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by Jackson, Julian

  Today the situation is reversed. The experience of the Jews is central to contemporary perceptions of the Occupation. This can create new distortions: it would be as wrong to read the entire history of the Occupation through the prism of anti-Semitism as it would to leave it out entirely. Little of the regime’s propaganda targeted the Jews. It commissioned no anti-Semitic posters; there was no anti-Semitism in any of the official film documentaries produced by the regime;2 no speech by Pétain directly mentioned the Jews. When Vichy issued its first Jewish Statute in October 1940, it did so almost apologetically. The accompanying communiqué announced that the government ‘respects Jewish persons and property… There is no question of easy vengeance but of indispensable security.’ The Statute would be applied in a ‘spirit of humanity’.3

  The tone was different in the Occupied Zone where the collaborationist press was violently anti-Semitic. Au pilori declared in March 1941: ‘Jews are not men. They are stinking beasts. One gets rid of fleas. One fights against epidemics.’4 The main centre of anti-Semitic propaganda in Paris was the IEQJ, nominally run by a thuggish French officer, Paul Sézille, but financed entirely by Germany. Its most ambitious undertaking was the notorious exhibition on the Jew and France at the Palais Berlitz. As always, however, it would be wrong to exaggerate the contrast between the two zones. Pétain’s entourage contained fanatical anti-Semites like Ménétrel and Alibert. As for propaganda, much of the southern press was so anti-Semitic that the regime hardly needed to organize its own campaigns. Anti-Semitism was a dominant theme of the Legion’s daily radio broadcasts. Even if Vichy’s anti-Semitism was less radical than Germany’s, it was an autonomous policy, with its own indigenous roots. There were two separate anti-Semitic projects in France between 1940 and 1944, and the Jews were caught between them.

  Emulative Zeal: Vichy Anti-Semitism/Nazi Anti-Semitism

  The Jewish ‘problem’ was one of Vichy’s earliest preoccupations. Alibert had immediately started to prepare legislation against the Jews. In September 1940, Peyrouton was exploring the possibility of sending 2,000 Jews to Madagascar, but the Ministry of Finance was worried by the cost.5 The first law specifically aimed at Jews (as opposed to measures against foreigners also affecting some Jews) was the Jewish Statute of 3 October 1940. The Statute was drafted by Alibert, but apparently Pétain was the ‘most harsh’ when the government discussed the project.6

  Despite what Vichy apologists later claimed,7 the Statute was not imposed by the Germans. Some Vichy leaders, however, did view anti-Semitism as a means of winning German favour: Flandin told a German interlocutor on 16 July 1940 that collaboration would require France ‘completely to rid herself’ of Jewish influence.8 On 24 September, General de Laurencie reported that the Germans were enquiring whether Vichy planned any measures against the Jews, adding that there was no pressure from them for such measures.9 Three days later, the Germans issued an ordinance requiring Jews in the Occupied Zone to register with the authorities, but a German memorandum reveals that this measure was passed in the knowledge that the French were about to act: ‘it was consciously judged necessary to have it antedate the French law so that the regulation of the Jewish question appeared to emanate from the German authorities’.10

  The Jewish Statute was the start of a thickening web of regulations directed against the Jews. Over the next twelve months, Vichy issued twenty-six laws and twenty-four decrees on the Jews. In June 1941, a second Jewish Statute widened the definition of Jewishness and introduced more occupations banned to Jews. It was followed by decrees imposing quotas on Jewish lawyers, doctors, students, architects, and pharmacists. In July 1941, Vichy ordered a census of the entire Jewish population in the Unoccupied Zone. This was a breach with the Republican tradition confining questions of religion and ethnic origin to the private sphere; it had grave consequences when Jews started to be rounded up in 1942.11

  Vichy’s treatment of foreign Jews was even more callous. From 4 October 1940, they could be interned at the discretion of prefects. Seven main camps were used for this purpose, and by the start of 1941 about 40,000 Jews were held in them. The conditions were atrocious: in total about 3,000 Jews perished in the French camps from undernourishment and cold before the Final Solution had begun. The number of internees dropped in 1941, but this was due to the efforts of relief organizations, not to the government. Indeed Darlan ordered in June 1941 that Jews who had not been resident in France before May 1940 should not be released in case they tried to integrate into French society.12

  Left to itself, then, Vichy’s policy was to turn French Jews into second-class citizens, and treat foreign Jews as an encumbrance to whose fate it was indifferent. But Vichy was not left to itself for long. By the end of 1940 Dannecker in Paris was pushing his own anti-Semitic agenda. He was certainly emboldened by Vichy’s own example. At a meeting at the German Embassy in February 1941 he declared: ‘the fact that more than 40,000 Jews are interned in the Free Zone is an argument one can advance to encourage the military to give the SD immediate and full powers for the arrest of all Jews’.13

  Once Dannecker started to press for a radicalization of anti-Semitism, Vichy had a simple choice: to let the Germans proceed in the Occupied Zone, at the cost of allowing infringements of sovereignty and jeopardizing France’s unity, or to preserve nominal sovereignty at the cost of doing the Germans’ dirty work for them. Usually the latter course was chosen. When on 18 October 1940, the Germans passed a second ordinance, requiring all Jewish enterprises in the Occupied Zone to be placed under trusteeship as a preliminary to ‘Aryanization’, Vichy, fearing that this was a German plan to penetrate the French economy, instituted an agency of ‘temporary administrators’ (SCAP) to ensure that the trustees were French. By the summer of 1941, half the Jews of Paris had been deprived of any means of existence. In July 1941, to preserve administrative unity, Vichy also imposed Aryanization on the Unoccupied Zone.

  The Germans also pushed for the setting up of a Jewish office to co-ordinate anti-Semitic policy. Darlan was not enthusiastic, but having just come to power he was keen to win German approval. He also preferred the existence of a French organization responsible for all France to a German one operating in the North alone. The result was the creation in March 1941 of the Commissariat-General for Jewish Affairs (CGQJ), headed by Vallat. Although less fanatical than some of Germany’s candidates for the job—who included Céline—Vallat considered himself a ‘serious anti-Semite’. He once told Dannecker: ‘I have been an antiSemite for much longer than you.’ The theoretical difference between Vallat’s State anti-Semitism, which viewed the Jews as unassimilable to the French Catholic tradition, and German racial anti-Semitism, was that it allowed exemptions for Jews who had served France with distinction. German anti-Semitism did not embrace the concept of the good Jew. But Vallat granted exemptions so parsimoniously that the practical consequences for French Jews were negligible.

  Having obtained the setting up of the CGQJ, Dannecker’s next objective was to force all the Jews in France into a single organization somewhat like the Eastern European Judenräte—those Jewish councils obliged to administer their own misery. This was contrary to the logic of Vichy policy which preserved a distinction between French and foreign Jews. Vallat therefore procrastinated until it became clear that Germany was ready to act unilaterally. Rather than allow this, in November 1941, Vichy set up it own General Union of the Israelites of France (UGIF). This organization, which subsumed existing Jewish organizations under its authority, covered both zones, and was answerable to the French government.14

  Vichy’s desire always to keep up with the Germans meant that anti-Semitism spiralled continuously in a more radical direction. This is clearly visible in the Aryanization process. In fact the Germans had no major designs on the French economy, but they were happy for this to be believed, so that the French would act prophylactically. The aim, as Elmar Michel stated in November 1940, was ‘To make the French authorities participate in the elimination of the Jews. I
n this way we shall make the French share the responsibility for Aryanization and we shall have at our disposal the French administrative apparatus.’15

  This Machiavellian strategy was extremely successful. Although the initiative for Aryanization came from Germany, many French interests became implicated in it, seizing the opportunity to advance their own agendas: Vallat wanted to reduce Jewish influence; the Ministry of Industrial Production saw a chance to impose further economic ‘rationalization’; the COs, administering Aryanization in their industries, hoped to eliminate Jewish competition. These sectional interests frequently clashed, but they were united in displaying little sentimentality about the fortune(s) that circumstances had presented them with. By May 1944, over 40,000 Jewish enterprises had been placed in trusteeship, and of these three-quarters had been sold to ‘Aryans’.16

  Vallat’s attempt to preserve French control over anti-Semitic policy eventually caused the Germans to lose patience with him. His patriotic dislike of the occupier was only too evident. In April 1942 Laval replaced him by Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, a corrupt and violently anti-Semitic journalist who had often been arrested in the 1930s for brawling with Jews. Darquier’s approach was apparent in a memorandum he issued to his personnel instructing them that Jews should no longer be referred to as M. Levy or M. Dreyfus, but as ‘the Jew Levy’ or ‘the Jew Dreyfus’.17

  Under Darquier, the CGQJ stepped up anti-Semitic propaganda. From September 1942 it had three weekly radio slots on French national radio. The South now received the same kind of anti-Semitic propaganda as the North. Darquier sponsored a number of pseudo-scientific bodies devoted to studying race, such as the Institute of Anthropo-Sociology under Claude Vacher de la Pouge (son of the famous Georges). A Chair in the History of Judaism was created at the Sorbonne, and its first holder, Henri Labroue, author of a pamphlet entitled Voltaire antijuif, gave his first lecture in December 1942.18 The IEQJ was transformed into the Insitute for the Study of Jewish and Ethno-Racial Questions (IEQJER) under the direction of Georges Montandon (with René Martial on its board of directors).

  Montandon had since 1935 held the Chair of Ethnology at the conservative École d’anthropologie. During the 1930s his ideas had become increasingly racist and anti-Semitic. In 1938 he proposed a Jewish statute and suggested that Jewish men who disobeyed it should be castrated. Accused by a left-wing newspaper, during the Phoney War, of having taken up the ideas of Hitler, he claimed that on the contrary Hitler had copied his ideas. In 1941 he founded a new anthropology journal called L’Ethnie française and he was also author of the book Comment reconnaitre un juif? (How to recognise a Jew). Less harmless than these pseudo-scholarly speculations was Montandon’s role as the CGQJ’s ethnological expert adjudicating whether a person was Jewish or not. He spent much time examining penises, noses, and earlobes. People who hoped he might procure them a certificate of non-Jewishness had to pay for his services with no guarantee that he would decide in their favour.19

  Darquier was an incompetent administrator and the Germans took a low view of the effectiveness of these bodies. The IEQJER was wound up in the autumn of 1943. Another problem, from the German point of view, was that these bodies genuinely believed in racial theory, but the Nazis were not happy with the French designating themselves as Aryans.20 Darquier was despised at Vichy, where he rarely set foot. He wanted to exclude Jewish children from schools and force all Jews to wear a yellow star, but Vichy rejected these ideas. The Germans were also pressing for the imposition of the yellow star, and in June 1942 they acted unilaterally and imposed it in the Occupied Zone. For once, Vichy refused to follow, more out of fear of public reaction than out of concern for the Jews.21

  The yellow star was part of a steady tightening of the screw on the lives of Jews in the Occupied Zone. From August 1941, Jews were forbidden to own radios and bicycles; from February 1942, they were subject to a special curfew; from June 1942, they were allowed only to travel in the last carriage on the metro and shop only between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m., and were banned from all public places (cinemas, restaurants, libraries, public gardens, sports fields). When the deportations began in July 1942, the Jews of Paris had been excluded from participation in normal daily life.

  These were German, not French, policies. But Vichy continued to implement its own separate policy of persecution. Even after the Germans started to deport Jews from France, the Vichy authorities were, for their own reasons, expelling Jews from certain départements. In April 1943, the 332 Jews (French and foreign) of La Bourboule, near Vichy, were forcibly shunted to another locality because Pétain was moving into the town.22 Even more dangerously, in December 1942 Vichy required all Jews, French and foreign, to have their identity and ration cards stamped ‘juif’. This made the Jews all the more vulnerable to the German policy of arrests.23

  The way that French and German policies interacted to the detriment of the Jews emerges clearly from the progressive amendments made to the definition of Jewishness. The first definition was provided by the Germans in the ordinance of 27 September 1940: it did not use the word ‘race’, and defined as Jewish anyone of the Jewish religion or having at least three Jewish grandparents. A week later, Vichy’s Jewish Statute spread its net further: it used the criterion of ‘race’ and defined as Jewish anyone with at least three Jewish grandparents or two if the spouse was Jewish. In an ordinance of 26 April 1941, the Germans adopted Vichy’s definition but extended it further: half-Jews (people with two Jewish grandparents) who were married to Jews would now be considered Jewish unless they had divorced before the publication of the ordinance. Vichy’s second Jewish Statute in June 1941 widened the boundary further by backdating the point at which divorce could exempt half-Jews from being included as Jews to 25 June 1940. Once the German round-ups started in the summer of 1942, Dannecker ordered the wider French definition of Jewishness to be used in preference to the slightly more restrictive German one.24

  When Vichy apologists later claimed that Vichy anti-Semitism was not, like the German one, driven by the ultimate aim of exterminating the Jews, they were correct. But this did not stop Vichy simultaneously continuing its own policy of depriving French Jews of their livelihoods, shunting them around, arresting them for minor infractions of the law, stamping their papers— oblivious of the fact that in the background the German convoys were rolling east. From 1942, Vichy behaved towards the Jews like a family building a bonfire in its backyard despite its knowledge that a forest fire is raging just over the fence.

  The Holocaust in France

  Even before the Wannsee conference in January 1942, arrests of Jews had occurred in the Occupied Zone. The first took place on 14 May 1941 when 3,710 foreign Jews were arrested. In August 1941, there was a raid on the 11th arrondissement in Paris, resulting in the arrest of 4,230 Jews, both French and foreign. Finally, in December 1941, 734 prominent French Jews (and 250 immigrant Jews), were arrested, allegedly as a reprisal for an attack on German soldiers. The victims were interned in four camps: Pithiviers and Rolande-la-Beaune in the Loiret (about 100 km from Paris), Compiègne to the north-east of Paris, and Drancy, an unfinished municipal housing estate just outside Paris. Apart from Compiègne, all these camps were run by the French. Drancy was so lacking in basic facilities that in October 1941 the Germans ordered 900 sick and dying internees to be released.25 One observer noted in November: ‘I have met several living skeletons who can hardly stand. They are the Jews freed from Drancy.’26

  The arrests of 1941 prepared the ground for the deportations of 1942. Laval and Bousquet’s complicity in this policy has been discussed earlier because it was dictated more by the logic of Vichy’s collaboration policy than by its anti-Semitism: it was the most horrific example of the consequences which could flow from collaboration. Most of those arrested in the summer of 1942 were sent to Drancy. Conditions in the camp had improved, but no one stayed long enough to benefit from this: Drancy became the departure point for almost all the trains leaving for Auschwitz. After the Vel d’Hi
ver round-up in July 1942, many Jews fled to the South, assuming they would be safe there. In fact, in the South, between 6 August and 15 September, the French authorities slightly exceeded the 10,000 Jews they had promised to arrest. About 4,700 of these came from the internment camps. In total, 41,951 Jews were deported from France in 1942.

  In 1943, 17,069 Jews were deported. Vichy’s slightly less co-operative attitude may have partly accounted for this lower figure, but the extent of Vichy non-cooperation should not be exaggerated. In early 1943, when Knochen and Röthke demanded the arrests of French Jews, Bousquet refused, but again he offered to arrest foreign Jews. There was a wave of arrests in Paris on 10 February, when 1,549 people were arrested, 500 of them in their seventies or older.27 Another 2,000 were found in the South, again by the French police. In January 1943, the Germans destroyed the Old Port at Marseilles, and this allowed them, with French co-operation, to round up 800 Jews, of whom 211 were French. Never before had the French police in the Unoccupied Zone participated in arresting French Jews.28 But generally from the spring of 1943, the Germans carried out arrests alone.

  In June 1943, the administration of Drancy was taken over by the Germans. The camp was now run by the violently sadistic Aloïs Brunner who had organized the elimination of the Jewish community of Salonika. Now that the Germans were carrying out most arrests, the distinction between French and foreign Jews no longer counted. The arrests were more random and more brutal, but less efficient. The biggest operation occurred in the autumn in Nice to which 30,000 Jews had fled while the city was occupied by the Italians. When the Italians signed an armistice, Brunner moved in. Over the next four months, with the help of PPF activists, and white Russian ‘physiognomists’, the Germans hunted all the Jews they could find. Their lack of documentation only made the operation more arbitrary. One survivor remembered: