From the very beginning Vichy asserted that Jewish property would not be touched, but from the very beginning, it was. Attention to the niceties about who was and who was not Jewish became a movable feast once property was involved. If you were Jewish or half-Jewish, or had a Jewish name, or were denounced as any of these, your property came under the eagle eye of the Vichy state.6
On 13 May 1942, a week after Louis Darquier's appointment as its commissioner, the CGQ J incorporated SCAP into its new Economic Aryanisation Section. Darquier did not deal with this himself. Lucien Boué had been chief secretary to both the Paris and the Seine city councils, and had lent Darquier money over the years. In return Louis placed him in charge of the Economic Aryanisation Section with a staff of over seven hundred, three-quarters of the entire personnel of the CGQ J. As Boué's deputy, briefly, Louis promoted his most loyal servant, Pierre Gérard.7
Fanning out beneath both of his chiefs of staff, first Galien then Antignac, the Aryanisation Section, linked on the one hand to German command, on the other to the CGQ J's own police, the SEC, became by far the largest section of Louis Darquier's empire, with many subsections devoted to specific areas of spoliation. For the Germans, collaborating in economic despoliation was also a weapon of propaganda, as “approval of the fight against the Jews is given easily when they are seen to enjoy economic advantages.”8 This meant that many levels of French society were corrupted by the sequence of events which followed appropriation. Aryanisation was a creeping plant which grew into almost every aspect of French business, professional and commercial life during the Vichy years, trailing down from the bankers, industrialists and insurance companies, the doctors, lawyers and judiciary on high, to the secretaries, employees, shopkeepers and concierges who served them.
Galien put paid German informers into various departments of the CGQ J, sold Jewish properties to his friends and mistresses at knockdown prices or placed them in appropriated apartments, and appointed others—many of them considered criminals even by avenue Foch—as provisional administrators. Thus the row between Darquier and Galien in October 1942 began through Boué, supported by the tireless Pierre Gérard, who produced a lengthy report detailing all Galien's embezzlements and misdeeds. Gérard's reward for the defeat of Galien was to be despatched immediately to an equally uncomfortable hot seat in Darquier's propaganda activities.
Because Darquier survived, so did Boué, but Galien's replacement by Antignac made no difference to the atmosphere. Aryanisation had been “a battle to the death between Galien and Boué, with Darquier the filling in the sandwich.”9 Antignac and Boué carried on in the same manner as before, but Antignac's efficiency and his control of the SEC ensured that Boué's incompetence, at least, was kept in modest check. If Antignac was on the take—and his staff certainly thought he was—he was much better at hiding it, and at the Liberation he was clever enough to burn as many files as he could lay his hands on.
Darquier and Boué took a much noisier approach. Behind every Aryan administrator they saw a hidden Jew, the original owner, gesticulating behind a helpless Frenchman—“men of straw,” such front men were called. But Darquier, Antignac and Boué would deal with Jews if the money was right, so whether for purposes of bribery or for spoliation, their investigations extended to “all people with a German-sounding name” or “with a name thought to be Jewish.”10
The first move of the Economic Aryanisation Section was to appoint a provisional administrator or trustee to sell or liquidate a Jewish asset. If sold, it must be to an Aryan; if liquidated, it was to be asset-stripped by auction. Vichy insisted that “trustees replacing removed Jewish owners will, in almost all cases, be French,” and except for a hundred-odd who were Germans, they were.11 Besides the legal profits arranged by Vichy law, the illegal profits in all this were vast, for the trustee himself, already salaried, and for the organisation and for anyone who worked there.
Every possibility could present extra income. Should the business be sold? There was money in making this decision, by taking bribes from competing bidders. The collection of profiteers and grafters who became involved in this were very often friends of Darquier and his henchmen. Apartments and commissions, buildings and garages, villas in the south of France, all were Darquier's now to distribute, and to be paid for the favour. Sometimes such “friends” could acquire as many as a hundred trusteeships. Most favoured of all were his old colleagues from the Paris city council, of whom Pierre Taittinger proved to be perhaps the most enthusiastic. He was particularly well placed from the beginning, because his relationship with Vallat went back for decades. Taittinger replaced Trochu as president of the Paris city council in May 1943. This made matters even easier for Taittinger, and indeed for others on the city council. Trochu was of course also rewarded, as were the Comte de Castellane and many others. On 3 February 1943, in a letter carefully written before his presence was required at the Madeleine to celebrate Darquier's annual Mass for 6 February, Taittinger enquired of Darquier about some establishments in Lille. He “would be delighted to receive their Aryanisation in the near future.” A month later they were his.12
Taittinger used the headed writing paper of the president of the Paris council for the requests which he fired off to both Boué and Darquier, asking for and receiving “interesting Jewish businesses” for his brotherin-law Louis Burnouf.13 After the receipt of one, Taittinger wrote to Darquier asking for more. Three months later Burnouf had sixteen Jewish enterprises to “administer.” In December 1943 Taittinger again asked for more—he had a large family—managing to irritate Darquier, who sharply reminded him that by this time Burnouf was on the point of controlling twenty-seven Jewish enterprises.
Trochu also asked for more lucrative provisional administrations “for a friend,” while Taittinger continued in this mode until the Allies were at the gates of Paris. At that point Taittinger's transformation into a résistant was one of the most startling of the war.
There are hundreds of thousands of such examples: the papers of the Economic Aryanisation Section are an Aladdin's cave of boxes bursting with papers testifying to the enormous energy called forth by human greed. However, any analysis of the unseemly scramble after Jewish wealth is often ambiguous, always complex and often—very often— impossible to unravel. For in theory there were many Vichy controls of this empire.
Another reason Louis Darquier held on to his job by a thread was because, in the tussle between Vichy France and the Germans, he was much easier to manipulate than a more capable or principled replacement. Amidst the chaos and animosities, the Germans felt that they could control Darquier. They were right. His regime eased German acquisition of Jewish wealth in a way Vallat would never have permitted; this was also why Laval was always trying to pass Louis and the work of his CGQ J to another ministry, or to find some way of closing it down.
When Vallat left, spoliation in the north was well advanced, but in the Vichy Zone matters were far less satisfactory. SCAP and the Vichy Ministers of Industrial Production and of Finance were at loggerheads with the German authorities, slowing Aryanisation down where possible in an endless battle to keep the money out of German hands. Laval took over the CGQ J and appointed ministers to assist him who were formidable Vichy bureaucrats, generals of Aryanisation in the presence of whom Louis Darquier was no more than the lowest poilu.
Pierre Cathala, Laval's school friend, was his Minister of Finance from the beginning of his 1942 regime.14 With the brilliant young technocrat Jean Bichelonne—Albert Speer's French counterpart—as his Minister for Industrial Production, from August 1942 Laval had a team that was almost a match for the Nazi forces ranged against him. He had René Bousquet in charge of French policing; in theory nothing could be sold to “foreign hands” without the signature of the Ministry for Finance, while the Ministry of Industrial Production had to agree to all appointments of trustees to Jewish enterprises. In practice, under Darquier, such processes were often “forgotten” as the balance of power shifted to the German
s.
But Vichy had other weapons, mostly the banks and state offices which held the Jewish money Aryanisation produced. One of them was the Administration des Domaines, the State Property Department—it was to this Vichy department that Laval wanted to transfer the CGQ J's Aryanisation Section. For beaux arts, at Laval's service was the Direction des Musées de France, the French Museums Administration, under his Minister of Education and Culture Abel Bonnard.
Legally, Vichy was permitted to keep the proceeds from the appropriation of Jewish assets as long as “specific German interests were not at stake.”15 All such proceeds were to go into a special department of the French Treasury, the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations. This Deposit and Consignment Office received everything, ranging from the little sums taken from prisoners as they were booked into detention camps—all that was not stolen en route, that is—to Jewish securities which it “purchased” from its own State Property Department.
Ten percent of everything, however, went to the CGQ J, from which the administrators and “other costs” were to be paid, a poisoned chalice from which many drank. The residue of this 10 percent was to be “placed in a solidarity fund for destitute Jews.” In fact it was used to finance UGIF in the Occupied Zone, and thus, once again, destitute Jews paid for their own deportation. The remaining 90 percent of the proceeds of each sale or liquidation went into a blocked account in the name of the Jewish owners. The only occasion when despoiled Jews were allowed access to their own money was when the Minister of Finance forced the CGQ J to allow them to pay their taxes. Otherwise, their own wealth could be allotted to them by the Vichy state in “strictly limited amounts,” but they had no access to the money.
Everyone else did. When the Germans wanted a billion francs as punishment for civilian resistance in December 1941, they took the money from the proceeds of French Aryanisation. As the Nazis considered some of the industries most important to their war effort to be in Jewish hands, they and Vichy potentates, together with administrators and civil servants ranging from the downright corrupt to the nitpicking bureaucrat, now began to wrangle over the bonanza.
Denunciations poured onto every official desk, but it was usually Vichy's CGQ J that set the ball rolling. This letter from the Aryanisation Section of the CGQ J could have been sent to any German or Vichy police service: “I am writing to ask you to arrest and intern the Jew B…of 99–101 rue L— in Paris who, contrary to ordinances now in force regulating the activity of the Jews, continues to run his business with the assistance of his daughter.”16 Another approach, equally ubiquitous, was that adopted by de Brinon to Darquier on 16 March 1943, recommending a friend of Himmler's: “Our friend, Baron Michel Bruyère…is interested in purchasing a Jewish business ‘La Maison de la Laine Mode’ whose owner is the Jew Hagenuenauer, of Besançon. This firm retails knitting wool to thirty different shops of which ten are in Paris …”17
Sometimes no denunciations were needed. The Louis Dreyfus business was simply liquidated on 16 October 1942, and most of its vast trading fleet sequestered. Under Darquier, for two years the CGQ J simply took what it wanted. French trustees of Jewish property were not permitted to purchase Jewish properties, or shares in them. They often did. Bids for assets were meant to be sealed, and to be knocked down to the highest bidder. This was often, and easily, avoided. Assets were often sold to mysterious groups of crooks and “financiers” who would pay for an incurious sale. A significant number of administrators surfaced from the criminal classes. By 1943, of twelve thousand provisional administrators in the Department of the Seine, more than 50 percent had criminal records; some of these were administering thirty to forty former Jewish businesses.
Then, should a business be liquidated and the proceeds put into French coffers, asset stripping during liquidation could provide a rich source of income. And there was also money to be made from the Jewish owner, who might pay to have his company sold to a French person of his choice, his man of straw, to run it for him—Jewish owners were not allowed to participate in the fate of their assets, but from the shadows they often did.
Another source of money was denunciation to any German service, generally to the MBF, military command, whose hated representatives in place des Petits-Pères ensured that Germany got its share of the spoils. Jewish owners would pay to prevent such denunciations. And there was money to be made in reporting Vichy's inadequacies to the occupiers, who might pay to know if the French administration was filching money under German noses, or shielding Jewish assets.
Bribes, denunciations and extortion flowed too from the fact that the Jews of France, as anywhere else, were not a homogeneous body of victims. They fought back. Some Jews were rich, and had influence; some were crooks and had influence too. Many had French friends who helped them. Aryanising Jewish assets involved detailed and laborious work which required a certain sort of businessman or accountant, not the scoundrels Darquier liked to appoint.
And so Vichy watched the nonexistent business experience of Darquier's camp followers lead to the decline or ruin of prosperous Jewish enterprises. Laval's dislike of Darquier contributed to his desire to get rid of him, but another powerful reason was the distress of every Vichy ministry over the CGQ J's Aryanisation techniques. Their attempts to protect massive French industries were doomed to failure since when money was involved Louis Darquier would pay attention to German demands or Vichy demands depending on who paid him most, and whether he was in the office on any particular day.
It was known by all and sundry that “Darquier did not supervise letters sent in his name.”18 Antignac signed authorisations on a massive scale in Darquier's absence, but Darquier was too busy pocketing money confiscated from Jews to make any objection. Here great names of German industry like Krupp and IG Farben, and French enterprises such as Helena Rubinstein, entered the picture. Fierce territorial rows blew up as the CGQ J permitted Rubinstein's shares to be sold to a German company, or Krupp to take over Austin, a former French Rothschild agricultural machinery company, without the approval of the Minister of Finance.
IG Farben, those masters of slave labour at Auschwitz and elsewhere, and of the German war machine, were only one example. During the years of the Occupation German business interests, hitched to war production, made full use of every opportunity to spread their wings of ownership. With Darquier at the helm, German takeovers of French assets were so constant that French industry and big business felt in no way protected. In one swindle of this kind “a certain Darquier de Pellepoix, who speaks German fluently and who…is a very judicious industrialist whose brother occupies an important position within the present French government” did a deal with a German company over a piping construction firm said to belong to René Darquier.19 Louis never missed an opportunity to aim a kick at his younger brother; using his name for such deals was as good a way as any. Louis' German was as good as René's; René never called himself “de Pellepoix,” and at the time of this deal was informing his professional colleagues in no uncertain terms that the end of the war was nigh, and also firmly signing his name as “René Darquier, Président Général du Comité Général d'Organisation des Corps Gras.” Most of Louis' ruses began in the rue la Boétie, and the Paris office of the German company in question was at number 3, very near to Louis, who at that time was busy with his UFDR at number 21. Thousands of French “piping companies” were at the mercy of this vicious tug-of-war between the occupier and Vichy.
Aryanisation brought about day-to-day contact between the CGQ J and every German service in France, but while Boué, Galien and then Antignac carried out their duties, Darquier “exerted himself without cost in propaganda and above all in keeping himself in the spotlight.”20 One of his secretaries remembers: “The little time he spent each day in his office was always taken up with numerous visits. His service directors had literally to grab him on his way in or out to ask for instructions.”21
Darquier had his salary from Vichy, and his German subsidies, but he seems to have kept h
imself in pin money in the following ways. First, there were the Certificats de Non-Appartenance à la Race Juive, a tremendous source of income for Louis Darquier and Georges Montandon. Then he also used the denunciations which poured into the offices of the CGQ J. These “numerous visits” would be from supplicants denying such accusations, who would pay him to “forget” what he had been told. The long sequence of payoffs involved in selling a sequestered house or business at a knockdown price to a “friend” was another source. Finally, he seems to have done well out of protection. He believed that Jews had squirrelled away their assets in the Vichy Zone in order to escape controls in place in the north. Also, he loved the Midi—the more glamorous part of it, that is—and so, much of his corrupt activity took place outside Paris. That was where his income from bribery could flourish, where he kept his mistresses and where he could live off the fat of the land. The regional offices of the CGQ J became “property brokers” in the Aryanisation game.
Alexandre Salzedo lived in Nice, and was Jewish, but as one of Pétain's “old French Jews” and a war veteran he, and his property, should have been safe from Vallat and Darquier. They were not, so to avoid further seizures Salzedo, a careful man, placed some of his property in the hands of a woman of straw, Madame de la Paz. Salzedo was foolish, probably dishonest, and certainly a man who needed protection. His wife and one daughter were arrested and sent to Auschwitz. They did not return, and Salzedo was left in Nice with his elder daughter. After the Liberation he accused Louis Darquier of extortion “through the intermediary of his mistress in Nice, who called herself Jeanne Robin, and afterwards Jeanne Destanches. This woman came to me with a note written and signed by Darquier asking for 100,000 francs for Darquier, 100,000 francs for herself and 25,000 francs for her travel expenses…I know that many Jews in Nice were her victims since she used to claim—in the name of Darquier, by showing notes and letters from him—that the trusteeship procedure would be stopped.”
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