Darquier asked Salzedo for money on another occasion, again using “the Robin woman.” He would stay with her at her Villa Royale in Nice, and “spent several days in the summer of 1943, at the villa ‘La Briseand extracted large sums of mon in St.-Aigny (Alpes Maritimes) with his mistress. This despite the presence of M. Robin, who seemed quite happy with this situation.” Madame Robin freely boasted of her connections, and extracted large sums of money from hapless Jews by telling “anyone who wanted to hear it that Darquier was ready to favour Jews with large fortunes.” She also told them that Darquier “had been appointed to the post of Commissioner for Jewish Affairs by de Monzie.”22
Louis Darquier's “friends” were often clients who would pay him for favours, but among them were also those young men who had been his “biff boys” in the days of the rue Laugier. One of them was Fernand Roirmarmier, a former member of his National Club whom Darquier placed as a clerk in the propaganda service of the CGQ J. His mission was “to establish contacts between the Commissariat and various ministries in order to compile reports as to how certain Jewish companies, and the Louis Dreyfus firm in particular, gained their fortunes.”23
Despite the deportations, Jews continued to apply to Vichy courts for justice. Louis enjoyed satisfying his lust for quarrelling in the courts, in a reversal of his pre-war role, when he was so often the accused himself. He made two attempts to Aryanise the property of Geneviève and René Dreyfus, first in 1942, then in 1943. For her second appeal Geneviève Dreyfus claimed “in her capacity as a descendant of the Jew PERPIGNAN, resident of Bordeaux, to be able to rely on letters patent of the king of France Louis XVI, signed in 1776, according to which, ‘the Jew Perpignan, his family and descendants are entitled to acquire prop-erty…no ordinance or ruling of the kingdom [can] be used to prevent them from exercising these rights. and extracted large sums of mon ” Geneviève and René Dreyfus were thus two of Pétain's “old French Jews,” and so their property had been “wrongfully provided with a trustee.”24 Cases like this, which pre sented pretensions on behalf of any Jew, but particularly any Jew named Dreyfus, caught Louis Darquier's wandering attention and stirred him to vicious activity.
Some of Darquier's “supplicants” were the French administrators of Jewish assets. They needed protection, and they would pay for it; there was always an illegal air to the appropriation of Jewish businesses or apartments, and what would happen should the Germans lose the war? By 1943 these wealthy purchasers of Jewish property feared they would find themselves obliged to return it. There was a three-year restriction on reselling appropriated Jewish property, and they would pay to circumvent this. Darquier produced for them an Association Française des Propriétaires de Biens Aryanisés, a French Association of Owners of Aryanised Property.
Occasionally Darquier could be moved by other things besides money. He would, for example, do anything de Monzie instructed. A month before Dr. Klassen's all-out attack on Louis Darquier on 5 April 1943, Captain Sézille wrote Klassen a very long and overwrought letter, bringing to his attention Louis' scandalous protection of wealthy Jews, amongst them Claire Boas, first wife of de Monzie's friend, Henry de Jouvenel. Sometimes Darquier would extend the same expensive sympathy to other distinguished Jews, particularly doctors. An old war colleague could have some influence, and so could his family—Janot Darquier could ring Lucien Boué for inside information about forthcoming Aryanisations, and she did.25
After the death of her husband, Louise Darquier had returned to Neuilly. Through her sons, life was easier for her than for most women in Occupied France, who generally passed the day queuing or scrounging for food. She spent months with René's family on holiday, and returned to Cahors every year to see to her properties, rented out now, while Jean took her to visit friends in the country. Presumably Louis provided her with the necessary passes for so much activity. Nevertheless, she suffered: “Everywhere I go I take my incurable wound with me. It is awful and now, almost six months later, I feel even more in a state of despair, I cannot get used to [Pierre] not being here and I think only of rejoining him. In November I shall be back [in Cahors]. I can't leave him alone for All Souls' Day. After that, I shall see my children as much as I can while I continue on the path to my own tomb.”26
In Neuilly Louise lived amidst the domestic worst of the Nazi regime; over four thousand Germans moved into the large public buildings, gracious apartments and private houses of the suburb, many of them left empty by fleeing Jews or unacceptable foreigners. Neuilly was full of Germans—kommandants, the Gestapo, Hitler Youth and the German Red Cross. Worse, for a woman like Louise Darquier, was the presence of the two most notorious criminal gangs of the Occupation. The leader of the French Gestapo of the rue Lauriston, Henri Lafont, used some of the nine hundred million francs he earned as head of a terrorist arm of the German Gestapo to hold lavish court at his town house in Neuilly. Then there was the Neuilly Gestapo, another gang of thieves and cutthroats, at internecine war with Lafont's gang. Louise noted, “in Paris, if you have a lot of money, you can get by.”27
One of René's colleagues at Henry Lévy's Grands Moulins de Strasbourg reported that René “was upset by his brother's attitude when he became Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, René had always remained unhappy about his brother: meetings were a rare event and such as there were, were tense.”28 But René's job entwined him in the work of the CGQ J and the Occupation authorities. The Ministry of Production regulated the French economy through its Comités d'Organisation, COs, which grouped each trade or profession together. As president of the Organisation Committee for Fats, René Darquier worked for the Vichy state. COs were instructed to involve themselves in the appointment of administrators, to try to establish professionals in such positions rather than the friends and racketeers preferred by the CGQ J. René dealt with the staff of the CGQ J, with Pierre Gérard and Lucien Boué: he pointed out Aryanisation possibilities in his field, and recommended a friend, Major Dendoid, for a job: “The worth of Dendoid is very well known…he gave extremely well documented lectures on the Jewish question.” René also intervened on behalf of Jews. On one occasion he asked the Status of Persons department to reverse its decision about a friend, Alice Maître, who had been defined as Jewish. When his request was rejected he asked Louis, who refused him.29
By July 1943, in the Northern Zone alone, the total amount earned from Jewish property sold was “1,289,139,035 frs, after commissions.”30 The statistics involved in the rape of France—the rape of Europe—by the Nazis are fluid, but estimated at about a fifth of the world's art treasures. Each year more discoveries of lost paintings, hidden libraries, great sculptures, come to the surface. At the Liberation the French republic established a restitution service immediately, and the trains which had taken the loot away were quickly set to work to bring it back again.
Decades of effort culminated in the Matteoli Commission, authorised by the French government in 1997, which produced its final report in April 2000. The conclusion of the Matteoli Report was that the looting in Jewish bank accounts and insurance policies, confiscated homes, artworks, books and furniture, the washbasins and sheets from Jewish homes, and the last possessions stripped from Jews as they entered France's detention camps or were put into trains to take them to Auschwitz, came to five billion unadjusted francs. Restitution remains a grey area, in which even the Matteoli figures are suspect. Its conclusion was that between 70 percent and 95 percent of the loot which has been accounted for had been returned to survivors or heirs, less being achieved in the return of companies and properties.
But there remains the spoliation which Matteoli lists as unaccounted for. Post-war legislation included only French citizens. A liquidated business was not as easy to restore as a painting; there were no written records of the pillage of furniture, no procedures to replace lost profits. There were unclaimed shares, unclaimed cash, their Jewish owners deported, disappeared, dead. By 1949, in the department of the Seine, nearly three thousand estates had not been clai
med. To this day looted paintings hang in hundreds of museums, galleries and private collections. One hundred and seventy-one paintings from the Schloss collection have not been recovered, though some have been seen in sales, or found in foreign museums.
During the Vichy years over eighty thousand bank accounts and six thousand strongboxes were frozen, several million books pillaged, forty thousand apartments looted. Over sixty thousand of the 100,000 paintings and objets d'art taken have been returned; the forty thousand remaining are lost to this day. Twelve million francs were taken from the prisoners in Drancy; the sale and liquidation of companies came to three billion francs: the figures go on and on. A lifetime spent in the bowels of every French archive would not suffice to clarify this muddy area, or to place a figure on such losses. And all this is in addition to the two hundred million, later four hundred million, francs the Nazis charged France per day for its “Occupation costs.”
In the immediate aftermath of defeat in 1940, under orders from Hitler, the pillage of France was allocated to military command, the MBF, while Ribbentrop authorised Abetz to seize Jewish works of art. Between them any collection belonging to a Rothschild, and the stock of many Jewish art dealers of Paris—Georges Wildenstein, Paul Rosenberg (the great pre-war art dealer, no relation to Alfred) and Alphonse Kann amongst them—was crammed into packing cases. Fifteen cases from an early cull went straight to Hitler; years later a painting from the Rosenberg collection was found on the walls of the house of Laval's daughter, Josée de Chambrun.
Hitler gave Rosenberg's ERR an extra mandate, to “transport to Germany cultural goods which appear valuable.”31 The ERR became Hitler's official looting agency, pillaging Jewish art collections and apartments, libraries and objets d'art. All German services used the cooperation of the SS to assist their confiscations, and the ERR and the Gestapo in turn used a network of French and German spies, criminals and informers in a long trail of villainy that looped throughout France—and Occupied Europe—to deliver booty to the Reich.
This moved spoliation onto a new level altogether, because while the Vichy administration concentrated on keeping Jewish wealth out of German hands, the Nazis were after both French and Jewish assets. It was pillage for the Germans, Aryanisation for the French. The Nazis stole gold, currency and foreign securities, but the greatest pillage was of works of art. Hitler, failed artist, considered France degenerate, but was spellbound by its cultural wealth, and for this reason, of all the conquered territories France was pillaged the most. Hitler's envy and folie de grandeur inspired a Nazi war on France, modern art and Jews. His aims were the elimination of degenerate modern art—burning and slashing were the usual methods used—plus the creation of his huge personal museum at Linz in Austria, and the fashioning of Germany as the cultural centre of the New Europe.32
After Hitler, Goering carved a special niche for himself by giving his personal protection to the work of Alfred Rosenberg. Through the ERR in Paris, Goering ravaged France for his own collection at Carinhall, his baronial hunting estate north of Berlin. Rosenberg could choose after that, then came German museums and universities. French museums were allowed the residue, or it was sold. Profits from sales were supposed to go to French war orphans, but well before this could even be thought of the spoils were shared between accomplices.
“Degenerate” art was not allowed into Nazi Germany, though Goering in particular ignored this. Unacceptable painters—Cézanne, Degas, Van Gogh, Manet—were exchanged for “pure” works; those of lesser worth to Hitler—Bonnard, Vuillard, Braque, Matisse—were sold off, and the proceeds used to buy approved art for the Reich. The residue, the work of modern or Jewish artists, was destroyed. On 27 July 1943 five or six hundred paintings, amongst them works by Miró, Picabia, Valadon, Klee, Ernst, Léger, Arp, Kisling and Picasso, were burnt by the ERR in the garden of the Jeu de Paume in Paris.33
Throughout all this Vichy struggled, protested and lost. Vichy laws for the control of French national patrimony were as strict as those for the exclusion of Jews from la patrie, and the Reich liked a semblance of legality. Middlemen scrambled for rich commissions, but if Hitler, Goering and their lackeys paid at all, low valuations, dubious “exchanges” and the favourable exchange rate enabled those with Reichsmarks to buy French art for pin money. Vichy was particularly indignant about the Rothschild collections, which it wished to liquidate itself. When Vichy objected to Abetz's seizures, his reply was that the Jewish owners were no longer French citizens. Thus Vichy's own laws excluding Jews had unlocked France's coffers for Nazi looting. In these circumstances the art market boomed. In 1940 the initial mountain of confiscated works of art was so vast that the Louvre could no longer accommodate it, and the small museum, the Jeu de Paume, became the new depot, stuffed also with “clocks, statues, jewellery and furniture”—and tapestries, rugs, embroideries, church bells and pianos. More treasure was stored all over Paris and in the provinces.
Many great Jewish collections had been confided to the protection of the French Museums Administration and were hidden, mostly in châteaux in the Vichy Zone; they came under the sovereignty of the Vichy state. Only the Vichy Ministry of Culture could authorise the export of such national patrimony. The ERR, under direct orders from Hitler and Goering, acted outside this law, and by August 1941 had seized the great collections of David-Weill, Jacobson, Leven, Reichenbach, Kapferer, Erlanger, Raymond Hesse, Léonce, Bernheim and two Lévys, Roger and Simon. One of the most important Jewish collections, that belonging to the Schloss family, French Jews, was still undiscovered by March 1943.Everyone was after it, for the Schloss collection was one of the unique collec tions of France, consisting of the “racially pure” Dutch and Flemish old masters so coveted by Hitler.
It was 12 March 1943 when Darquier lambasted Laval at the press conference in the Champs-élysées; but he was not the only one in trouble at this point. The following month Hitler withdrew his favour from Alfred Rosenberg; in the future his experts at Linz were to take charge of his looting arrangements. Desperate to demonstrate the irreplaceable services of his ERR, Rosenberg wanted the Schloss collection for Hitler. The man he chose to run ERR in Paris, Baron Kurt von Behr, was a doppelgänger for Louis Darquier. The ERR was not a military department, so Rosenberg was particularly happy that von Behr liked to wear spectacular uniforms, generally that of the German Red Cross. Von Behr had a glass eye and an English wife, and entertained in grand and lavish style.
With five offices and four warehouses, as well as the Jeu de Paume, von Behr ran his looting headquarters at 54, avenue d'Iéna—another appropriated Jewish property—in the Darquier manner. Its atmosphere was “fraught with terrible intrigues and jealousies,” exacerbated by von Behr's unremitting sexual dalliance with his female staff.34 Like Louis Darquier, von Behr was “large but handsome,” a playboy some found charming, as ignorant about art as Darquier but a little more efficient, particularly in carrying out Rosenberg's idea that Jewish furniture should be sent to make life comfortable for Germans “colonising” the east. It was this operation, M-Aktion (Möbel-Aktion, Furniture Project), that took the residue from great lootings, the everyday objects of Jewish life— cutlery, pots and pans, bed linen and washbasins.
By 1943, in the greediest, if not the most vicious, of all Nazi inter-service battles, the combined forces of Goering and Hitler had pushed the MBF and the embassy into the background, and the ERR had the field to themselves. All this Darquier knew in March, when his relations with every Vichy and German department were so bad that Klassen at the embassy was clamouring for his dismissal.
So it was that Rosenberg and von Behr provided his leap to salvation. When, in 1941, Dannecker had placed Captain Sézille and his Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions into 21, rue la Boétie, he had sequestered the property: it was the former gallery and home of the great art dealer Paul Rosenberg, agent of Picasso, Matisse and Braque. The IEQ J opened its doors in May of that year, since when all the professional anti-Semites of Paris had thronged to wha
t had been Paul Rosenberg's elegant showrooms, and Darquier was often there. In June 1942 Darquier had taken over the IEQ J. His French Union for the Defence of the Race had moved into the ground floor of 21, rue la Boétie, and on 24 March 1943 he inaugurated his last desperate propaganda endeavour, the IEQ JER— Institute for the Study of Jewish and Ethno-Racial Questions—there. Six days later Louis appointed a ferocious vulture of the art world, the “expert” Jean-François Lefranc, his friend and close collaborator, as a provisional administrator at the CGQ J “for Jewish goods of high value.”
Dannecker had made Sézille and his institute directly responsible to the ERR, and thus to von Behr. From May 1942 “Darquier de Pellepoix greatly helped the Germans in their work, particularly in plundering works of art where he worked closely with the services of Colonel von Behr”;35 but von Behr was not Darquier's only source of information about art looting. Louis had lived in rue la Boétie for most of the last ten years. This thoroughfare was the centre of the art market of Paris, part of a triangle of streets, bordered also by the Faubourg St.-Honoré and the avenue Matignon, where French art dealers did their business. In 1918 Picasso himself lived at number 23, rue la Boétie. One of the greatest galleries was at number 57, that of Georges Wildenstein, run during the Occupation by his Aryan replacement Roger Dequoy. Until January 1944 Dequoy did flourishing business acquiring works of art for the Reich, regularly visited by German agencies looking for, and getting, anything from Renoir to Rembrandt. Darquier was not the only one suspicious of these arrangements, for suspicion and intrigue pervaded everything in this triangle, and nowhere more so than in the pursuit of the Schloss collection.
As early as August 1942 Dequoy approached the Schloss family for a possible sale. There would be huge commissions for any dealer who got his hands on it. Its 333 Flemish and Dutch paintings included Petrus Christus' Pietà, Gossaert's Vénus, Rubens' Marie de Médicis and works by Rembrandt and Frans Hals, Brouwer, Ruisdael, van der Heyden, Bruegel, van der Neer and rare works by other masters. Rembrandt's Jew in a Fur Bonnet was also part of the collection.36
Bad Faith Page 41