LE: But you certainly wrote this: “I do not believe, in my soul and conscience, that the French state will be able to carry through this national revolution. What is necessary, and my French heart compels me to demand of you, Germans, that you take over the governance of France, and then let us act for ourselves.” You can search the archives of all of Occupied Europe, and not find another example of such servility towards the Nazis. You were begging for a Gauleiter!
LD: Quite the contrary. I was putting them off the scent. In making a pretence of following them, of anticipating their wishes, I was keeping in my hands (in French hands) the reins of the anti-Jewish struggle. Laval did not understand this strategy at all. He always put his foot in it as far as this was concerned…
LE: Let us return to the Vel' d'Hiv' round-up.
LD: If you wish. But I have truly nothing more to add.
LE: Yes. The children. I have a document here. A Gestapo note. Annotated by Dannecker.
LD: That fool!
LE: This note is the German translation of your report after the round-up in the Vel' d'Hiv'. You complain that only 8,980 persons were arrested. And Dannecker has written in the margin: “This proves Darquier's industry very well.” And then further down he adds: “More than four thousand children.” Sir, what became of those children?
LD: This was not I…I was not responsible…It was Laval. I'm tired out telling you that he understood nothing about the Jewish question. You know what Laval did? When we talked to him about a mass deportation, he said: “Above all, do not separate the children from their mothers.” It was he who insisted that the children should be deported with their parents. A stupidity. I wanted the children to be taken into care.
LE: Perfectly true.
Urgent telegram from Dannecker to Berlin (addressee unknown)
summarising Laval's position, 6 July 1942.
The negotiations with the French government have concluded today with the following results: President Laval has proposed that with the deportation of Jewish families from the Occupied Zone, it should include children aged less than sixteen years old. The question of Jewish children remaining in the Occupied Zone does not interest him. I beg you to take a decision urgently and tell me, by telegram, whether children under sixteen years of age can also be deported, beginning with the fifteenth Jewish convoy…
LD: There, you see: it wasn't me. LE: I notice that you don't contest this document. And this?
First meeting of the Organising Committee for the round-ups.
Present at this meeting: Dannecker, Heinrichsohn, Darquier de
Pellepoix, etc., 8 July 1942.
In opening the meeting, Darquier de Pellepoix noted that the Occupation authorities had declared themselves ready to rid the French state of the Jews, and that they were meeting to discuss the practical arrangements for the deportation…Under discussion was the arrest of about twenty-eight thousand Jews in Paris … The inspectors of the Anti-Jewish Police and women auxiliaries are to bring their cards classified by arrondissement … The Jews will then be assembled in the different town halls and taken to the rallying point (Vel' d'Hiv').
LD: Well, on paper I was responsible for what took place. But, in reality it was Bousquet who managed everything. With his filthy police force! I did not want the anti-Jewish police! I wanted a French police force, who would have understood their responsibilities, you know what I mean? But there was nothing I could do!
LE: You maintain that you had nothing to do with the Vel' d'Hiv' round-up?
LD: Absolutely. I was only a civil servant. I was very far removed from the day-to-day practicalities. And I was too busy saving good Jews, the French Jews…
Letter from Darquier de Pellepoix to Laval, 23 July 1942.
… The Commissariat for Jewish Affairs has been charged with placing at the disposal of the German authorities thirty-two thousand Jews and Jewesses (twenty-two thousand from the Occupied Zone and ten thousand from the Non-Occupied Zone) … Action was taken on 16 and 17 July and yielded the following figures: 3,095 men, and 5,885 women.
… The conversations I have had today with the Occupying authorities leave me no alternative but to tell you that they are not at all pleased. The number of trains the German authorities prepared for this job corresponded to the transport of thirty-two thousand Jews.
… May I propose the following supplementary procedures:
The arrest of all stateless Jews.
The arrest of all Belgian Jews and Dutch Jews and all foreign Jews without a
recent passport. If, after the application of these measures, the anticipated figure is still not reached, it would be worthwhile envisaging fulfilling the requirements by having recourse to Jews and Jewesses whose French naturalisation is dated after 1 January 1927.
LE: You were obsessed with the year 1927. It's the year that appears on all your statements. Why?
LD: Because it was the years between 1927 and 1936 that produced the great onslaught of stateless persons, people who came from everywhere and nowhere. People who wanted to destroy us. People who wanted us to wage war on their behalf. Who, above all, did not want us to prepare for war. People who wanted our defeat, who wanted our ruin. You are too young: you don't know what it was like before the war.
LE: I know one thing, anyway: in 1935, a year before the Popular Front, a man like you was elected to the city council in the 17th arrondissement. And on a single platform. Anti-Semitism.
LD: False. I was elected on a na-tio-na-list programme! That is entirely different. And more important, the word anti-Semitic is inaccurate…
LE: God knows how often you have used it!
LD: Possibly! But it was a mistake. After all, the Arabs are Semites too. Do not confuse things. But I would like you to know, dear sir, that in 1935, after the Stavisky affair and all the rest of it, to be a nationalist implied that one was anti-Semitic. Because of corruption and because of this Jewish hold over all means of expression. At that time there was only one press free of Jewish influence: the right-wing media! And, I'll say it again, the Jews wanted the war. I fought in '14, I had what is called “a very good war.” I had no intention of doing that again. And, then, to be defeated! Besides, a Jew—this will give you pleasure—Georges Mandel himself, wrote in the thirties: “It is the democracies that declare wars.” For a Jew…
LE:…Whom your friends in the Milice assassinated…
LD: It's much more complicated than that…For a Jew to come to the point of avowing a thing like that, it has to be true. Don't you think so? So, the Jews wanted the war. I did not want it. And then, if you wanted a war, you need to prepare for it seriously. But the Jews, under the cloak of pacifism, refused to do precisely that. That is why I was anti-Jew.
LE: How did this come about? From where?
LD: I must tell you: I am from Cahors. In Cahors we have never liked Jews. It is like that. An ancient tradition. It goes back to the Middle Ages. But I repeat that I was not elected on an anti-Jewish platform. A national movement existed. This movement elected me, doubtless because of my performance on 6 February 1934. Look at this. (He raises his trouser leg and shows me a hole in his right calf.) I did not get that in the trenches. I got it on 6 February. The Parisians knew that I had fought for my principles. Physically. That must have impressed them.
Meeting of the Paris city council, June 1936. M. Darquier de Pellepoix,
addressing M. Georges Hirsch:
As I make a distinction between Jews, I will make one now in telling you that you are a dirty little Jew … the most racist people in the world are the Jews … Until we are rid of those people, the national survival of the country is in grave danger…
LE: Admit it, for the Nazis, you were the man of their dreams. From 1936, you clamoured aloud in Paris for measures—denaturalisation, amongst others—which they did not even dare impose themselves in 1942.
LD: Once again, you have no idea of the atmosphere of the country in the thirties. Jews were everywhere. They controlled ever
ything. When I slapped Léon Blum—yes, I publicly slapped Léon Blum, and I do not regret it—it was a natural gesture, a gesture that many other Frenchmen dreamed of making. At that time you could not love your country, or wish for peace, without coming up against Jews. It was impossible! But I must say that even the French are a funny bunch. They have an allergic reaction to demographic changes. When there are too many Jews, when they feel themselves surrounded, put upon by the Jews, they begin to shout: “Out with the Jews!” Eventually, they take to the streets. But kill fifty Jews and you have an outcry. I tell you that the French in general are only moderately anti-Semitic.
LE: It's still a fact that these moderate anti-Semites elected you overwhelmingly. In 1935. You, a person who had declared in the Salle Wagram, at a meeting on 11 March 1937: “The Jewish question must be solved urgently. Either the Jews must be expelled, or they must be massacred.” It seems to me that even at Nuremberg at that time, they used words in a more guarded way.
LD: It was a way of talking. As for me, I have never wished the death of anyone.
LE: Not even the death of the Jews you sent to Auschwitz?
LD: I wanted to get them the hell out of the place, the rest I didn't care about. Wasn't my problem.
LE: I think that you were meticulous in pursuit of persecution in a way which was quite unusual. Also, on 9 September 1942 you wrote the following internal memo:
The Commissioner has noticed that in the correspondence of certain departments, Jews are referred to as “Israélites.” The use of this term is due to Jewish influence which, by banishing the word “Jew” has managed to achieve, finally, the first principle of Jewish defence, which is to pretend that the Jewish problem is only a religious problem. At the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, a Jew must be called a Jew, and you must not write “Monsieur Lévy” or “Monsieur Dreyfus,” but “the Jew Lévy” and “the Jew Dreyfus” …
Signed: Darquier de Pellepoix
Notified to all Vichy departments.
LD: What's the problem? Aren't Jews a race? Isn't it true that they hide behind the pretence of religion to perpetrate their crimes all over the world? Honestly, I cannot see what you can object to in that memo. It is perfectly anodyne. There is no trace there of any of the persecution you suggest.
LE: Those who talked about race in 1942, in France, as a description of an individual or a people, made themselves accomplices to genocide. No?
LD: But, once again, there was no genocide, for Heaven's sake! Get that idea out of your head.
LE: Do you know that in Germany they are about to begin the trial of Kurt Lischka? I am reliably informed that the Frankfurt tribunal would be happy to have your testimony.
LD: You're talking about Lischka? Who is this man?
LE: Well, the chief of the Gestapo in Paris between 1940 and 1943.
LD: I see, a minor German civil servant. I must have met him two or three times. But this is definitely something that you cannot seem to understand: I knew very few Germans.
LE: That is exactly what is terrifying. Your decisions were not dictated directly by Berlin. You know what Knochen told the examining magistrate on 4 January 1947, just before his trial?
LD: Knochen was not mad like Dannecker. I wish to make that clear.
LE: Knochen said: “After the arrival of Darquier de Pellepoix, the Commission for Jewish Affairs demonstrated an excess of zeal, anticipating our wishes, and sometimes going well beyond what we wanted.”
LD: But of course. Put yourself in his place a little. He is about to be tried, he'll say anything to save his own skin. That's normal. That's human…
LE: And then, at that famous meeting between Heydrich, Bousquet and you, in May 1942, on the very day of your nomination, what did you talk about, you and Heydrich?
LD: At first, I did not want to meet the man. But Knochen insisted, and I ended up by agreeing, since he said that after all it was better to know exactly what kind of person Heydrich was. And so I went. We shook hands. We exchanged a few words. We saw each other for five minutes, in all and once and for all.
LE: You did not talk, that day, about the measures you were to take in the weeks and months to come?
LD: No. I have no idea of what he might well have said to Bousquet and what Bousquet said to him, but as to what concerns my own conversation with Heydrich, I assure you that it was perfectly anodyne.
LE: To continue: Bousquet and you received carte blanche from the Germans to bring the repression of the Jews to a successful conclusion: the arrests, the round-ups. They must really have had confidence in you! And, finally, the Germans even helped you to get to Spain…
LD: That's not true. It was the French who saved me. But when you come to that period, I'll surprise you. Do you know who helped me to get from Bordeaux to Spain over the mountains? A half-Jewish woman, who, what is more, went under her father's Jewish name. I saw her again, later on, in Barcelona; we remained close until her death. That astonishes you, no? And, earlier, a minute ago, I told you they left me happily alone. And do you know whom this is thanks to? To Jews, for the most part. Good French Jews, whom I helped in difficult times. Between ourselves, a certain Worms. I will say no more…
LE: And so, contrary to what is often said about it, far from making a fortune from Jews' assets, you permitted certain rich families to keep their wealth? You sent the furriers of the 11th arrondissement to Auschwitz, and you protected the big capitalists of the 16th? At bottom, that's logical…
LD: I refuse to answer those kind of questions. I remind you that my punishment is prescribed.
LE: So, you arrive in Spain…
LD: Yes, at the beginning, my wife and I were as poor as Job. I have read, I don't know where, that I started a braces business. That is false. I did sell braces, that is true, but as a street vendor in the gardens of the Retiro in Madrid. But, happily, that poverty did not last for long. I had good friends in Spain, from the period of the Civil War. Soldiers. They helped me. They set me back on my feet. They protected me.
LE: What soldiers?
LD: You would not know them. I have a horror of informing, dear sir. (Note: The protector of Darquier was General Barroso y Sánchez-Guerra.) I became the official translator for the Diplomatic Office. It was I who translated the official speeches of Franco's ministers. I also translated The Red Book of Gibraltar. Later, I was able to open a small language school.
LE: And during all this time you were even in the Madrid phone book under your own name, no? You had better luck than Laval. The Spanish extradited him.
LD: Not at all. If he had remained in Madrid, perfectly quietly, as I did, nothing would have happened to him. But one fine day his wife said: “Let's go back. You've done nothing. They won't dare touch you.” And he went back, to please his wife. You know what followed. They shot him, the poor old thing. Poor ugly old Auvergnat…
LE: In thirty-four years, no one came to see you, no one tried to stop you, no one threatened you?
LD: Not a soul…Oh yes…Three years ago, someone, a French voice, phoned to abuse me. “Bastard. We're coming to get you.” I was afraid. Not only for me. For my family. I immediately called upon my military friends to ask for their special protection. They immediately gave it. Since then, nothing!
LE: And do you sometimes have regrets? Remorse?
LD: Regrets for what? I don't understand your question.
Interview conducted by Philippe Ganier-Raymond
© l'Express/Philippe Ganier-Raymond/28 October–4 November 1978
Translation by Carmen Callil
Appendix II
“The Snows of Sigmaringen”
by Louis Aragon
FROM THE PROSECUTOR'S SPEECH at Darquier's trial at the High Court of Justice on 9 December 1947: “After the Liberation, the poet Louis Aragon composed a ballad about the writers and notable political men of the collaboration. It is Darquier that he chose as its most representative type and it is Darquier's name which recurs like a leitmotif at the end of each stan
za of the poem…Gentlemen, I have not reminded you of these verses casually, but because they demonstrate something about that period. Darquier seems like the expression of it, like the symbol and synthesis of all collaborators.”
Louis Aragon, poet, novelist, essayist, one of the founders of Surrealism, political activist and communist, was born on 3 October 1897,two months before Louis Darquier. He was the illegitimate son of a Parisienne and the préfet Louis Andrieux, an anticlerical republican and a notable of the Radical Party, like Pierre Darquier. For years Aragon's mother, Marguerite, passed as his sister or his aunt. Aragon lived and went to school in Neuilly. When the First World War broke out he was studying medicine at the medical faculty of the University of Paris, as Jean Darquier was to do. Aragon fought as Louis did, late in the war, in 1917, and for a short time, but won the Croix de Guerre for gallantry. The horrors of the Great War were the same for both of them.
Louis Aragon, lyrical idealist, and Louis Darquier, unruly rascal, were both twenty-two when they were demobbed, and Aragon's family home in Neuilly was only one street away from the Darquier apartment. In May 1919 his squadron leader wrote up Louis Darquier's military record: “Can and should do very well, on condition that he is well guided, as he is still young and has an influenceable character.”
Louis Aragon became a communist in 1927, and remained dedicated to the Party for most of his life, through the years of Stalin, the purges and the Hungarian uprising.1 In 1933, under the influence of Action Française, Louis Darquier took the opposite direction. Throughout the Occupation Aragon was always a résistant, and his poems and writings of those years are his finest; they came to be symbolic of that underground France which was not Vichy. During the war his mother Marguerite took refuge in Cahors; she died there in March 1942, three weeks before Pierre Darquier, and is buried in the Cahors cemetery as he is. Aragon was in Cahors when she died, attended her funeral and engraved a poem—a beautiful poem—on her tombstone. It is still there, in the same cemetery as the abandoned Darquier tombs. In October 1944, as Louis Darquier crossed over to Spain, Aragon and his fellow writers and résistants were honoured by de Gaulle at a ceremony in Paris.
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