Some papers of the extreme right moved to the Vichy Zone—Candide, Gringoire. Some writers, such as Colette, were happy to work within the milieu of German censorship; others kept their heads down. In 1941 de Monzie, deprived of his immense portfolio of committees and appointments, was sidelined in the Lot. When he published Ci-devant, his sour diary of the last days of the Third Republic, he was happy to let it be serialised in the pro-fascist slander sheet Gringoire.
Bernard Faÿ (1895–1978): Professor of American Civilisation, Collège de France; director, Bibliothèque Nationale, from 1941. He ran Vichy's Commission Judeo-Maçonnique. Faÿ was linked to the Gestapo; listed amongst his crimes at his trial after the war was the creation of 170,000 files on Freemasons, of which sixty thousand were investigated. He was arrested by French partisans in August 1944, and sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labour. Faÿ was aided by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, who also helped to finance his escape to Switzerland in October 1951. Pardoned in 1953. Vichy set up Faÿ at 16, rue Cadet, the former headquarters of Freemasonry; Coston was at 8, rue Puteaux.
Paxton, p. 69, 24 October 1940; Burrin, p. 65.
The reparation payments were lowered to 300,000 francs a day; after the Germans occupied all of France in November 1942, they went up to half a million francs a day. In order to eat, each subject needed a Carte d'alimentation, a ration card, and tickets, coloured stamps issued by the town hall, with which each person had to register. Then registration was required with a butcher, a baker, for whom there were bread tickets, and so on. It was forbidden to sell certain foods on specific days of the week: meat, sugar and alcohol for instance.
In 1939 Daladier passed a decree, the Code de la Famille, which included all the usual incentives for large families. The decline in the French birth rate had been a running sore to the Third Republic. The laws of this period included affirmation that husbands remained head of the family, and their right to forbid their wives to work.
Vichy set about increasing the birth rate almost immediately. In October 1940 a law was passed requiring married women to cease working in the public sector. This changed as the war began to require women's work, but management of women continued in other ways. There were over three hundred youth centres for girls, and just as physical education became mandatory for boys, school instruction in managing the home became so for girls. Women under Vichy, like women in Nazi Germany, were valuable to the state primarily as mothers of the next generation. For both Church and Vichy restoring the family as the central force of a Christian state was a key tenet. Vichy authorised financial rewards for the birth of children. Fathers of a family of more than five children were given additional civic rights. Being childless had employment disadvantages for men. French women, who would not have the right to vote until 1944, were not likewise rewarded, unless, as mothers, they stayed at home and had no outside employment. In that case they received a special allowance. Increased rations were given to pregnant women, and abortion was severely repressed. Twenty years' hard labour was the punishment for an abortion, and sometimes death.
Pétain had an affair with Eugénie Hardon while she was married; she divorced in 1914 and they married in 1920, in a civil ceremony only. By 1929 she had obtained a Catholic annulment, and Pétain could have performed the religious ceremony any time after that. He did this in March 1941.
SRD.
Gildea, pp. 57–58.
33.“Le système D”: D stands for débrouille, which with its verbal form débrouiller means literally “untangle” or “get out of a tangle”; débrouillez-vous basically means that it is your own problem, and that you should not expect any help in dealing with it.
Tasmania J.
The first hotel Louis went to, the Hôtel Castille at 37, rue Cambon, on 2 December 1940, was elegant enough to suggest that someone was paying for him there. Then followed the Hôtel Richepanse at 14, rue Richepanse and 1,rue d'Isly (the family of former CGQ J Director of Aryanisation Auguste Mudry lived at no. 8). “Enquiries at different addresses have revealed that Darquier left the Hôtels Fortuny and Richepanse without paying his bills. The hoteliers have not lodged a complaint” (AN 3W142). In September 1945, when the Justice Ministry began their investigations into Darquier's past, the address they gave for one of his passing abodes during this period was avenue Bonnet, stating that he was staying with a “family member” there. Charles Trochu lived at 6, avenue Colonel-Bonnet.
Jean-François Darlan (1881–1942): Darlan took over as deputy head of government on 9 February 1941, and lasted until 17 April 1942. Zealous for the French Empire, he negotiated the Protocols of Paris, signed on 28 May 1941, which granted access to the naval bases of the French empire to Germany. During his fourteen months in power he was Vice President of the Council of Ministers and Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Interior, Information and Defence.
In a letter of 1 March 1941 to Carl Theo Zeitschel, Abetz listed other men he had paid as alternatives: Bucard, Boissel, Clémenti, de Gobineau.
Citation: “On 12 June 1940 at Le Cadran (Montagne de Rheims) [Darquier] covered the army from the very first contact, changed his battery's position and was the last to stay in position with a machine gun until his artillery pieces were out of range. On 14 June at Connantre, when leading his battery's automobile column, his vehicle was hit by machine-gun fire. One of the occupants was killed and [Darquier] carried out the necessary repairs under fire without losing a single vehicle. On 15 June he led two combats—one at Voué and the other at Bréviandes—during which he took command of two isolated infantry detachments and defended the territory on foot to the point of exhaustion.” Signed by Huntziger, 15 July 1941.
After their marriage in London in 1928, Louis should have gone to a French consulate with all the necessary documents for the marriage to be recognised in France (Transcription d'un Acte de Mariage), then the marriage and all relevant details should have been entered in the Register of Civil Status at the Mairie of Cahors. Louis' death was added to his civil status (wrongly dated 1983), but never a marriage.
Ailes = wings, so for pilots at Enstone.
Pat Smalley, January 1999. She lived opposite 98 Hazel Crescent from 1939.
Louis' request for decorations is in his military file, dated 26 September 1941 (date uncertain), together with the response of the Secretary of State for War to the Comité d'Assistance aux Familles de Soldats Français, dated 14 October 1941, and General Huntziger's own confirmatory letter of 20 October, stating that Louis was still a prisoner of war.
Louis was also reappointed to the Administrative Committee of the Council of the Seine. Between 1939 and 1943 he served on the 11th Committee of the General Council in 1939 (technical control of works); 8th Committee of the General Council in 1939 (beaux arts, miscellaneous matters); 6th Committee of the Municipal Council in 1939 (water, sewerage, navigation and hygiene); 7th Committee of the Municipal Council in 1939 (métropolitain); 3rd Temporary Committee of the Municipal Council in 1943 (public works, urbanism, architecture, transport); 2nd Committee of the Departmental Council in 1943 (health, hygiene, work, family, economic and social life, POWs). “From the information gathered, it seems that the concerned party played a negligible role on these committees and was only rarely present” (AN 3W142).
Bishop Paul Chevrier: Chevrier was counterbalanced by a Monseigneur Araguay, mentioned with praise by many Cadurciens for his courage and opposition to the Germans. See also Chapter 20,n. 5.
Pierre Combes, 12 January 2000.
AN 3W142 and CDJC LXXV-105.
Burrin, p. 133.
Langer, p. 117.
Ibid., p. 219.
CHAPTER 13
Tormenting Men
SOURCES: AMAE (b) no. 435, 7 September 1942; AN 3W142; AN 3W147, Archives de Berlin: Abetz to Foreign Office in Berlin, Paris, 13 December 1940; AN 3W356, Archives de Berlin, bordereau 3459, 4 September 1942; APP GA D9, 18 December 1941; CDJC LXXV-59 and 70; CDJC XCV-135 and 135a; CDJC CII-55; TNA: PRO FO 892/163; TNA: PRO GFM 33–206
2.Publications: Action française, 8 April 1944; Billig, Le Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives (1941–1944); Burrin, France Under the Germans; Calef, Drancy 1941; Charbonneau, Les Mémoires de Porthos; Daily Herald, 16 December 1940; l'Express, 1978; Fest, The Face of the Third Reich; Gildea, Marianne in Chains; Gordon, Collaborationism in France During the Second World War; Guérin, La Résistance; Halls, Politics, Society and Christianity in Vichy France; Hilberg, La Destruction des Juifs d'Europe; Hoover Institution, France During the German Occupation; Jackson, Julian: France: The Dark Years; Jardin, Vichy Boyhood; Joly, “Darquier de Pellepoix ‘Champion’ des Antisémites Français”; Joly, Darquier de Pellepoix et l'antisémitisme français; Judt, “Betrayal in France,” New York Review of Books, 12 August 1993; Koestler, The Scum of the Earth; Lacroix-Riz, Industriels et banquiers français sous l'Occupation; Laloum, Jean: La France antisémite de Darquier de Pellepoix; Lerner, “A Michelin noir,” www.commentarymagazine.com/Summaries/V101I5P51–1.htm; Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews; Modiano, The Search Warrant; New York Times, 16 September 1944, 26 February and 8 March 1947; Nossiter, The Algeria Hotel; Ousby, Occupation;Overy, The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Third Reich; Paxton, Vichy France; Peschanski, http://histoire-sociale.univ-paris1.fr/12.TheseConclusion.pdf; Le Point, February 2000; Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich; de Rochebrune and Hazera, Les Patrons sous l'Occupation, vol. 2, Pétainisme, intrigues, spoliations; Taguieff (ed.), L'Antisémitisme de plume; U.S. Foreign Relations, 1941, vol. 11; Vallat, Le Nez de Cléopâtre; Weber, Action Française; Weisberg, Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France; Wistrich, “Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust,” Times Literary Supplement, 3 May 2002; Zucotti, The Holocaust, the French and the Jews.
Zucotti, p. 44.
Fifteen thousand people lost their citizenship between 1940 and 1944,of whom six thousand were Jews. Foreign work units were Groupements de Travailleurs étrangers (GTEs).
“For all administrative measures that it will be called upon to take, the Military Administration will pass through, on principle, the channels of the French authorities… Direct intervention is required only if measures prove to be inefficient” (CDJC LXXV-70).
Jardin, p. 63.
SS—first Standartenführer, then Obersturmbannführer—Helmut Knochen commanded the Gestapo and SD. Many thousands of people were recruited by the Gestapo and by the Abwehr—the intelligence service of the army: concierges, hairdressers, criminals; the world of denouncers, informers and spies was dense and tangled, and remains so.
On 12 August 1940 the Germans formed the Judenreferat, or police branch for Jewish affairs.
Hoover Institution, pp. 639, 640 and 644.
Raphaël Alibert (1887–1963): Vichy Minister of Justice from June 1940 to January 1941. He went into hiding at the end of the war and was sentenced to death in absentia by the French High Court of Justice at Paris on 7 March 1947. Lived in exile in Belgium; granted amnesty in 1959.
Pastor Marc Boegner (1881–1970): President of the Reformed Church of France, leading and most outspoken French Protestant and critic of Vichy and its treatment of the Jews. Later President of the World Council of Churches.
Action française, 8 April 1944.
Weber, p. 471.
By February 1941 Déat had formed the Rassemblement National Populaire and had attached himself to the embassy. His paper, l'Oeuvre, which he edited, was funded handsomely by Abetz.
Between four and five thousand communists were arrested by summer 1941 despite the Nazi-Soviet alliance.
Later the camp had sixty toilets, or rather trous d'aisance, public holes in the ground.
Of seventy-four all-Jewish convoys to the death camps, two left from Compiègne, six from Pithiviers, two from Beaune, one from Angers, one from Lyon, and sixty-two from Drancy.
Goering's extermination instructions would have passed thus: Heydrich– Eichmann–Dannecker.
Billig, p. 46.
Schleier was only a few years younger than Darquier, a committed Nazi, a solid presence, belted, booted and decorated in the accepted Nazi mode. He loved parties and receptions and proper French respect. It was Schleier and his embassy who had to agree and to help implement the plans for propaganda Louis presented. See also chapter 20,n. 34.
Billig, p. 76.
Xavier Vallat (1891–1972): Vallat was actually born in Vaucluse; his father came from the Ardèche and he always chose it as his pays. His first job at Vichy was as Secretary-General for Veterans' Affairs, and he transformed Pétain's cherished ex-servicemen into a Légion Française des Combattants (LFC, Legion of Veterans). These blue-shirted devotees were Pétain's replacement for the political parties he blamed for ruining France, and became his strongest organisation in the field for the implementation of his National Revolution. Vallat was personally selected for the Légion by his fellow Catholic General Weygand, and was as hostile to Germany as Weygand himself. This awkward sentiment meant that his new appointment lasted only twelve months. The LFC became the Service d'Ordre Légionnaire (SOL), and later the Milice.
Taguieff, p. 25.
Marrus and Paxton, p. 89.
Hoover, p. 626. In a twenty-thousand-word essay of justification which Vallat wrote in prison, after the war.
At first Vallat fiddled with Alibert's statut, but Alibert was dismissed as Vichy Minister of Justice for participating in the palace revolution behind Pétain's dismissal of Laval in December 1940. Joseph Barthélemy (1874–1945): Succeeded Alibert as French Minister of Justice from January 1941 until March 1943. His father was Professor of Science at Toulouse University and mayor of Toulouse. Close friend of Cardinal Gerlier. Defeatist, but anti-German, he supported Pétain and the National Revolution, inspired new divorce, and all post-Alibert anti-Semitic laws. Arrested by the French authorities in September 1944 and indicted by the French High Court of Justice, he died of tongue cancer at Toulouse before he came to trial.
U.S. Foreign Relations 1941, volume 11,p. 508. Vichy, 16 June 1941.
CDJC CII-55 quoting the Security Service. Billig, p. 160.
The efficiency of these technocrats was corporatist, a third way, it was felt, between Marxism and liberalism, in which each profession organised itself in a social order of professions and trades. In Vichy, these autocrats instigated a mixture of state control and corporatism under a new system of Comités d'organisation (COs). As is ever the case, order took precedence over any syndicalist ideas of workers' control of industry, or any system independent of the state with which some of these Vichy men had previously toyed. Trade unions were cancelled and these committees came to be controlled by big business, keyed in to working in the service of Germany.
Weber, Action Française, pp. 460ff.
CDJC XVII-13(58), 19 July 1941.
Between ten and twenty thousand communists were imprisoned. It is very hard to get correct figures; sources give conflicting numbers.
Pryce-Jones, pp. 50–1.
www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/order1.htm. The formation of the Police aux Questions Juives was not published in the Journal official as it should have been.
The PJQ destroyed their own files, so their activities are hard to pinpoint.
Weisberg, p. 197.
In July 1933 Pacelli (later Pius XII) masterminded and signed the Concordat, of which Hitler, Chancellor of Germany since January of that year, stated, in wording agreed by Pacelli, “that it gave sufficient guarantee that the Reich members of the Roman Catholic confession will from now on put themselves without reservation at the service of the new National Socialist state.” Another papal error was the support he gave to the terrifying murderers, “the Ustasi,” in Yugoslavia.
Gildea, p. 207.
PRO FO/892/163, Daily Herald, 16 December 1940.
Suhard said more to José de Lequerica: “The Cardinal [Suhard] told him [Benoist-Méchin, then Secretary of State] without much prevarication although in naturally guarded terms, that he and all his clergy would be prepared to take a much more favourable attitude t
o the policies of the Vichy government and its relations with Germany if they had an assurance that the National Socialists, victors in the war, would not persecute the Church.” Suhard assured Benoist-Méchin that no Church dogma prevented “precautions” against the “corrosive influence” of Jews (AMAE (b) no. 435, 7 September 1942).
Weisberg, p. 425.
The cardinals who voiced this view were Tardini and Montini of the Vatican State Department, in August and September 1941. Montini became Pope Paul VI in 1963. Pétain applied for papal approval of his anti-Semitic laws by way of his ambassador to the Vatican, Léon Bérard, whose report in the autumn of 1941 conveyed qualified approval. Lequerica wrote to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Madrid recording his discussions with Bérard, Pétain's ambassador to the Vatican, who had come to Vichy to explain “the attitude of the Church towards the measures taken by France on matters of race. According to him, the Vatican places no obstacle…” AMAE, Lequerica, 1 September 1942 to Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Madrid.
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