Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation

by Charles Glass

  While de Brinon conferred with Pétain, Bedaux met various Vichy officials to discuss projects in France and North Africa. His final meeting was with Robert Murphy at the American Embassy in the Villa Ica. For the past week, Murphy had been reporting to Secretary of State Cordell Hull and President Roosevelt on the machinations at Vichy. The interior minister, Marcel Peyrouton, had informed Murphy in advance of his intention to arrest Laval. It undoubtedly met with American approval. Murphy wrote later, ‘We played no concealed part in Laval’s overthrow there in 1940, although we did emphasize in all our talks with Pétain’s ministers, including Laval himself, that the American Government was convinced that its interests demanded the defeat of Nazi Germany.’ Laval’s dismissal made it easier for the secretary general of Vichy’s Foreign Office, Charles Rochas, to issue Murphy a permit to tour North and West Africa that Laval’s faction had been delaying. Bedaux and Murphy, already acquainted from Paris and the Château de Candé, discussed Murphy’s coming mission to French Africa. President Roosevelt had asked Murphy to assess the need for American aid to the region. Murphy did not tell Bedaux about his other objective: to place twelve spies in North Africa undercover as US consuls. Their nominal task as ‘food control officers’ would be to certify that American aid went to the inhabitants, not to Germany. Bedaux was sufficiently informed on the Algerian and Moroccan economies to brief Murphy.

  That night, Fernand de Brinon drove Bedaux back to Paris. They arrived at Bedaux’s hotel at about three o’clock in the morning. ‘Now, you can put aside your gun,’ de Brinon said. Bedaux did not carry a gun. De Brinon, whose bodyguards were armed, seemed surprised. According to Bedaux, he said, ‘You are worth a thousand men.’ Vichy announced later on 18 December that de Brinon would succeed General de la Laurencie as delegate general of the French government in the Occupied Zone, Vichy ‘ambassador’ in Paris with ministerial status in the government. Abetz had personally demanded de la Laurencie’s removal after the general, as part of the anti-Laval coup, had arrested the pro-Nazi French politician Marcel Déat in Paris. (Déat headed one of two political parties, the Rassemblement National Populaire, permitted by the Germans in the Occupied Zone.) Forcing Pétain to accept an obvious German puppet like de Brinon as de la Laurencie’s successor was part of Germany’s retribution for Laval’s dismissal. Other punishments were to rename Vichy’s ‘Free Zone’ the ‘Unoccupied Zone’; to restrict further the food supplies in Paris; and to renege on promises to release some of the French prisoners in Germany. If collaboration had benefits, non-cooperation incurred costs. Abetz made Pétain accept a directorate under Admiral Jean-François Darlan, then naval minister, to advise the cabinet and, incidentally, keep an eye on the Vichy government for Abetz. The new regime at Vichy sought to collaborate with the Germans just as Laval had. For Charles Bedaux, the elevation of de Brinon partly compensated for the loss of Laval.

  When Abetz returned to Paris, Charles Bedaux met him at the German Embassy in the Hôtel de Beauharnais. (When the anti-Nazi diplomat Ulrich von Hassell visited Paris at the time, he wrote in his diary, ‘The beautiful palace seems dishonoured by the present incumbents. ’) Despite the chill of the Paris winter, Abetz invited Bedaux outside for a walk in the Hôtel de Beauharnais’s magnificent garden courtyard. This may have been to avoid the devices with which Hermann Goering’s Forschungsamt, Research Office, listened to the conversations of most second-rank German officials, many of whom were pursuing contradictory policies in France and other occupied territories. As they strolled around the frosty grass, Abetz confided to Bedaux that Laval’s arrest had been ‘frivolous’. Abetz was impatient with French politicians and mentioned that even Laval, despite his charm, was superficial. Bedaux, who had a professional obsession with order, said Laval was ‘an artist with a horror of orderliness’. Laval had once said to Bedaux, ‘I like to look at you and see an example of what I wouldn’t be for anything on earth.’ Bedaux took the remark as a compliment.

  As the two men circled the garden, Abetz said he was considering a scheme to please Hitler and undermine Vichy. Bedaux was part of the plan. Still out of earshot of the embassy’s hidden microphones, Abetz told Bedaux he knew of his intention to meet General Maxime Weygand at the Kenadsa mines on his coming trip to North Africa. Weygand, who had been Pétain’s minister of defence in the emergency cabinet of 10 July 1940, had been exiled to Algiers as military governor-general because his strict adherence to the Armistice Agreement annoyed the Germans and the collaborationists. Would Abetz ask the general to succeed Pétain as head of a new French government in Paris? Bedaux thought it was a joke, because Weygand hated Germany. Abetz explained, ‘We would rather have in France at the head of the government a freely spoken enemy whom we respect than a collaborator whom we don’t know.’ Bedaux agreed to carry Abetz’s offer to Weygand, his first political mission for the Germans. Abetz, at the same time, promised more support, including heavy machinery, to Bedaux’s coal mining operation at Kenadsa. Abetz did not mention that Kenadsa’s coal might fuel the North African railways for eventual use by the Wehrmacht.

  On 23 December, the German occupation forces in Paris executed 23-year-old Jacques Bonsergent ‘for an act of violence against a member of the German Army’. The violence was a minor scuffle between some German soldiers and young Frenchmen, all of whom but Bonsergent ran away. On the order of the military commander in France, General Otto von Stülpnagel, Bonsergent became the first Frenchman executed by the Germans in Paris.

  As a gesture to win Parisian goodwill, the German command extended the curfew on Christmas Eve from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. Cafés and restaurants were permitted to remain open until 2.30 a.m., serving food and drink to the Parisians who could afford to pay. The Germans had seized over 90 per cent of the forty million tons of coal France required, as well as the barges used to transport it along canals to the Seine, depriving the capital of fuel. The city’s inhabitants, including about 2,000 Americans, endured the coldest winter in fifty years without enough coal to heat their homes.

  In New York, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein released the hit song of the Christmas season, ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’. It was the first number the duo, composers of Broadway musicals like Show Boat, had written to stand on its own. Kate Smith sang the lyrics over national radio, reminding some Americans of their relatives cut off in Paris:The last time I saw Paris, her heart was warm and gay.

  No matter how they change her, I’ll remember her that way.

  PART THREE

  1941

  SIXTEEN

  The Coldest Winter

  ON A FROZEN NEW YEAR’S MORNING, a train left the Gare de Lyon in Paris for Marseilles. Among the passengers entrusted by the German occupiers with an Ausweis to cross the line into the Vichy zone was Charles Bedaux. Having left Fern at home with their guests in the Château de Candé, he planned to take a short flight from Marseilles to Algiers and drive over the Atlas Mountains to Kenadsa on Sahara’s northern fringe. His rendezvous with General Maxime Weygand, military governor general of French North Africa, had the stated purpose of discussing coal production. But Bedaux had a secret agenda: to relay German Ambassador Otto Abetz’s offer to place Weygand at the head of a pro-German government in Paris.

  The train moved slowly south amid the heavy snows of a treacherous French winter, until it stopped suddenly in bleak countryside north of the Provençal town of Avignon. Thick, packed snow blocked the line. With the train immobilized, Charles Bedaux could not remain passive. He trudged through snow drifts to a farmhouse, telephoned for horse-drawn wagons, and hired men to find provisions for the passengers and the train staff. The delivery of food and other supplies continued for eight days, with Bedaux arranging logistics as he had on the trail in British Columbia. ‘Charles was amused by this little adventure, ’ his brother Gaston remembered. When the snow was cleared from the line, the train reversed north to Lyons. Bedaux flew to Marseilles, but technical problems delayed his flight to Algiers another day. Bedaux reached Algiers by chart
ered plane on 10 January 1941. General Weygand, who had already left Kenadsa, sent a message asking Bedaux to visit him in Rabat, capital of Morocco.

  General Maxime Weygand had been a hero of the Great War and was one of the officers with Maréchal Ferdinand Foch in the train at Compiègne when France and Germany signed the Armistice Agreement of 1918. Twenty-two years later, as the French and British armies were retreating from the German front, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud recalled Weygand to replace General Gamelin as commander of the French armed forces. Weygand, after declaring Paris an ‘open city’ in June 1940, joined the defeatist camp in Reynaud’s cabinet, along with Maréchal Pétain, in seeking an immediate armistice with Germany. Pétain made him minister of national defence in his July 1940 cabinet. In September, he was reassigned to North Africa as Vichy’s delegate general and armed forces commander. Pétain’s instructions were to keep the region out of the hands of the British, the Germans and General Charles de Gaulle. In the meantime, all three courted Weygand. De Gaulle asked him to attack the Italians in Libya from French bases in Tunisia while the British launched an offensive in the east from Egypt. Expelling Italy from Libya would remove the Axis from North Africa, thus securing the entire southern Mediterranean for the Allies. Weygand refused.

  When Bedaux met Weygand in Rabat, he delivered Abetz’s proposal. Would the general preside over a new French government in Paris? ‘I consider this a great compliment,’ Weygand told Bedaux, ‘but the Germans cannot fool me with great compliments. I have one superior. I could not ask for a better one: Maréchal Pétain. I will ask for his orders.’ Weygand informed Pétain at once. Charles Bedaux’s role as messenger did not endear him to Pétain, who may already have suspected his friendships with Pierre Laval and Fernand de Brinon.

  Robert Murphy, in North Africa ostensibly to assess the area’s humanitarian needs, cabled Secretary of State Cordell Hull, ‘Weygand and his associates are laying the foundation for substantial military action against Germany and Italy.’ Perhaps Weygand’s dislike of the Germans swept Murphy along, but the general did nothing to challenge the German military. Murphy, meanwhile, reached a humanitarian accord with Weygand that released frozen French funds in the United States for France to purchase civilian provisions for North Africa. The Murphy–Weygand agreement allowed the United States to install American vice-consuls in French North Africa, who would certify that no American aid went to Germany and, secretly, send military intelligence to Washington. ‘To demonstrate his confidence in the United States Government,’ Murphy wrote, ‘General Weygand made an unprecedented concession: our consular staffs, including the twelve new “vice-consuls,” would be permitted to use secret codes and to employ couriers carrying locked pouches, a privilege usually restricted to diplomatic missions and not extended in wartime to consular offices in French North Africa.’

  In Algiers, Murphy saw Bedaux several times, and in February they called together on Weygand. Bedaux’s presence may not have been an asset. Weygand called Bedaux a bandit, because his bill to the French government for installing the Bedaux system at Kenadsa was exorbitant. Bedaux kept Murphy informed of his work at the coal mines, but it seems he did not tell him of Abetz’s proposal to Weygand. Murphy referred to it neither in his messages to the State Department nor in his memoirs, Diplomat among Warriors. When Bedaux told Abetz that Weygand had declined his proposal to replace Pétain, Germany ordered Pétain to dismiss Weygand. If he did not, the Germans would occupy the Unoccupied Zone. Weygand’s loyalty to Pétain earned him dismissal by Pétain. He retired to his farm in the south of France. Soon afterwards, the Germans arrested him.

  Bedaux returned to Paris to brief Dr Franz Medicus on Kenadsa. Medicus agreed to push the military to release more heavy machines to augment the mines’ coal production. It was as much in Germany’s interest as France’s to produce coal for the trains of French North Africa. With Medicus’s support, the Germans handed over more than $200,000 worth of compressors, diggers and other equipment. Bedaux needed thousands of workers to build a new rail line and mine the extra coal, and the Nazis helped with that as well. To supplement Berber and African labourers in the Sahara, the Germans sent Polish and Czech prisoners of war. From Spanish Sahara, Franco contributed Loyalist prisoners who had fought against him in the Civil War. Bedaux was about to go beyond speeding up low-paid workers in American factories to using slave labour in one of the hottest terrains on earth.

  In January 1941, Sylvia Beach received news of the man to whom she had given attention and love for most of her adult life, James Joyce. With his wife and son, he had finally crossed the Swiss border and settled in Zurich on 17 December 1940. Although safe after six months’ waiting to exit France, Joyce was consumed with worry. He had left his daughter in a French asylum, and he was short of money. The hostile critical reception of his recently published book, Finnegans Wake, preoccupied him. His health, never robust, deteriorated. After emergency surgery for an ulcer and peritonitis on 13 January, the author of Ulysses died. To Sylvia, the loss combined with the death of her father in California two months earlier to send her into depression. Her dearest friends, Adrienne Monnier and Françoise Bernheim, offered some consolation. But the deaths of those she loved outside France hurt more than anything in her own precarious existence in occupied Paris. It was a cruel winter.

  Although some Americans were leaving France in early 1941, René de Chambrun was returning. He had completed his second and final wartime journey to the land of his parents’ birth. But his mission was only half accomplished. On his first visit, he had persuaded Franklin Roosevelt to send arms to Britain. On his second, however, cousin Franklin rebuffed his request for American government food shipments to hungry French and refugees in the Vichy zone. René left New York dejected and, after a rough thirteen-day sea crossing, arrived in Lisbon. On 6 February, Josée was waiting for him just over the Spanish border in Toulouse. They spent the night together before flying to the Laval chateau at Châteldon. Josée noted in her diary that René brought her presents from America: ‘Bunny gave me a lovely little dress, a sweater, a magnificent golden cigarette case and some cigarettes.’ Two days later, the couple went to Paris to see Clara and Aldebert. The next few days’ lunches and dinners were spent in the new Paris with German Ambassador Otto Abetz and his French wife, embassy counsellor Ernst Achenbach and his American bride, German consul-general Rudolph Schleier, Luftwaffe General Hanesse and famed French actress Arletty. For a soldier who resisted the German invasion and a lobbyist who opposed the Germans in the United States, René adapted quickly to the new order that his father-in-law and wife were introducing him to.

  The American Hospital’s board of governors’ meeting in Aldebert de Chambrun’s offices on the Champs-Elysées on 13 February 1941 officially appointed Dr Sumner Jackson Médecin Chef (Chief Physician) ad interim to replace Dr Edmund Gros, who was too ill to return to Paris from the United States. At the time, the hospital was caring for seventy French soldiers, twenty-five British patients and sixty ‘needy French children’. Dr Jackson and Aldebert de Chambrun worked together to keep a patient in every bed so that the Germans would have no excuse to take over the institution. A month later, Edward B. Close reported to the board: ‘Another hospital year, and probably the most difficult in the history of The American Hospital of Paris, has again come to an end.’ He stated that the number of patient days over the previous year came to 38,952 for wounded French soldiers and 14,103 for civilians. He added, ‘I report with great pleasure that we were able, during the year, to care for all American citizens who applied for treatment in our Out-Patient Department or for admission, and that those, who were not able to pay, were treated absolutely free.’

  SEVENTEEN

  Time to Go?

  IN APRIL 1941, Aldebert and Clara de Chambrun invited the ranking American diplomat in Paris, Maynard Barnes, to lunch at 58 rue de Vaugirard. Barnes had been chargé d’affaires in Paris and at the Château de Candé since Ambassador Bullitt’s departure a year earlier.
The Chambruns had regarded him as a friend for some years, and they believed he understood France better than his colleagues. In Vichy, Bullitt’s successor as US Ambassador to France, Admiral William D. Leahy, thought Barnes ‘had a higher opinion of Laval than prevailed generally’. Over the modest, rationed lunch, Barnes told Clara and Aldebert that the United States would undoubtedly declare war on Germany. ‘Please tell her not to delay much longer,’ General de Chambrun admonished the diplomat. Clara shared her husband’s view that America must, at last, fight for the Allied cause. This was a change from her conviction in October 1939 on a visit to the United States for the publication of her History of Cincinnati, when she told the Cincinnati Times-Star, ‘Why should the United States even consider getting in the war? The question should be decided purely on the grounds of American trade and American rights … As for the allies wanting America to enter the war, they already have more men to feed than they need to maintain what can only be a deadlock.’ After the Germans broke the deadlock in the spring of 1940, the occupation of France made American intervention acceptable to Clara. At lunch, she pressed Barnes on American intentions. ‘Do not worry,’ he told her. ‘We will be there even if England is beaten. We cannot afford, after the war, to see our trade cut off from Greece, Italy, Spain, France, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Holland, and the Scandinavian Peninsula.’ Barnes, who was preparing to close the Paris embassy under orders from the Germans, asked whether the Chambruns wanted to send anything with him to the United States. Aldebert entrusted him with two Purdey shot-guns that had been made for him in London. If the Germans found them hidden in the linen cupboard, he and Clara would be sent to prison.