LE: No. I'm not a prosecutor. And I'm not a Nazi-hunter. I have come to see you to try to understand what goes on in a mind like yours after thirty-six years. That's all I'm after.
LD: You are an agent of Tel Aviv.
LE: An agent of Tel Aviv, should he be interested in you, would not waste time asking you these questions.
LD: Anyway, you're the one who is wasting time. I've nothing to tell you.
LE: You've still got it wrong. You have already taught me something essential: you are a rather unique case. You don't say: “I had my orders. I carried them out.” Your position doesn't seem to have changed one iota since 1942.
LD: You think the Jewish question dates from 1942! No, the Jewish question has been a problem for a thousand years… Since the Middle Ages, the West and Christianity have fought against the creeping stranglehold of the Jews. The yellow star—we didn't invent it. If it proved necessary as far back as the twelfth century to make Jews eat pork, it was for a good reason. As for our recent history, it was entirely governed by the search for a solution to the Jewish problem.
Look, here is a question: Have you ever wondered why we had to wait so long for the application of the Balfour Declaration? Have you counted the wars, counted the deaths that have got us to the position we are in today: the settling of the Jews on disputed territory? When the Marshal put me in charge of the Commission for Jewish Affairs, I determined on one fixed end. A humanitarian end, please note: to make the situation of French Jews as comfortable as possible.
LE: You're not serious. Who do you hope will believe that?
LD: I forgot that you are one of those unhappy victims of Jewish propaganda. And Jewish propaganda has always been based on lies. Always…Always…I tell you again, that during the months when I was minister, I spent most of my time trying to protect Jews from trouble. I'm talking of French Jews, that goes without saying. I'll take an example. Between ourselves, do you think it was necessary to deport the Debré family?
LE: No. Absolutely not. Neither the Debrés, nor anyone else…
LD: The father Debré was half-Jewish, that is well known. What is more, these people had a record of service. They were Jews who had chosen France. To deport them would have been profoundly unjust. I've cited that case, but there were many others. Generally speaking, I wanted to keep French Jews out of it.
LE: It is certainly true that in the month of February 1943, you proposed to the Vichy government a certain number of measures which the Germans themselves had not even dreamt of.
Declaration of Louis Darquier de Pellepoix to Le Petit Parisien,
1 February 1943.
I propose to the government:
To institute the obligatory wearing of the yellow star in the Non-Occupied Zone.
To prohibit Jews, without any exception, access to, and the exercise of, public office. Whatever the intellectual worth of, and the services rendered by, any individual Jew, he is nonetheless Jewish and by that very fact brings into government organisations where he has a position not only a natural resistance to Aryanisation, but also an attitude that in the long term profoundly alters the effectiveness of our French administration.
The withdrawal of French nationality from all Jews who acquired it after 1927 …
LD: I don't remember anything about this story of the yellow star in the free zone. It must be another example of your Jewish propaganda…
LE: Absolutely not. It is there in black and white in Le Petit Parisien of 1 February 1943.
LD: Perhaps… perhaps…In any event it was a mistake. Because you know, contrary to what has been so often said, the yellow star was not popular.
LE: And was the denaturalisation of the Jews an error?
LD: That, oh no! That was definitely my responsibility…
LE: Your predecessor at the commission, Xavier Vallat, otherwise considered too soft by the German authorities, had fixed upon 1932 as the final date for naturalisation; before that date—in principle—no one could be affected by the racial laws.* You put it back to 1927.
LD: But of course. There had to be more!
LE: More deported Jews, is that it?
LD: Of course. We had to get rid of those foreigners, those wogs, at any price, and of the thousands of stateless persons who were the source of all our problems. They wanted the war. They led us into it. It was vital to get rid of them. As quickly as possible, as far away as possible. I fixed upon that as my second aim when I took up my responsibilities: to send all those people back to their own country to do the damage there that they had tried to do to our country!
LE: What do you mean, their own country? In 1942, Jews did not have a fatherland.
LD: I mean—over there, I don't know where, in Poland. The idea was to give them land somewhere over there. Then they would no longer be
* This was a purely formal law: in practice, from the month of March 1941, the French police arrested Jews who had been French since 1897, to hand them over to the Germans! (PG-R)
stateless people! That is what I wanted: the end of the wandering Jew. So that at last, after two thousand years, those people would no longer be foreigners wherever they were.
LE: This is stupefying. You are not far short of telling me that Auschwitz is in line with the Balfour Declaration!
LD: Auschwitz…Auschwitz…You know, there have been too many stories about Auschwitz! It's time to begin to face up to what really happened there.
LE: A million dead. Amongst them, innumerable children. All gassed.
LD: No, no, no…You'll never make me believe that. Here we are again with the satanic Jewish propaganda which has spread and encouraged this myth. I tell you again, Jews are always ready to do anything to get themselves talked about, to make themselves interesting, to complain. I'll tell you exactly what happened at Auschwitz. They used gas. Yes. That's true. But they gassed the lice.
LE: What are you trying to say?
LD: I am saying that when the Jews arrived at the camp, they were made to take their clothes off, as is normal, before being taken to shower. During that time, their clothes were disinfected. After the war, the Jews circulated photographs everywhere, showing piles of dirty linen in shreds. And they wailed… “Look,” they said, “there are the clothes of our brothers who have been exterminated.” That was a lie, absolutely. But what do you expect; the Jews are like that. They just have to tell lies.
LE: I was right in saying that you are a one-off. Even Eichmann did not deny the existence of the Final Solution. You do. Nonetheless, you were well aware of it.
Internal memo from the Central Security Office of the Reich 1VB4, 11 June 1942.
A conference took place attended by, besides the undersigned SS Hauptsturmführer Dannecker, those responsible for the Jewish sections in Brussels and La Haye. Object: This summer, military reasons prevent the departure of German Jews to the
zone of operation in the east. And so the Reichsführer SS has ordered the transfer of the largest number of Jews from south-west Europe or the Occupied regions in the west, to the concentration camp of Auschwitz. The essential condition is that Jews, of both sexes, must be between sixteen and forty years of age. These convoys can include 10 per cent of Jews unfit for work.
Decision: It has been agreed that fifteen thousand Jews will be deported from the Low Countries, ten thousand from Belgium and 100,000 from France, including the Non-Occupied Zone.
LE: You don't find that this simple text, which automatically landed in your office, is a barely veiled implication of the Final Solution?
LD: No. I repeat. The Final Solution is an invention, pure and simple. Do you know anyone who has ever seen what they call a gas chamber?
LE: The millions of survivors of Auschwitz. Not to mention the Allied Commissions of Inquiry after the war, and all the visitors to the museum at Auschwitz. Myself, amongst others.
LD: Your gas chamber was invented after the event. You won't get me to change my mind.
LE: That's true. You won't change your
mind. Now, these photos. You've already seen them? (I try to make him look at photographs showing the bodies of women and children that have just come out of the gas chamber. He turns away.)
LD: I don't even want to look at them. They're fakes. You know, I'm very well informed. I know that after the war the Jews invented thousands of lies, and as I told you before, they have intoxicated the whole world with their fabrications. You are only one of their millions of victims.
LE: Good. Now, could you tell me where these people come from? (I turn over the pages of Klarsfeld's book in front of him, a kind of directory of the deportations.) What became of the one thousand deportees of the convoy no. 33—I take this example from among others—who left the station at Drancy on 11 September 1942? What became of Daniel Belchatowski, ten years old, Solange Grinsztein, two years old, Raymond Hubermann, seven years old?
LD: How do you think I know? It wasn't my job to know what happened to Jews afterwards. My work was exclusively administrative. I was a senior French civil servant. I always made sure that the Jewish problem in France should be resolved by the French. And, believe me, it wasn't easy. You had always to navigate between Pierre Laval and that raving idiot Dannecker. Between those two, it was almost impossible to do one's job well. If I had to do it again, I tell you straight, I would refuse.
LE: Your reply raises several questions. Here is the first: what exactly do you mean by doing one's job well?
LD: To separate the wheat from the chaff. To protect French Jews, as I have already said. Apart from that, I shall surprise you. Do you know that I had many Jewish friends? Later, they thought it better to cut me dead. That's life. I don't hold it against them. All the more so because some of them helped me; I'll tell you about that later. To return to your question, to do my job well consisted in preventing the Germans from interfering in Jewish affairs. If they had done so it would have been a catastrophe.
The Marshal and President Laval took a fortunate decision in giving M. Darquier de Pellepoix the Commission for Jewish Affairs… There are those who sometimes say that our struggle against the Jews is only a pale copy of German racism. Fools! Don't they know that a true, pure Frenchman, and Darquier is one such, has nothing to learn from anyone in this respect.
André Chaumet, vice-president of the Association of Anti-Jewish Journalists.
LE: Second question. Pierre Laval. What were your relations with him?
LD: Very cordial.
LE: Nevertheless, he had you arrested on 26 February 1944, for “irregularities in the administration of sequestered estates.”
LD: No! Not at all! Where did you get hold of that? Laval never had me arrested. We had words sometimes, that is true, but Laval was a splendid fellow, he did his job very well. They tell many stories about Laval. One recent account was that he was a Portuguese Jew. What a lie! He was ugly, that's true. Good Lord, that man was ugly! But he wasn't Jewish for a minute. He had the ugly head of the typical Auvergnat, that's the truth of it. Besides, I often called him “ugly old Auvergnat,” and he wasn't offended by it. It was the same with Pétain. They say everywhere that Pétain opposed my actions, that he hated me. But, first, it was he who nominated me to the commissariat, and secondly, he never disapproved of me. Each time I went to see him, as soon as he saw me in the distance he would call out: “Look, here comes my torturer!” But that was a joke. What's more, he laughed. And that did not prevent him from shaking my hand. As for Laval, he was a good man, very hard-working, very competent. Unfortunately, one must be frank, he knew nothing about the Jewish question.
LE: We'll get to details soon. Dannecker…
LD: He was mentally ill. I never stopped having trouble with him.
LE: What kind of trouble?
LD: Well, he couldn't help himself: every time he saw a German Jew on a list, he did everything he could to save him from deportation! Never did stateless Jews have a better ally.
Telegram from Dannecker to Berlin, 6 July 1942, summarising his discussion with Eichmann of 1 July on the subject of future round-ups:
For the moment there is no question of arresting any but expatriate and foreign Jews. In a second phase, we will get on to Jews naturalised in France since 1919 or 1927.
LE: On the contrary, it seems to me that you got on very well with Dannecker. All the documents prove it.
LD: Absolutely not. The Germans never stopped putting a spoke in my wheels.
LE: Well, what is the significance of this note of 29 May 1943, sent by Röthke, Dannecker's successor, to Knochen: “Several times, Darquier has asked us to apply his draft legislation, because for a long time now he has lost all hope of the French government accepting even one of them.”
LD: That's another lie! A lie made up after the event by the Jews! Oh, these Jews! They're priceless! They'll do anything to invent a scapegoat. They have made me into a character out of a novel. They want to blame me for absolutely everything! I, who helped them so much! But they've not succeeded. Besides, it would have been very difficult to get me, because I've died twice.
LE: How is that?
LD: I'll tell you…In 1944, when everything had begun to break up, I began to think of my own safety. A friend took me to Toulouse, another to Bordeaux, and a third got me into Spain. And then, the Liberation arrived. 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. To continue—in brief. They shot this poor unfortunate in my place. Then, some years went by. They discovered that I was well and truly living. Then they condemned me to death in my absence on 10 December 1947. They could not do otherwise. (He laughs a little.) Since then, let me tell you, they have left me in blissful peace.
LE: They never asked for your extradition?
LD: Never. What on earth are you thinking of ? I would add that until the recent past I always maintained the best relations with the French ambassador in Madrid. We saw each other often. I sometimes went to their receptions.
On 27 August 1978, the spokesman for the Minister of Justice told me: “In fact, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix was condemned to death in absentia on 10 December 1947 for collaboration with the enemy. Under the statute of limitations his punishment lapsed in 1968. Only the ban on living in France is maintained for life.”
LE: If I've got it right, the originator of the Vel' d'Hiv' round-up of July 1942 has not been brought to book for crimes against humanity.
LD: First, I had nothing to do with the Vel' d'Hiv' round-up, as you call it. It was decided upon much earlier. I had been commissioner for only a few weeks. I knew nothing.
LE: What is terrible about you is that you never stop telling outrageous lies, so that whoever begins to ask you for simple information is obliged to turn into an accuser. You had not been commissioner for only a few weeks. You had been at the head of anti-Jewish repression since the month of May. More than two months! And you had already taken decisions which surprised even the Germans!
LD: The Vel' d'Hiv' round-up, it's funny that you want to talk to me about that. It was Bousquet who organised the Vel' d'Hiv' round-up. From A to Z. Bousquet was the chief of police. It was he who did everything. And you know how Bousquet ended up? He only got five years of national indignity. He had helped the Resistance! What a farce! And he ended up the director of the Bank of Indochina. Oh, he wangled things very well, Bousquet! Whatever, it was he who organised everything.
LE: Forgive me for talking to you like a policeman. What did you do on the days of 16 and 17 July 1942?
LD: What's so special about 16 and 17 July 1942?
LE: The Vel' d'Hiv' round-up. Thousands of men, women and children were crammed into the Vélodrome d'Hiver before being sent to Auschwitz.
LD: It will be easy for you to understand that I do not remember
precisely what I was doing on those days. But, in all probability, I went to my office to get on with current business. Always, always, administrative work.
LE: You did not go to the Vel' d'Hiv' to see what was going on?
LD: Certainly not! Why would I go there? I repeat that it was Bousquet who was in charge of all that.
Minutes of a conference in the avenue Foch, 4 July 1942.
Present were: Standartenführer Dr. Knochen, SS Hauptsturmführer
Dannecker, SS Obersturmführer Schmidt. French representatives:
Bousquet, Secretary of State for the Police, Darquier de Pellepoix,
French Commissioner for Jewish Affairs.
…A commission must be set up by the French including a representative of Jewish Affairs, a representative of the Secretary of State for the Police…Bousquet stated immediately that the management of the Commission must be in the hands of the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs…It must be noted that at this point Darquier de Pellepoix almost gave the impression of being appalled at the idea of accepting such a responsibility.
LD: Oh well! Someone had to do the work. If it hadn't been me, it would have been someone else. A German perhaps.
LE: You belonged to the Germans. It was they who put you in the job.
LD: Another fairy tale. It was the Marshal who appointed me. In full knowledge of the reason. He knew very well that only I—as well as a few others—was capable of achieving success in the anti-Jewish struggle within the context of French law.
LE: That did not ever stop you from going to complain to the Germans when the Vichy government were too timorous and rejected your proposals.
LD: Lies! Lies! Monstrous lies! You have no right to say such a thing! You are free to be deluded by Jewish propaganda, but at a certain point…
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