Bad Faith

by Carmen Callil

  Encounters could become all-out battles; in March, on the plateau of Glières in the Alps, the Gestapo and the Milice fought nearly five hundred Maquisards. In 1944 nothing but treachery, torture and death stopped the Resistance, and by May résistants and Maquis had gathered together as the Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur, the FFI, the final Resistance force against Germany. They were massacred, assassinated, shot in the back, tipped into pits and down wells, executed in those lonely spots you can still find everywhere in the French countryside, marked by a stèle. Miliciens,if caught, died savagely too. And nothing stopped the freight trains: after April 1944, Knochen gave up on Vichy and gave instructions that all Jews, whatever their nationality, were to go. Within the eight months left to them in 1944 another 14,833 Jews were deported: 9,902 were gassed on arrival; 1,289 were found alive a year later.

  Aloïs Brunner was particularly keen on taking children, and nearly 2,500 were sent to death camps in 1944. Brunner, the SS and Vichy's Mil-ice did the work: they raided prisons and camps, hospitals, hotels and apartments, old people's homes. Children's homes and Jewish institutions for the children of the deported became an easy target; informers made a fortune. In April 1944, at an isolated farmhouse in Izieu, near Lyon, Klaus Barbie's men “cleaned out” forty-five children, at breakfast with their carers. “They seemed to have become little old people,” wrote one Jewish survivor of Auschwitz who watched the children arrive. “They did not seem to cry, but wore a fearfully resigned expression, as if they understood better than we what was going to happen.”39 There were eleven homes for orphans run by UGIF in Paris. The Gestapo raided eight of them, and took off 258 children and their thirty adult carers. Two hundred and thirty-two of these children went on one of the last convoys to Auschwitz, on 31 July 1944. There were 1,300 people on this train; none of the children survived.

  The Allies had been announcing their imminent arrival in France daily: “Each night, each day the relentless Anglo-American bombers cut down our young in thousands, destroy our houses, set our towns on fire, destroy our cathedrals and museums,” wailed the collaborationist magazine Le Nouvelliste de Neuilly. 40 Allied bombing of Paris and other major French cities in March, in April, in May, increased German terror and reprisals. The population starved, died, and were advised not to eat cat.

  Pétain made his only visit to Paris on 21 April, after a raid which killed or wounded over a thousand Parisians and damaged the Sacré Cœur. From the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville he addressed an ecstatic crowd, roaring for what the Hero of Verdun had represented in better times. Louis and Myrtle were still in Paris. Louis was still a city councillor, and it seems still living well at the Hôtel Bristol. Though he had not left the CGQ J with a Goya or a Rembrandt, he was still in funds. In Paris, approaching nemesis meant little to his fellow anti-Semites and fascists, whose faith in their cause never wavered. On 3 May all of them gathered for one final demonstration, to celebrate the centenary of the birth of édouard Drumont, their prophet, fittingly held at the cemetery of Père-Lachaise. Henry Coston organised the event, and every pillar of the anti-Semitic and fascist community was present. Louis Darquier, on speaking terms with nobody, was not.

  As the vast Allied armada prepared for the D-Day landings sailed from southern English ports on 4 June 1944, Louis' activities were already under investigation. Secretaries at the CGQ J were arrested and documents seized.41 On 1 June the police noted that Louis Darquier had applied to open an Office of Genealogy at 1, rue de Caumartin in the 9th arrondissement. Céline, much more intelligent, had already begun to go about with a pistol, and by D-Day had fled to Baden-Baden. Throughout June, in Action française Maurras commanded what was left of his public: “Discipline! Obey!” stand up with the “rare and sublime” Marshal against the “Gaullo-Communists” descending upon la patrie. 42

  In the east the Russian army was advancing inexorably towards Berlin. On 6 June, “the longest day,” the supreme commander of the Allied forces General Eisenhower broadcast to the French people, and eight hours later General de Gaulle was permitted to proclaim that the final battle for his country had begun, while Pétain told his subjects to be calm and accept the “special circumstances” the German army might have to impose.

  After the beach landings in Normandy, at Capestang, in the Hérault, at Tulle, at Oradour-sur-Glane near Limoges, SS detachments massacred village populations in retaliation; women and children were burnt alive in the Oradour village church. Over six hundred Maquisards were bombed to death on the plateau of Vercors.

  The Resistance was taking over; in the Lot, they controlled the entire department except for Cahors. Philippe Henriot now broadcast on radio twice a day; “the French Goebbels” they called him, though he called himself the Voice of France. He was the Lord Haw-Haw of Vichy, a mesmeric performer; everyone listened to him, and mealtimes were moved so families could hear him speak. After D-Day, as the Allied armies slowly fought their way inland from the Normandy beaches, his broadcasts grew in vitriol. Anti-Semitic always, he was violent too about de Gaulle, Moscow, London, Washington and the descending “liberators,” for by 14 June both Churchill and de Gaulle had visited their troops in France.

  Henriot kept a special poison for his own people, the “communists and terrorists” of the Resistance. In this he was still faithful to his Church, for the four senior cardinals of France, however much they wavered as Pétain's “renewal of France” turned to ashes around him, remained united to the end in their condemnation of the Resistance and of General de Gaulle. His victory, they believed, would open the gates to communism. Cardinal Gerlier's dislike of de Gaulle was compounded by his being distantly related to him.

  On 28 June the Resistance invaded Henriot's apartment in Paris and shot him dead. Xavier Vallat took over his broadcasts, calling the Catholic faithful to cleave to the Marshal until the very end, by which time his voice was frantic, for in July 1944 de Gaulle had granted an audience to the Pope. Henriot was accorded a state funeral. His body lay in state at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, and his funeral provided the last great gathering of Pétain's faithful as Cardinal Suhard celebrated his Mass for the Dead at Notre Dame, attended by officers of German command. In reprisal for Henriot's death, on 7 July the Milice lifted Georges Mandel from Santé prison, took him to the forest of Fontainebleau and executed him. There was no Mass for Mandel; he was one of Pétain's French Jews.

  At his trial after the war, Pétain attributed all his worst actions to his desire to shield France and its people from the ravages of Nazi rule. Yet every town and village in France is marked by what he did. Today his name is obliterated, hidden under the thousands of rues du 18 Juin 1940 and 25 Août 1944 you can see all over France. Vichy, which denies every public sign of his presence, provides the richest trawl. A very short walk from Louis' headquarters at the Hôtel Algeria is Le Petit Casino. This became the detention centre for the Milice, where they tortured French résistants. When the city was liberated in 1944, the lift of the Petit Casino was found to be full of blood.

  In one sense the years 1940 to 1944, for the French people, had little to do with the world war raging outside their occupied territory, but much to do with what the French did to the French, and how they ended the long civil war which had begun with the Revolution in 1789. Both Pétain and Laval were guilty men, but the passing of time has been kinder to Laval's less hypocritical chicanery. Pétain's reputation was a gift from his people: his rock-solid hypocrisy, and the terrible use he made of his people's trust, gives him the edge in villainy. France was tragically unlucky to have either, and both, of them. The Vichy France which allowed Louis Darquier full scope for his activities was essentially the product of the governance of both, but there was only one man who continued in power throughout the Vichy years, from 16 June 1940 to 17 August 1944: Marshal Pétain.

  V

  SOME PEOPLE

  20

  The Family

  LOUIS DARQUIER took his time; he did not leave France until the Liberation, and then on
ly when his assassination was announced. Almost every member of the Vichy government and the collabos of Paris left before him. The Allied armies landed between Cannes and Toulouse in August 1944, and met the D-Day troops near Dijon in September. Battle casualties were severe, northern French towns were bombed to smithereens and something approaching fifty thousand French civilians died as the Allies advanced through France.

  But the French were also killing each other. After D-Day, the civil war became savage. In early August, finally, Pétain complained to Laval about the atrocities: his Milice had become “Frenchmen delivering their own compatriots to the Gestapo.” Darnand's reply was Vichy's epitaph: “In the course of these four years…you encouraged me. And today, because the Americans stand at the gates of Paris, you start to tell me that I shall be the stain on the history of France? It is something which might have been thought of earlier.”1

  Throughout France the Germans too were fighting, killing Allied soldiers and the French, shredding papers, burning files, emptying their rooms and offices, and packing their cases to depart. By 17 August street fighting had broken out in Paris; on the same day, in the lovely summer weather, Karl Epting gave a farewell party at the Deutsche Institut, and Aloïs Brunner left Drancy for the last time, taking with him fifty-one Jews, headed for Buchenwald. Some of these Jews escaped, and ten survived. One who did not was the twelve-year-old son of the director of the Rothschild Hospital, Georges-André Kohn, who was sent on to another camp for medical experiments. On 20 April 1945, with twenty other Jewish children, he was hanged in the cellar of a school in Hamburg.

  By 1944 the “system of children's control” had reached its peak: “Every day brings us new tragedies… the manager of our Brout-Vernet home has been arrested together with his babies, one of six and the other of two years… sent to Drancy from where there is but one way… please continue to do your utmost… yesterday we had to pay the boarding of four thousand kids”—desperate letters such as this reached the British Foreign Office in February 1944. 2

  The last French convoy left Clermont-Ferrand on 22 August, making the year's total fifteen thousand Jews. By the time the Nazis stopped gassing Jews in Auschwitz, on 20 November 1944, 523 men and 766 women of this convoy were left alive. Despite the efforts of so many German and French officials, the Vichy state finally deported something between seventy-five and seventy-six thousand of the 850,000 Jews they believed to be living in France, less than a quarter of the actual Jewish community. Over seventy thousand were sent to Auschwitz, and well over half of them were gassed on arrival; only 2,564 survivors returned to France.

  Céline saw his great friend Georges Montandon for the last time in June. By September Céline, his wife and his cat Bébert had found sanctuary in Sigmaringen in southwest Germany. Before then, on 17 August the Germans informed Pétain that he was to be taken “to the east.” Pétain would not go. On 20 August German troops surrounded and broke into the Hôtel du Parc, forced the Marshal's door with crowbars and escorted him downstairs. As a small crowd sang the “Marseillaise” he was put into a convoy of German cars and, in civilian clothes, was whisked away to an unknown destination. He told his German keeper Cecil von Renthke-Fink that matters had descended into “farce, a slapstick comedy”; his last message to his people told them, once again, to obey, and to remember his sacrifices on their behalf.3 Within a week the Hôtel du Parc was in use for courts-martial.

  Meanwhile, in Paris, as politely as possible, Abetz gave Laval his marching orders, leading to what was probably their first row. Laval would not go, and nor would his ministers. On 15 August the French police joined the metro workers and, finally, went on strike. Postal workers followed; Radio-Paris (German) went off the air, the collaborationist papers ceased publication. Earlier that month Hitler had sent a new military commander to Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz, with orders to defend the city or destroy it. The Germans left in trucks and trains, the Paris collabos in whatever they could lay their hands on, often together, in convoys. Doriot organised trucks; Coston hired a car. On 17 August Laval resigned his post and delegated powers to Taittinger and the Parisian préfets; they were to maintain order, receive the Allies and negotiate with von Choltitz.

  By the beginning of September Pétain and Laval, with their respective retinues, were in Germany, installed in the chocolate-box Hohenzollern Castle of Sigmaringen, perched above the Danube. Squeezed into the town below were the wives, children, mistresses, informers, criminals and refugees from the Vichy state. Overseen by Abetz, there they all stayed, quarrelling and plotting as before, attending Mass, with Céline in medical attendance noting every malevolent moment for posterity. (This led to arguably Céline's best book, D'un Château à l'autre, at once incomprehensible and perfectly clear, and always hilarious.)

  An army of Darquier's colleagues were at Sigmaringen: Fernand de Brinon, nominal head of government, Darnand, Déat, Jean Luchaire, Lucien Rebatet, Georges Oltramare, Marcel Bucard, Jean Bichelonne, Abel Bonnard. Nearby, Doriot hatched plots with Ribbentrop. Another selection of comrades—the remnants of the ten-thousand-strong French division of the German army, the Charlemagne Division of the Waffen SS, by this time cut to pieces on the Russian front—ended up in Berlin in April 1945, defending Hitler as he prepared to commit suicide in his bunker.

  Louis Darquier remained holed up with Myrtle in the Hôtel Bristol, watching as the Hôtel de Ville—his town hall—passed to his enemies. On 19 August barricades went up all over Paris and squabbling résistants— communist and non-communist—took to the streets. Taittinger raised the tricolore at the town hall, but to no avail: by Sunday the twentieth the Hôtel de Ville was occupied by the Resistance. Taittinger and his fellow councillors were whisked off to imprisonment by those French they had fought for decades: “men in armbands bearing a hammer and sickle.”4

  Von Choltitz received the final order to destroy Paris on 23 August— he had already received nine such instructions from Berlin—but he did nothing, considering Hitler to be deranged. At the same time General Eisenhower—more sympathetic than Churchill or Roosevelt to the symbolic importance of such a move—had authorised the French General Philippe Leclerc and his 2nd Armoured Division to be the first of the liberating forces to enter Paris, followed by the U.S. 4th Infantry. A unit of Leclerc's forces, escorted by the Resistance, greeted by ecstatic Parisians, reached the Hôtel de Ville on the evening of 24 August. By this time de Gaulle had contrived to get his way with the Allies and to establish his authority over all the Resistance groups.

  The next day, von Choltitz signed his surrender; de Gaulle arrived, and from the balcony of the town hall delivered his famous speech: “Paris! Paris humiliated! Paris shattered! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated, liberated by itself.” Amidst scenes of wild rejoicing, to the sounds of rolling tanks, the occasional rifle shot, accordions and harmonicas, American soldiers distributed chocolate and were showered with kisses and hugs.

  Taittinger was a close friend of the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Suhard; on 26 August de Gaulle led a victory parade down the Champs-élysées from the Arc de Triomphe to Notre Dame, where a thanksgiving service was held; Suhard was not permitted to attend. The rest of the cardinals and bishops got off lightly. While some of their obedient clergy were summarily executed, and the pro-Nazi chaplain Monseigneur Mayol de Lupé was imprisoned for five years, only a quarter of the Catholic hierarchy were indicted, of whom the Vatican allowed only a handful to be “resigned.” This clemency enraged a multitude of Catholic résistants, amongst them those of Cahors, where the rumour that Bishop Chevrier had been arrested proved false: he survived as archbishop until 1962. 5

  Men of the cloth might be spared, but for men like Louis Darquier the Liberation was the end of their world.6 At the CGQ J, “Antignac held a meeting to tell us that he no longer had any reason to be there, the Allies were at the gates of Paris and he disappeared.” The CGQ J was closed and sealed in early September. Pierre Galien had continued in the service of the Gestapo until May 1
944, and was arrested in September. He thought he had burnt all his files, but some were later discovered in his St.-Denis tyre factory. Joseph Antignac was arrested in November; the hapless staff well before that date.7

  French cities and towns were gradually liberated throughout the following month, and as the Resistance, including its formidable communist cadres, came to terms with a French government in the hands of de Gaulle, something like nine thousand collaborators were summarily executed before special courts were set up in September 1944. These illegal purges were wild and vicious, each community exercising its own rough justice in an épuration sauvage as the French civil war came to an end. Women thought to have copulated with Germans had their heads shorn in public for their collaboration horizontale, and sometimes they were paraded naked. Miliciens and collaborators were tortured and shot without trial.8Resistance newspapers first reported Louis Darquier's arrest on 8 September, and continued to do so for some months. In Bordeaux, in Brive, his execution was announced, usually coupled with the despatch of Admiral Platon. In London on 17 October, The Times reported that Darquier and Platon had been shot in Limoges. The next day The Times retracted; the reports were “premature.” The paper may well have been alerted to its error by the French charities which were still pursuing Louis for money for Anne. The French police remained suspicious, but at a press conference at the Ministry of Justice on 23 October, journalists reiterated that both Darquier and Platon were dead.9 Platon was indeed executed by the Resistance on 19 August 1944; perhaps, to these men, one of Pétain's monocled officials was the same as another.

  Louis' version of events tells some of the truth: “One fine day they fell upon someone who resembled me in a remarkable way. This was a completely hysterical period, you know. They arrested anyone, they fired indiscriminately. Anyway, they took this poor chap and the crowd cried, ‘It's Darquier! It's Darquier! Shoot him! ’ Just between ourselves, I have always thought that there must have been friends of mine in that crowd…They shot this poor unfortunate in my place …”10