Bad Faith

by Carmen Callil

  Vigilance Meeting, 28 March 1936, AN F712965.

  Henri de Kérillis (1889–1958): Much-decorated First World War veteran aviator. Journalist, traveller, deputy for Neuilly, elected in May 1936. Formed a propaganda centre for National Republicans. In 1938 he founded L'époque,a unique anti-Nazi paper of the right, as “an important instrument of Catholic information.” Others involved included de Castelnau, and one of its backers seems to have been the Louis Dreyfus bank. Forcefully anti-Nazi and anti-Munich, de Kérillis became famous for his articles exposing the Ribbentrop/ Abetz scandal of which Louis Darquier was a beneficiary, naming de Brinon, Déat, Je suis partout and le Matin as recipients of Nazi largesse. Hostile to the left and to Action Française, and later to de Gaulle. He was the sole conservative to vote against Munich in the Chamber of Deputies. In 1940 he fled to the United States, where he remained until his death.

  Georges Oltramare in Randa, p. 117.

  Some of the funders of these leagues were: Gabriel le Roy Ladurie of the Worms Bank, close to Action Française; François de Wendel and his subordinate Pierre Pucheu with funds from the Comité des Forges (the Steel Trust)— both had been members of Croix-de-feu. Taittinger was supported by the Worms Bank and the Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas, and other Jewish businessmen. La Roque was also funded by the government itself, under Tardieu, by the Banque de France, by Ernest Mercier, industrialist and founder of Redressement Français and by many many other big companies and businessmen. The Rothschild Bank, when it funded Doriot's Fascist League in the 1930s, seems to have ignored the fact that Rothschilds were favoured whipping boys of both left and right, and in particular of édouard Drumont.

  La Tribune Juive, 27 March 1936, “Les amis parisiens de M. Hitler” in AN 72 AJ 592, Fonds Vaniakoff.

  De Gaulle signed the ordinance granting women the right to vote on 5 October 1944. They first voted in the elections of 1945.

  The Socialists won 146 seats, Communists 72, Radicals 116. This was the Popular Front.

  Laborie, p.11; La Défense, 27 May 1934.

  Kingston, p. 8; AN 3W142. Rapport de la police municipale du 8ème arrondissement, 24 May 1936 and Joly, Darquier de Pellepoix,p. 74.

  The Paris Council (Conseil de Paris) combined the city council of Paris and the general council of the Seine.

  1918 is a particularly early date. Most of those of Darquier's ilk chose the naturalisation law of 1927.

  Coston's instructions were given to the Jeunesses Anti-Juives movement he had founded in 1930.

  For impotence, sexual organs, Dreyfus etc. see BMO: 6 June 1935, 17 January 1936, 5 June 1936 et al. See also BMO, 4 June 1936 and 6 June 1936.

  L'Humanité, 6 June 1936; Augé, p. 656.

  chapter 9

  Pot of Gold

  INTERVIEWS AND CORRESPONDENCE: Jeanne Degrelle, Auguste Mudry. Sources: Darquier family correspondence; AN 3W142, Georges Hirsch statement; AN 72 AJ 592: Fonds Vanikoff; AN AG/3(2) 326 (BCRA); APP BA 1896, police note, 14 June 1936; APP GA D9, 5 November 1936, 30 January 1937, 12 June 1942; APP GA R4, 14 April 1938 and 30 May 1938; Archives du Bas Rhin, Strasbourg, 98AL698 BMO, 23 June 1936; U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA): Records of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services COI/OSS Central Files 1942–1946, box no. 502, file no. 3, 22 September 1944,p. 14, declassified; BNF JO77305; CDJC CI: “The Jewish War”; CDJC CXLII-152; CDJC CCXIV-78; CDJC CCCXXIX-22; CDJC CCCLXXIX-3; Bundesarchiv, Berlin; AAPA; Thüringisches Hauptstaatsarchiv: Weimar Amt zum Schutz des Volkseigentums Nr. LK 2787, Ulrich Fleischhauer, 11 August 1947; Stadtarchiv Erfurt; Stadtarchiv Ludwigsburg, EL 904/2,EL 904/5; TNA: PRO FO 371/31941–Z3005; TNA: PRO FO 892/163: Fernand de Brinon; TNA: PRO: note on Abetz. Publications: Action française, 4 August 1936; Agulhon, The French Republic 1879–1992; Bankwitz, Maxime Weygand and Civil-Military Relations in Modern France; Ben-Itto, Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion; Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg und seine Gegner; Brechtken, Madagaskar für die Juden; Bulletin du Club National, 17 and 24 April 1937; Burrin, France Under the Germans; Byrnes, Antisemitism in Modern France, vol. 1; Cohn, Warrant for Genocide; Le Crapouillot,no. 23, 1953; Crémieux-Brilhac, BBC Radio, 14 May 1942, 1 July 1942; Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l'an 40; Eatwell, Fascism; La France enchaînée, October 1938; Frank, “Holocaust—Das Brandopfer in Niemandsland,” Zeitschrift zwischen den Kulturen, Heft 3 und 4, Berlin, 1987; Guérin, La Résistance; Heiber, Walter Frank und sein Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands; “How Popular was Streicher? His Friendship with Hitler,” Wiener Library Bulletin,no. 5–6, 1957; Jackson, France: The Dark Years; Jackson, Popular Front; Joly, Darquier de Pellepoix et l'antisémitisme français; Journal de la Résistance, 16 May 1942; Les Amis de Rassinier, © by Gilles Karmasyn 1999, www.phdn.org/negation/rassinier/coston.html; Kingston, Anti-Semitism in France during the 1930s; Laloum, La France antisémite de Darquier de Pellepoix; Larkin, France Since the Popular Front; Libre parole, 22 November 1936; Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews; l'Oeuvre, 15 October 1937; Planté, Un Grand seigneur de la politique; Randa, Dictionnaire commenté de la collaboration française; Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left; Taguieff (ed.), L'Antisémitisme de plume 1940–1944; Tannenbaum, The Action Française; Thornton-Smith, Echoes and Resonances of Action Française; BNF: Le Voltaire, 27 June 1936 and 4 December 1937; Weltdienst, newsletter no. 16/17, 1938; Weltdienst,World Service,no.V1/10, 15 May 1939; Zucotti, The Holocaust, the French and the Jews.

  The ONT, Ordo Novi Templi, published the Ostara, full of Hitler babble, which was closed down in 1921. It was followed by the Pan-Aryan Anti-Jewish Union of France, founded in 1923–24 by George de Pottere and Edwin I. Cooper. The Pan-Aryan Anti-Jewish Union of France is supposed to have survived. The ONT still has headquarters in Vienna. Ostara has its own website.

  The Illuminati believed in worldwide conspiracy, imminent takeover by Antichrist/Jew/Communist/Mason, a new world order, etc. The British mystic Nesta Webster (1876–1960) was a vociferous believer.

  The Protocols were published in Britain by Eyre & Spottiswoode, who were also publishers of the Bible.

  When The Times proved that The Protocols of the Elders of Sion was a forgery (August 1921), Bainville maintained that this was of no consequence: “What does that prove about the Bolsheviks and the Jews? Absolutely nothing!”

  Cohn, p. 84.

  Ulrich Fleischhauer (1876–196?): First World War veteran, a regimental commander. Seriously wounded and pensioned off. He became a choleric pacifist and monomaniacal anti-Semite. He launched his Weltdienst as a Roneoed bulletin, published fortnightly, in three, then eight, and later in nineteen languages. Fleischhauer was obsessed with the Protocols and the World Jewish Conspiracy, and worked for the despatch of all Jews to a distant land. Often in bad odour with more fastidious Nazis. By 1938—at a time when he cared about such things—Hitler was advised that Fleischhauer was placing Germany in embarrassing positions abroad, as he was the kind of “anti-Semite who pretends to see a threatening Jew behind every street corner of the world and who tries to deal with the matter in a psychosis of fear and secretiveness.” Fleischhauer had worked with de Pottere—see note 1—and also helped found the Pan-Aryan Anti-Jewish Union, an international anti-Semitic organisation whose annual congresses, held in secret, he chaired. He held congresses for the Weltdienst in Erfurt from 1936 to 1938; attendance ranged from sixty to seventy delegates from up to twenty-five countries. From 1945–46 he was in American internment camps and hospitals for “denazification.” Released, in 1947 he made a written statement denying that he was a Nazi, a reactionary or a fanatical anti-Semite.

  Louis T. Weichardt (1894–1985): leader-in-chief of the South African National Party (Greyshirts). As to agents, a Swiss journal said there were thirty thousand of them, but Brechtken (p. 60) thinks this highly exaggerated.

  Julius Streicher (1885–1946): Gauleiter of Franconia, early follower of Hitler, co-author of the Nuremberg racial laws, officer of the SA, the paramilitary police of the Nazi Party. His nympholepsy exhibit
ed itself in accusing women of sexual offences with Jews, but pardoning them for favours permitted himself. He was a close friend of the Mitford sisters.

  Quoted by © Randall Bytwerk: www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/faculty/streich3.htm.

  These comrades were Pierre Clémenti, Marcel Bucard, Jean Boissel and the aptly named Serpeille de Gobineau, grandson of the nineteenth-century French racial determinist prophet, and perhaps one of the most objectionable denizens of the French Nazi pond.

  Weltdienst,World Service,no.V1/10, 15 May 1939.

  Sylvie Deroche was refused access to the file which contains the correspondence between Louis Darquier and Emilie Vasticar in 1936 by the Ministry of the Interior, on the grounds that this book is not a university thesis. French academics can thus have access to it (CAC 880509,art. 15, investigatory file [dossier d'instruction] of the Cagoule). The correspondence seems to have been about propaganda, meetings, but not money. As to Henry Coston, he wrote politely to Sylvie Deroche on 23 August 2000 saying that he could not give us the information we wanted: “I am nearly ninety years old and I am very busy finalising my ‘Dictionary of French Politics’ ”—a new edition of it, making something like his two hundredth publication.

  BMO, 23 June 1936, sitting of 17 June 1936.

  According to Hirsch, Louis Louis-Dreyfus paid some eighty million francs for Bailby's l'Intransigeant, and this money funded Le Jour. Bailby remained on the board of l'Intransigeant after the sale until Louis-Dreyfus showed him the door. The intimation here is that Louis Darquier was undertaking this attack on Jews under the influence of Bailby's enmity with Louis Louis-Dreyfus. AN 3W142 Georges Hirsch statement.

  Marrus and Paxton, p. 39; Jackson, p. 106.

  Jackson, p.250.

  The Louis-Dreyfus family had moved partially to Switzerland earlier; after the defeat of 1870 they moved to Marseille and Paris.

  France's population was nearing forty-two million as the Second World War began. There were nearly three-quarters of a million Italians in France, and by 1939 over four hundred thousand refugees from the Spanish Civil War.

  Louis' salary for 1937 was 41,473 francs (worth approximately £14,000 today). Net of his pension and overheads he had twenty thousand francs a year to live on (£6,800 today), support himself and Myrtle in the style to which both were accustomed, Anne perhaps, and the rental of two houses, with all the activities, publications and meetings both entailed.

  Joly, Darquier de Pellepoix,p. 81.

  APP GA D9, 5 November 1936. From a final receipt from an employee paid by Myrtle in March 1937, it looks as though the club closed in that month; so it lasted ten months, a long time for one of Louis Darquier's endeavours. Auguste Mudry (interview, November 1999), a former Director of Aryanisation at the CGQ J, says the club did not belong to Darquier: “The sports club belonged to Henri Becquerel, he gave bodybuilding classes there, and physical education from 7 to 8 in the evenings. There were all kinds of fellows there, of all ages, from eighteen to forty. There were also hot showers, with jets. He rented the top floor, the sixth—of this building in the rue Laugier, and the cloakrooms and the bar were in the basement. After the courses, we would go and drink a lemon juice—there was a lift to go to the sixth floor.” However Louis paid the rent, the police had him marked as the leasor, and there is no reason to believe Mudry's version, particularly in the light of his recollections of his days at the CGQ J, quite at odds with those of the police who interrogated him at the Liberation: “It was at these times that I met Darquier—two or three times—he had the offices of his Club National above.” (He [Mudry] said he'd never set foot in these offices, but later said that they were small). “But Darquier didn't do any physical culture.” It is hard to choose between Darquier and Mudry as witnesses.

  Some of the money to publish the Bulletin, and to pay the rent, may have come from Pozzo di Borgo, who had now fallen out with la Roque, and who was in the midst of planning a more revolutionary attack on the republic.

  “Biff boys” was Oswald Mosley's name for his British version of the same kind of young men. Later, in prison camp in 1940, one of Louis' fellow prisoners implied that he had his own “biff boys.” When the inmates of the prison camp turned upon him “he no longer had his thugs from the funfair to protect him.” Crémieux-Brilhac: BBC, 14 May 1942.

  This brochure (AN72 AJ 592: Fonds Vanikoff ) in which the membership rules are outlined was issued in October 1936. Strangely enough, Louis Darquier, as president, only used his real name, but this may well have been for legal reasons, because he was about to go to court, and also about to receive René's bailiffs.

  Taguieff, p. 397; Action française, 4 August 1936.

  Robert Brasillach (1909–45): A Maurrassian, a novelist and one of the most important men of letters on the French right. Like Lucien Rebatet, a collaborationist—pro-Nazi. Editor-in-chief of Je Suis partout, a prose murderer. Condemned to death and executed by firing squad in 1945. Georges Blond (1906–89): Married Germaine Garrigue of St.-Paul-de-Loubressac, whose parents were very close friends of the Darquier family. Blond was a ship's captain turned journalist and writer, colleague and partisan of Brassillach; he was put on the index for collaboration (one of his works was a selection of the choice words of Hitler). After the war he wrote quantities of novels and books about the sea and those who sail on it.

  Tannenbaum, p. 224. These hundred deputies wanted heavier sanctions against Italy for its war on Ethiopia.

  The elders of anti-Semitism, men born in the 1860s, were all editors or journalists. As well as Lucien Pemjean, the lieutenant of the Marquis de Morès, there was Urbain Gohier (1862–1951), professional anti-Semite, journalist, editor and writer, who published the first French edition of the Protocols in 1920.A noted polemicist, financed by Coty, and a hounder of Maurras and Daudet, he was nearly eighty when France fell, but continued his vituperative journalism throughout the Occupation. He was convicted after the Liberation but his age spared him imprisonment. Jean Drault (1866–1951) was another professional anti-Semite and journalist. Drumont's closest disciple, he also wrote successful humorous books for children. Associated with Coston and Boissel, a vicious collaborationist during the Occupation, he edited La France au travail until in 1943 the Germans gave him the editorship of the pinnacle of anti-Semitic publications, Au Pilori. Arrested in August 1944, he was imprisoned at Drancy, sentenced to seven years' imprisonment, and freed in 1949.

  Joining these fathers of anti-Semitism were those born a decade later, men such as the fanatic and alcoholic Paul Sézille (1879–1944), another wounded and decorated First World War veteran, the mystic Hitlerian Alphonse de Chateaubriant (1877–1951) and the demented anglophobe Paul Chack (1876–1945). Louis Darquier's generation came next. All of them were veterans of the trenches, bearing wounds and honours in varying degrees. Louis was easily the most unscathed physically, but shared their eccentricities, rages, conspiracy theories and paranoia. Louis' continued subservience to Charles Maurras managed to alienate all of them.

  Jean Boissel (1891–1951): Severely disabled First World War veteran, he lost his right eye and wore an eye patch like Vallat. Professional anti-Semite, fascist, journalist. A prolific founder of minuscule parties, papers and groups, Boissel wrote prose even more poisonous than Darquier's. Visited Germany, appearing with Streicher at a Nuremberg rally, and met Hitler in 1935. Subsidised by the Nazis in the Darquier manner; he was often in prison or in court. Participated in the foundation of the LVF in 1941. A refugee in Sigmaringen, he was arrested and condemned to death in 1946, but the sentence was commuted to life with hard labour. He died in prison.

  Marcel Bucard (1895–1946): First World War veteran, with honours, journalist and failed politician. Founder of the Francistes, the “Paris Blueshirts” (not to be confused with Coston's group of the same name), his newspaper Le Franciste, and his political party after June 1936, was the Parti Unitaire Français. Originally financed by François Coty. No Jews or Freemasons were allowed. A neighbour of Darquier's in the Terne
s, he was funded by the Nazis, but was an advocate of Mussolini's approach and, again like Darquier, was financially questionable and often in court. A Catholic in the Vallat mould, he was also a speaker for the FNC and a member of Croix-de-feu. Arrested in 1944, he was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad.

  Henri-Robert Petit (or Henri, or Henry-Robert) (1899–1985): Professional anti-Semite. Son of a royalist, joined Croix-de-feu, then Henry Coston on Libre parole in 1935. Founded the Centre for Information and Propaganda with Coston, and was also secretary-general of the International Anti-Communist League. Fell out with Coston over purloining his archives and library, and moved over to work with Darquier in 1937. In 1938 he fell out with Darquier, who accused him of stealing money. After various other checks, all of a similar nature, he went to Erfurt to work for the Weltdienst. His life during the Occupation was equally marked by accusations of swindling and successive rows, though he managed to maintain a correspondence with Céline. He was in close contact with the propaganda departments of the German occupiers, and it seems he was a member of the French Gestapo. Condemned after the war, in absentia, to twenty years' hard labour and dégradation nationale, he was granted amnesty in 1959 and remained in France, adding investigations into astrology, druidic rituals and esotericism to his oeuvre, though his anti-Semitism continued in the post-war neo-Nazi organisation FANE: he was condemned several times for incitement to racial hatred. Typical of his published works is Rothschild, King of Israel and the Americans, published in France in 1941.