For this reason, it is now extremely urgent to create a “Central Jewish Agency”…17
At this point, the Final Solution was phrased as “a carefully established colonisation plan in a territory that is still to be decided.” Thereafter, acting on instructions from Goering, the German authorities met every Tuesday in Dannecker's office. Joining Dannecker were representatives of the MBF; from the embassy came Abetz or his “men of steel,” notably Consul-General Rudolf Schleier, an “uncompromising party man.”18 Also in attendance was Baron Colonel Kurt von Behr, Alfred Rosenberg's representative in Paris. Rosenberg was the official philosopher of the Nazi Party, but his Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) was given an extra duty—the sequestration of the art collections, archives and libraries of Jews and other enemies. Together these men determined upon action against the Jews, agreed on the need for a central agency and discussed how to achieve the compliance of Vichy. The “Central Jewish Agency” became the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, the CGQ J, which Vichy set up for Dannecker in March 1941. Unlike other Vichy departments, it was given power in both zones to ensure that the appropriation of Jewish assets would be diverted into French, not German, hands. Vichy's specifications for this “Ministry for Anti-Semitism” were quite simple:
The CGQ J was responsible for the preparation of all laws relating to the removal of Jews from the French body politic, for the implementa tion of all the government decrees concerning Jews, for the encour agement of other government ministries to do likewise, for the liquidation of Jewish property, for the appointment of trustees to do this, for the supervision of these trustees, and for the initiation of police measures against Jews as dictated by the general interest.19
At much the same time, in the interests of divide and rule, the Germans moved swiftly to provide a gathering point for all the disputatious anti-Semites of Paris, who looked upon Vichy's considerable efforts as grossly inadequate. The German propaganda office for this purpose was the Institut d'étude des Questions Juives (IEQ J), the Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions, which was provided with its own shock troops of rabble-rousers, and offices at 21, rue la Boétie in Paris.
During Louis' absence, Captain Paul Sézille, the strangest and most inebriated of all his pre-war brethren, had formed a Communauté Française and taken on Louis' Anti-Jewish Union, organising meetings, publishing brochures and nagging Vichy to do more about the Jews. Dannecker, after some months' experience of dealing with the over-enthusiasm of men such as Petit and Coston, placed Sézille in charge of the IEQ J and made it directly responsible to Baron von Behr of Rosenberg's office.
On 11 May 1941 the Germans allowed Sézille to inaugurate his new empire, an occasion marked by violent altercations when Sézille attacked one of the invitees whom he took for a Jewish spy. All the usual suspects attended, as well as their cultural patrons in the shape of Rebatet and Céline. Sézille and his fellows informed and spied and assisted the Gestapo in arresting Jews, searching their houses, appropriating their property. They were paid for such work. Many of Louis' old colleagues in his Anti-Jewish Union resurfaced in the IEQ J. Louis, who wanted the Vichy job, did not, for Vichy and Paris were already at war over the subject of Jews.
In Xavier Vallat,20 Vichy's first Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, Dannecker had to accept considerable frustration. Vallat, a friend of Maurras, was Pétain's choice for the job, and in its first year his CGQ J was very much a Vichy/Action Française construct. Vallat's militant Catholicism, absorbed in his rural childhood in Provence, was also shaped by the rabidly anti-Semitic Catholic journal Le Pèlerin. He was only six years older than Louis Darquier, not as tall but equally hefty. In the First World War Vallat, wounded three times, won the Légion d'honneur but lost a leg and an eye, and wore a black eye patch thereafter. In photographs this patch echoes Darquier's monocle, so that both Vichy's Commissioners for Jewish Affairs seem similarly one-eyed.
Vallat's anti-Semitism was carefully defined. He called his philosophy state anti-Semitism, “antisémitisme de l'état français,” “inspired by the doctrine of the Church,”21 and indeed at his trial after the war he used this as a defence. He repeatedly claimed the support of the Church, its teachers and its teaching, both historically and during the Vichy years. He would be governed, Vallat stated, by “neither hatred nor reprisals,” but by “simply the strict defence of the national interest.”22 The anti-Semitic regime he created and handed on to Louis Darquier was the most elaborate and the most severe in Europe. As a French patriot, Vallat wanted to eliminate Jews in a French, not a German, way. He insisted again and again that his, Alibert's and Vichy's anti-Semitic laws were of a piece—French, not German or Nazi, but Catholic, natural, established by precedent and by the views of St. Thomas Aquinas. And so Vallat—and many of his punctilious Vichy comrades—proved themselves to be as compulsive in their way as Louis Darquier.
In a twenty-thousand-word essay he wrote in Fresnes prison after the war, Vallat traced the spiritual ancestry of Catholic anti-Semitism from St. Paul and St. Thomas Aquinas to Charles the Bald, and pointed to fifty-seven bulls issued by twenty-nine Popes between 1217 and 1755 to prevent “Jewish saturation” of Catholic life. “Let us understand this point clearly,” wrote Vallat. “It is not a matter of taking Rome as a shield, and of finding in ancient pontifical texts some absolution for a political fault. We are not ‘pleading guilty with attenuating circumstances. ’ It is simply a matter of proving, in intellectual honesty, against those who accuse the Marshal's government of having been a servile plagiarist of the Nazis, that this anti-Jewish legislation, as distinct from that across the Rhine, never went beyond the just limits established by the Church in accordance with the right of protecting the national community against the abuses and harmful influence of a foreign element.”23 In practice Vallat's philosophy led to an investigation of French Jewishness which was morbid, persnickety and ridiculous.
The new Minister of Justice, the distinguished lawyer Joseph Barthélemy, prepared with Vallat the second Vichy Statut des Juifs, issued on 2 June 1941. 24 Vallat's new law, which widened and replaced the earlier Vichy decree, provided for a census of Jews, as newly defined, in the Vichy Zone and changed the reasons for which they could be dismissed from their jobs. It also broadened their removal from industrial, commercial and artisan sectors. It combined extended exclusion for Jews from most walks of life, totally forbidding them from others—markedly anything to do with money or the media—with a convoluted list of specific criteria to protect more carefully the “old” French Jews. “French Jews,” “Israelites,” were defined by Pétain and Vallat as all Jews who had “rendered exceptional service to the state, or whose families have been established in France for at least five generations or whose families have rendered meritorious service.”25
After this Vallat was still unhappy, for he discovered that “since the publication of the last decree many Jews have converted to Catholicism, a move very much disapproved of by most Jews.”26 The Germans knew that the exceptions applied to “old” French Jews were a sticking point with both Pétain and Vallat, and attributed this to Pétain's desire not to alienate the United States.
During Darlan's fourteen months in power, Pétain's lofty visions for his National Revolution had fallen by the wayside as technocrats and civil servants took over. These were an efficient bunch of men, with a touch about them of Mussolini's railway-station fascism.27 With no parliamentary impedimenta to slow down the execution of their plans, they had a free hand to instigate change from above. There was a barrage of new decrees: on 16 July 1941 the number of Jews permitted to practise law was limited to 2 percent; on 22 July the confiscation of Jewish property and enterprises was authorised; on 13 August Jews were prohibited the possession of a radio; on 15 August Jewish doctors, chemists and midwives joined lawyers in the same 2 percent limitation; on 24 September architects were added.
Charles Maurras applauded and praised everything, encouraged further improvements and objected to the “in
ordinate fuss” that shortly began, particularly the murmurs of “unpatriotic Christians” and prelates.28 The French judiciary fully participated in applying Pétain's enormous raft of laws, as did its civil servants. Many of those involved in the fate of the Jews were men of the law. Laval and Vallat were lawyers; so was Dannecker and his successor, SS-Hauptsturmbannführer Heinz R. Röthke.
To complement the Paris fichier, Vallat's new statut instituted a census of Jews in the Vichy Zone. This resulted in a list of 180,000 Jews, though Vallat fretted that up to 10 percent more remained unaccounted for. Added to that of the Paris census, this provided 330,000 Jews, an efficient basis for the round-ups to come. The conscientious care with which the préfets and their officers carried out this census is revealed in a host of memos and instructions and in the final, tragic lists.
Both Vichy and the Nazis shared a view about the omnipotent wealth of the Jews. The results from the Aude revealed otherwise. The French official who took the census in this southern department first divided the 765 Jews he tracked down into French Jews and Foreign Jews (only 239 of the French Jews and 350 of the foreigners had actually filled in the census). He then categorised them by business or other identification. Then he looked for the others. There are many annotations and additions on this report in the handwriting of this diligent flunkey. “Children are often left off the declarations,” he noted. Near the name of Cohen, Oscar, salesman, living in Carcassone, he annotated in his best script the names of six more Jews he discovered in nearby villages who had not filled in the census. One of them, Eliazar Davidovici of Esperaza, he presumed to be Jewish because of his name; another had no name, being recorded only as “One (1) Jew, thatch merchant, rue du Pont.” “In the department of the Aude,” he reported, “there are few Jews, none of them very active, they arouse little sympathy.”29 As to wealth, the occupations of the Jews on his list included: salesman, soldier, prisoner of war, hospital worker, shopkeeper, travelling hosier. Each department of France carried out similar investigations, and made similar reports, with widely varying degrees of enthusiasm.
At the end of this month of intense anti-Jewish activity in Vichy, on 22 June 1941 Hitler invaded Russia and laid the foundations for his own defeat. While the French Communist Party was always at war with the Vichy state, which imprisoned its members by the thousands, it continued to prevaricate over collaboration with the German occupiers as long as Hitler and Stalin's Nazi-Soviet pact endured.30 Germany's declaration of war on Russia released loyal communists to fight both the Nazi and the Vichy state; henceforward the Communist Party was at the forefront of the Resistance. At the same time Hitler's plan for the destruction of Soviet Russia, Operation Barbarossa, also liberated the Paris collabos, who could now combine their pro-Nazi position with the defence of Christianity.
At the Majestic, the headquarters of the MBF, a unique gathering of all the fascist rivals took place—Doriot, Déat, Deloncle and others. With the priestly blessing of Cardinal Baudrillart of Paris and of their chaplain, the bellicose Monseigneur Mayol de Lupé, who liked to end Mass with the cry “Heil Hitler!,” the Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchevisme (LVF), the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism, was born. Pétain's message, blown up beneath a vast poster of himself, was: “IN JOINING THE CRUSADE LED BY GERMANY, THEREBY GAINING THE UNDENIABLE RIGHT TO WORLD GRATITUDE, YOU ARE PLAYING YOUR PART IN WARDING OFF THE BOLSHEVIK PERIL FROM OUR LAND.”31 In a rare instance of unity, French fascists and their followers now donned German uniforms, swore an oath of loyalty to Hitler and marched off to fight the Soviet army.
And so, in July 1941, when Louis Darquier felt confident enough to get his identity card from the authorities, Vichy had created a world in which he could happily flourish. The Nazis had already begun to exterminate communists and Jews in Eastern Europe. Dannecker received further instructions from Berlin:
OrderfromHermannGoeringtoReinhardHeydrich,Berlin, July 31, 1941
To Gruppenführer Heydrich:
Supplementing the task assigned to you by the decree of January 24, 1939, to solve the Jewish problem by means of emigration and evacuation in the best possible way according to present conditions, I hereby charge you to carry out preparations as regards organisational, financial, and material matters for a total solution [Gesamtlösung] of the Jewish question in all the territories of Europe under German occupation.
Where the competency of other central organisations touches on this matter, these organisations are to collaborate.
I charge you further to submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution [Endlösung] of the Jewish question.
Goering32
July 1941 was therefore the beginning of the end for French Jews. In preparing them for their future, Vallat regularly redefined who they were. German racial theory, dividing humankind into Aryan and non-Aryan, was much simpler than this tortured Vichy system which injected religion into its racial laws.* Vallat's achievements added up to the eighteen laws, eighteen executive orders, sixty-seven texts and 397 articles in all. The mountain of discussion Vichy's CGQ J left behind as to what exactly con
* A person was a Jew if he or she had three Jewish grandparents, whether or not they had been baptised. So was anyone with two Jewish grandparents if they were married to someone half-Jewish. A person might also be considered Jewish if he or she had two grandparents and no baptismal certificate dated before 25 June 1940.
Miscellaneous sects took up a great deal of time. Were Mosaic Georgians, Karaites, Jugutis, Subbotniks, Ismaelites, Jewish or not? Mosaic Georgians, for instance, accepted the Torah but not the Talmud; all fifty of them living in France in 1941 came under intense scrutiny. Vichy considered them Jewish for religious reasons; the Nazis did not. The 270 Karaites in France were considered Jewish by the CGQ J, while the Catholic Church, when consulted, considered them as “leaning more towards Islam than the Jewish religion.” The Germans did not consider Karaites to be Jewish. Vallat and Vichy agonised. An additional problem with Moslems and Armenians was that they could sometimes be Jewish. An Armenian Jew was a possibility. Muslims were often Semites and were sometimes circumcised, which complicated life for that rich inspector of this sexual organ, Georges Montandon. Then there were illegitimate children to consider, and, most worrying, children of mixed race. Here, more than anything else, blood spurts out of the myriad papers, memos and instructions of the Vichy state. Two sets of racial blood flowing together: was it Jewish? Was it Christian? How can you trace the grandparents of illegitimate children who know not from whence they come? When first cousins married, with fewer than two Jewish grandparents each, such a marriage might well provide them with the necessary quota for imprisonment. Many preposterous and tragic circumstances surround the rows between the German occupying force, Vichy France and Vallat and Darquier on these subjects.
stitutes a Jewish human being is at once exhaustive, frenzied and ludicrous. Tortuous definitions added to the number of persons Vichy could arrest. It also meant that some Jews were Jewish in the Vichy Zone, but not Jewish in the German Zone, and placed an enormous burden on the Jews of France to find the necessary proof of ancestry or religious adherence. This led to corruption on a vast scale. Clerical records were tinkered with, documents were forged, blank forms and baptismal certificates paid for, as were the CGQ J's Certificats de Non-Appartenance à la Race Juive (certificates of non-adherence to the Jewish race), introduced in October 1941.
To keep an eye on all this, Vichy's Ministry of the Interior formed the Police aux Questions Juives (PQ J), Police for Jewish Affairs, in October 1941. Vallat and Dannecker tussled over the control of this force, but the Jewish people spied upon, pursued, arrested and interned by these French policemen of the PQ J would hardly have noticed any difference between Dannecker's grip on its Parisian office in the rue Greffulhe, or Vallat's firm control in the Vichy Zone.33
There were more Vichy decree
s, and Vallat left behind a third Statut des Juifs, in many versions, each draft aimed at tightening the law, zealously striving for a perfect definition of the Jew, which he ultimately achieved, for Dannecker accepted Vallat's definition: “… being broader [it] will now serve as a basis in all doubtful cases.”34
The certificate of Aryan blood issued by Louis and Vichy's CGQJ
In the summer of 1941 Dannecker offered Louis Darquier the opportunity to set up an exhibition, financed by Otto Abetz, Le Juif et la France, The Jew and France. Darquier declined, though he made it perfectly clear that he was available for higher things. Paul Sézille took the exhibition on, and it opened at the Palais Berlitz in the boulevard des Italiens on 5 September. Over a quarter of a million Parisians went to see how the Jews had strangled France and now controlled the black market. Using Nazi and French material—slogans, cartoons, paintings, films, graphics, caricatures—Sézille presented an unending sequence of “Jewish noses,” curly hair and curling fingernails; Jews in the movies, Jews as journalists, writers, painters; rich Jews, famous Jews, Jews as whores, Jews as bankers. Vichy disliked such obvious racism, and Xavier Vallat refused to attend the official opening; in pursuit of Vallat's job, so did Louis Darquier. Otherwise le tout Paris, German and collaborationist, was there, and the exhibition went on to attract packed audiences in Bordeaux and Nancy.
After the Vichy internment law of October 1940, Protestants, Quakers and international relief agencies came to the aid of the internees. With many exceptions, throughout the Occupation, the French Catholic Church provided essential support for Pétain and Vichy, their difficulties exacerbated by required obedience to a most unfortunate Pope, the Italian Eugenio Pacelli, who in March 1939 became Pius XII. Obsessed with the fear of communism, from 1930 onwards Pacelli strove for, and achieved, alliances through diplomatic means with any state that could be considered as a bulwark against it.
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