Accommodating Hitler was only one of the terrible mistakes made by Pius XII in his attempts to destroy Bolshevism, perhaps one of the most bizarre being that though he condemned Nazism, German Catholics were never excommunicated for belonging to the Nazi Party or for voting for, or supporting, Hitler.35 Catholics who became communists, on the other hand, of whom there were so many in France, were automatically excommunicated. Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini were irreligious, but Pétain, Franco and Salazar, unchristian certainly, were not, and paid lip service to the tenets of the Catholic Church. If the Pope had spoken out against the treatments of Jews, communists and dissidents, his influence would have been considerable.
Instead, throughout the war the Vatican remained silent on the fate of the Jews. On 31 October 1942, in the year which saw the implementation of the Final Solution throughout Europe, when seven hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Poland alone, the Pope consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Despite worldwide pleading, including a request from President Roosevelt, Pius XII failed to condemn Nazi war crimes and Nazi Germany to the end. His culpability is much debated, and his good works during the war, of which there were many, are often enumerated in his defence. But no debate can mitigate the silence which ensured the collusion of the large community of German Catholics in Nazi persecution of the Jews.
In France this hobbled the Catholic hierarchy. The most virulent among them was Cardinal Baudrillart, eighty-one years old in 1940.He supported the Nazis “as a priest and a Frenchman… should I refuse to approve this noble common enterprise, in which Germany is taking the lead?” His fellow cardinals, Cardinal Liénart of Lille, Cardinal Suhard of Paris and Cardinal Gerlier of Lyon, all greeted the arrival of Pétain with fervour, and regarded the fall of France and its occupation as a punishment. As the Bishop of Nantes put it: “France has driven Christ from the law courts and schools. She has expelled the religious congregations. She has systematically and deliberately destroyed all faith in the souls of too many of its children. She has tolerated vice, immorality and wrong. She has undermined the family by divorce and suppressed the birth rate.”36
Gerlier twinned Pétain with Franco as “un chef magnifique,” and “speaking on behalf of the Church in France,” said: “France needed a leader to guide her towards her eternal destiny. God permitted that you should be there.”37 In December 1940 Otto Abetz reported to Berlin: “Cardinal Suhard, the Archbishop of Paris, assures me that the French clergy is ready to act in favour of French collaboration with Germany. The Church has given instructions in this direction to the French clergy… that the national interest of France today and in the future lies in close collaboration, and not in hostility to Germany.”38
Thousands of priests and their flock did not obey; more thousands did. Cardinal Suhard was perhaps the most constant supporter of Pétain and his measures, while Gerlier and Liénart often changed their attitudes as the true nature of Pétain's Vichy state revealed itself over the coming years. Selective sympathy towards the plight of the Jews in France, and of the French people in general, often moved them to intervene with both the German occupiers and the Vichy government. Yet despite the exceptions they made, both cardinals, like the others, condoned horrific acts by silent acquiescence.
Gerlier, asked to do so by a Jewish Catholic priest, was the only cardinal to object to the camps, but he delegated the matter and Vichy changed nothing. Gerlier also oversaw relief work and cooperated with the Protestant Church to help refugees and Jews, but his humanity was always drowned by obedience to the Vatican, which did not challenge the legality of Vichy's anti-Semitic discrimination. Much of the population of France shared the Vatican's inaction only in the early years of the German Occupation; after the deportations began, both the public and Gerlier protested.
Discussing Vichy's anti-Semitic laws with Vallat, Gerlier said, “No one knows better than I the enormous harm the Jews have done to France…No one supports more zealously than I the policies of Marshal Pétain…it is in its application that justice and charity are lacking.”39 Pétain, disquieted, instructed his envoy at the Vatican to sound out the papal position, and was reassured that there was nothing “intrinsically wrong” with Vichy's anti-Jewish statutes. Vallat was assured that the papacy would not make trouble over the issue: “The Holy Father does not disapprove of the recent anti-Jewish measures.” When some Catholic clergy asked for condemnation of the Jewish laws from the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops, they were told to bow to the wishes of their rulers. The position of the Catholic hierarchy was fatal for the Jews of France, because now that Pétain ruled without Parliament, the Catholic Church was the strongest institution left in France, and moreover it had influence at Vichy.40
Theodor Dannecker had never been able to impose upon Vallat his desire for an anti-Semitic propaganda machine, so he had made use of what was to hand in Paris, Captain Sézille and the Paris collabos. They hated Vallat, and he reciprocated; Vallat was too Catholic, too soft, a “Jew-lover,” to these men of the extreme right, and they attacked him remorselessly in their venomous newspapers and journals, demanding his replacement. Dannecker obtained “unfavourable details” about Vallat's private life.
Céline despised Pétain—“Philip the Last,” he called him—and Vichy's approach to the Jewish question. He was also dissatisfied with the continued animosities of his Parisian colleagues, who were well on the way towards providing fifty-six anti-Semitic parties and associations, squabbling angrily amongst themselves for Reichsmarks. “Are you racists,” he bellowed, “like Hitler, like all National Socialists? If not, what are you?” In December 1941 he organised a meeting with the anti-Semitic paper Au Pilori, with a view to forming one united anti-Semitic party. It was only two days after Pearl Harbor, and Germany had just declared war on the United States. Only nine of the twenty-six anti-Semitic notables he invited came to the meeting. Louis Darquier refused to attend because he considered Au Pilori to be “in the pay of the Germans.”41 Instead he shook out his old Anti-Jewish Union, and wrote to Georges Montandon and asked him to join him again. Montandon agreed. The round-ups of Jews in France had already begun—there had been one in May, another in August. A week after the third round-up, of 12 December 1941, the French police were asked to provide a full dossier of information about Louis Darquier.
Knowing that he was to replace Vallat, Louis felt secure enough to collaborate with Sézille and to express the “independent views” which would not altogether alienate Vichy, but which would please his Germans too.42 On 15 March 1942 he wrote a piece for the first issue of the IEQ J's publication La Question juive en France et dans le monde (The Jewish Question in France and in the World). After trawling through the history of the Jewish destruction of France and saluting his heroes from Drumont and the Marquis de Morès onwards, after attacking and repeatedly misspelling Dreyfuss (sic) and guardedly awarding Hitler honours in the anti-Semitic struggle, he concluded in full Célinian mode:
Personally, I could not be less German. Born in the south-west of France I am a Celt or Celt Iberian with a solidly Roman culture.
I can claim to know better than anyone what I owe to the soil of France. I have defended it twice to the best of my abilities, as did my father, brothers and my many forefathers before that …
Today, the (not-so-well) hidden Jews continue their underground work while the government looks on indulgently.
Today, as in the past, in the two Jewish poles of finance and revolution, in Washington and Moscow, a clever offensive is being prepared to deliver France to slavery … 43
By the end of 1941 Dannecker had almost everything in place for the Final Solution. In November he had finally coerced Vichy and the Jewish community to set up the “enforced Jewish association” he wanted. After the usual tussles over power and principle, Vallat collaborated with Dannecker over the foundation of the Union Générale des Israélites de France—
UGIF—and this too was placed under the control of the CGQ J.44 All Jews had to pay a ti
the to UGIF; all were forced to belong to it. With offices in Occupied and non-Occupied France, UGIF superseded all the various charitable Jewish associations which had catered to the relentlessly increasing needs of the Jewish community of France, both citizen and refugee.
Thus UGIF was forced to enact that most horrific of Hitler's methods: Jews now serviced, and paid for, their own persecution and death, for, to the horror of old French “Israelites,” they were now lumped together with their immigrant Jewish brethren. Worse, when the Resistance began to show its face, German military command insisted on reprisals. Communists and Jews became interchangeable, and hundreds were shot. A billion-franc fine was imposed on UGIF, paid in March 1942 as the first trains left Paris for Auschwitz. The money to pay it came from UGIF's assets, those of the old French Jews, for the immigrant Jewish population had hardly a sou to its name.
The German round-up of Jews in December had included many of the French Jews whom Pétain protested so often that he wanted to protect. These prominent French Jews were arrested at the end of a December week in which the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the Allies declared war on Japan, Germany declared war on the United States, and the United States entered the war. Britain remained pugnacious and undefeated. Australia turned from tending the European war to fighting the Japanese in the Pacific; GIs flooded into Australia too. The famous magazine l'Illustration,by 1942 so firmly collaborationist that it was closed down forever at the Liberation, kept Myrtle unhappily informed. On the Eastern Front the German army had to abandon its attack on Moscow, and the Soviet counteroffensive had begun.
Pétain and Darlan had been convinced that the United States would never enter the war. That it did was the second nail in the coffin of Nazi Germany, and so of the Vichy state. Winds of hope began to rouse the French population from compliance in defeat. The relief and salvation expected from “Papa” Pétain began to give way first to resignation, in time to resistance. The V (for victory) sign began to appear on walls, German ammunition was stolen, communications cut, and there were defections from Pétain, particularly amongst those on the left.
However much it pleased Myrtle, Louis did not like the growing dis illusionment of the French people or the “thunderous rounds of applause for England [he] witnessed in Parisian cinemas.” He told the German embassy how superior he would be as an alternative to Sézille and his team, whom he called a bunch of “rogues, imbeciles and untrustworthy elements.”45
“Australia in Danger,” l'Illustration, 14 February 1942
The German command was not happy with Vallat. Vichy had given him full powers to implement total Aryanisation, but economic rewards from the Vichy Zone were far inferior to those in the German Zone. They considered Vallat's French laws too lenient, and wanted them to include French Jews too. Vichy's police force, the PQ J, was, Dannecker felt, insufficiently robust under Vallat.
After Pearl Harbor the decision was taken. The MBF, Abetz, Dannecker and the SS initiated angry rows with Vallat; in March 1942 they sacked him, and gave Louis Darquier his job.46
14
Rats
LOUIS DARQUIER WAS CHOSEN by German command “solely for reasons of propaganda,” because he had “the correct conception of the Jewish question.” In the months preceding his official investiture, the embassy buffed up his public persona with a round of publicity engagements. He was advised to proceed tactfully with Vichy, and to restrain his “too energetic” manner until Vichy accepted his appointment. He gave his usual radio broadcast on 6 February 1942, various anti-Jewish conferences were arranged for him—and it appears that he was told to rid himself of encumbrances which Vichy would not tolerate, for he had rejoined Myrtle in January.1
At Vichy they knew about the “complex activities” of Louis' tumultuous private life, which had given him such a bad reputation, and Myrtle so much to put up with. But her approach to his beatings, temper tantrums and infidelities remained fixed: “Louis is Louis and there are a great many worse than he is.” During their separation in 1941 Myrtle had moved into the fleapit which was the Hôtel Fortuny at 35, rue de l'Arcade, a place of rabbit-warren rooms, with walls so thin that their rows and the blows they exchanged could leap from one room to another.
Myrtle needed comfort in early 1942, because in addition to her dismay over the plight of Britain, on the radio Lord Haw-Haw broadcast German propaganda on the progress of the war in North Africa, where for five months Australian soldiers—he called them “Rats”—were holding out against Rommel at the siege of Tobruk. Then, on 15 February, Singapore fell. Four days later the Japanese bombed Darwin and the Pacific war was now on Australia's doorstep.
In the following months Louis was a busy man, although nothing could prepare him for the responsibilities he was about to be given. Now forty-four years old, he had lived on his wits all his life; he was now to take over “a hybrid body whose multiple organs formed a complex and grotesque whole.”2 By 1942 the CGQ J had acquired vast powers, and it was to be given more almost immediately. Louis began to entertain old cronies and various CGQ J employees in Parisian bars, promising them jobs or promotion. In January 1942 Sézille, ever vigilant, warned Vallat of the plots Louis was hatching. Carl Theo Zeitschel, the malevolently anti-Semitic former ship's doctor who was Abetz's specialist on Jewish affairs at the embassy and their liaison with the SS, noted in March that the Jewish round-ups could be put on hold to await Darquier's arrival. Louis discussed his plans with Dannecker. The security service continued to observe him, and on 12 March noted that he was to become the new commissioner as soon as the Vichy government could be cajoled into accepting him. This took nearly two months.
A number of Vichy ministers opposed Louis' appointment. Pétain's men of Vichy rejected the “vulgar anti-Semitic elements” of the Paris collabos, of whom they considered Louis Darquier to be an extreme example. As far as money was concerned, Vallat was an honest man. He begged Darlan not to appoint Louis, “quite simply because he had a reputation for being hard-up. (There is nothing wrong with being hard-up if you have no expensive habits; but a hard-up man with expensive habits is always dangerous in a position like this…)” In private Vallat was much ruder: Darquier, with his manias and swindles, would be a catastrophe.3
During Darlan's time in charge of Vichy's government, neither he nor his ministers had managed to achieve the longed-for peace treaty with Germany. When Pétain moved to replace Darlan, he was again in dis-favour. From February to April, Blum, Daladier, Reynaud, Gamelin and Georges Mandel were on trial at Riom, accused of a variety of seditions which included sending France to war, unprepared, at the behest of Britain and against the advice of Pétain and Weygand. The brilliant advocacy of Léon Blum made the trial such a fiasco of embarrassment for Pétain that German pressure and Vichy discomfort brought a stop to it.4
Anatole de Monzie kept in touch with Otto Abetz and the embassy in Paris. In these strange weeks The Times in London reported that de Monzie was heading a group of leading French politicians in an attempt to unseat Pétain, and that Laval had reported this to Pétain, as he “cordially detests” de Monzie.5 Whatever the truth of this, when on 18 April 1942 the Germans reinstalled Laval as head of government, he inherited the vacillation over the appointment of the new commissioner of the CGQ J.
The unanimous Vichy view of Darquier was expressed in a letter passed on to Pétain by General émile Laure, who had been Pétain's aide for many years before the war and who became his faithful secretary-general in 1940.
Nîmes, 25 March 1942
Mon Général,
Please excuse an old Alsatian who has endured much over the years and who wishes to present his fears to you …
In Strasbourg, I knew M. [René] Darquier well … I learned from him … that his brother, who calls himself Darquier de Pellepoix, was not a commendable individual, that he had abandoned his wife and 3 children [sic], and that he (René) was forced to see to the needs of his brother's family.
As the Marshal is a fine supporter of the family,
this being one of the principles of the new state, I believe that our honoured leader will be delighted to learn about [Darquier de Pellepoix] … currently a candidate, supported by the Germans, for the post … of Commissioner for Jewish Affairs.
This man will put himself at the service of the highest bidder.
After the war, in 1919, I know that he almost went to work for a Jewish company. And today he is against them. Tomorrow, who will he attack next? … 6
This letter arrived in Vichy as the first convoy of Jews left Paris for Auschwitz. Less than a week later, on 31 March, Pierre Darquier died in Cahors. He was buried there on 4 April 1942, and his funeral Mass took place in the Cathédrale de St.-Etienne. Anatole de Monzie gave the eulogy for his “oldest friend in the Lot” before a considerable throng at Pierre's graveside, who heard him bury Louis' lifelong alienation from his father in a welter of mendacious praise. Louis, “most outstandingly gifted,” said de Monzie, had “delighted his beloved father with his resolute and loyal understanding of his duties as a Frenchman. If I brought Pierre Darquier any joy in his retirement, it was in telling him of Louis' army citation and in conveying to him the growing esteem shown to this great young man by all patriots in our unhappy times.”7
For his appointment as commissioner, possibly for German use, Louis rewrote his family history in one of his longest and most fictitious curricula vitae, covering himself and all his family in full collaborationist garb. The typewriter he used was still rickety, but this time, as the stakes were higher the lies were more extravagant: “From 1925–1928, having made a fortune of about two million francs, Darquier worked for himself and travelled, particularly in Australia, the United States and in England.” Next he addressed the “Principal Calumnies” that persisted about his character: he was not a drunk, a pederast, a Mason, a member of Action Française, nor did he take his orders from Maurras.8
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