Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda. The Ministry of Propaganda provided thirty thousand Reichsmarks for Fleischhauer for the Berne trial (Brechtken, pp. 57–8). For Fleischhauer's Nazi funding see also Marrus and Pax-ton, p. 284. Their sources are: AA: Pol. II, “Innere Politik: Parlamantund Parteiwesen, Frankreich 5, 1936–40 (T-120/753/269596–604); Report of 1 July 1939 (APP: 37022–B). However, it was impossible to find the report of 1 July 1939 in the archives at the Préfecture de Paris. The filing system at the archives has been changed, and ref 37022–B cannot be traced. But Robert Paxton, the great historian of Vichy France, saw this document, and there is a later report from the Renseignements Généraux, dated 31 December 1938, in Darquier's file. This report mentions a note of 29 December 1937 from the Interior Ministry to the Foreign Ministry. It says: “Darquier de Pellepoix is in regular contact with the Internationale Antisémite …The latter receives orders from Mr. Julien Strasser [sic; police misspelling for Julius Streicher], the leading anti-Semitic theoretician of the Third Reich, and is supported by Germans and Italians.” APP GA D9, 31 December 1938. Date of contact: 1937.
The organisation the police called the Internationale Antisémite de Genève could be the Alliance Anti-Israélite Universelle (World Anti-Israelite Alliance), founded in August 1886 in Bucharest. Jacques de Biez, failed French playwright and disciple of Drumont, helped found it, and its inspiration came from Biez, Drumont and Paul de Lagarde, the nineteenth-century German equivalent to Drumont who proposed such ideas as “Blood and Soil,” the “Master Race” and “German living space in the East.” Hitler used all of these ideas. I have been unable to find out anything about Otto Grutzner. The Alliance spread all over Europe in the twenties and thirties and became a countermovement to the Communist International.
Another extract from a note sent by the Interior Ministry on 9 July 1938 mentions: “It is to be noted that Darquier de Pellepoix will soon visit Nuremberg where he is to meet Messrs Alfred Rosenberg and Fleischhauer. We believe he will then go to Berlin for a meeting with leaders of the Nazi party, particularly Dr. Bohle, Secretary of State at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and head of the AO, the Foreign organisation of the Nazi Party.” However, there is no proof that Louis Darquier made this visit.
Himmler and his SS. Louis received money directly from them later; in the Thirties Fleischhauer was in direct contact with the SS. See: a) Brechtken, pp. 54–5, and Sicherheitsdienst, SS reference file Cooperation with other offices/Fleischhauer-Finke BArch.R 58/988, BL. 3, and also BL 26,90.286; b) Ben-Itto, p. 134; c) Marrus and Paxton, p. 45, outlines Coston and Darquier's funding, to which their notes refer.
In addition, the involvement of:
Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy, Walter Frank's Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany and Wilhelm Grau's Frankfurt Institute for Research on the Jewish Question are often mentioned as funding agents in these years.
The police report of July 1939 states that another source was the publisher Deutscher Fichte-bund of Hamburg, with the French anti-Semite most active in this connection being Serpeille de Gobineau. This report calls Darquier a “ Fourrier d'Hitler,” Hitler's Harbinger. This may well be the money Louis received in June 1939. “After establishing contact with the prefecture of the Rhône on 30 June 1939, the funds serving to finance La France enchaînée were to be transferred into France by the intermediary of agents residing in Belgium and by the secretary of Darquier de Pellepoix, a man called Roze.” ( Joly, Darquier de Pellepoix,p. 113. Joly's source is AN F7 14781, dossier of Charles Roze, secretary to Darquier de Pellepoix.) Nothing can be discovered about this Charles Roze.
Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac believed Louis was funded directly by Fleischhauer (BBC Radio, “Ici Londres,” AN AG/3(2)326 (BCRA), transcript of broadcast by Crémieux-Brilhac on 16 May 1942. There are many errors of fact in his résumé of Darquier's relationships with the Nazis, what they funded and what they did not: for instance, Crémieux-Brilhac asserts that they paid for Louis' election to the city council. “He [Louis Darquier] handled the French distribution of the periodical the World Service. This World Service was one of the publications issued by the “L'Internationale Antisémite,” whose headquarters were in Erfurt, under the directorship of Colonel Fleischhauer. Each month, Darquier de Pellepoix, who was already a purveyor of betrayal before becoming a profiteer of defeat, received payments from Germany in the form of international money orders stamped in Erfurt. It was therefore the money from Colonel Fleischhauer, that is to say from Hitler, that was used to finance his anti-Semitic newspaper La France enchaînée, which was run by Darquier and which was nothing less than the French edition of the German paper Der Stürmer published in Nuremberg. It was therefore the money from Colonel Fleischhauer, that is to say from Hitler, that financed Darquier's electoral funds and allowed him to recruit a whole crowd of thugs from a sideshow at a funfair to work as his security police during public meetings…” The gist is right, but it is unlikely that Fleischhauer was doing much more than disbursing the money both Rosenberg and Goebbels gave him—as, probably, did other Nazi anti-Semitic organisations too.
L'Antijuif (first issue 3 June 1937, last issue 22 January 1938) seems to have appeared about every three weeks. All quotes from l'Antijuif nos. 4 and 5, 17 July 1937;no. 3, 26 June 1937;no. 10, 25 October 1937; and July–August 1937, Special Propaganda Edition.
“The Jewish race has always been tightly allied to the German race by a close, almost fraternal bond, and Yiddish is based on the German language…” Action française, 17 November 1938.
L'Antijuif, Special Propaganda Edition July–August 1937.
CDJC XIV-78, quoting La France Réelle, 5 August 1937.
CDJC CCXIV-78 RG report 3.9.1937; Also in PRO F0 892/163.
Princess Karadja, pp. 130–1 (see also www.sacred-texts.com).
L'Antijuif, Special Propaganda Edition, July–August 1937.
The presiding magistrate, a M. Roux, asked Pierre Gérard how the Jews managed to stop French people having children. Gérard replied that he had shown how in his newspaper article. Tribunal Correctionnel (Magistrates' Court) de la Seine, 12ème chambre, 26 July 1939.
L'Antijuif, no. 1, 3 June 1937.
Joly, Darquier de Pellepoix, p. 108, and l'Antijuif, October 1937.
L'Antijuif,no. 11, 20 November 1937.
The Cagoule was the popular name for the Organisation Secrète d'Action Révolutionnaire Nationale (OSARN).
Pétain was a reactionary, not a revolutionary; but his aide Loustanau-Lacau instigated an anti-communist network in the army, called the Réseaux Corvignolles. Weygand and Pétain were connected with the Cagoule through the army and the Corvignolles, which had a lot to do with Pétain and which later surfaced in Algérie Française.
Eugène Deloncle (1890–1944): Distinguished First World War veteran, broke with Action Française to found the Cagoule. A right-wing revolutionary, he led the Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire (MSR) in 1940 and was co-founder, with Marcel Déat, of the collaborationist political party the RNP (see note on Déat, Chapter 12,n. 33) and was also involved in the creation of the LVF. Deloncle was an anti-Semite who blew up synagogues in Paris with the SS, but he fell out with them, as with others, and was shot by the Gestapo in January 1944.
“Henry Charbonneau, a Camelot who had gone over to the more effective activities of the Cagoule”—by becoming Deloncle's secretary while he was in the Santé prison. “The Comité National [de Vigilance des Jeunes Français Mobilisables] held a huge meeting in the Magic City Music Hall, at which four thousand determined young Frenchmen heard the professional anti-Semite Darquier de Pellepoix announce that he, for one, would not fight at the bidding of international plutocracy. No one could count on them for a Masonic and Soviet war, the organisers announced amid general enthusiasm” (Weber, Action Française,p. 293). Pozzo di Borgo was another Cagoule member. In addition Fleischhauer had fallen out with de Pottere in 1936, but the following year the latter turned up in Switzerland as an agent of the Weltdienst,
and seems to have inserted funds into the Cagoule.
Jean Boissel and Jean Drault also attended Fleischhauer's Congress in Erfurt in September 1937 and met Streicher and Eichmann; Emilie Vasticar was fed the calumny that Louis and his club were “friendly to Jews.”
Registered Letter
Paris, 5 November 1938
Monsieur Darquier de Pellepoix
12 rue Laugier Paris
Monsieur,
Following the visit made on your behalf by messieurs Rémondy and X… we believe that a meeting to discuss the amount of your rent would be a waste of time for all parties since we cannot envisage reducing this amount in any way.
Furthermore, we regret to have to inform you that we can no longer tolerate the constant late payment of your rent as has been the case during the past 15 months. Therefore we ask you to pay in full before the 20th of the present month, the amount that was due on 15th October. Our professional situations do not allow us to engage in these incessant and futile requests. We remain, Sir, yours etc. The heirs of Ballagny
The banker was Pozzo di Borgo.
APP GA D9D9, 31 December 1938.
November 1938, Joly, “Champion,” p. 47. His source: AN F7 14781, Confidential note of the Sûreté Nationale (the CID).
L'Antijuif,no. 11, 30 November 1937,no. 12, 4 December 1937 and no. 13, 18 December 1937.
Pierre-Antoine Cousteau (1906–58): Anti-Semite, collaborationist, political journalist, noted polemicist in Je Suis partout, and author of l'Amerique juive. Joined the Milice in 1944, then fled to Germany, for whom he broadcast to France. Sentenced to death in 1946, commuted to life imprisonment in 1947, released in 1955, to some degree due to the good offices of his oceanographer brother. Alain Laubreaux (1898–1968): From French New Guinea, he became a radical journalist in Toulouse. Notorious theatre critic of Je Suis partout, but more, wrote the “Echos” column devoted to denunciations and informing. Also a novelist and a broadcaster for Radio-Vichy. Member of Doriot's PPF. He denounced the existentialist Robert Desnos, and sent him to his death. Larger than life, as quarrelsome and violent as Darquier, of whom he was in many ways a more intelligent version. Fled to Germany, then Spain. Tried in absentia in 1947 and sentenced to death. He lived untouched in Madrid where he worked for Radio Nacional. He is Daxiat in François Truffaut's film Le Dernier métro.
Vitoux, p. 319.
Taguieff (ed.), p. 153. Lucien Rebatet (1903–72): Member of AF, film and music critic for Action française, enthusiastic anti-Semite and one of the most important writers for Je suis partout from 1932 to 1944. The most notorious and celebrated fascist and collaborationist writer of the war. After the war he fled to Germany, then Austria. Arrested and condemned to death in 1946, he was pardoned and freed in 1952, and continued his literary career until his death.
McCarthy, pp. 149 and 152, quoting Céline's Bagatelles.
Vitoux, p. 319, quoting Céline's Bagatelles.
41. La France enchaînée,no. 18, 15 December 1938, En buvant un verre avec Céline, by Robert Dubard.
If we are to believe his tax return for March 1938—and, of course, there is no reason to do so—Louis' taxable income was 20,473 francs (worth £6,800 today). Obviously, he declared none of his German monies on this return.
Jean to René, undated, probably October 1936.
Archives départementales du Bas-Rhin, 98 AL698 Fonds Valot, 25 November 1937, Prefect of the Department of the Bas-Rhin to Ministry of the Interior.
Prefect of the Haut-Rhin to Ministry of the Interior. Archives Départementales du Bas-Rhin, Strasbourg, 98 AL698, Fonds Valot, Archives de la Direction Générale d'Alsace-Lorraine, 98AL698, Sémitisme et Antisémitisme (1926–40). This letter, one of many, is undated, but must be after March 1938, as it refers to the tract of that date. Louis himself called the Nazis “generous donors” who enabled him to publish three thousand copies of La France enchaînée in Strasbourg. When advising the furniture salesman from Lyon who wanted advice as to how to get money from German sources for anti-Semitic activities, Louis also told him to continue contact with the German Consul there.
Archives Départementales du Bas-Rhin, Strasbourg, as above. Letter of 19 September 1938.
Ibid., letter of 23 April 1938, leaflet distributed in the market of the old station of Strasbourg on 23 March 1938.
On 5 February and 16 April 1938 Le Droit de vivre accused Louis of being in the pay of Germany. On 22 April in La France enchaînée Louis wrote of him: “Lecache est un individu ignoble, il accomplit dans l'humanité une abominable besogne et déverse sur les officiers des poubelles d'excréments… cet excrément de ghetto…ce pourceau circoncis.”
(“Lecache is a vile individual, one of those human beings who carries out his repellent deeds and showers his betters with bucket loads of excrement… that excrement from the ghetto… that circumcised swine.”) On 5 May 1938 Lecache's men invaded one of Louis' meetings—five people were injured, and there were seven arrests.
Company declaration, authorised 2 March 1938. Louis said he published it himself, on the first and fifteenth of each month, but it was actually printed by Action française. It began with only two pages, went up to four or five, and then to six pages after issue no. 8.
AN 3W142/288 et AN 72 AJ 592, Fonds Vaniakoff.
Councillor Hirschovitz, of the St.-Gervais quarter, is not to be confused with Georges Hirsch, Louis' previous opponent. AN 3W142. This episode was not recorded in the BMO.
BMO, 5 April 1938.
La France enchaînée,no. 3, 19 April 1938.
CHAPTER 11
War
INTERVIEWS AND CORRESPONDENCE: Bill Coy, Jean Gayet, Yvonne Lacaze, Auguste Mudry, Pierre Orliac, Alistair Rapley, Simone Reste, Pat Smalley. Sources: AMAE (b), no. 392; AN 3W142; AN 72 AJ 592: Fonds Vanikoff; APP dossier 79/501/ 882–B; APP GA D9, 28 November, 14 and 31 December 1938, 4 and 7 January 1939, 28 February 1940, 7 May and 13 June 1942; APP GA R4: draft of 14 April 1938 and later version of 30 May 1938; BMO, 21 December 1938;CAC 880509:art. 15, investigative file of the Cagoule; CDJC 6600; CDJC LXII-11; CDJC LXXIV-13; CDJC XCV-31, 75; CDJC XCVI-57; CDJC CXLIV-424; TNA: PRO FO 371/31941Z3005.Publications: Action française, 1 October and 17 November 1938, 1–15 April 1939; l'Antijuif, May, June, August and November 1937; Bankwitz, Maxime Weygand and Civil-Military Relations in Modern France; Billig, Le Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives (1941–1944); Crémieux-Brilhac, BBC radio broadcasts 14 May 1942, 1 July 1942; Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Français de l'an 40; de Monzie, Ci-devant; La France enchaînée, 15–31 December, 15–30 November 1938, 1–15 and 15–30 April, 15–31 May, 1–15 June 1939; Gee, Keeping up with the Joneses; Horne, To Lose a Battle; Jackson, The Popular Front in France; Jardin, Vichy Boyhood; Joly, “Darquier de Pellepoix: ‘Champion’ des Antisémites Français”; Joly, Darquier de Pellepoix et l'antisémitisme français; Les Amis de Rassinier, © by Gilles Karmasyn, 1999, http://www.phdn.org/negation/rassinier/ coston.html; Keesing's Contemporary Archives, 12–19 June 1948; Kingston, Anti-Semitism in France during the 1930s; Koestler, The Scum of the Earth; Laloum, La France antisémite de Darquier de Pellepoix; Larkin, France Since the Popular Front; Laubreaux, Ecrit pendant la guerre; Lottman, Pétain; Lukacs, The Duel; Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews; Mazet, Céline et Montandon, www.louisferdinandceline.free.fr; Ousby, Occupation; Pax-ton, Vichy France; Peschanski, La France des camps; Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich; Saint-Paulien, Histoire de la collaboration; Soucy, French Fascism: The Second Wave 1933–1939; Taguieff (ed.), L'Antisémitisme de plume; Taylor, The Strategy of Terror; The Times, 20 June 1939; Warner, Pierre Laval and the Eclipse of France; Weber, Action Française; “What the Taxpayers are Paying for,” l'Ordre, 25 October 1938; Weygand, Recalled to Service.
L'Antijuif, May, June and August 1937.
Telegram from Robert Dubard to Emilie Vasticar, Fleischhauer's secretary, 26 April 1938:“Le combat mené par Darquier est commencé, espoir que des ‘moyens’ viendront bientôt.” (“Darquier's battle has commenced,
let us hope that the ‘means’ will come soon.”)
Tasmania J.
La France enchaînée,no. 26, 15–30 April 1939.
Action française, 1 October 1938.
Larkin, p. 71.
Pierre Auguste Galien (1898–1978) lived at 26, rue du Château, Neuilly. Super Gom was at 110, rue du Landy at la plaine St.-Denis. Pierre Galien, in the histories of Vichy, is often called Joseph, and his name is often spelled as Gallien. Vague as such histories are about Darquier, they are vaguer still about his germanophile deputy. At the Liberation he was arrested on 1 September 1944, then moved from jail to hospital prison in December on the assumption that he had a brain tumour; but this may have been no more than a rumour based on the testimony of Galien's personal doctor, Maurice Tussau, who said of him, “From a mental point of view, he is a sick man.” Time was kind to Galien, as it was to so many of Darquier's war cronies. He was released on parole in April 1945 and did not attend his trial in July 1949. He died in his bed in a nursing home in Lyon in March 1978.
Some Germans certainly thought Galien was the “principal financier” of La France enchaînée.
APP GA R4: draft of 14 April 1938 and later version of 30 May 1938.
Bad Faith Page 63