AN 3W142, Marie-Jeanne Costemale-Lacoste, secretary, 19 August 1946.
Marie-Eléonore Mathieu, CGQ J translator, CDJC XCVI-64 and -57.
All the above quotes from AN 3W142-KNO.
AN 3W142, note 118, regarding the Hospital Rothschild and the Jewess Asson, 12 October 1942.
Other nations were permitted to take Jews back to the countries from which they came, but only Switzerland made any use of this possibility, and then not for long. A few other countries took back Jews who were valuable from “an industrial or financial point of view.”
Quoted by Pryce-Jones, p. 63; Les Décombres (The Ruins). Ousby, p. 101.
Jacques Doriot (“Le Grand Jacques,” 1898–1945): First World War veteran and prominent French communist who in 1934 veered violently to the right and in 1936 founded the PPF. The leading French fascist, a born leader, a skilful if tedious orator, he courted the Gestapo and the MBF and, hostile to Laval, bowed low before the Marshal and the Church. A dominant force in the founding of the LVF, he took the uniform himself and fought on the Eastern Front. Fled France with two thousand of his followers in August 1944 to Germany, where Hitler supported him as an alternative to Pétain and company at Sigmaringen. He was killed when his car was strafed by Allied bombers in February 1945.
By December the embassy had interviewed Darquier twice about his Judenfrage article.
Burrin, p. 165.
AN 3W142.
Billig, p. 119; CDJC CXCIII-203,p. 11.
Billig, p. 121.
Marie-Eléonore Mathieu, CGQ J translator, CDJC XCVI-64.
The description of the searching of the internees is from Modiano, The Search Warrant,pp. 60–1, citing “an extract from an official report drawn up in November 1943 by a manager from Pithiviers tax office.”
AN 3W142, note 122, letter to von Behr in favour of Susanne Lévy, 9 September 1943.
AN 3W142.
CDJC LXI-122; Billig, p. 124.
CHAPTER 16
Death
SOURCES: AMAE (b), 15 September 1942; AN AJ 38/3; AN 3W142; AN 3W353; CDJC XXXV-48; CDJC XXVb-55, 112, 128; CDJC XXVI-40; CDJC XLIX-13, 42; CDJC XCVI-15; CDJC CV-61; CDJC CXI-41, 55; CDJC CXCIV-25, 92; CDJC CCXVIII-72; TNA: PRO FO 371/32056.Publications: l'Antijuif, 17 July 1937; Billig, Le Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives; Burrin, France Under the Germans; Cazaux, René Bousquet; Coston, “I Have Seen Jews Work,” La France au travail, 18 May 1941; Eichmann Trial Judgement, 100 Cable T/443; l'Express, 14–20 February 1972, 28 October–4 November 1978; Halls, Politics, Society and Christianity in Vichy France; Jackson, France: The Dark Years; Joly, Darquier de Pellepoix et l'antisémitisme français; Judt, “Betrayal in France,” New York Review of Books, 12 August 1993; Klarsfeld, Le Calendrier de la persécution des Juifs en France; Klarsfeld, French Children of the Holocaust; Laborie, Résistants, vichyssois et autres; Laloum, La France antisémite de Darquier de Pellepoix; Lambert, Carnet d'un témoin; Lévy and Tillard, La Grande rafle du Vel' d'Hiv; Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews; Ousby, Occupation; Le Monde, 10 November 1994; Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich; Sabbagh (ed.), Lettres de Drancy; Taguieff (ed.), L'Antisémitisme de plume; Weber, Action Française; Zucotti, The Holocaust, the French and the Jews.
Heydrich's visit to Paris was one of his last displays of power. He was also Reich Protector of what was left of Czechoslovakia. Two weeks later, in Prague, he was shot by two Czech exiles trained by the SOE in London, and a week later he was dead. Czechoslovakia paid mightily for this: Nazi reprisals included the liquidation of 936 people in Prague, 395 in Brno, and all the inhabitants of Lidice. In Heydrich's honour the construction of the extermination camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, the planning and coordination of deportations there, the installation and application of gas chambers, the incineration of bodies, and the transport of Jewish valuables and belongings from dead Jews to German storage was named “Operation Reinhard.” These extermination camps in Poland were added to that of Auschwitz, also transformed into an extermination camp in 1942.
SS-Brigadeführer and Generalmajor der Polizei Karl-Albrecht Oberg, the head of the German security and police services from May 1942, was not responsible to the MBF, but to the Nazi Party; this was crucial.
Billig, p. 23.
Knochen had two deputies, Herbert-Martin Hagen and Kurt Lischka. In Paris, Eichmann's Judenreferat, run by first Dannecker, then Röthke, was directly responsible to Oberg.
La Mémoire courte, a film by Henri and Francine Torrent. Bousquet went first, then Georges Hilaire, Secretary-General of the Ministry of the Interior, then Darquier.
Earlier Heydrich had conveyed his orders to Fernand de Brinon, Pétain's ambassador in Paris, and instructed him to inform Laval.
Coston, “I have seen Jews work,” La France au Travail, 18 May 1941; Taguieff, p. 569.
These prominent Jews were taken to a concentration camp in Compiègne, where they shared their prison with over three thousand French communists and Russian prisoners of war.
The list for the convoy of 27 March 1942 has never been found, but the number of deportees has been estimated at 1,112.
French Jews: In 1939, 195,000 were French citizens and the remaining 135,000 foreign Jews. Sixty percent of them were citizens of France; under Vichy 20 percent of these Jews were exterminated. The immigrant Jews who had sought refuge in France between 1880 and 1939, mostly in Louis' lifetime, made up the other 40 percent; only 55 percent of them survived Vichy.
Jean Leguay (1909–89): After the Liberation, despite his role in Jewish deportations as René Bousquet's police deputy in the Occupied Zone, although suspended from government office, he was permitted to leave for the United States, where he became a leading executive of Nina Ricci and Warner Lambert Pharmaceuticals. He returned to live in France until the Darquier Affair brought him to light. Indicted in 1979. Jackson, p. 229.
Laval, occupied with other worries, was nevertheless perfectly aware of the military setbacks that were plaguing the Germans in the east and North Africa. Until the end of 1942 the Germans had little more than thirty thousand men at their disposal to control France, and Knochen and Oberg no more than three thousand German police. Bousquet commanded a French police force of about 100,000 men.
The Germans wanted to include 40 percent of French Jews in the deportations.
On 2 July Bousquet met the German SS chiefs in Paris, Oberg and Knochen, Hagen and Lischka among others.
Klarsfeld, French Children,p. 34.
CDJC XXVI-40 and Billig, p. 245.
The target for Paris was later reduced to twenty thousand.
Billig, p. 245.
Klarsfeld, Le Calendrier,p. 261, quoting Laval: “rubbish that the Germans themselves had disposed of.”
Intervention of Laval at the Conseil des Ministres: “Dans une intention d'humanité, le chef du gouvernement a obtenu—contrairement aux premières propositions allemandes— que les enfants, y compris ceux de moins de seize ans, soient autorisés à accompagner leurs parents” (CDJC XLIX-35); and “President Laval suggested that Jewish children under the age of sixteen should be included in the deportation of Jewish families from the Unoccupied Zone. The question of Jewish children remaining in the Occupied Zone was of no interest to him” (CDJC XXVI-46RF, 1233).
“Therefore, I request urgent notification by telegram of your decision as to whether children under the age of sixteen should be deported after the first fifteen convoys have left France. In conclusion, I would add that for the moment, the operation has only concerned stateless and foreign Jews. During the second phase we shall deal with Jews naturalised in France after 1919 or 1927” (Billig, p. 247).
Joly, Darquier de Pellepoix,p. 148, quoting Dannecker.
Billig, p. 250.
Jean François (1884–?): Police Commissioner, in charge of Jewish Affairs at the Paris Prefecture de Police. At the Liberation the purge commission ordered his dismissal without pension, without result. Never brought to justice.
André Tulard (1899–19
67): Never brought to trial.
The Vélodrome d'Hiver opened in 1910;by 1931 it was a Palais des Sports with a capacity of twenty thousand.
Billig, p. 251; CDJC XXVb-55.
AN 3W142.
Marie Jeanne Costemale-Lacoste, 19 June 1946, CDJC XCVI- 15.
Zucotti, p. 111.
Ibid., p. 112.
AN 3W142, Statement by Kurt Schendell.
AN 3W142.
CDJC XXVb-128.
See CDJC XXXV-48, correspondence between Louis Darquier and Urbain Gohier, on the inadequacy of the situation and the difficulties of Darquier at Vichy. Gohier wrote his first letter on 9 June 1942; Louis wrote his first reply on 13 July.
CDJC CXC IV-92.
CDJC XXXVb-92; Billig, p. 253.
Darquier to Laval, 31 July 1942.
The ACA, the Assemblée des Cardinaux et Archevèques, met quarterly. The persecution of the Jews was not mentioned in October 1942, at any of its meetings in 1943, nor at its last meeting before the Liberation in February 1944.In October 1942, from his prison in Le Portalet, Paul Reynaud wrote to Gerlier, accusing all the cardinals of the Church of massive betrayals, and ended: “by making common cause with Pétain and Laval, you have worked mightily towards the divorce of the Church from all the healthy elements in the nation” (Halls, p. 76).
AN 3W142-KNO.
Cazaux, p. 190.
“Bousquet told Daladier, in prison, that Laval and he wanted to use their energetic pursuit of the children as a bargaining tool in other negotiations.” Bousquet permitted seventeen kinds of exemptions; on 18 August he withdrew eleven of them (Klarsfeld, French Children,p. 52, and Cazaux, pp. 193–4). Donald Lowrie to YMCA August 1942; sent to British Government confidentially by Save the Children Fund in November 1942. PRO FO 371/32056.
Between five and eight thousand children said goodbye to their parents and never saw them again. Klarsfeld, French Children,p. 44; Marrus and Paxton, p. 266; and Zucotti, p. 124.
The Prefect of the Hérault department, quoted by Marrus and Paxton, p. 256.
Laborie, p. 235. Bishop Jules-Gérard Saliège (1870–1956): Archbishop of Toulouse. See also Chapter 20,n. 5.
Pierre-Marie Théas of Montauban, bishop of Bousquet's native town, was one of those who followed Saliège.
Among these messages was a clandestine tract of six pages, published in 1942, detailing almost everything that happened to the Jews in these July and August round-ups: “It is three months since thousands of Jewish children, after having been separated from their parents and suffering horrors in the camps of Pithiviers and Drancy, were deported to the east. And then, not a word” (CDJC XLIX-13).
The BBC continued to refer to mass murders. On 2 July the New York Times published a report of the gassing. The Vatican and its cardinals knew. Whether they believed it, of course, is another matter. The Germans went to great lengths to deny it too, using all kinds of proof, model camps and so forth.
Donald Lowrie to YMCA August 1942; sent to British Government confidentially by Save the Children Fund November 1942. PRO FO 371/32056.
Some of the relief agencies: CIMADE (Comité intermouvements auprès des évacués): a Protestant group of five youth movements. Pastor Boegner, the French Protestant leader, presided over it and was a prime mover against Vichy's Jewish laws. He and Cardinal Gerlier, to whose diocese the anti-Nazi Jesuit Père Chaillet belonged, agreed that joint effort should be made to rescue the children. This became l'Amitié Chrétienne, which produced vast quantities of the false documents which so irritated Louis Darquier and Georges Montan-don. Dr. Donald Lowrie, an American, of the International YMCA, took a leading role in relief, as did the World Council of Churches. Jewish relief agencies and charities abounded, and there was UGIF in both zones to supply what it could. Some of the hundreds of charities involved in trying to save the Jews and others of France were Quakers, the Red Cross, Secours Suisse, Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE, a Jewish children's relief agency) and the Salvation Army. Jewish relief funds tried to get the children to America. The U.S. government offered a thousand visas, later raised to five thousand. Laval agreed, as long as there was no publicity. Bousquet gave only five hundred exit visas; his firmness on the matter meant that delays took the matter up to November. Operation Torch brought an end to it. About 350 children finally got to the United States. The French Resistance, the World Jewish Congress and the Save the Children Fund also helped in different ways: the reports of the underground press of the former, in the CDJC and of the latter two in the TNA: PRO tell more than anyone can easily bear to know.
At Vichy, René Gillouin, a Protestant close to Pétain, continually protested. Admiral Platon, also a Protestant, did the opposite and refused Boegner's pleas for intervention.
Weber, Action Française,p. 471.
Pryce-Jones, interview with Jean Leguay, p. 232.
Lambert, pp. 186–7.
Lequerica to Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Madrid: “I await his [Darquier's] conversation with curiosity… since even though they may have been some unpleasant excesses of violence in its execution, a mere eleven thousand people have been placed in camps…” (AMAE (b), 15 September 1942). There is a lot more like this in Lequerica's correspondence.
These letters are from, in order, Coeurs Vaillants, 21 April 1942 (Coeurs Vaillants is a Catholic journal for children); anonymous, 18 July 1942; Jeanne L., 24 August 1942;B.I., 24 August 1942; Françoise D., 30 August 1942. All are reprinted, with many more, in Sabbagh (ed.).
September 1942, Jackson, p. 203.
Marrus and Paxton, p. 278, and Halls, p. 80.
Barthélémy: Carnets, quoted in Le Monde, 10 November 1994.
The plaque in Vichy commemorates 6,500 Jews.
CDJC XLIX-42.
Dannecker, however, managed to meet his future wife in Paris, and got engaged there.
Zucotti, p. 114.
Klarsfeld, French Children,p. 48.
CHAPTER 17
Having Fun
INTERVIEWS AND CORRESPONDENCE: Jean Gayet, Auguste Mudry, Teresa. Sources: Darquier family correspondence; AGA; AMAE (b), 9 and 13 June 1939, 13 March 1941; AMAE (f) Exp. 21; AN AJ 38/3; AN AJ38/3V, 20 May 1943; AN 3W142;AN 3W147; AN 3W155; APP GA D9, 12 January and 12 March 1943; CDJC VI-176; CDJC XIV-80; CDJC XXVI-40; CDJC LXI-104; CDJC LXXIV-13; CDJC LXXV105; CDJC XCV-80; CDJC XCVI-12, 72; CDJC CIX-97; CDJC CXVIII-162; CDJC CXXXIX-6; CDJC CCXIV-82; CDJC CCXVI-9; TNA: PRO FO 371/28228 Z6543; TNA: PRO FO 371/49587 Z3523; TNA: PRO FO 892/163.Publications: Beevor and Cooper, Paris After the Liberation; Billig, Le Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives; Burrin, France Under the Germans; Cointet, Vichy; Bernadette Dubourg, “Le Procès Papon, compte rendu d'audience du 23 janvier 1998,” www.sudouest.com/papon/ procedure/page17.htm; La France enchaînée, 1–15 June 1939; Gordon, Collaborationism in France During the Second World War; Gordon, Fascism, the Neo-Right and Gastronomy; Halls, Politics, Society and Christianity in Vichy France; History Today, October 2001; Hoover Institution, France During the German Occupation; Howson, Arms for Spain; Jackson, France: The Dark Years; Jardin, Vichy Boyhood; Joly, Darquier de Pellepoix et l'antisémitisme français; Journal officiel, 23 and 24 November, 13–24 December 1942; Jucker, Curfew in Paris; Kernan, Report on France; Lacroix-Riz, Industriels et banquiers français sous l'Occupation; Laloum, La France antisémite de Darquier de Pellepoix; Libération, 13 July 1993; Mail on Sunday, 16 January 2000; Marnham, The Death of Jean Moulin; Le Matin, 22 December 1942; Mengin, No Laurels for de Gaulle; Modiano, The Search Warrant; Patterson, “Ireland, Vichy and Post-Liberation France”; Paxton, Vichy France; Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich; Randa, Dictionnaire commenté de la collaboration française; Rearick, The French in Love and War; Sana, El Franquismo sin Mitos; Taguieff (ed.), L'Antisémitisme de plume; Templewood, Ambassador on Special Mission; Wellers, Un Juif sous Vichy; Woodhead, War Paint.
CDJC XCVI-72.
Vittel is another French spa town which admits little about its Vichy years. This camp was controlled by the Nazis, and its
grand hotels housed Americans and Canadians too; then came Polish Jews, who were deported. Five hundred of these women were exchanged for German prisoners of war; the rest were liberated in September 1944.
Jucker, p. 155.
Letter to Darquier from de Lequerica, 26 February 1943, marked personal— “Mon cher Commissaire et Ami ”—about a former colleague of Lequerica's, apparently of Jewish origin: “Spain is a country which in my opinion has never been unaware of what they call today, racial questions. On the contrary…” This was the affair of Gattegno Botto.
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