Germans: ‘In your relations with the occupying authorities you will display a courteous and loyal collaboration, which should not exclude dignity and firmness when the circumstances require it.’2 Over the next five months, until being dismissed by Vichy, Moulin tried to show by example how his instruction should be interpreted. Although he took the ‘dignity and firmness’ seriously, the Germans had no complaints and appreciated his efficiency. When the Feldkommandant, Colonel von Gutlingen, was replaced at the end of September 1940, he wrote a farewell letter to Moulin hoping that ‘your collaboration with my successor will follow the same paths you and I have followed’. His successor described Moulin as a remarkable administrator: ‘working with him has been satisfactory’.3
Involuntary Collaboration/Voluntary Collaboration
The case of Moulin shows that the word ‘collaboration’ must be used carefully. Quite apart from his later Resistance career, Moulin’s behaviour on 18 June shows him to have been someone of exceptional moral courage. But his official position required him to ‘collaborate’ with the German authorities. This was collaboration as specified by article 3 of the Armistice, requiring the French authorities in the Occupied Zone ‘to conform to the regulations of the German authorities and collaborate [zusammenarbeiten] with them in a correct manner’.
Collaboration in this spirit was quite different from collaboration as pursued by the Vichy regime. Stanley Hoffmann has distinguished between ‘involuntary’ and ‘voluntary’ State collaboration, the former involving a punctilious conformity to the letter of the Armistice but no more, the latter representing an attempt to go beyond the Armistice and offer more than it required.4 After the war, Pétain’s defenders claimed that he had favoured a minimalist policy of involuntary collaboration, while Laval had pursued voluntary collaboration. They presented Laval’s dismissal on 13 December 1940 as a repudiation of collaboration, one even alleging that this was an event as grave for Hitler as the loss of a battle.5 One of the many achievements of Robert Paxton is to have established that this was completely untrue: the regime was united behind the need for some degree of voluntary collaboration. But two qualifications can be made. In the first place, because Paxton made extensive use of German sources his picture may be slightly skewed. What the French felt that they had to say to the Germans was not necessarily always what they believed. In fact the subsequent opening of French archives vindicated Paxton’s interpretation in most respects, but—and this is the second qualification—he did perhaps underestimate the existence of elements within the regime who were unhappy about collaboration. As we shall see, some of the first resisters in France emerged from within the orbit of the regime. Although the contradiction between a subjective disposition towards resistance within a regime that was objectively collaborating (or trying to) could not be sustained indefinitely, there was a period of uncertainty about what the ultimate orientation of the regime would be.
Different responses towards Germany emerged as early as 15 July 1940 when the Germans requested the use of French bases in North Africa. This was a clear breach of the Armistice. François Charles-Roux, Secretary-General at the Quai d’Orsay, drafted a reply which politely but firmly refused, but the government opted for a refusal which tested the water for the future: ‘only a new negotiation can solve these problems’.6 In the end Hitler did not pursue the matter. The most vociferous opponent of any overtures to Germany was Weygand. In the summer of 1940, cabinet meetings frequently degenerated into slanging matches between Weygand and Laval. Although Weygand was sent away to be Delegate General in North Africa on 6 September, this was an important power base and he continued to make his views known. In November 1940 he reminded Pétain that ‘Germany and Italy remain the enemies’.
The line between voluntary and involuntary State collaboration did not run between Pétain and Laval: they both believed that Germany had won the war and Britain would soon surrender. This did not mean that they, and other proponents of voluntary collaboration, shared identical views of its purpose. There were at least three different motives behind voluntary collaboration. First, there was what might be called the politico-administrative motive which aimed to protect French sovereignty. Although in theory sovereign over all French territory, Vichy’s control over the Occupied Zone was at the mercy of German interference. French laws had to be submitted to the Germans before they could
be published, and the Germans could veto administrative appointments. In June 1941 prefects were instructed to report German acts that they considered ‘unacceptable for the maintenance of French sovereignty’. Where such acts could not be prevented, the government preferred the French to carry them out. Pucheu told the prefects in January 1942: ‘the role you have to play is the maintenance of public order … It must be assured by French hands, French arms, French heads.’7 Although this administrative collaboration started out as defensive and prophylactic, it became an ever more dangerous spiral of complicity: a River Kwai syndrome as one writer described it.8
The second motive behind collaboration might be described as politico-diplomatic: to prepare a favourable outcome for France in the peace treaty which was believed to be imminent. On 7 July, General Huntziger, the French representative on the Armistice Commission, proposed that the Commission’s discussions should be supplemented by additional contacts, in view of the fact that France was ‘almost at war’ with her former ally. Two days later the Foreign Minister, Paul Baudouin, was trying to make contact with Ribbentrop, telling him that France wanted to become an ‘associated power’.9 Such sentiments were partly explicable in the wake of Mers el Kebir. But French feelers towards collaboration represented not only short-term pique against the British. They were the beginning of a policy that was to be pursued in various guises for the next four years.
The first indications of German plans for a future peace treaty were worrying. On 15 July, the Germans set up customs controls on the 1871 frontiers between Alsace-Lorraine and Germany. Two Gauleiter were appointed to administer the region, suggesting that Germany intended to annex it after the war. Although technically a breach of the Armistice, this development did not entirely suprise the French. They were more alarmed by the other divisions which the Germans created within the Occupied Zone. The two départements of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais were attached to the German military command in Brussels. This was supposedly done to prepare the invasion of Britain, but even after the invasion was called off in September, the measure was not reversed. There was no military pretext for the creation, within the Occupied Zone, of the so-called Reserved or Forbidden Zone. Refugees who had left this area during the Exodus were not allowed to return. Even more sinister was the fact that their properties were handed over to the Ostland Company which started to settle German colonists on them. Nor did it escape notice that the boundaries of the Reserved Zone coincided more or less with the frontiers of the German Reich after the death of Charlemagne. If this was a portent of Germany’s long-term plans for France, it was vital to win German goodwill before it was too late.10
The disruptions caused by the creation of these extra zones explain the third motive behind collaboration: the need to alleviate the impact of the Armistice on daily life in France. Originally, it had been assumed that the Armistice would only be a provisional arrangement before a speedy end to the war. As the war dragged on, the Armistice proved increasingly burdensome. One French priority was to obtain the release of the 1.5 million prisoners who were due to remain in captivity until the end of the war. Trying to relax the terms of the Armistice was all the more urgent because Germany started to apply them as rigorously as possible, treating the demarcation line as a sealed frontier which was virtually impossible to cross, and imposing huge financial burdens on the French.
The Armistice had made France responsible for paying the upkeep of the German army. In August 1940 the Germans estimated these costs at 20 million Reichsmark a day, and then fixed the franc/mark exchange rate at 20 francs to 1 mark, which represented a 50–60 per cent overvaluation of the mark. The French found themselves having to pay 400 million francs a day, enough to keep an army of 18 million men. As a result the Germans had massive spending power in France. One German official noted: ‘with this money the Germans will be able to buy the whole of France’. On the cheap, he might have added.11 As a final screw on the French economy, the Germans forced the French government to sign a clearing treaty. This mean that each country would pay its own exporters and then clear the trade debts nationally. French importers would pay francs into a clearing account and German importers would pay in marks. From this account the respective government would pay their exporters. But since France would be exporting much more than she imported, the account would be massively out of balance. To pay French exporters, the account would have to borrow francs from the Bank of France. Thus the French government was effectively financing Germany’s imports from France.12
German Polyocracy: ‘What a lot of authorities’
Vichy’s problem in establishing contact with the occupiers was to identify who had the ear of Hitler. The Germans transplanted to France that multiplicity of competing agencies which have led historians to call the Nazi regime a ‘polyocracy’. The Nazi power-brokers—Goebbels, Goering, Himmler, Ribbentrop—all had representatives in France. When told that Germany was an authoritarian state, Laval remarked this might be so, ‘but what a lot of authorities’.13
The supreme authority in the Occupied Zone was the German military administration (MBF) based at the Hôtel Majestic in Paris under General Otto von Stülpnagel. The MBF was divided into military and civilian branches. The latter was itself subdivided into an administrative wing under the jurist Werner Best and an economic one under Elmar Michel. Best was a committed Nazi who had been in the Party since 1930; he later became Reichskommissar in Denmark. Michel was a technocratic civil servant who joined the Party only in 1939. Both were formidably able administrators. Matters arising from the Armistice were discussed at the Armistice Commission in Wiesbaden, chaired by General Karl von Stülpnagel (Otto’s cousin). The Commission had its own economic commission chaired by the diplomat Richard Hemmen. Policing was the responsibility of the MBF, but Himmler managed to secure the presence of a few representatives of his security services (SD) under the SS officer Helmut Knochen. Censorship, propaganda, and cultural policy were the responsibility of the Propaganda-Abteilung (with four outposts in the provinces and one in Paris). Although incorporated into the MBF administration, the Propaganda-Abteilung was answerable to Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry in Berlin. There was also a German Embassy at the Rue de Lille in Paris. The ambassador was Ribbentrop’s protégé, Otto Abetz.14
These authorities had different priorities. The career officers at the MBF were essentially pragmatic, and ready to use the carrot as well as the stick. ‘If one wants the cow to give milk, it must be fed’, said Otto von Stülpnagel in September 1940.15 They were irritated by the zealousness of hard-core Nazi ideologues like Knochen. When the SS, in co-operation with French fascists, bombed several Paris synagogues in October 1941, Stülpnagel was furious, and tried to have Knochen removed. Knochen himself resented the fact that the military controlled policing. But the line between professionals and ideologues did not necessarily separate those prepared to be gentler on the French from those prepared to be more harsh. Hemmen was distrusted by the Nazi Party, but as a negotiator he was devastatingly effective, ready to concede the French no favours.
Most German authorities in France were suspicious of the Embassy, which had the reputation of being too Francophile. Abetz’s knowledge of France went back to the Sohlberg circle at the end of the 1920s. He was Francophile in that he admired French culture, food, and wine (and had a French wife), but he also believed that the French needed to know their place. The plan Abetz presented to Hitler in July 1940, before his appointment to the Embassy, was to reduce France to a ‘satellite State’ forced to accept ‘permanent weakness’. He proposed to play on French rivalries and excite French hopes of an entente with Germany: ‘a uniform attitude of rejection would provoke a single and indivisible front of all the French’. His instructions from Hitler ratified this strategy: ‘everything must be done to encourage the internal divisions and thus the weakness of France’.16 Abetz’s subordinates were, like him, young and knowledgeable about France. They included Friedrich Sieburg, whose ‘Francophilia’ was of the same
variety as Abetz’s, and Karl Epting who had in the 1930s organized Franco-German student exchanges. Epting ran the German Institute which was the cultural arm of the Embassy. The Propaganda-Abteilung, whose brief was to destroy French cultural influence, did not approve Abetz’s policy of cultural seduction. It was run by Major Heinz Schmidtke, a narrow Prussian officer type impervious to any attractions France might have to offer.
The relative power of these authorities oscillated. In the clash over control of cultural policy the Propaganda-Abteilung lost ground to the Embassy in the summer of 1942, but Abetz himself fell out of favour later that year. Between December 1942 and December 1943, he was replaced by his deputy Rudolf Schleier. Control over economic policy shifted from Wiesbaden to Paris when Hemmen moved there in the spring of 1941. The army lost control of policing and security to the SS from 1942. But the infighting never ceased, and there were other players to complicate the game further: the army’s intelligence service, the Abwehr, and the Einsatz Rosenberg, which was in charge of pillaging of works of art, and acted as a law unto itself.
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