Vallat sent out a press release on 11 October: “There was nothing in the laws passed to protect France from Jewish influence in opposition to Catholic doctrine.” This was not entirely true, one instance of wool-pulling being that the Catholic Church firmly believed in Christaining Jews, and was not averse to marriages between Jews and Christians for that purpose. A Jewish convert was a Catholic, not a Jew. But papal inaction and failure to concern itself about the true nature of Vichy's attack on Jews enabled the Vichy regime to do as it wished. Much the same procedure, had, of course, occurred with Franco.
Taguieff, p. 188.
Louis certainly knew he was going to replace Vallat by 28 January 1942. See Schleier to Zeitschel of that date (TNA: PRO GFM 33–2062).
AN 3W142.
9 November 1941, law instituting UGIF, l'Union Générale des Israélites de France.
AN 3W142.
Memo, 29 March 1942, probably from Zeitschel, to Abetz, Schleier, Achenbach and others that Darlan had agreed to sack Vallat immediately.
CHAPTER 14
Rats
INTERVIEWS AND CORRESPONDENCE: Colette Calmon, Jean Gayet, Pierre Gayet, Auguste Mudry, Yvonne Lacaze, Bertrand Leary, Simone Reste, Pat Smalley. Sources: Darquier family correspondence; AN 3W142;AN 3W147;AN 3W353, 18 May 1942;ANAJ38 3, André Cantel to Louis Darquier; APP GA D9, 12 March, 8 June and 8 October 1942; CDJC XLI-40, 30 June 1942; CDJC XLIX-42; CDJC XLIXa-5; CDJC XXIX-130, 9 May 1942; CDJC XXXV-2, 35, 44, 48; CDJC LXII-11: undated biography of Louis Darquier entitled “Note Concernant Darquier de Pellepoix”; CDJC LXXIV-4, 12 and 13; CDJC XCVI-5; CDJC CVI-103, 107; CDJC XXXV-44N; CDJC CCCXXIX-22; TNA: PRO FO 892/13; TNA: PRO FO 892/163; TNA: PRO GFM 33/2052, Schleier to Zeitschel, 28 January 1942; SRD; TNA: PRO GFM 33/2062, memo to Achenbach, 3 March 1942, unsigned but probably from Zeitschel. Publications: Billig, Le Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives; Burrin, France Under the Germans; Cazaux, René Bousquet; André Chaumet, in Cahiers jaunes, May–June 1941; Cointet, Vichy; Le Crapouillot; Crémieux-Brilhac, BBC Radio, 16 May and 1 July 1942; Daily Herald, 12 May 1942; Daily Telegraph, 15 May 1942; Débordes, Vichy: Capitale à l'heure allemande; Les Dernières nouvelles de Strasbourg, 7 April 1937; l'Express, 28 October–4 November 1978; Froment, René Bousquet; Gildea, Marianne in Chains; Halls, Politics, Society and Christianity in Vichy France; Hoover Institution, France During the German Occupation; Jackson, France: The Dark Years; Jardin, Vichy Boyhood; Joly, Darquier de Pellepoix et l'antisémitisme français; Journal d'Alsace et de Lorraine, 7 April 1937; Journal du Lot, 8 April 1942; Klarsfeld, French Children of the Holocaust; Lambert, Carnet d'un témoin; Libération, “Le dossier Bousquet,” 13 July 1993; Manchester Guardian, 23 July 1941; Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews; New York Times, 28 July 1947; Nossiter, The Algeria Hotel; Julia Pascal, “Vichy's Shame,” Guardian Weekend, 11 May 2002; Paxton, Vichy France; van Praag, Daughter of France; Taguieff (ed.), L'Antisémitisme de plume; The Times, 6 April 1942; Vulliez, Vichy.
Klassen, cited by Joly, Darquier de Pellepoix,p. 142. Billig, p. 129; Myrtle moved to the Hôtel Fortuny on 16 October 1941.
All comings and goings were observed by the Service des Garnis, the police who kept watch over the hotels of Paris and who knew their habits of old.
Billig, p. 73.
Ibid., p. 115. Vallat complained about Darquier's appointment to Raymond-Raoul Lambert, in charge of UGIF in the south, on 27 March 1942.
Georges Mandel (1885–1944): Half-Jewish journalist and politician and an opponent of Munich and of Nazism. He was one of the deputies who left France on the Massilia to start a free government in Morocco. Arrested and imprisoned by Pétain; sent to Buchenwald with Blum and Reynaud, returned to France in July 1944 and imprisoned in the Santé. Executed by the Milice as revenge for the Resistance execution of Philippe Henriot. Léon Blum (1872–1950): Arrested by Vichy in September 1940, he was accused of weakening France and causing the defeat, and condemned before trial to life imprisonment. After three years in prison he was delivered to the Germans and, as a bargaining chip, was kept in special confinement for two years at Buchenwald concentration camp. Liberated in May 1945. After the war he remained leader of the Socialist Party and editor of its newspaper Le Populaire, served as special ambassador to the United States in 1946, and again as premier—for two months—in 1946–47.
Blum and Daladier explained very clearly Pétain's personal responsibility, as army chief, for the “unpreparedness of France,” not to mention the uselessness of the Maginot Line.
PRO FO 371?319 392 3005.
AN 3W142. Laure was about to lose this job when he received this letter, signed by “Schoeffer,” but he remained close to Pétain and published his authorised biography, Pétain, in 1942.
Journal du Lot, 8 April 1942.
CDJC document LXII-11. Filed as “Biographical note in French and various reports (various documents from Germany) about the calumnies propagated by the Jews against Darquier.”
Henry Lévy, the “Miller King,” had held every position and done every good deed that Strasbourg and France could have required of him. Shortly before he died, this “perfect philanthropist” told Léon Blum that he had one dream to fulfil before his death. Already a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur, he wanted to be made a commandeur. Blum told him that, in the political climate of the time, it was not possible to nominate a Jew.
COs, Organisation Committees, were run by a chairman and a small committee, all under the Vichy Minister for Industrial Production, Jean Bichelonne (1904–44), prime exponent of Franco-German economic integration, involved in both the spoliations of the Jews and the STO. By August 1942, therefore, René Darquier came under this brilliant mathematician who worked so closely with Albert Speer. In 1944 Bichelonne was despatched to Sigmaringen with the rest of the Vichy government. He died in Germany in mysterious circumstances after a minor operation.
CDJC LX11–11 and Leary, 9 October 2000, regarding René's post-war application.
Billig, p. 130; Vichy confirmed Louis' post on 8 May 1942.
Hoover Institution, p. 656. Darlan had removed the responsibility for the CGQ J from himself to the Ministry of the Interior in September 1941.
René Bousquet (1909–93): His trajectory was slightly more complicated than Louis'; he failed once, tried again, but left the university before completion; however, he seems to have been given some sort of degree by Toulouse University. He began his political career in 1931 as private secretary to the deputy Pierre Cathala, and was Vichy chief of police in the Ministry of the Interior from 18 April 1942 to 30 December 1943. The number of Jews deported during his reign was 57,908, of whom 1,228 were still surviving in 1945 (Klarsfeld, French Children,pp. 418–19). I have been unable to discover accurate figures of the many thousands of communists and others whose deaths he arranged.
AN 3W142-KNO.
Billig, p. 113; CDJC CVI-103. 9 September 1942.
Louis Dreyfus & Co. is to this day the only international grain trade enterprise in family hands. King Two Louis' son Jean Louis-Dreyfus took over in 1940 and ran the company until 2003.
CDJC XXXV-2.
There are hundreds of letters like this. See CDJC XXXV.
Joly, Darquier de Pellepoix,p. 144, citing AN AJ38 3, letter of André Cantel to Louis Darquier.
Taguieff, p. 404, André Chaumet in Cahiers jaunes, May–June 1941.
Taguieff, p. 398, source: CDJC CCCXXIX-22.
CDJC X19-30.
Letter written by Dr. Achterberg, director of the Weltdienst. It was taken over entirely by Rosenberg's foreign policy office of the Nazi Party in Frankfurt in 1939, and Fleischhauer was replaced by August Schirmer. By 1941 he was living in his cellar in Erfurt, running a tiny rump of his old empire.
CDJC XXXV-44, étienne Genevois of Lyon to Louis Darquier, 27 May 1942.
SRD; Yvonne Lacaze, January 2000. 27.PRO FO892?13.
Daily Herald, 12 May 1942; PRO FO 892/163; the Manchester Guardian; 23 July 1942, and the Daily Telegraph of 15 May 1942.
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Consul Général de France to Vichy Foreign Office, 7 May 1942. In September and November the benevolent societies continued to give Nanny Lightfoot funds for Anne, even though the Vichy military bureaucracy had finally realised that Louis Darquier was no longer a prisoner. They had their revenge; Louis never became a chevalier de la Légion d'honneur.
S. E. van Praag, Daughter of France (1945).
Laval also had private rooms at the Majestic, but he eschewed Vichy high life and liked to return to his small château in Châteldon, driving the twenty-three kilometres each night in a blacked-out, bulletproof car. Outside the Parc stood Pétain's personal guard, bayonets fixed, facing the elegant Parc des Sources with its covered walkways, tall plane trees, casinos and hotels.
Débordes, p. 64.
Nossiter, p. 125.
Crémieux-Brilhac: BBC, 14 May 1942.
Urbain Gohier to Louis Darquier, 17 July 1942; CDJC XXV-48.
Vuillez, pp. 168–73. Wanda Vuillez Laparra was correspondent for the Swiss news agency Universum Press.
Today, nothing in Vichy looks seedier than the old Hôtel Algeria at 22, boulevard Carnot, on the corner of rue Roovère. With letters missing from its scruffy sign, its walls and doors are spattered with graffiti which include the sign of the FN, the Front National, the party run by Darquier's political descendant Jean-Marie le Pen. Today Robert Faurisson, the first and boldest of the negationists—those who deny the Holocaust, as did Louis Darquier—lives only a boundary throw from the Algeria.
There was another deportation on 25 February 1943. The plaque was put up by Serge Klarsfeld on 26 August 1992, despite the protests of residents (today both the Parc and the Majestic are private apartments); it was removed to a modest position inside the hotel after it had been daubed with blood or the swastika on several occasions. This is not surprising, as Pétain's former rooms have been purchased by the Association pour la Défence de la Mémoire du Maréchal Pétain, which has made it a private shrine.
There is a plaque inside the opera house in the casino honouring the eighty deputies who did not vote for Pétain in that room on 10 July 1940, and another outside a Maison de Retraite to Father Victor Dillard, deported to death in Dachau. That is more or less it.
Nossiter, pp. 186 and 190.
CDJC LXI-78. Billig, p. 51.
Crémieux-Brilhac: BBC, 14 May 1942.
On 15 July 1942, according to Billig (p. 243), Darquier promised the head of the Sicherheitspolizei (Dannecker of the Judenreferat) to supply him with “several thousand Jews from the Non-Occupied Zone.” According to Cazaux (p. 186), Darquier, without having previously consulted the government, specified to Dannecker, “that we could count on putting at the disposal of the Germans several thousands of Jews from the Non-Occupied Zone, with a view to their evacuation.”
Crémieux-Brilhac: BBC, 1 July 1942.
Bousquet to Darquier, 18 June 1942, telling him of the suppression of the PQ J, to take effect on 1 July. On 5 July it was finalised. Darquier retaliated by starting an Anti-Jewish Brigade of his own, but as it was attached to the remnants of Deloncle's paramilitary MSR, and they were warring bitterly amongst themselves, the brigade had no time to take on Jews as well.
CDJC YXLI-40, 30 June 1942.
On 23 May 1942. CDJC XXV-35.
L'Express, 28 October–4 November 1978.
CDJC XXV-48, Louis Darquier to Urbain Gohier, 13 July 1942.
CDJC XLIX-42.
AN 3W142, Dr. Klassen to Schleier.
“Die Judenfrage,” in Politik-Recht-Kultur und Wirtschaft, Herausgegeben von der Antijudischen Aktion,no. 18, Jahrgang VI, Berlin, 15 September 1942. It is probable that Darquier wrote the article in German.
Klassen AN 3W147, Archive de Berlin, telegram of 5 December 1942.
Georg Ebert, Rosenberg's agent at the Embassy, 20 May 1942. Billig, p. 231.
22 June 1942, quoted by Burrin, p. 151, in a slightly different translation.
L'Express, 28 October–4 November 1978.
CHAPTER 15
The Rat Pit
Interviews and correspondence: Henri Fernet, Pierre Gayet, Auguste Mudry. Sources: AN 3W142; AN 3W147; CDJC LXI-122; CDJC XIb-474; CDJC LXXV105; CDJC XCIV-57, 64; CDJC XCVI-5, 57, 72, 89; CDJC CVI-75; CDJC CXLIV; CDJC CXCIII-135, 1 June 1942; 203; TNA: PRO FO 371/31941 Z4579.Publications: Billig, Le Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives; Burrin, France Under the Ger mans; Halls, Politics, Society and Christianity in Vichy France; Hoffman et al., France: Change and Tradition; Jackson, France: The Dark Years; Joly, Darquier de Pellepoix et l'antisémitisme français; Libération, “Le dossier Bousquet,” 13 July 1993; Marrus and Pax-ton, Vichy France and the Jews; Maspero, Cat's Grin; Mondiano, The Search Warrant; Ousby, Occupation; Péan, Une Jeunesse française; Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich; Zucotti, The Holocaust, the French and the Jews.
Abetz also knew de Monzie, and protected fascists such as Bucard. In general the Reich thought of him as far too sympathetic to the French.
CDJC XCIV-57.
AN 3W142.
Jalby, former police officer, 14 September 1946: “He [Galien] pushed Dannecker to get Darquier de Pellepoix appointed as Commissioner-General. With his plan complete, he became Darquier's chief of staff.” Knochen (4 November 1947) says Galien was appointed by the Germans. Both Dannecker and Abetz also claimed responsibility for Darquier's appointment (AN 3W142).
Louis Darquier merged the Status of Persons section with the Legal Affairs section run by Armilhon.
Roland Lécuyer (1913–66): Louis Darquier's wartime bodyguard is said to have escaped to North Africa, first to Abidjan then to Dakar, where he died.
Billig, pp. 126, 149.
CDJC XCVI-57,p. 4a; Billig, p. 120.
Billig, p. 131.
AN 3W142-KNO.
Billig, p. 80.
AN 3W142.
31 July 1942. Libération, 13 July 1993.
AN 3W142, Marie-Jeanne Costemale, secretary, 19 August 1946.
(AN 3W142), Paule Fichot, 5 September 1944.
Ibid.
Jean Bouvyer (1917–?): Bouvyer's parents and François Mitterrand's parents were very close friends, and remained so throughout the years. Antoinette Bouvyer, Jean's mother, was godmother to Mitterrand's son Christophe. Jean Bouvyer became the lover of Mitterrand's sister Marie-Josèphe de Corlieu ( Josette), who had made an unhappy marriage. The Marquise, or Jo, as she was known, was a portrait painter and lived at 17, rue de la Paix. Bouvyer was a constant guest there. After the Liberation, Bouvyer was tried and condemned to death in absentia, but was protected by François Mitterrand, who averred that Bouvyer had assisted him in his resistance work in making forged ID papers. Bouvyer found exile in Paraguay, then Brazil. His activities and connections with the Mitterrand family are amply documented in Pierre Péan's Une Jeunesse française: François Mitterrand, 1934–1947.
AN 3W142 letters of 1942.
Jean Gayet, November 1999.
Henri Fernet, former Waffen SS, Division Charlemagne, September 1999.
CDJC X16-474. Billig, p. 134.
AN 3W142. Boxhorn, 27 April 1943; Dehesdain, 12 March 1943.
AN 3W142. Report from the police judiciaire (CID) concerning the operations of the CGQ J signed by Lafarge, 10 February 1945.
There are numerous reports of noisy altercations in the Paris office in place des Petits-Pères. These began with Pierre Gérard, who lasted as assistant director of the Aryanisation section for the briefest time; he quarrelled with Galien and produced a detailed and damning report, pages long, on Galien's embezzlements and misdeeds. “Paule Fichot said that Darquier found out that Galien was keeping secret personnel and aryanisation files, doubtless destined either for the Gestapo or for blackmail after the war. Darquier objected to the obvious German influence Galien exerted and inserted throughout the office” (CDJC XCVI-57, 10 October 1946). Galien retaliated by telling the Gestapo that they quarrelled over Darquier's malpractice and that which he tolerated from his staff, and he instructed the Gestapo to
sack Darquier (CDJC XCVI-72, 29 November 1946).
The money involved in all Louis Darquier's compassion relies for evidence on the vast number of times he was accused of taking it, and the verbal evidence of his employees, but, obviously, no records exist of exactly what he received. What is recorded is that, as far as running the CGQ J was concerned, Louis Darquier “knew how to do nothing, he couldn't manage anything, and he knew nothing about any of it” (Auguste Mudry).
AN 3W142.
The Synarchie (Synarchy): pro-fascist and infamously influential at Vichy during Darlan's time. Doing what de Monzie told him was one incentive in helping men such as Hippolyte Worms, but another would be the secret mumbo jumbo and mysteries in which Synarchists liked to indulge. The strong Anglo-Saxon connections of the Worms Bank and its associates were an added incentive, for despite his recent Anglophobia, these were the kind of men Louis Darquier had longed to encounter during his disastrous London years. Hippolyte Worms (1889–?): Grandson of the founder of the Worms Bank, which dealt in arms, coal, naval construction and banking, and had tentacles in many other affairs. In 1939 the British government used Hippolyte as Chief of Anglo-French Maritime Transport; de Monzie had set up such an arrangement when he was Minister for the Merchant Marine in 1917, and reappointed him in 1939. Other Worms family members who could have been assisted were édouard, Pierre, Marc and Philippe. Pierre Worms was murdered after a denunciation by Charles Maurras.
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