In August 1940 Hitler was preparing Operation Sealion, the invasion of Britain. As Anne Darquier turned ten in September, still in junior school, German aircraft bombarded British airfields, factories, towns and cities, and the London Blitz began. Kidlington men went off to fight in the Middle and Far East. Many were pilots and sailors; others, men and women, were at work in factories, at the motor works or on the land. From Kidlington you could see the bombing of London and the reply of the anti-aircraft guns, lighting up the night sky. By the end of September the RAF had won the Battle of Britain; Hitler postponed the invasion and turned his attention to the Soviet Union, but the bombing did not cease. A German Junker bombed Kidlington airport in November 1940. Later the German planes came again, dropping a stick of bombs on the fields behind the cinema, destroying the cricket pitch and breaking the leg of a cow.
The citizens of Kidlington were Firewatchers, Air Raid Wardens, members of the Home Guard; mothers and spinsters were working in factories or offices or on the land, or busy being patriotic on the Kitchen Front. An untroubled local Kidlington builder advertised, “We don't think Hitler can damage Oxford—but we know the weather will still take its toll.” The last letter Anne had received from her father had given an address in Poland. She believed him to be a prisoner of war.
French soldiers were sent to Stalags, others, including officers, to Offlags. As an officer, Louis Darquier was despatched to Offlag II D at Groß-Born, now called Borne Szczecinecki, in Poland. He arrived in June 1940, prisoner of war number 1294/9. Some of the men at Offlag II D— most of them remained prisoners until 1945—have left vivid descriptions of the camp: men packed into wooden huts, burning hot in summer, freezing in winter, soup and dry bread to eat, lice and boredom to live with—the stuff of a thousand war films. Louis arrived rather plump, without his monocle, his reputation well known by his fellow prisoners. He gave lectures about the “Jewish question,” and other accounts tell of him boasting about his womanising.
Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac was one of the few to escape Offlag II D. He became an officer of de Gaulle's Free French forces in London, and after 1945 he was an important French historian of the Second World War. During the war the BBC broadcast to France from 6:15 a.m. to midnight: news bulletins, discussions, reflections, messages, secret codes, and de Gaulle's own programme, “Honneur et Patrie.” The BBC's French broadcasters received voluminous fan mail from their French audience, who listened to them clandestinely. By 1941 the penalty for being caught listening to the broadcasts from London was a ten-thousand-franc fine or two years in prison; by the end of 1942 it was death.
One of the most famous evening magazine programmes of the BBC French service was “Les Français parlent aux Français” (The French talk to the French). It was on this programme that Crémieux-Brilhac broadcast his first attack on Louis Darquier, in May 1942:
… As one of eleven officers who escaped from Germany, we were, if not comrades, then at least neighbours of Darquier in Offlag II D. I knew this man and can state that he is a coward. Eleven officers will support my testimony: in a camp of six thousand officers, where comradeship was a duty and a rule, Darquier de Pellepoix was an object of scorn and disgust. He arrived at the Offlag wearing espadrilles and told his roommates that he “put them on to flee from the invader as quickly as possible” …
He did not have the courage of his convictions. One day, after one of his speeches, a Jewish officer, respected by everyone, a hero of both wars and decorated captain for his actions during the battle of Rethel, challenged Darquier de Pellepoix to withdraw his remarks or he would settle the matter with his fists. Darquier de Pellepoix, who no longer had his thugs from the Foire du Trone [funfair] to protect him, retracted immediately. He went pale, stuttered, apologised with a stream of “Dear friends” and finally made his way out under a hail of abuse …
Finally, after two months in captivity, towards 1 September 1940, the news broke that Darquier—and Darquier alone—was to be released. At first, no one believed it: the Germans had not set anyone free before … but … a German officer came to get him …
By August 1940 Louis Darquier was back in Paris.
As he departed, his cellmates begged him to send them the compass and civilian hat so essential for escape. Darquier did not say no, he promised everything—he would have promised the moon to get out the camp with the minimum of trouble.
Later Louis wrote to one of the few prisoners who would speak to him, reporting that
he had enjoyed an excellent trip, that he had stopped in Berlin where the Germans presented him with a civilian suit. He had returned to Paris on an express train where he had been delighted to find his apartment. As for his prisoner friends, he counselled patience.
Two months later Jean Darquier was liberated, also surprisingly early. Later Louis was heard making speeches about “the happy life of prisoners.”16
When the Germans moved into their new French territory they immediately restored order, ruling Occupied France, ZoneO, directly from Paris, controlling three-quarters of the country's industrial wealth, most of its important agricultural land, and nearly 70 percent of its population. Housed in Paris in the Hôtel Majestic in the avenue Kléber, the Wehrmacht provided the military command in France, the Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich, the MBF,17 which was responsible for administration, management of the economy and the maintenance of order. At the Majestic, Goebbels' Propaganda-Abteilung (Propaganda Division) started work at once, informing the defeated inhabitants: “It's the English and the Jews who have brought you to this sorry pass.”18
In Paris the occupiers distributed food, cigarettes and posters of a benevolent Nazi soldier cheerfully holding a little boy munching a piece of bread, with two little girls attached to his other, outstretched hand, with the message: “Abandoned peoples, put your trust in the German Soldier.” The presence of the conqueror was on every corner. Paris was transformed by German street signs and instructions, banners and posters, the latter becoming more malevolent with the passing of time, for the friendly German soldier vanished once resistance began, which it did very soon.
The Germans requisitioned many of the most historic and beautiful buildings of Paris. The blood banner, the Blutfahne, waved from the Hôtel de Ville. The Palais Bourbon, which had housed the National Assembly, was festooned with a vast banner proclaiming “Germany is victorious on all fronts.” The flag of the swastika flew from public buildings, the best hotels were taken over, and German soldiers changed guard and stood to attention outside them. Within weeks of the Nazi arrival the French stock exchange opened again, as did the universities and schools. Industrialists and bankers turned their attention to doing business with their conquerors. Paris became a centre of high life for the German victors and those French who were happy to entertain them; together they filled the restaurants and cinemas, nightclubs and racecourses, and as the German soldiers goose-stepped to duty, the French people went back to work.
Hitler ruled France through numerous organisations with overlapping responsibilities, all of them dependent upon his favour. A number of Nazi offices operated in France under direct control from Berlin, while in Paris the MBF vied with the office of Ribbentrop's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the German embassy. Ribbentrop returned Otto Abetz to Paris at the moment of victory, and on 8 August 1940 he was appointed German ambassador to France. From his headquarters in the rue de Lille Abetz soon became a more important agent than the military command; Céline called him “King Otto I” with good reason. His role was to “transmit the wishes of Hitler,” and as early as 19 August 1940 he was circulating plans to dispossess and expel Jews.19
Abetz was a charming francophile, and his personality soon made his embassy a magnet for Parisian social life during the war. Before this, Abetz included Louis Darquier on a list of pre-war sympathisers for immediate release from prison that he drew up after his first meeting with Pierre Laval in July, when he and Laval took to each other with mutual enthusiasm.20 Laval barely knew L
ouis Darquier at this point; it was the Nazis who prepared this July list of pre-war mercenaries, which included Marcel Bucard, Robert Brasillach and many others.
On Louis' return the Germans had been in situ for only two months. France had fallen apart, and Paris was a dead city with its tongue cut out. Communication of all kinds was forbidden by the Nazis; no letters, no travel—even carrier pigeons were forbidden to fly. German soldiers settled into the towns and villages of Occupied France, greeted by a populace stunned into resignation or acceptance.
During this time and for many months to come, the office of General Charles Huntziger, who became Vichy Minister of War in September 1940, wrote a sequence of letters to several commandants of different regions asking where Darquier had been, was or would be. In fact the French War Office was writing such letters just as Louis was signing off from the army at the Paris mobilisation centre in the rue de Liège and applying for the feuille de démobilisation he needed to carry to demonstrate that he was neither a deserter nor an escaped prisoner of war. The police could have told them that Louis was living with Myrtle at 2, rue Chauchat, not, it seems, an apartment, but the usual hotel room.21 On 27 August 1940 Vichy France abrogated the Marchandeau Law, but Louis Darquier was not yet a free man. His pre-war criminal convictions still held.
Louis was happy to take German money and lie about it, but he was also a rabid French patriot. He had alienated many recent comrades— Maurras, the nationalist right, the Paris city councillors; he needed to mend many fences. In the confusion of these early months no one knew how the balance of power would settle between Vichy and the Germans. For some months Louis bided his time, and avoided his anti-Semitic cronies. He was by no means unusual in keeping mum in the autumn of 1940; the entire population of France was doing much the same as they anxiously assessed the lie of the new land.
In Vichy, gathering around Pétain, were the men who formed his first government and his consultative council of ministers, many of whom shared with Louis Darquier the political inheritance of Maurras and the nationalist leagues, and of the Fédération Nationale Catholique and the Catholic Church. A disparate collection of machinators, rarely sharing each other's politics or ambitions for France, Pétain's followers were, however, usually entirely united by a demonisation of everything that the Popular Front had represented, a strong belief in authoritarian government, and anti-Bolshevism, “the nearest thing to a Vichy common denominator.”22
Like that of Louis Darquier, the nationalism and anti-Semitism of Pétain's chosen disciples in Vichy was French, not Nazi. Very soon ranged against them and centred in Paris were the French intellectuals and journalists—the Rebatets and Brasillachs—and the politicians—Doriot and his rival Marcel Déat,23 the most socialist of all the French fascists. On the fringes of these tribes was Céline's scruffy underworld of “ideologues, adventurers and bandits”24—the Montandons and Deloncles, the Cos-tons and Darquiers and their fellow muckrakers and crusaders, who in August 1940 were ready to pounce upon every opportunity the Germans might offer them. All of them energetically disagreed amongst themselves as to how much, how little or for what reason they welcomed Nazi rule. Whatever their differences, they now formed a pro-Nazi alternative to the Vichy state, with Occupied Paris as its capital city. Described as “collaborationists” and often called “Paris collabos” to distinguish them from “collaborators”—the men of Vichy—some of these Parisian fascists adored Hitler, and many took to uniforms and marching and saluting. These Paris collabos passed the war years tormenting Vichy for its moderation and fighting amongst themselves for German favour and money.
If Paris was the Nazi capital of France and Vichy its French capital, both shared anti-Semitism and anti-communism, more rabid in Paris, more Catholic in Vichy. While Paris and Vichy vied with each other in their attempts to please the German victors, the Nazi occupiers dealt with Vichy as they wished, and treated the Paris collabos as gigolos to dine with and be diverted by. Even the affable Abetz, considered to be too much of a francophile by his German peers, rarely took them seriously.
Hitler's various representatives in France immediately took control of the media—all news agencies, the press, publishing, radio and the cinema. The injection of so much energy and money into propaganda was a boon to these fanatics. After Vichy repealed the Marchandeau Law, which had prohibited attacks on ethnic or religious groups, racist newspapers proliferated, most of them a mélange of fascist idealism, poetic imagery and incantatory patriotism, interwoven with vicious denunciations of Jews, Masons and the English. Vichy monitored everything, as did the Germans, but both also subsidised generously the collaborationist press in Paris, which flourished throughout the Occupation.25
Typical of the pre-war anti-Semites was Henry Coston, who, like all the old warriors of The Protocols of the Elders of Sion, glowered at the new arrivals invading his territory. With so much on offer, former colleagues became rivals. Coston wanted to start up his paper, Libre parole, again, but he had joined Jacques Doriot's fascist Parti Populaire Français in 1940, and Abetz and Laval were suspicious of anyone connected with Doriot. So Coston's considerable energies turned towards “the Jews' auxiliaries,” Freemasons. Vichy set him up in the former premises of the Grand Lodge, with a Centre d'Action et de Documentation (CAD) (Action and Documentation Centre) under the murderous Bernard Faÿ, the great friend and protector of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, both of whom did so much to help him escape retribution after the war. Pétain placed all these efforts within his Ministry of Justice, for he shared the traditional Catholic view of Freemasonry: “A Jew cannot help his origins, but a Freemason has chosen to become one.” He was particularly hostile to schoolteachers, whom he considered to be Freemasons, socialists or both, responsible for raising a generation unfit to fight and die for France: a thousand of these lost their jobs.26
Coston's passion for categorisation and identification was of the greatest use to Faÿ; he drew up a card index containing sixty thousand Masonic names. Many Catholic papers made use of these lists in order to boycott and publicly shame those listed. Nine hundred and ninety-nine Masons were sent to Germany, and 549 were executed by firing squad or died in concentration camps. A further fourteen thousand lost their jobs. Coston did this work as a French civil servant working for the Ministry of Justice, but he was also Gestapo spy number R12. He flourished like the green bay tree in a world of German-sponsored circles, groups and centres, pouring out pamphlets, brochures, leaflets, tracts, articles and essays which culminated in the “pinnacle of his art,” “Je vous hais”—“I Hate You.” Produced for Doriot and his PPF by Coston and colleagues in 1944, this pamphlet was considered to be the most violently anti-Semitic publication of the period.
Louis Darquier's ideological position within the complexities of French support for Germany was driven first by his strategies for survival. After survival he wanted recognition, and both desires were tied up with his hunger for money and success. By early 1941 it became more than obvious that he could be paid by the Vichy state as well as the Germans to rid France of its Jews, and at the same time public recognition, power, honour and acclaim would be his; 1940 to 1941 was therefore the period of his most determined assault upon his final goal. Within twelve months every speech Louis Darquier made would reveal detailed and thorough briefings from German sources. But outwardly, the police reported, he was avoiding all public activities in order to demonstrate his disagreement with the ideas of the occupiers and his independence of spirit.
The ambition of both Pétain and Laval was to place France, powerful again, at the side of Germany in a new world order. In October 1940 first Laval and then Pétain met Hitler at Montoire, near Tours. Photographs of Pétain and the Führer shaking hands appeared in every French news paper. Pétain told Hitler that de Gaulle was “a blot on the honour of the French officer corps,” and a week later he told his people that he was taking them “on the path to collaboration.”27
The greatest obstacle to this fantasy was Hitle
r himself. He had no desire for any good to come to or be done to France, Germany's “mortal enemy.” He permitted a Vichy state because it was cheaper; French civil servants and administrators ran the country. Hitler wanted France rendered powerless to obstruct his war plans for Europe, and to function as a source of wealth and labour for Germany. Unlike every other defeated European country, France had been permitted an armistice; now Vichy wanted a peace treaty. Hitler was not interested. Vichy would devote years of wasted effort to useless negotiations with Nazi Germany as it failed to come to terms with this humiliation.
Hitler turned France into a milking cow for Germany throughout the war years. Everything was sent to Germany, but money most of all. Reparation payments to the Reich, the cost to the French people of being occupied, were vast, and were used as blackmail. When Vichy behaved the sum was lowered, and vice versa. Most French food production went to Germany. There continued to be food for the occupying Germans and their French cohorts, but the people of France were among the worst-fed in Occupied Europe. Hunger and cold dominate every memoir of those who lived in France during the war, as do a pall of prohibitions and a forest of papers of permission required to live, to travel, to work. Between the Germans and Vichy, French subjects were tethered to the ground. From September 1940 everything good was rationed: from butter to clothes, from tobacco and wine to salt, from petrol to coffee. There was little meat. Family pets had to watch their backs, as did the pigeons in the parks.28
In 1940 however, sheltering under the grandfatherly protection of the Hero of Verdun, the French people believed in Pétain with the faith of the desperate. This was the period of attentisme, of “wait and see,” and Pétain was quickly sanctified. His face adorned a vast army of mugs, statues, magazine covers, stamps and postcards. There were Pétain streets, squares and buildings, most of them hastily renamed when Liberation came. There was even a Pétain suit. Mothers held up their children to receive his touch. He was showered with gifts—cigarettes and crystal, baby lambs decked out in pink ribbons. In his toy kingdom, the men who served him rose and fell with a frequency identical to that of the governments of the Third Republic. Group contended with group, squabbling courtiers came and went. The torment such men passed on to their scapegoats, the Jews, Masons, Gypsies, communists and socialists they had so long despised, was to be great, but under Pétain's National Revolution the suffering of his French subjects was not inconsiderable either.
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