The CGQ J's leaders, first Xavier Vallat and then Darquier, were finicky men. For though Darquier was out of the office most of the time, when he was there he pestered his menials with instructions about discipline, use of the telephone, punctuality, what to do about half-Jews and about raising the number of Jewish Aryanisation cases. Letters went off in every direction on the finer points of anti-Semitism. Letters to Laval such as: “The profession of bookseller is not forbidden to Jews. However, since the trustees of Messageries Hachette are likely to sell works published by the Hachette company, they fall under the remit of the laws of 2 June and 17 November 1941,” or pointing out that “the profession of Algerian lottery ticket sellers [should] be forbidden to Jews,” explain why Laval always coupled the word “irritating” with Louis Darquier.18
A friend of the Darquier family in Cahors reported: “one of my friends…was contacted by Louis Darquier when he was nominated. Louis explained to him that he was setting up a small team of about a dozen men from amongst his friends, to manage property within the CGQ J.”19 This practice contributed greatly to the inefficiency of Darquier's CGQ J, and to resentment and rivalry between his employees, exacerbated by his choice of young men from his days at rue Laugier to staff various departments of the CGQ J.
One of a thousand reasons Laval had no time for Darquier and his CGQ J was that from the moment of his return to power in April 1942, all Laval's considerable energy had to be devoted to coping with increasing German war demands. In March 1942 Hitler had appointed one of his most perfectly formed monsters, Fritz Sauckel, to provide the Reich with workers—slave labour. Two months later, when Louis was appointed, Sauckel came to Paris, and demanded 250,000 men. Laval's bargaining “victory,” called the Relève, was that one French prisoner of war would be freed for every three “volunteers” who went to work in Germany. The French people heard Laval announce this new collaboration on 22 June 1942 in the same speech in which he told them of his desire for a German victory. If France was to “find her place in the New Europe,” she could not “remain passive and indifferent in the face of the immense sacrifices Germany is making.”
The French populace hated Laval already, and 22 June gave them reasons for hating him even more. Many thousands of workers had to go to Germany, and if not to Germany, they slaved for Albert Speer's construction office, Organisation Todt. From 1941 to 1944 French workers and prisoners from French camps were forced to build Hitler's massive line of concrete bunkers along the coast—the Atlantic Wall—their fate another lost story of the D-Day landings.
All the departments of the CGQ J had boundless opportunities. The Status of Persons section, which examined racial inheritance, issued cer tificates as to Jewishness and pursued forgeries, was a gold mine. This was the hounding department, sniffing out Jews or people whose “attitude and actions seemed highly suspicious,” snuffling out false baptismal certificates and complicit priests, and working with the police to pursue Jews for such assessment. Under Vichy many of the Catholic clergy, and some of the hierarchy, dared to differ from their bishops and speak out on behalf of their flock, the Jews, and resistance generally. Dissenting Catholics became a formidable cadre within the Resistance, reminding their parishioners “that Christ was a Jew.” Such clergy often provided Jews with false baptismal certificates. Darquier's hatred for baptised Jews was particular and vivid: “Baptism cannot change their livers, their spleens, their ovaries.”20 To delve behind these documents he put another old friend into his Status of Persons section as its resident ethnologist: Georges Montandon.
Montandon, who claimed to be able to determine racial characteristics by the examination of blood, was already working for Vallat as his ethnic expert. Now Darquier gave him the job of looking at the bodies of Jewish persons, measuring their heads and inspecting their penises. Montandon had a monopoly in this business, and his examinations were exhaustive and very expensive. The bribes he took to declare a body non-Jewish and provide the necessary Certificat de Non-Appartenance à la Race Juive were to make him a very rich man. He took this money at all points of the persecution ladder. Applicants came to him willingly to be “cleared” of suspicion; Darquier and his staff sent him cases, and so did the police. He also carried out his work at Drancy concentration camp. If he decided a prisoner was Jewish, Auschwitz; if not, freedom.
All the CGQ J departments could venture into blood inspection. Typical was the man Darquier chose as director of the Legal Section, Jean Armilhon, the sort of person who, like Vallat, would continue to fuss about the Jewish blood count of Mosaic Georgians, and who thought that the defeat of France in 1940 was “a miraculous turnaround of events,” for “defeat—which could have led to our ruin—has in fact enabled us to purify and regenerate the nation once again.”21 Even the Administration and Finance Section could make money by passing on information or taking bribes.
Every department, in pursuit of Jewish wealth and Jewish blood, worked closely with the Commissariat's police force. For money, Louis would write letters like this:
For the attention of Monsieur Röthke—SS—Obersturmführer Re: Messieurs André et Jean Boshorn [sic]
… despite the fact that Messieurs André and Jean Boxhorn have both been issued with certificates declaring that they do not belong to the Jewish race, they have been detained in the Compiègne camp, in the section reserved for Jews. Furthermore, I have learned that they may be selected for deportation.
… it would be extremely regrettable to see people deported who are not considered to be Jews either in terms of French or German law.
Signed: Darquier de Pellepoix
Mostly, Louis Darquier's CGQ J charged for help with property, and being an old friend of the Commissioner helped:
Monsieur le Baron von Behr
One of my comrades from the war, Monsieur Dehesdain … was previously married to a Jewish woman but is now divorced … His former wife, who ruined him, still has property that belongs to Monsieur Dehesdain, and he would like to try, with your help, to get this back. Could you please tell me when it would be convenient for him to come and see you …
Signed: Darquier de Pellepoix22
Throughout France the CGQ J police, the SEC, investigated the behaviour of appointed trustees, enquired about the presence of Jews in prohibited positions, checked on Jewish property declarations and identity cards, and followed every Jew, watching for “suspicious behaviour.” The connection between the Gestapo and the SEC gave the CGQ J the necessary muscle to plunder as it wished, and to sustain a financial section with a staff of twenty-five “including accountants, insurance agents, clerks, attorneys, brokers, bank clerks, currency dealers…It was widely acknowledged that its inspectors exacted ransoms from Jews and mistreated them if they failed to deliver. This explains the legend of the ‘Torture Chamber’ at rue Greffulhe, which was, no doubt, an ordinary interview room but one in which the agents perfected a special interview technique for the poor victims who were arrested in their homes.”23
Everything about the SEC infuriated Darquier: the fact that Bousquet had taken its police powers away in principle, and the fact that the Gestapo had given these powers back to Galien in practice. It also led to the end of Darquier's relationship with Galien, for the latter often used the SEC without consultation. One of Galien's largest lies after the war was his statement that he “always refused to have the least contact” with the SEC. In its first five months, when it was under his control, the great round-ups of Jews began. Galien and his SEC methodically robbed the Jews in Drancy concentration camp as they awaited deportation. For Galien, money always came first. He was an oddball amongst extremist anti-Semites because he was a ruthless businessman and enormously energetic, which Louis Darquier was not. Thus the bonds of brotherhood between Galien and Darquier survived only six months, and when they broke, the Gestapo joined the embassy on the list of German authorities that found Darquier intolerable.
Galien always acted as though he, and not Darquier, was Commissioner, which was
easy to do, as Darquier was so rarely there. He treated Darquier as “his subaltern.”24 What Galien and the Gestapo most disliked were the favours Louis distributed to French Jews, “Israélites.” A witness testified in 1947: “The Commissariat was notorious for its use of ‘fiddles' to get its hands on Jews’ money. This was particularly so for the issuing of non-Jewish certificates. I heard that Darquier de Pellepoix himself was happy to do this.” Louis always left the actual work to others, but he insisted on signing the precious non-Jewish certificates himself.25
As the two camps developed within the office, and Louis' problems outside it multiplied, he started trying to cover his tracks. On 6 October 1942 he wrote to Röthke:
Today I received two letters from Aryan individuals requesting permission to accommodate or temporarily foster Jewish children whose parents have been interned.
One of these children is a boy of eight years old, currently still at Drancy; the other is a girl of twelve, living alone in Paris.
Before sending a reply to these people I would like to know if you consider that German ordinances allow such requests to be granted or whether it would be easier, for racial reasons, to issue a refusal.26
Darquier and his CGQ J had indeed become notorious for accepting vast bribes from rich Jews. He had often met these wealthy men through Anatole de Monzie. Later, Louis explained away such encounters: “Good French Jews, whom I helped in difficult times. Between ourselves, a certain Worms. I will say no more.” For Louis, as for Pétain and indeed for most “Israélites,” there was a hierarchy of Jews. The Worms bank was a merchant bank with shipping interests, and amongst its vast portfolio was a chain of hotels which included the Crillon in Paris. The Worms group was said to belong to a mysterious international banking fraternity known as the Synarchie. Its director Gabriel le Roy Ladurie and his associates, one of whom was de Monzie's acolyte Hippolyte Worms, were perfect targets. For de Monzie Darquier would ignore the fact that Hippolyte Worms was half-Jewish, though his mother was a Catholic, as was Hippolyte himself.27
Darquier always quailed in the presence of powerful or rich men, English, French, German or Jewish. If such Jews paid him enough he would turn a blind eye. Later he boasted of the Jews he helped. One of his secretaries described his approach: “He was married to an Englishwoman who had no qualms about speaking publicly of her Gaullist sympathies and he himself granted several substantial favours to Jews. I must add though, that his attitude was contradictory and I saw him issue both false papers and arrest warrants against Jews with the same ease.”28
At the end of October 1942 the Gestapo interrogated Darquier for an entire day, during which he doubtless learned about aspects of Galien's role which displeased him mightily. He returned from avenue Foch in a fury and dictated a letter demanding Galien's resignation; two weeks later, resignation not received, he sent a second letter, barring Galien the door.
Galien stormed into the CGQ J in place des Petits-Pères, knocking down the guards at the door. Darquier, summoned to the office—as usual he was not there—punched it out with Galien with all the staff watching; “it was a nasty scene and very violent.”29 Galien returned to avenue Foch, repeated again that Darquier was taking Jewish bribes, and came back the next day with an order from Knochen, insisting on his reinstatement.
Pierre Leroy, Louis' pre-war barrister, and René Darquier, who knew Galien as a Neuilly neighbour, now intervened. For excellent reasons Laval had no wish to see Louis Darquier replaced; he wanted to get rid of the CGQ J, but in the meantime Darquier's ineptitude remained an excellent excuse for any Vichy inaction on “the Jewish Question.” This, in turn, infuriated German Command. First, in September, Darquier had alienated most of the embassy over his Judenfrage article. In October he added the Gestapo to the list. The embassy and the Gestapo both agreed that he had to go. He had been in the job for only seven months, but was to survive another fourteen.
An even worse punishment for the Germans responsible for his appointment was their discovery that Darquier was a pestiferous bore. As Knochen testified later: “We didn't take him seriously, his behaviour was often contradictory, depending on the fluctuations of his private life and his financial position.” He nagged Knochen to put pressure on Vichy, arguing that “the more money he had, the better he could serve us.” He complained to Abetz and the embassy about Vichy's cold shoulder; but they knew what Laval thought: “However large the sum you give him today, he'll have nothing left by tomorrow.”30 The SS, the MBF and the embassy discussed Darquier's dishonesty. But they knew that if he was unacceptable to Vichy, Pierre Galien was out of the question, for the excesses committed by his SEC, its “arbitrary arrests, spoliations and beatings,”31 had such an effect that the Germans arrested fifteen of its agents in October 1942 and ordered its disbandment.
In this way, Darquier survived. Mostly it was the Allies who saved him, for in November 1942 Rommel was in trouble in North Africa and the Red Army was completing its encirclement of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad. The siege of that city and the fear that Germany, like Napoleon's France, would be defeated in Russia continued throughout the year. Then, in January 1943, the German army at Stalingrad surrendered. Those “good old French Jews” who were not sent to Auschwitz— and many were—were saved by Russia and the Allies, and by many French people, but not by the French state.32
By this time, bombing had become a part of life for Paris, as it was for London. Suspicion that the Allies might win was becoming a certainty, raising the decibels of anger amongst the collabos in Paris. Lucien Rebatet spoke for all of them in his famous best seller Les Décombres, a memoir and a polemic published in the autumn of 1942, in which he called for “Hate unto Death!”33 and urged Vichy to join Germany to fight the Allies in “my war, our war.” Talk of a coup against Laval was in the air. Jacques Doriot was the most successful French fascist, the one Laval feared the most. In Paris, on 4 November, he held the annual congress for his fascist party, the PPF. Doriot spoke for eight hours to fifteen thousand or so of his delirious followers, uniformed in various shades of blue, shouting “War with England” and “Laval to the scaffold.”34
All this came to naught, for, on 8 November 1942, with Operation Torch, the Allies landed in North Africa. Two days later Hitler ordered the arrest of all Jews and other enemies of Germany in France, and on 11 November, Armistice Day, he ordered his troops to occupy the Vichy Zone. Otto Abetz was summoned back to Berlin, and remained there until December 1943. 35 After the German army took over the south, Mussolini extended his portion of France to include much of the Rhône Valley, so that Italy now controlled eight French departments which stretched from the Riviera to Switzerland.
Henceforth the grip of the Gestapo tightened. Coping with the German Occupation of the entire country and the increasing agitation of the Paris collabos became Vichy's priority. Pétain delegated more powers to Laval, but told his subjects: “I remain your guide. You have only one duty: to obey. You have only one government: the one I have empowered to govern. You have only one country: the one I embody, France.”36
Laval and the Vichy government trundled on, but there were Germans in Vichy now, Germans all over France. What Vichy thought of Louis Darquier was no longer important. When German military command, the embassy and the Gestapo discussed what to do with him, all agreed that he must be sacked, but decided it was “inopportune at the moment.”
Darquier put an end to the Galien affair by repaying—most likely with Jewish money—the sixteen thousand francs he owed him. Galien retreated to the arms of Captain Sézille, whose joy at Louis' appointment had turned to rage within a month when Dannecker closed down his IEQ J and gave it to Darquier to reinvent as a more scientific propaganda instrument. Sézille was comforted by the Gestapo with a new endeavour, the Groupement des Amis Anti-Juifs (Association of Anti-Jewish Friends). There he re-created a “veritable office of denunciation,” which Galien took over when Sézille died in April 1944. Galien continued in form until the end: “I, the undersign
ed Galien, declare that I was obliged to take control of anti-Jewish affairs under pressure from the SS,” he wrote in a statement for the police who arrested him after the Liberation.37 The next day he saw things differently: “I declare that I have never worked for the Germans…in addition, I never expressed any pro-German sentiments.” He had a final word for Louis Darquier too, denouncing him as “a miserable actor, paid to strut the stage but do nothing. He works hand in glove with the Jews and is their great protector. Under his supreme administration the organisation at place des Petits-Pères has become a pro-Jewish Bastille.”38
Despite these unpromising circumstances, with hardly a friend to hand, Louis Darquier bounced back, his remarkable recovery guaranteed by the man chosen as Galien's successor, Joseph Antignac. A key embassy strategy in the control of the CGQ J was the appointment of reliable civil servants to key positions, and the appointment of the implacable Antignac was their most successful implementation of this policy. Antignac was a much-decorated former cavalry officer, a veteran of both wars, and like Vallat had been awarded the Légion d'honneur. He moved from being an army officer and industrialist to the PQ J, then was brought to Vichy— in the midst of Darquier's first row with Bousquet—in August 1942 to head its successor, the SEC. Until October he observed Galien restore its power as an anti-Jewish police force aligned to the Gestapo.
After his fisticuffs with Galien, Darquier brought Antignac to Paris, first as secretary to his cabinet, then as its chief of staff. Until his departure in June 1944 Antignac provided Darquier with the efficiency that enabled him to keep his job. Antignac was “the man of the Final Solution of the Jewish question,”39 ending up as the last secretary-general of the CGQ J. He worked well with all the Germans, but his closest links were to the Gestapo and Röthke's Judenreferat in the avenue Foch. Antignac, dark and hefty like Vallat, was also a passionate anti-Semite and French patriot, “the incarnation of an officer of the ancien régime”;40 he was a nitpicking, driven, pompous administrator, a most competent authoritarian. In the voluminous records left behind by Vichy's Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, it is usually Antignac's signature on documents, and often his voice in the terrifying dicta that issued from it.
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