References to Louis Darquier's visit to Cahors in 1941 are fleeting, but he seems to have achieved some reconciliation with his father. The visit also enabled him to observe the flood of refugees, and to complain, “Cahors, which before the war had only one Jew, now has the sad privilege of welcoming two to three thousand.”46
By the end of the summer of 1941, French resistance in Paris was mounting, as it was throughout France. Death notices began to appear, Affiches Rouges, wanted posters, printed in red. Hitler ordered German reprisals of up to a hundred hostages for every German victim, and the execution of communists, anarchists, Gaullists and Jews began. Vichy, which liked to handle these reprisals itself, continually finagled to get communist hostages shot instead of “good Frenchmen.”47
If there had been a honeymoon between the efficient German occupier and the defeated French, the autumn of 1941 saw the end of it. Pétain reacted to the “evil wind” of discontent by issuing even more “Thou shalt nots” to his refractory people. Darlan was wont to describe the British leader as “the drunkard Churchill.”48 But it was Churchill who described best these men of Vichy:
They lie prostrate at the foot of the conqueror. They fawn upon him. And what have they got out of it? The fragment of France which was left to them is just as powerless, just as hungry, and even more miserable because divided, than the Occupied regions themselves. Hitler plays from day to day a cat-and-mouse game with these tormented men.49
13
Tormenting Men
THE LAWS VICHY INSTITUTED against its Jewish population came about without German instruction: they were the creations of Pétain and his National Revolution, carefully designed to avoid any implication of alignment with the German approach.
Louis' efforts at ingratiation were about to pay off. To Vichy he said little about Jews. He had no need to. He now lived in a world which fulfilled almost every longing to rid France of them. The speed of Vichy's approach could not fail to please. Vichy made its first moves in the midsummer aftermath of the chaos of 1940, as demobilised soldiers were returning home and some of those who had fled south were making their way back to Paris and the Occupied Zone. Amongst their number were some thirty thousand Jews. On 17 August the Germans forbade the return of any more. “The government of Marshal Pétain,” Vallat assured the German occupiers, “is perfectly aware of the extent to which Jewish elements are responsible for the ills affecting France.”1
A week after Pétain was voted into power, on 17 July, employment in the civil service was closed to anyone without a French father. Five days later a commission was established to review the citizenship of all persons naturalised after 1927. Foreigners and refugees were put to work in “foreign work units.”2 In August all secret societies were forbidden, including Masonic lodges. In September restrictions which already applied to the medical profession were extended to the legal profession. These laws, which exceeded German demands, affected all refugees and foreigners—and automatically, a large number of Jews. As with all Vichy laws, they applied in theory to everyone in both ZoneO and Zone NonO,as long as they fitted in with German laws in the Occupied Zone. When Vichy set to work, the Germans in Paris were still involved in administrative and military matters. Only in September 1940 did the German occupiers catch up with Vichy and issue their first decree applying to Jews. This secured abandoned Jewish property and defined whom they considered to be Jewish. A sign, “Jewish business,” in German and French, was required on all Jewish shop windows. To the Germans, a Jew was a Jew if he practised or had practised the religion, or had more than two Jewish grandparents.
This German decree required the word “Juif ” or “Juive” to be stamped on all Jewish identity cards, and for a census of such persons to be undertaken in the Occupied Zone. This became the infamous fichier, the “Tulard file,” named after the French police official who organised this meticulous information, colour-coded for deportation and death. The Jewish census began in Paris on 3 October 1940, and was carried out for the Germans by French civil servants; 150,000 Jews registered for the fichier. It had orders to list women and children, and it did. As he walked around Paris, Louis Darquier saw Jews labelled and segregated as he had always wished.
All this was the first shot in what was to become a battle royal between Vichy and the Germans for possession of the Jewish wealth of France. The Germans wanted the French to do the work, but to retain the
Jewish carte d'identité, introduced by Vichy in 1940 (© Klarsfeld Collection)
proceeds for the German war effort; Vichy fought to keep the wealth in French hands.3 A complication was that German command in France proved to be as divided and contentious as its French counterparts. The third German authority in Paris, working alongside and often in conflict with the MBF and Abetz's embassy, was the kingdom of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's minion in charge of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RHSA), the Reich Central Security Office. All its divisions sounded like snakes hissing—the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Intelligence Service, the Sicherheitspolizei (SS, SiPo), the security police. The SS wore a death's head on their black caps, and their black uniforms made them as frightening as their secret state police, the Gestapo, the most frightening of them all. Perhaps because of this, all of Himmler's services, whether Gestapo, SD or SS, became known in popular parlance as the Gestapo.
Himmler's deputy, under whom all these organisations so terrifyingly flourished, was Reinhard Heydrich, also responsible for the RHSA's Judenreferat, its Jewish Office. For that office Heydrich's appointed authority in Berlin was Adolf Eichmann. Himmler's police service had offices everywhere in Paris. Its address, as well as that for other miscellaneous and proliferating German police bodies, was 11, rue des Saussaies, formerly the French Sûreté Nationale. Here the French police and the German Gestapo worked together, finally achieving “twelve torture chambers… functioning twenty-four hours per day.”4 Also at their disposal were the cells of the rue Lauriston, where French gangsters aped the torture of their Gestapo masters. Hovering around these German and French police services was an army of informers, spies and crooks and members of the public recruited to spy, denounce and inform. For this spider's web of security services the Nazis almost took over the great avenue Foch in Paris, which stretches from the Arc de Triomphe to the Bois de Boulogne. In 1940 a young Nazi, Helmut Knochen, arrived in Paris as senior commander of the SD and SS.5 Only thirty years of age, an intellectual who spoke English and French, a journalist with a doctorate in literature, he ran his command from 72, avenue Foch, extending also into numbers 82 and 84. None of his qualifications fitted him to cope with Louis Darquier.
In a typical Nazi arrangement, reporting to Knochen, but also to Eichmann in Berlin was the SS Captain Theodor Dannecker, a young protégé of Eichmann who had worked for him in Berlin, Vienna and Prague. Dannecker inhabited number 31, avenue Foch, a house which
Who was and who was not Jewish in the Vichy State
continues to exude a sinister air to this day. He was only twenty-seven when he was sent to Paris in the summer of 1940 to run the Judenreferat.6 Vallat, in his post-war justifications, called Dannecker “a mad sadist” deluded by “frenzied fantasies.”7 Darquier added to this: for him Theodor Dannecker was a “raving idiot,” and more, mentally ill. Dannecker was generally considered insane, but while he was certainly one of the most fearsome members of those complex and secret services, he was not without competitors.
On the day of the Paris census, 3 October 1940, Pétain signed Vichy's first Statut des Juifs (Statute on the Jews), more stringent than the September decree of the Nazis, and more extensive than they had asked for. It was drafted by Raphaël Alibert,8 Pétain's first Minister of Justice, a Catholic convert and a fellow traveller of Action Française. He defined a Jew by race, not religion: three Jewish grandparents, or two Jewish grandparents if the spouse was also Jewish, were sufficient. Except for special cases—and such exemptions had to be laboriously applied for—Jews were banned from teaching, journali
sm, film, theatre, radio, the officer corps and the civil service: anywhere they could “influence” the French race. A numerus clausus, a quota of Jews, was to be established in the liberal professions. The next day a second decree permitted the préfets of provincial France to round up all foreign Jews and put them into internment camps, or confine them to forced labour. This law made life dangerous for Jews everywhere, for the difference between foreign Jews and French Jews more or less disappeared at this level, and a local functionary could arrest a Jew for any reason whatever. Later that month General Huntziger removed all Jews, officers and men, from the army.
Only the Protestant leader Pastor Marc Boegner9 made any objection to these laws, though he specified that his objections related only to “French Israelites,” that is to “well-born” Jews who had been French for generations. The Catholic bishops of France remained silent. The defeated French population had other worries. In public Pétain talked about all his Vichy measures in the high-flown language of moral regeneration, the purification of the French patrie, and the establishment of order and authority.
Meanwhile, Maurras had taken his newspaper Action française first to Limoges and then to Lyon, where he continued to publish throughout the Occupation. Léon Daudet died in July 1942, but a few acolytes remained. Age—he was now in his seventies—did not dim Maurras' capacity for idolatry. Pétain became his King, and though his intractable hostility to Germany remained, in practice it softened under the weight of his approval of what the Nazis, and Vichy, were doing to the Jews of France. Open collaboration with the Germans remained intolerable to him, but collaborate he did because of Pétain.
To his long list of enemies Maurras could now add de Gaulle, and more, any fellow Frenchman or -woman who failed to agree with him; denunciation became his chief occupation during the war. His column “La Politique” still appeared on the front page of Action française, hailing the “rare and sublime”10 Pétain or calling “for hostages and for killing without mercy… that captured Gaullists might be shot out of hand… that if the death penalty is not sufficient to put a stop to the Gaullists, members of their families should be seized as hostages and executed.”11 Though a number of Maurras' former followers were to join the Resistance, men of Action Française were ubiquitous at Vichy in the early years, writing Pétain's speeches, filling many secondary posts where they could enthusiastically interpret Vichy laws with Maurrassian vigour. Pétain made no objections to any anti-Semitic laws, and signed all of them. He was content as long as he was allowed to make odd exceptions for Jews his wife knew personally, for the occasional “old French Jew,” and in particular for war veterans or any in his entourage.
The men who governed under Pétain at Vichy in these early days were by no means all followers of Maurras, for in the contest between Vichy and the German occupiers over the transfer of Jewish enterprises and the despatch of Jews to Auschwitz, former republicans, socialists and Radicals accepted Vichy's edicts. But not in Paris. Within a month or two the Paris collabos had taken a quick look at Vichy and found it wanting. By September 1940 they were back in the capital, and these men of the extreme right—Jacques Doriot, Marcel Déat, Marcel Bucard, Eugène Deloncle— began to circle round each other, plotting the formation of a state National Socialist Party along Nazi lines.12 Hitler had no interest in uniting these pro-Nazis into a unified French fascist party, and much German money was spent in fanning the flames of already fiery hostilities. Louis Darquier wanted to lead a national Vichy anti-Semitic movement; he wanted a purified Christian France, not a pagan Nazified patrie. In this manner he managed to alienate everyone.
Of the 330,000 Jews in France at this time, the larger number were in the Vichy Zone—they felt safer there. In their pursuit of Jewish assets, the Germans continued to dump Jews into the Non-Occupied Zone, to the fury of Vichy. For the Jews of France the demarcation line was closed in both directions. Vichy's anti-Semitic laws were for elimination, not death, but its method of ridding itself of undesirables—internment camps—was perfectly adapted to German requirements: they became concentration camps in all but name.
After the fall of the Popular Front, Daladier's government had set up internment camps to detain political refugees, criminals, foreigners in general and communists in particular.13 By March 1940 nearly three and a half thousand communists had been interned, but the camps multiplied to contain the 350,000 Spanish republican refugees interned in 1938–39, after Franco's victory in the Civil War. German and Italian refugees from their fascist states were also sent to the camps, together with all suspicious persons collected at the outbreak of war in September 1939. So republican France had prepared the ground; the French were used to these camps before the war. They called the internees “enemy aliens” or “undesirables,” and their internment camps “centres d'hébergement,” lodging centres. Many of the inmates were set to work in special labour groups.
Under Vichy the purpose of the camps changed. Vichy's internees were almost entirely the enemies listed by Maurras. There were fifty-two camps in all, perhaps more, in both zones. Most of them were along the Mediterranean or inland from it, carefully obliterated today to hide them from tourists—Récébédou, Noé, Le Vernet, St.-Cyprien, Rivesaltes, Rivel, Argelès, Bram, Agde, Saliers, Langlade, Aubagne, Les Milles and many more. By the end of 1940 between forty and fifty thousand prisoners were interned in the Vichy Zone.
The worst of the camps were in the Pyrénées. In the most notorious, at Gurs, thirty people died every day during the winter of 1940–41; in its cemetery you can see the graves of more than a thousand, some Spanish republicans, but most Jewish. Hannah Arendt was at Gurs, Arthur Koestler at Le Vernet, which he later described as “below the level of Nazi concentration camps,” Max Ernst at Les Milles. Equally notorious were Pithiviers, Beaune-la-Rolande and Compiègne in the Occupied Zone, and above all, in a northeastern suburb of Paris, Drancy.
Drancy, the final camp before transportation, filtered Jews from all over France, usually to Auschwitz. Opened in August 1941, administered by the French and guarded by French police until July 1943 when the Nazi Aloïs Brunner and his SS took over, Drancy today is a massive housing
Some of the principal internment camps in France during the Second World War
estate near the Drancy–Le Bourget and Bobigny railway stations. In 1941 it was unfinished. There was no electricity or water, and no toilets, but for its first prisoners latrines were dug in the yard and it was surrounded with barbed-wire fences and watchtowers.14 Drancy was a working-class suburb, but not built-up as it is today. More open land surrounded it then, but there were sufficient members of the working class—subjects considered unimportant witnesses by Vichy—to know what was in their midst. And Drancy saw the worst of it. From 1942 to 1944, sixty-five of the seventy-four convoys that deported 73,853 Jews to German death camps passed through Drancy.15
The French camps were run by the Vichy Ministry of the Interior; French police or French military watched over them. Barbed wire, electrified wire, unfurnished and unheated huts, sometimes without windows, sometimes with sealed windows, with polluted drinking water, rotten food, lice, fleas, rats, no latrines; all the usual horrors afflicted these prisons, as did dysentery, pneumonia, tuberculosis, typhus, starvation and death. Malnutrition was the key to most of the diseases that caused such suffering. Corruption was rampant. Between 1939 and 1946 these camps imprisoned 600,000 men, women and children: 350,000 Spanish refugees, 40,000 other foreign nationals, 1,500 political prisoners, 3,000 Gypsies and 100,000 Jews. The Jews were not the only ones deported, though it was mostly the Jews who did not return.
The French concentration camps were not extermination camps, though thousands died in them. They became the source of forced labour for Vichy and for Germany, as slave labour was sucked into the Reich from all the defeated territories to feed the Nazi war effort. By the end of the war in Europe the millions who died “at work” for Germany in Albert Speer's production programmes became a different, largely ove
rlooked, holocaust. But most of all the French camps became the assembly points for the fulfilment of the Final Solution. Hitler could not spare Germans for this collection work; it was Vichy's CGQ J and its civil and administrative services, and most of all the French police, who carried out his orders. The photographs of the French police in their uniforms and képis organising the detention and concentration camps all over France, rounding up Jews, communists and French dissidents, looking down on the wretched internees or herding them onto trains for the long journey to Auschwitz, are among the most vivid images of the Vichy years, as painful and desolate as all others.
As are the photographs of old women and men who can hardly stand up, the babies and the children and prisoners marked in so many ways. There were at least nine other badges beside the yellow star the Jews were forced to wear. Worn on the left, German political prisoners bore a red triangle, French political prisoners red and black. Jewish political prisoners wore red and yellow, antisocials black, Gypsies brown, Jehovah's Witnesses purple, stateless persons blue, and ordinary prisoners green. In addition to this there was a red-and-white circular piece of material, exactly like a rifle target, which, worn on the back, signalled that a prisoner should be brought to the attention of the SS.
The stringency of Vichy's Statut des Juifs of October 1940, and its compliance with all German decrees, freed the Nazis to set in motion the Final Solution for the Jews of France. On 21 January 1941, twelve months before its final formulation at the Wannsee conference, Theodor Dannecker wrote out his blueprint for the Jewish Office he wanted Vichy to create, and for the scope of its activities.16
In accordance with the wishes of the Führer, the Jewish question in those parts of Europe administered or controlled by Germany must be settled definitively once the war is over. The chief of the SS and SD [Heydrich] has already been commanded by the Führer, after negotiations with the Reichsführer SS [Himmler] and the Marshal of the Reich [Goering], to submit a project for the “final solution” … It has been submitted to the Führer and the Marshal of the Reich …
Bad Faith Page 27