After the war Pierre Gérard defended Louis' performances—and his own, because he probably wrote all of the fifty or so broadcasts—by stating that “their excessive nature was calculated deliberately to reduce their impact.” Louis appealed for denunciations on the air, and he got them; they were always followed up by Antignac and Louis, who passed on the results of their enquiries to the German authorities.
In general, however, throughout 1943 Louis Darquier was permitted to play, and play he did, interrupting this with forays in all directions aimed at capturing or recapturing favour from above. This is not to say he had no hand in the deportations which continued, for each department of the CGQ J was inevitably involved in them. The persecution of every Jewish person was the result of some aspect of its work, but mostly Darquier concerned himself with propaganda and money, and with anything to do with secret Jewish blood. As soon as Bousquet had fulfilled his August 1942 obligations as to the number of Jews deported, Darquier issued a decree instituting a provisional monthly payment of six million francs, to be withdrawn from “Jewish fortunes.” On 27 November 1942 he replied to a query from Maurice Papon, secretary-general of the Gironde préfecture. Papon had deported two convoys of Jews from Bordeaux: who was to pay for this? Darquier told him to send the bill to UGIF, who paid it.
All this Louis Darquier achieved as German disillusion with him rose from a hum to a roar. After Abetz was withdrawn from Paris in disgrace on 12 November, his assistant Rudolf Schleier had taken over at the embassy; he was soon driven to distraction by Louis. The embassy was already shaken by the affair of Die Judenfrage, and an exceptionally shrill note was added to the memos of indignation poured out by Dr. Peter Klassen, chief of its propaganda office, who provided Darquier with two-thirds of the funds his propaganda efforts required throughout 1943. “How did we get ourselves in this situation?” Klassen would ask his fellow Germans. “How can we get rid of him?”55
Knochen was the first to agree with him. After the debacle with Galien, his SD and Gestapo had no need to rely on Louis Darquier. They still had spies everywhere amongst the anti-Semitic underworld—Coston, Henri-Robert Petit, Galien himself, the gang of criminals known as the French Gestapo at the rue Lauriston, and hundreds of others who could provide the fervour Darquier lacked. But Knochen had chosen Darquier over Galien, and by now it was clear to him that both Pétain and Laval didn't take Louis seriously, and that “his behaviour was often contradictory, depending on the fluctuations of his private life or his financial position.”56
On 12 March Darquier's response, probably when drunk, was to attack Laval in public again, and violently. The Propaganda Staffel held two or three press conferences each week. In the usual manner, Nazi officials sat at a long table and instructed the press. On this occasion Louis Darquier sat with them, and let forth in considerable detail about Vichy's recalcitrance over the new bills he wanted Laval to introduce. Darquier's livid attack on Laval, being delivered at a Propaganda Staffel press conference, seemed authorised, so his astonished audience wondered whether this was a German attack on Laval. Such was not the case. The French police, who never stopped recording Louis Darquier's activities for Bousquet's security service, noted a week later that Laval was musing over exactly how to get rid of Louis Darquier. Parisian collabos were also complaining that Louis was “too assiduous in his attendance at ‘les boîtes de nuit. ’ ” The patience of the embassy, Laval's supporters, was near its end.
In truth, Louis was not spending his money only on the pleasures of the flesh—he used it for his friends too. This is how it worked. André Chaumet, a deputy vice president of Louis' UFDR, was also a vice president of the Association of Anti-Jewish Journalists, the AJA, as was Henry Coston, who wrote letters to Louis these days asking for favours and humbly addressed to “My dear Minister and friend.” Through his UFDR, Darquier gave sixty thousand francs to the AJA and twenty thousand francs to finance its press agency. Louis' friend André Chaumet received a subsidy of fifteen thousand francs and a sequestered “Jewish” publishing house, éditions Strauss, was placed at his disposal.57 All these francs seem to have been spent elsewhere: “lacklustre” was the mildest word Dr. Klassen used to describe the AJA and all its works.
By March 1943 Louis Darquier had seven institutes, associations and unions in his portfolio, but none of them proved a success. The first person to go was Pierre Gérard; the Germans “resigned” him in February 1943, and the thoroughly disillusioned Dr. Klassen took over, appointing a businessman, Louis Prax—“our man at the CGQ J”—to control Louis' “pet subject.”58 The demise of these endeavours—Louis watched as students booed and threw liquid gas during the lectures at the Sorbonne, and whistled and shouted, “None of this rubbish in France”—more or less coincided with Louis' now desperate launch of his IEQ JER on 24 March 1943. 59
Under a bombardment of choleric announcements from Captain Sézille, with Professor Montandon in charge, Louis gave one of his longest speeches, evoking the past, present and future of French anti-Semitism, praising himself and his adventures in the place de la Concorde on 6 February 1934, denouncing a list of his enemies, rendering homage to the Ger mans, and also, unctuously, to Laval. His “I have confidence in him” was an anxious attempt to dampen down the scandal he had created by attacking Laval twelve days before. “Our battle,” Louis cried, “is nothing else but a fight between good and evil, between God and Satan.” Georges Montan-don announced the courses at the institute, one each for onomastics, eugenics and demography, history of literature, Judaeocracy (how Jews take over a country) and ethno-racial philosophy. He then gave the first lecture himself, on the Jewish virus and its responsibility for the fall of Rome, the French Revolution and the fall of France in 1940. 60
Louis' speech was the opening gambit in a last desperate struggle to save himself. By 6 March 1943, forty-nine thousand Jews had been deported, nothing approaching the number demanded by Eichmann. Bousquet was almost ready with his own denaturalisation law, about which he had not consulted Darquier. Dr. Klassen sent a memo of despair to his boss, Rudolf Schleier:
All German services … have declared that it is no longer possible to keep Darquier de Pellepoix … the result of Darquier de Pellepoix's activity over his past year in office is nil in all areas … Vichy does not take Darquier seriously … the Aryanisation programme has come to a standstill … this bon vivant loses all interest in work when he finds himself in such a well-paid position … the failure of Darquier in all areas is striking, especially in the field of propaganda …
However, “Darquier has declared that he considers himself to be irreplaceable.”61
On 14 April 1943 Darquier was removed as president of the UFDR and Alex Delpeyroux, a protégé of Fernand de Brinon and a former political journalist from Le Jour, replaced him. Louis had thought of Delpeyroux as his vice president; in fact Delpeyroux, briefed by Laval that Darquier was a “fanatic and a madman,” kept Laval informed in detail of the plans of the CGQ J.62
Through a miraculous coup Darquier hung on, for a time, as honorary president of his UFDR. Darquier's miracle, though brief, was of such magnitude that every German commandant and French official had to bow before it and, temporarily, before him. On 10 April he announced the discovery of a hidden Jewish art collection—the Schloss Collection— of such value that every German official had to go into reverse mode, and for four months his fortunes were in a fabulous ascendant. Two days after the discovery of this treasure he began a counterattack against Bousquet's denaturalisation proposals, but mostly, he partied. On 30 April he sent out invitations:
On the occasion of the first anniversary of my appointment to the post of Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, I shall be bringing together my senior colleagues for a lunch on Saturday 8 May … Monsieur de Brinon [is] hosting this luncheon …
Dinner followed dinner, lunch followed lunch, and to these events every German official who had read and agreed with Dr. Klassen's indictment of Louis Darquier had to turn up and celebrate with hi
m. Most typical was a luxurious banquet on 29 May at l'écu de France in rue d'Alsace to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the foundation of the anti-Semitic newspaper Le Pilori,now Au Pilori. Gathered with German command were all the Paris collabos, including its literary stars—Céline, Brasillach and Rebatet amongst them.63
One of the few not to have to temporarily bow and scrape before Louis was Georges Oltramare, founder of Le Pilori, although his own programme on Radio-Paris, “The Jews Against France,” was financed by Louis. On this occasion, however, it was necessary to accept Louis Darquier as guest speaker. Oltramare later recollected:
Although I played an important role in the appointment of Darquier de Pellepoix to the High Commission for Jewish Questions, he knows nothing about it. As he has seduced so many women, he likes to think that Lady Luck shines on him, that it is his merit and his merit alone that manages to achieve miracles.
… Both delegates to a Congress for the reform of the League of Nations, we quickly used the familiar “tu” when speaking to each other. The moment he assumed the dignity of Commissioner, Darquier, afflicted by amnesia, asked me: “By the way, do we use ‘tu’ or ‘vous’ with each other?”
“What a question, my dear minister!” [replied Oltramare] “Every time I had the honour of approaching Your Excellence, I used the third person.”
My witticism didn't offend Darquier who snorted, readjusted his monocle and let out a jerky, whinnying laugh. Valiant, always drunk and always broke, Darquier was as vain and self-important as a vaunting musketeer.64
The waters of Louis' salvation flowed swiftly away. His Institute of Anthropo-Sociology was subsidised with 100,000 francs a month. These payments, already irregular, were diminished substantially after Louis had processed the money via his UFDR. On 24 August Pétain was to seal his doom, but well before that the Germans scented another Darquier failure on the horizon, and closed down the institute. Next they shut down Louis' IEQ JER, and took him off the radio. Although they did not officially dissolve the UFDR until October, its last meeting was held in July, as “Delpeyroux and M. Prax…came into conflict with Darquier de Pellepoix for personal reasons.”
Prax was spying on Darquier and reporting his every move to Dr. Klassen at the embassy. To prevent this, in July Darquier tried to insert his own man, Haffner, to “paralyse” Prax.65 Klassen, who had been told to lay off Darquier, erupted again, issuing more and more outraged memos about the “startling” behaviour of the Commissioner for Jewish Affairs and demanding his replacement.
At the same time Louis came up with a new venture, an attempt to buy Au Pilori, which was up for sale in July 1943. Au Pilori, dismissed by Darquier two years earlier as “in the pay of the Germans,” was now the anti-Semitic newspaper of his dreams, with a circulation of eighty thousand copies. After complex financial twists and turns, in the end Prax won the battle, paying 3.5 million francs plus “1,700,000 francs under the table” for Au Pilori, and a grateful embassy moved him from the UFDR to run it for them. Alex Delpeyroux replaced Prax as director of propaganda at the CGQ J. Louis immediately fell out with him. At this point Dr. Klassen had reached a ceiling of fury.66
The struggle over the bone of Au Pilori brought down the final curtain on Louis Darquier's propaganda business affairs. His propaganda department had a monthly budget of 300,000 francs, excluding salaries. Of this Darquier paid himself 200,000 francs a month (worth £26,000 today), by transferring this sum from the CGQ J to his UFDR. This was meant to fund his institutes and so forth, but it rarely if ever did. Where did all the money go? No one came to any meetings at rue la Boétie. The proposed films were never made. There were no lectures or exhibitions, no swashbuckling novels and no infiltration of schools or sailing clubs. The only activity was the “huge purchase” of anti-Semitic books, some distributed free to the press, but mostly sold at the UFDR's bookshop. Darquier also charged for the privilege of joining his UFDR—ten francs a head. This limited customers to almost none.67
He did produce one glossy twenty-four-page brochure for the UFDR, printing twenty thousand copies of it, but it was never distributed. On the front is a picture of a mother feeding five children, with the slogan “Our greatest National Treasure IS OUR RACE!” Inside, one of the points covered—mostly written by Pierre Gérard—reads: “madness is three times more frequent amongst Jews than Aryans.”
18
Loot
ONE OF THE ABIDING beliefs of the apostles of The Protocols of the Elders of Sion is an almost mystical faith in the vastness of hidden Jewish wealth. From his exalted position as commissioner, first through the organisation inserted by Pierre Galien, then by the daily dedication of Joseph Antignac, Louis Darquier was now at the helm of a business whose principal concern was the legal and illegal appropriation of Jewish assets. This was called “economic Aryanisation.” It occupied two-thirds of the time of the CGQ J and was “the cornerstone of the whole system.”1
Louis had his eye on all this from the beginning: “It is mainly a question of depriving Jews of their principal weapon, i.e. money,” he told the press in May 1942. “Economic Aryanisation is achieved either by transferring Jewish property to Aryans, or purely and simply, in such cases when the first solution is not possible, the liquidation of Jewish assets. This is a huge task involving some 100 billion francs, perhaps more. In Paris alone, for example, are 3,500 apartment buildings belonging to Jews.”2
Darquier was interested in “political Aryanisation”—laws, camps, deportation, exclusion—because only then could “good economic Aryanisation” be effective. He paid considerable attention to the removal of Jews from the professions, particularly doctors and teachers, and of Jewish children from schools. But such controls were well exercised by Vichy, as they were by members of these professions, as anxious as Vichy to eliminate Jewish competition. For economic Aryanisation, however, the CGQ J provided a complete service for the Vichy state, with scrupulously kept files which identified all Jewish businesses; this was easier to do from Paris, as most Jewish assets were in the Occupied Zone.
While Coston and Faÿ got on with despoiling Freemasons for Vichy, the CGQ J became, more than anything else, its money factory. This was a perfect job for Louis Darquier, as he could extract money from a stone. Keeping it was quite another matter. He could now be crucially involved in the Aryanisation of all Jewish “industrial, commercial, real estate and trading enterprises,” buildings, apartments, offices, shares and possessions—furniture, antiques and jewellery; pianos, bathtubs, basins and chandeliers if it came to that. Vichy's “elimination” of “all Jewish influence in the national economy” included “hidden assets” and artistic property—libraries, decorative art, porcelain collections and, above all, some of the great painting collections of France. All that was missing was the “agriculture, fishing and mining industries,” and forestry, a consequence of the modest number of Jews working in these sectors.3
Louis Darquier could now strut before the “international speculators” typified by the Lévy, Baumann and Louis-Dreyfus families, those Jews who had blighted his life. Most members of these families had fled, were in prison or concentration camps, or were dead, but strut Darquier did—to the usual degree. His approach to other people's money was always small-time: it was pickings he was after, percentages, and while he scurried about after money, spending it was his prime concern. His involvement in economic Aryanisation was spasmodic, and nearly always personal or emotional. He would spot a name he did not like, he would decide that some Aryan asset was full of lurking Jewish blood, and he would pounce.
Above, beneath and to the left and right of him, an empire of appropriation sprang up, for it was here, in the area of Jewish wealth, that the Germans and Vichy worked most closely together. Jews were to be separated from every possession and from every financial enterprise. The rules the Germans issued to Vichy were that “both French laws and German ordinances for Aryanisation are enforced in the Occupied Zone. If a contradiction arises between them then German or
dinances take precedence. In the event that German ordinances go further than French laws, then the former also take precedence. It is the duty of the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs to enforce French instructions and German ordinances.” “To avoid creating the impression that Germans alone wish to take the place of Jews,” in all instances Frenchmen were required to do this work.4 To make sure that Frenchmen did it, they inserted German overseers into an entire floor of the CGQ J headquarters in place des Petits-Pères, the “infestation” so loathed by Louis Darquier.
To avoid illegal appropriation, the Germans needed Vichy's agreement and its civil service, for economic Aryanisation involved the sequestration of such vast enterprises as Galeries Lafayette and Messageries Hachette, banking companies such as Rothschilds and Lazard Frères, oil, steel and insurance companies, and art collections of value beyond imagining; in fact everything into which German control could be inserted to transfer products, money and shares to the Reich.
Preliminary measures began as soon as Paris fell, and appropriation began in earnest on 18 October 1940, when the Germans issued a decree setting up provisional administrators for all Jewish concerns in the Occupied territory and requiring Jews to go to police headquarters to declare their possessions.5 Jewish enterprises were to be handled in three ways: taken over by a non-Jew, sold, or liquidated. All such decisions were to be reported by the temporary administrator, French, to the military authority, German. Shareholdings were considered Jewish if a third of the shareholders were Jewish. This broadened opportunities. Vichy also set to work in October 1940, and matched the German decree by establishing the Service de Contrôle des Administrateurs Provisoires (SCAP)—the first move in a vicious struggle between Vichy France and Nazi Germany for control of the Jewish wealth of France.
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