It is most unlikely that Laval knew how close the contacts were between Darquier and the ERR, preceding the war by a number of years. Alfred Rosenberg had been financing Ulrich Fleischhauer for years, and either directly or indirectly had bankrolled Louis Darquier since 1936. One of Darquier's contacts at that time was the Rosenberg spy Georg Ebert, who by 1942 was ensconced in the Paris embassy, sending back reports to Berlin about his “double task” in Paris, infiltrating here and there on “ideological questions.” “I work cautiously and unobtrusively,” he wrote to Rosenberg on 22 May 1942, telling him that “Darquier de Pellepoix and his colleagues have a strong confidence in me which stems from our encounters before 1939.”37
At the outbreak of war in 1939, Lucien Schloss placed his family's art collection for safekeeping in the Banque Jordaan, which hid it in the cellars of the Château de Chambon, near Tulle in the Corrèze. On 10 September 1942 Jean-François Lefranc visited Bruno Lohse at the ERR. Lohse was an art historian, chosen by Goering to work with von Behr and paid by commission. Lefranc told Lohse that the ERR were missing out on 70 percent of Jewish works of art, which were mostly hidden in the country and under false names. For 25 percent of the take, the commissioner—Louis Darquier—would disclose where they were, on the condition that paintings valuable to the French people, for example the Impressionists, were kept in France. Darquier seems to have been unaware that Impressionists were of no value to Hitler. As for himself, Lefranc demanded half the profits. To discuss the proposal of Darquier and Lefranc, von Behr took another art historian, a Dr. Eggemann, to Maxim's for dinner. There Darquier was introduced, and the three men discussed the Schloss collection. On 29 September Lohse asked Goering about the proposed cooperation and payment: “After all, these Frenchmen are traitors to their country, and a traitor wants to be paid.”38
On the same day that Darquier appointed his friend Lefranc as a provisional administrator, 30 March 1943, he wrote a letter of authorisation to give to the prefect of Tulle, Préfet Musso, informing him that Lefranc was “one of the best-known art experts in Paris and a man of the highest worth in whom he could have complete confidence.” This view was not shared by Lucien Boué: he scented gross pillage, gross illegalities and the hand of Antignac, and “refused to have any of it and above all to sign anything whatsoever,” despite the lively pressure of Antignac.39 He would not ratify Lefranc's appointment to his department. Nevertheless Lefranc and Darquier continued illegally, and the SEC was sent off in search of the Schloss brothers.
On 6 April Henri Schloss was picked up in Nice by Lefranc and the SEC, and forced into a car. His house in St.-Jean-Cap Ferrat was searched and he was arrested. He stated he did not know the whereabouts of his brother Lucien. Unfortunately, in the midst of “threats and interrogation” a telegram arrived from Lucien, bearing a return address.40 Henri was taken to jail in Marseille; two days later the Germans arrested Lucien. Darquier and Lefranc now had the information they wanted, and on 10 April Darquier supplied Lefranc with a letter to Préfet Musso in Tulle, issuing authority to seize the collection and to transport it to Paris for “identification and valuation.” On the same day Darquier also sent an official telegram from Vichy to Musso authorising the transport of the paintings to Paris, and sent Lefranc and Jean Armilhon, director of the CGQ J's legal department, to the Château de Chambon to oversee the transfer.
The Schloss family had been French citizens since 1871. Legally, their property should not have been confiscated. Darquier ignored this. Furthermore, property confiscated legally by the CGQJ belonged to the Vichy state. It was only in Vichy itself that the valuation and sale should be done. Sending these paintings to Paris was tantamount to handing them over to the Germans.
Lefranc made the mistake of sharing his intention of selling the paintings to Goering with one of Louis' SEC policemen, and offered him a cut. This policeman warned Préfet Musso. On 12 April Musso consulted Laval's Ministry of the Interior as to whether Darquier's permission held water. They said it did not. A police guard was placed around the château.
Lefranc returned to Paris; he and Darquier met von Behr and Lohse at the ERR and made some conditions. The Germans were to promise not to grab the collection once it came to Paris, the Louvre was to have first choice of its works, and German transport would be required to bring it to Paris. Lohse reported to Goering. Goering agreed to the terms but stated that German trucks could not be used.
On 13 April a tourist bus and a van (requisitioned by Organisation Todt) turned up at the Château de Chambon, and out leapt various denizens of Henri Lafont's rue Lauriston gang, dressed up in the uniforms of the French police and led by a “French Alsatian” with a thick German accent who turned out to be a German policeman named Hess, a friend of Bruno Lohse. All of them were armed.
Lefranc had left in situ at the château as his deputy a man called Jean Petit, a “blatant profiteer” who had been sacked from the CGQ J in November 1942 for embezzlement, but whom Lefranc rehired for this “extremely special case, for which the services of the Commissariat could not find a replacement trustee willing to assume my duties.”41 Darquier later blamed Lefranc for this “clumsy” appointment.
At 8:15 that evening René Bousquet, in Vichy, rang Antignac in Paris, absolutely forbidding the removal of anything from the château, and most particularly the crates containing the Schloss collection. In the morning the rue Lauriston gang struck. Taking Petit and the Schloss collection with them, and much else that had been hidden in the same cellars—for the bombproof cellars also contained “stores of considerable value, much of it Jewish property” (Toulouse-Lautrec, Vuillard, Bon-nard…)—the bogus French policemen hared off, pursued by the French police, who had warned headquarters. The truck was stopped by a roadblock at Masseret, on the way to Limoges. German and French officials, high and low, converged on the roadblock. One of the two SS men who turned up gave his word of honour that the truck would be delivered to the Vichy police in Limoges. But a very short distance from Masseret, the Gestapo diverted the truck first to a German villa, then next day to a German army base. At each stop French and Germans exchanged threats and insults.
Laval summoned Darquier, whether in person or on the phone is not known, but Darquier, as ever, followed their conversation with a long letter of “explanation” on 21 April. As he and Lefranc had finalised matters with Lohse only one week before, this letter is an exceptional example of Louis Darquier's mastery of lies and fabrication. “I immediately wrote to Lohse,” lied Darquier to Laval, “that I intended to have brought to Paris an important collection of paintings, but that I could only do so if the Occupying authorities gave me assurances that [they] would give up all rights…Dr. Lohse replied…giving his formal agreement.” Darquier lied to Laval that “the events that arose”—the robbery by the rue Lauriston Gestapo—“particularly surprised me.”42 Lefranc, he assured Laval, was “a qualified expert whose honour is above all suspicion.” He blamed the unhappy episode on an abuse of power by a subordinate, and promised Laval that the crates would be returned to the Château de Chambon.
Six days later, Darquier being “unavailable,” Antignac received orders to return the paintings to Chambon. At this point Laval intervened. On 24 April the Schloss collection arrived, was accepted by and secured at the Banque de France in Limoges. On 4 May Lefranc, still the authorised provisional administrator for the Schloss collection, arrived to value it, expressing Goering's interest in it.
By April 1943, violent criticism was raining upon Laval from every quarter. Pétain continued to plot against him; in Vichy he was surrounded by rumours and intrigues. Germany demanded a further 220,000 workers. In Paris the collabos flourished their uniforms and their pens, schemed and paraded angrily through the streets. Outside Paris, the Milice began their civil war with the Resistance. Defeat, and so murder, was in the air. Laval desperately needed anything that would please Hitler. On 5 April he gave Blum, Reynaud, Daladier, Mandel and Gamelin—kept imprisoned by Vichy since their trial at Riom
a year before—to the Germans, who incarcerated them in Buchenwald. Laval had to borrow heavily from the Banque de France to pay the German Occupation costs, and so the Schloss collection stayed in its vaults, and became one of Laval's bargaining tools. Some estimated its worth at fifty million francs, though Darquier told Laval that one painting alone was worth that much.
Once Bousquet knew of the attempt to steal the collection, the French police became involved. Von Behr was moved away from art plunders and told to devote himself to furniture. Negotiations passed from Rosenberg's ERR—and Darquier's control—to the embassy. On 26 April Schleier sent a telegram to Dr. Erhard Göpel, in charge of Hitler's Linz museum, who had been appointed to examine the Schloss collection. Schleier's chosen scenario was that Hitler should have first pick; then Goering could get the leftovers.
Darquier may have lost his 25 percent, but he kept some irons in the fire. It was his CGQ J that would do the deal, whichever German got the collection. At worst, the CGQ J would still legally get 10 percent of the take. Lefranc was yet to get his commission, and it is more than probable that Darquier came to a private agreement with him. Until August he sailed on, hoping to please Laval and to provide Hitler with this “gigantic coup for Linz.”43 Losing out were Lohse, with his huge commission, and Goering, speechless. And so, from April through the summer of 1943, Louis Darquier partied and pontificated at one or another of his dinners, banquets or propaganda institutes, and the great paintings lay in vaults in Limoges.
While they bickered over the Schloss collection, the Germans capitu lated in North Africa, Jean Moulin held the first, secret, meeting of the National Council of the Resistance in Paris, and de Gaulle arrived in Algeria to begin his last battle with Roosevelt and Churchill over the place of France in their version of a new Europe. Twelve months ahead lay D-Day and the Liberation of France. Laval needed every old master he could lay his hands on.
19
D-Day
IN NEUILLY LOUISE DARQUIER, like her compatriots, knew the war was not going well for the Third Reich. “We are standing at the edge of a terrible volcano. How is it all going to end? Life is becoming very hard here. On some days there are no vegetables.”1 After the German army took over the Vichy Zone Hitler ordered the deportation of all Jews, French and stateless, but he did not change his arrangements with Vichy. The myth of Vichy independence still held good; it remained a sovereign state. The major change was the presence of the Gestapo, but not in great numbers: Hitler's army was stretched to breaking point on the Russian front and in North Africa, and later in Italy. In France only Bousquet's police could keep order for Germany; only they could send more Jews to the death camps.
In 1942 nearly forty-two thousand Jews had been sent to death. It was obvious by this time that no one came back from deportations; there were no letters. After that December no rolling stock was available for deportations, but on 9 February 1943 the convoys began again, taking 126 children, one of them only two years old. Vichy remained recalcitrant about French Jews, and without them they could not fulfil Eichmann's requirements. Eichmann came to Paris again in February to make sure they would do so. Röthke, Dannecker's successor at the Judenreferat, stated that with Vichy “only duress will bring results.”2 But Bousquet's raids in February 1943 were seamlessly efficient, and by March the tally was up to forty-nine thousand, but the census told the Germans there were a further 270,000 Jews at large. They, and Louis Darquier, believed there were thousands more than this, particularly in the south.
There were two possible sources of supply. Vichy and the Nazis constantly urged Mussolini to apply French laws in the Italian zone. Mussolini would concur, but he, his police and government officials would, energetically, do nothing. By 1943 Röthke believed that fifty thousand Jews had fled to the Italian zone for safety; something between fifteen and twenty thousand Jews were certainly there, many of them in Nice. Henri Schloss was one of them, and Darquier was acting illegally when he sent his police to Nice to arrest him.
Darquier's solution was the withdrawal of citizenship from the estimated fifty thousand Jews naturalised between 1927 and 1932. His draft law specified that their wives and children should be included. He believed that with the law of 1927 (the year of his Antwerp disgrace) the international Jewish conspiracy had sent in a specific species of Jew to corrupt France, and take her into the “Jewish war.” All these thoughts he presented time and again to Vichy, embedded in proposals for the pursuit, discovery and elimination of half-Jews, for if half-Jews were added to the quota, the trains would overflow.
Jean Armilhon, the CGQ J's legal director, prepared Darquier's 1927 denaturalisation law, and a bill about half-Jews which Darquier presented to Laval on 31 December 1942, just as German pressure had forced Laval to give him the money he had been demanding from Vichy for so many months. This bill was not even discussed at Vichy. What they assented to was the public identification of Jews in the south. The yellow star was never adopted, but in December 1942 Vichy passed a law which required all Jews—French and foreign—to have the word “Juif ” or “Juive” stamped on their identity cards. This, as good a ticket to Auschwitz as any census or star, was the only proposal of Louis Darquier's ever accepted by Vichy.
From January to April 1943, Laval, procrastinating and haggling as only he could, continued to avoid Darquier and his bill. During this time Nazi persecution became indiscriminate and brutal for every dissident, not only Jews. Denunciations became rampant; a cross neighbour offended by anything, real or imaginary, could be the gateway to Drancy. Nevertheless Röthke and Knochen had to work within a restraining Vichy framework. Jewish children could still go, warily, to school, and synagogues remained open for their communities until 1944.
These exceptions, and Laval, who “allowed things to drag on for months,”3 enraged Knochen and Röthke, and made them desperate. Life became perilous for everyone, because if the SS acted swiftly and randomly they could, and did, ignore Vichy laws. On one occasion in February 1943 the French police rounded up stateless Jews—some aged sixty and over, more than forty orphaned children, and thirty sick—to replace French Jews the Germans had targeted to go. The Germans accepted them as additions, not replacements, and sent them all to Auschwitz.
Vichy now thought Germany would lose the war, and Knochen told Eichmann's superior, Heinrich Müller in Berlin, that Vichy would “not allow any other measures against Jews in order to show the Americans that France does not follow the instructions of the German government.”4 As French resistance grew, so did reprisals. But culprits were becoming harder and harder to find. Ordinary citizens, the elderly and sick—Jews in their eighties and nineties and psychiatric patients—went to Auschwitz in 1943.
Bousquet began his year of reprisals by working alongside the SS to raze the old port at Marseille. This round-up produced nearly six thousand prostitutes, criminals, relief workers and Jews, French and foreign. As the desperation of the Germans grew, so Bousquet clung to his safety blanket, Vichy law: in this last year of his control, as it weakened, his tally was 17,069 Jews sent to the death chambers, of whom 1,816 were children. Only 466 were still alive in 1945. This was less than half his toll for 1942.
By March the gas chambers of Auschwitz were overloaded, so the next four convoys were taken to Sobibor. In April the first Milicien was killed by the Resistance, and Bousquet signed his second agreement with Oberg, extending the rights of his French police throughout France. At the same time—a quid pro quo?—Röthke demanded the deportation of eight to ten thousand Jews a week. But Bousquet could no longer always keep his troops in line. By early 1943 the sullen fury of the French population had become a dull roar of disillusion; French police were faced with fighting their fellow French now, not only résistants and the Maquis but also thousands escaping compulsory labour service, the STO. If given a quota to fill, they would fill it; they liked to arrest by list, and they would arrest foreign Jews, but French police unwillingness saved many in 1943.
Bousquet, however, had
to provide Knochen with a minimum of forty thousand Jews before the end of the year. On 1 April he presented his law to the Germans, proposing denaturalising Jews who had taken French citizenship after 1 January 1932. This would provide twenty thousand Jews. Ignoring Darquier, Bousquet's draft law was sent directly to German command, in a document Laval requested to be sent to Hitler and which “must not be taken,” Bousquet stated—seemingly unaware of how much such an attitude might please a vast number of German officials—“as a personal attack on Darquier.”5 Two weeks later, Darquier was removed as president of his UFDR. Louis went into vicious battle. He was at the top of his form: he had just discovered the Schloss collection.
Berlin replied on 21 May instructing Oberg to reject Bousquet's version of the new law, and to adopt Darquier's. To emphasise the point, on 1 June, on Himmler's instructions, Eichmann sent Aloïs Brunner, an SS captain armed with full powers from Himmler, to bring the French into line. Taking his orders direct from Berlin, Brunner began to edge Bousquet out. He always used his own SS men, to whom he would add ruffians from the collaborationist parties in Paris—Doriot's and Bucard's fascists, and Darquier's SEC.
Brunner's arrival came at the time when refuseniks from Laval's STO were swelling the ranks of the Maquis, although Darnand's Milice, after five months of action, was providing the Germans with ferocious support in the fight against the Resistance. The Germans began to lose confidence in Bousquet, once their favourite and most “precious collaborator.”6 Röthke rallied behind Darquier, demanding support for his 1927 law. There were more luncheons at l'écu de France. The anti-Semitic and collaborationist brotherhood of Paris rallied round, their newspapers pillorying Laval.
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