Bousquet would never have permitted Darquier personal control of the SEC. It was Antignac, with his police and military experience, who ran the CGQ J's police force in both zones, and it was under his rule that it reached its most chilling efficiency. Notwithstanding his lack of authority over it, Louis still managed to insert into the SEC “friends and some second-rate cronies, i.e. his henchmen, newspaper sellers etc.” In plain clothes, with “a pistol hanging from one side and a truncheon from the other,” they would arrive at a camp, set up a table in one of the huts, then “the internees filed past the men, who would then subject them to a minute and humiliating search. Very often they were beaten, or forced to remove their trousers… intimate body searches [were] suffered by the women. The search finished, cash and jewellery would be piled anyhow,” for “the policemen were free to help themselves to banknotes and jewels.”41
The prodigious output of memos, reports, letters and documents which issued forth from the CGQ J were generally signed by Louis Darquier, but it was accepted that their scrupulous attention to detail demonstrated the personality of Antignac. Half-castes and the medical profession were two matters to which both men devoted personal attention. One of the sourest Darquier family resentments against Louis before the war had been his dunning of their medical connections. In his pre-war newspapers he always devoted excessive space to medical matters, particularly to analyses of Jewish blood and its evil influence. Louis liked to use his power in favour of the famous as well as the powerful, especially famous doctors. Jean-Louis Faure, the great surgeon and writer, brother of the art historian élie Faure, intervened on behalf of his nurse Suzanne Lévy, and Louis graciously spared her: “a Jew doctor…nurse to a great surgeon, professor Jean-Louis Faure. I intervene therefore, not in favour of doctor Suzanne Lévy, but in favour of professor J. L. Faure.”42 Everywhere Darquier and Antignac looked they saw Jewish doctors. Stern letters were sent to the Secretary of State for Health about Jewish medical students, and detailed demands were sent to the Gestapo, with copious lists and carefully referenced documents which were quintessential Antignac, though either he or Darquier could have written the final paragraph of one attack: “Without wishing to stress my point of view too often, I believe that total deportation would considerably simplify these matters …”43
Little attention was paid to Antignac by the warring factions above him. Yet it was he who resolutely ensured that the system worked. As France was about to be liberated, he bore witness to the squabbles in Darquier's rat pit, and also to the position of the CGQ J in Pétain's dreams of a New France: “The Commissariat still has an important role to play in the National Revolution,” he told his staff. “…I shall personally make sure that order, confidence, probity, justice and a love for a job well done become the rules of this organisation…Fellow anti-Semites first, and faithful followers of the policies of the Marshal and his government second, under whose orders we are directly placed, these are the principles I wish to see us all adopt …”44
16
Death
IN MARCEL OPHULS' DOCUMENTARY Le Chagrin et la pitié, it is 6 May 1942 when Louis Darquier appears before Reinhard Heydrich at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. Earlier that year, on 20 January, Heydrich convened a conference in the Berlin suburb which bordered Lake Wannsee, and there, as instructed by Hitler and Goering, with his deputy Adolf Eichmann and fifteen other Nazi civil servants, he presented his plan for the extermination of the Jews. Eichmann, who had prepared the papers for the conference, and who was to run the system of liquidation decided upon, noted that the anticipated number of Jews to be killed was eleven million.
The words used for the Final Solution were always “deportation to the east,” “expulsion,” “elimination,” “resettlement,” “migration,” “evacuation” and “work.” The word “extermination” was never used. The Wannsee plan was to use euphemisms to secure the necessary collaboration from civil servants and administrators of all occupied countries, the men and women who would be required to carry out Nazi orders.
Heydrich spent a week in Paris, from 5 to 11 May, personally informing the German authorities of the Wannsee decisions.1 He moved ultimate responsibility for the Final Solution in France from the military command, the MBF, and brought in as supreme commander of all German police, intelligence and security services in France Karl-Albrecht Oberg,2 a former fruit importer fresh from his successful oppression of Poland, a man with Hitler's moustache and Himmler's spectacles and haircut. Heydrich gave Oberg and his police “almost full autonomy” in France.3 This meant that the struggle for command in France between the army and the Nazi Party was over: the Gestapo were the winners and the military and the embassy had to fall in line. Helmut Knochen was promoted to become Oberg's deputy, with responsibility for all the police work associated with the Final Solution.4
In Paris Heydrich met his French administrators at the Ritz Hotel, and the event was filmed. Looking plumper than in his London days, Louis followed Bousquet and strode towards Heydrich in an ill-fitting suit, smiling uneasily.5 Over thirty years later Louis insisted that he had to be cajoled into meeting Heydrich, and that the events of those May days were of no importance. But they were. Before May 1942, the exclusion measures Pétain instituted for his chosen undesirables were civic. After May 1942, for Jews and others, these measures led to death.
Heydrich then saw Darquier privately in Knochen's office, and “drew his attention to the fact that Hitler was personally very interested in settling the Jewish question in France.” He also summoned Bousquet to a meeting with himself and Oberg, at which Bousquet was informed of the altered powers of the SS in France and was instructed to pass on the new orders to his regional préfets and police superintendents. Heydrich made perfectly clear to Bousquet what he required as far as the Jews of France were concerned: trains would shortly be ready and “all Jews resident in France must be deported as soon as possible.” Bousquet made no protestations, and reported back to Laval.6
And so were drawn up the battle lines between Vichy and the Germans over the deportation of the Jews of France. For Vichy, the Christian-Catholic conscience could only adapt itself to the despatch of “foreign or stateless” Jews; for the Germans and Darquier no such division was acceptable, and French Jews must go too. In the first month after Heydrich's visit Dannecker set to work with Darquier and Bousquet to fulfil his orders, and theirs.
Vichy sent most of its Jews to death at Auschwitz in Poland, but it was French concentration camps which provided Louis Darquier and René Bousquet with the Jewish bodies required, though there were never enough. During Vallat's time there were only three important round-ups of Jews. His first, between 9 and 14 May 1941, garnered nearly four thousand, most of them Poles, Czechs and Austrians, aged between eighteen and sixty: the French police, with the approval of Vichy, then bused them to the Gare d'Austerlitz, where four waiting trains took them to Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande concentration camps about eighty kilo-metres from Paris. Henry Coston went to see them, and rejoiced: “I have seen Jews work…I have seen the sons of Israel devote themselves to something else besides speculation and the black market.”7 There they were visited by their wives and families over the coming year. In due course all of them, the men first imprisoned, and the wives and children who visited them, were deported. When you look at the photos of visiting day—fathers, wives and children eating a picnic, looking happy to be together for a day—you know that everyone you are looking at died at Auschwitz.
The next arrests were made on 20 August 1941, largely of foreign Jews, but also including two hundred intellectuals and many lawyers: 4,078 men were sent to Drancy. The last collection in Vallat's time was in December 1941. The Germans, not the French police, managed this round-up as a reprisal, and gathered up 743 prominent French Jews, including Colette's husband Maurice Goudeket—Abetz secured his release—and René Blum, brother of Léon, who died in the Auschwitz gas chambers.8
On 27 March 1942, eight days after Vallat was sacked, the f
irst train left the station of Drancy-le-Bourget, went on to Compiègne, Laôn, Rheims, Neuberg and then to Auschwitz, collecting over a thousand men. This was the only convoy not to travel in cattle trucks; they travelled to Auschwitz in third-class carriages, personally escorted by Dannecker. By September 1,008 of them were dead.9
At Wannsee, France was allotted the “solution” of 865,000 Jews, 165,000 for the Occupied Zone and 700,000 for the Non-Occupied Zone, a figure which demonstrates how effective Maurras and his offspring had been in exaggerating the Jewish Peril, for the gap between the 865,000 Jews considered to be in France and the 330,000 actually there was to be a major problem for Vichy. It was in pursuit of this inflated figure that so many Jewish children—over eleven thousand Jewish children—were sent to death.10
The first trains promised by Heydrich were ready by June. Vichy had to find the numbers for the trains, the trains had to be filled, and they had to leave on time. Convoy number two left on 5 June, a month after Louis Darquier's appointment and two days before the yellow star made its first appearance in Paris. More trains followed on 22, 25 and 28 June: each carried about a thousand persons. The convoy of the twenty-second was the first to include women, sixty-six of them. The largest number were Polish, but there were Jews from all over Europe, from Britain to Turkey, including over five hundred French Jews. Fifteen hundred of them were still alive on 15 August 1942. When Auschwitz was liberated on 27 January 1945, 189 had survived.
In the midst of these first convoys, on 11 June, Dannecker went to Berlin for a briefing by Eichmann. He was ordered to supply Auschwitz with 100,000 Jews from both French zones as a first effort. Problems with Vichy were anticipated, but it was settled that all Jews must go, French or foreign, and that France must pay seven hundred marks per Jew. Dannecker promised fifty thousand Jews immediately, beginning on 13 July, with three trains a week. The age range was to be between sixteen and forty, male or female, and 90 percent of them were to be fit for work.
On Dannecker's return Darquier had a meeting with him and promised several thousand unspecified Jews from the Vichy Zone, coupling this with dismal reports of the unlikelihood of any cooperation from Bousquet or Laval. The next day Bousquet met Oberg and Knochen. Bousquet learned of Darquier's interventions, and promised ten thousand Jews from the Vichy Zone. Dannecker told Eichmann that the initial supply of Jews would be forty, not fifty, thousand. As Dannecker was doing so well with the June transports Eichmann accepted this number, but only as a beginning.
In the meantime, René Bousquet, who was in the process of removing the PQ J from Darquier in Vichy, delegated police matters in Paris and in the Occupied Zone to his deputy Jean Leguay,11 who was to arrange the round-up of thirty thousand Jews, while Bousquet set himself the task of supplying the ten thousand which he had personally promised from the Vichy Zone. Laval had been informed of the Berlin decisions, but Bousquet had not discussed the exact figures.
Since the autumn of 1941 the escalation in assassination and reprisal in France had made the German uniform synonymous with death, for the MBF's code des ôtages demanded the execution of between fifty and a hundred hostages for every German killed. Most of these were communist résistants, Bousquet's enemies being “terrorists, communists, Jews, Gaullists and foreign agents,”12 ranked according to the amount of domestic disturbance each might cause. When sorting out French hostages for German reprisals, Bousquet made sure they were communists. Oberg wanted to control the French police, but neither Vichy nor German command could afford the inevitable public unrest if the SS were to be involved in the operation of Jewish deportations. The French police had to do the job.13
By 1942, the long-drawn-out siege of Tobruk had presented a propaganda victory to the Allies; in May Reinhard Heydrich was mortally wounded in Prague (he died in early June), and the first large-scale British bombing raid on Germany took place. The German reverses inspired Laval to make a show of strength. Because of the hostile reaction to be expected from the French public, he objected to the deportation of French Jews, and to French police deporting any Jew.14 Pétain agreed. On 29 June Leguay conveyed this information to Dannecker. Laval instructed Bousquet to keep a close eye on Darquier, and Oberg summoned Laval to Paris. Dannecker had only two weeks in which to collect forty thousand Jews; he turned to Eichmann for support. Eichmann arrived in Paris on 30 June to sort matters out (it was the following day that the BBC announced the death of 700,000 Polish Jews in gas chambers). Vichy was still unhappy about French police rounding up Jews to send them to a destination that might be “dangerous or fatal.”
Throughout this month of to-ing and fro-ing, Bousquet bargained in true Laval style.15 He would put his French police to work in the service of Germany on condition that he maintained absolute control of the French police in both zones. The Germans expressed their worries about Bousquet's opposition to Louis Darquier. Bousquet defended his removal of Darquier's police force, but at Knochen's insistence agreed to “place his police at the disposal of Pellepoix.”16 All Darquier's complaints about Vichy were aired; in particular German command asked why Vichy had not given him his budget. Bousquet replied that it was “up to Pellepoix himself…he believed that Pellepoix still had no plans for spending the money he was demanding.” Bousquet added that “the French were not opposed to the arrests as such, but explained that it was ‘awkward’ to have them carried out in Paris by the French police. This was a particular worry of the Marshal's.”17 The threat of Hitler's personal displeasure was invoked. Bousquet moved in for the kill. The number of Jews required had now descended to thirty-two thousand—twenty-two thousand from Paris, the rest from the Vichy Zone.18 Bousquet agreed that his police would round up the Jews for deportation “on condition that the proposals were put forward by Pellepoix.”19 Knochen gave in on French Jews. They were not to be troubled “for the moment,” though later Abetz recommended adding a few, little by little, to make up the necessary numbers and to habituate the population to their disappearance.
On 3 July Pétain, Laval and his council of ministers agreed the accord arranged by Bousquet. Foreign and stateless Jews in the Vichy Zone could be deported. They were just “rubbish,” to be resettled by the German government in “a Jewish state in Eastern Europe.”20 It was cheaper to let old Jews die naturally. In pursuit of the ten thousand promised from the Vichy Zone, Laval proposed, as a “gesture of humanity,” that they extend the age limit previously settled upon, and that children under the age of sixteen should be included in the deportations. What was decided about Jewish children in the Occupied Zone was of no interest to him.21 This proposal endangered the fiction that these were deportations to “labour” in the east. To send young children to the gas chambers, Dannecker had to obtain Eichmann's permission. This he applied for on 6 July.22 Laval and Bousquet then decided that Darquier was to be placed in charge of the Franco-German action committee for the deportations, making him the scapegoat should one be necessary.
Louis first learned all of this on 4 July, a Saturday, in Knochen's office on the avenue Foch. Dannecker took the floor, most unhappy that Bousquet's men, and not Knochen's SS, should control the round-ups. But Bousquet and Knochen had their way, and a Franco-German committee was established to carry out the arrests and deportations of thirty-two thousand Jews. The day after he took away Louis' police force, Bousquet announced that the committee “must be under the chairmanship of the Commissioner for Jewish Affairs.”
When reality attacked Louis Darquier, it always produced the same reaction: taken by surprise, he paled and looked terrified, “appalled at accepting such a responsibility.”23 Everyone noticed this, Dannecker in particular. Still fuming about the loss of his police force, Louis now had to recover from the shock of achieving what he had demanded for so many years—the murder of Jews, the moral and political responsibility for which Bousquet had now placed upon him.
As ever, his strategic skills rose up to save him. After an initial blast of activity, during which he issued letters and intervened in all
directions while Pierre Galien, now in charge of the SEC, did the work on the ground—almost immediately he disappeared from the coalface in a puff of smoke, having used the irritation aroused by his presence to extract money from everyone to hand.
The Germans had yet to learn the true depths of Louis' disinclination to work or to spend more than an hour a day in any office. On 7 July he presided over his first meeting to arrange, as he said, “the technical details of the deportations.”24 Accompanied by Galien, he faced a formidable array of uniformed functionaries at Dannecker's office in the avenue Foch. Those who would do the real work were there. Amongst the French police attending was Jean François,25 police chief of the Jewish section at the Paris Prefecture—also in charge of Paris detention camps such as Drancy—a man whose attitude “was judged to be satisfactory from the Nazi point of view.” Another was André Tulard,26 whose file cards, fichiers of Antignac-like efficiency, listed every Jew in every street from A to Z, with different-coloured cards for French and foreign Jews. Tulard was ordered to get his cards ready for use by 10 July. Dannecker, supported by his assistant Ernst Heinrichsohn, the kind of Nazi in polished leggings who relished the forthcoming procedures as much as Pierre Galien, took the minutes. They decided upon the age range—sixteen to fifty—and the physical requirements of each Jew.
On 13 July French police inspectors, assisted by female auxiliaries, armed with Tulard's cards would go through Paris arrondissement by arrondissement, arresting Jews, collecting them in various town halls, gymnasiums, schools and police stations and then transporting them to the Vélodrome d'Hiver, the winter cycling stadium of Paris in rue Nélaton, in the 15th arrondissement, near the metro Bir Hakeim.27 Five years earlier, almost to the day, Charles Maurras' release from prison had been celebrated there, and Louis Darquier, alongside Maurras, Xavier Vallat and Léon Daudet, had heard the crowd of thirty thousand stand to acclaim him as he hailed Maurras as the leader of a France united against its Jews. The Vel' d'Hiv' was big enough to hold the quota of Jews demanded, but it was decided not to arrest Jews married to Aryans. This reduced the numbers anticipated to twenty-two thousand. They were to be divided between the camps at Drancy and Compiègne and the two camps in the Loiret, Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers.
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