Cardinal Emmanuel Célestin Suhard (1874–1949): Archbishop of Paris during the Occupation. Named as particularly blameworthy. Never brought to justice.
Monseigneur Jean Mayol de Lupé (1873–1955): Friend of Abetz, much-decorated chaplain in the First World War. With Cardinal Suhard's approval, became chaplain to the LVF and accompanied the troops to the east. Praised His Holiness the Pope and Our Führer Adolf Hitler in the same breath. He was astonished by German defeat, and the Archbishop of Munich could not protect him. Extradited to France and sentenced in 1947 to twenty years' hard labour. Freed in 1951.
Bishop Jules-Géraud Saliège (1870–1956): Archbishop of Toulouse 1928–56. Georges Bidault also drew up a white list of clerics such as Archbishop Saliège who had not collaborated. Saliège was elevated to cardinal in 1946.
Taittinger wrote a number of mendacious accounts of his experiences, in which he never refers to Louis Darquier.
Joseph Adrien Antignac (1895–?): In August 1944, Antignac gave the order to destroy the CGQ J's archives. He was arrested on 6 November 1944;inJuly 1945 he was transferred from Fresnes prison to a series of Paris clinics. By November 1945 he was allowed house arrest and could move around Paris at will. On 4 July 1949, in front of the court, Antignac stated that he knew nothing of what happened to the Jews during the Occupation. He said: “I was not an anti-Semite. I accepted the job at the CGQ J as I would have accepted a job at the ‘Provisions ministry. ’ ” Before being interrogated by the court, Antignac read a preliminary statement in which he said he did not want to pay for the mistakes made by the man in charge of the CGQ J (Louis Darquier), who had not had the courage to face justice. Antignac was condemned to death and to dégradation nationale on 9 July 1949, after five hours of deliberations. He had tuberculosis. His sentence was commuted to forced labour in perpetuity. On his birth certificate there is no mention of his death, though his four marriages are recorded. His last marriage was in 1952. He was thus out of jail by 1952 or earlier, and he probably died under another identity.
There is considerable argument about the actual number executed after the Liberation. Courts were both military and civilian: 160,287 cases were tried, 45 percent of defendants were acquitted, 25 percent sentenced to prison, 25 percent to dégradation nationale; 7,017 were condemned to death, of which 1,500 were executed. Ordnances of 1944 introduced a new crime, l'indignité nationale, for which the punishment, dégradation nationale, ranging from five years to life, was essentially civic. The person thus sentenced lost the right to vote, became ineligible for public service, or was dismissed from it, lost army rank and the right to bear decorations, was excluded from business directorships, banks, press, radio, and all professional associations, institutes and organisations, all legal and judicial matters, teaching, journalism, and was forbidden to keep or carry arms.
On 23 October 1944: “Following the mention of the death of Darquier and Platon at the last press conference at the Ministry of Justice, it was stated in certain journalistic circles that Darquier had been killed while resisting arrest and that Platon had been shot without trial…Whatever, it was believed that the two men were dead” (APP GA D9).
L'Express, 28 October–4 November 1978.
Michael de Bertadano, March 2002.
René Darquier has passed his sense of family on to his three children, who are exceptionally close to each other.
L'Express, 28 October–4 November 1978.
Ibid., and Teresa.
SRD.
Teresa.
Ibid.
2 November 1944, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Madrid: AMAE R-2182, Exp. 12–15, Immigrantes Clandestinos.
After the defeat of Hitler, Franco's government transferred all German assets, in a variety of ways, to men of straw and others, which provided German war criminals with more lavish possibilities than anything on offer to the Vichy exiles—hence Horcher's restaurant (see also Chapter 21,n. 18).
Paul Preston quoting Franco, The Times Literary Supplement, 29 June 2001.
In 1944, 190,000 Spanish Republicans were executed or died in prison. Torture led to many suicides in prison. Other figures: 200,000 executed 450,000 in exile, 300,000 imprisoned.
On 12 March 1945 the Minister of Foreign Affairs wrote to M. Gibert, president of the pre-trial investigatory tribunal of the High Court of Justice, informing him that according to information from the French ambassador in Madrid, for the last four or five months Darquier had been living under a false name in that city. Two days later the preliminary investigation began. The warrant for his arrest was issued on 2 June 1945.
Maud de Belleroche described Geneviève as a pretty little shopgirl with a tremendous southern accent who spoke French very incorrectly. Maud de Belleroche (1920–?): Sexual rampager, writer (her books are filed under “Erotic” in French libraries) and actress. A woman of considerable vigour on many fronts, she gives a vivid portrait of these political exiles in Le Ballet des crabes and l'Ordinatrice. Among her husbands/amours was Georges Guilbaud, a member of Doriot's PPF and active in Tunis, who passed through Sigmaringen, then took refuge in Spain with Maud, his wife (?) of the time. They went on to Argentina, Maud only briefly, returning to France and many other activities. An example of her prose and her ideas: “Not for me to rise up against the nobility of the holocaust. Sexuality and suffering, spirituality and mortification are indissolubly linked in the common weft of higher pleasure, with death as a watermark.”
Mathieu Laurier, Randa p. 114. Name changed to Gran Via in 1983. The hotel Magerit is no. 76—it is the Coliseum Cinema today. Mathieu Laurier (1919–80): Former member of Jeunesses Patriotes, the Cagoule, then Clémenti's Parti Français National-Communiste, then the LVF, and an editor of Au Pilori.
Brian Nield, director of Briam School, September 1999, and Jean-Louis Huberti (real name Alain Baudroux), former journalist in Madrid, September 1999. François Gaucher (1910–90): Lawyer, secretary-general of the Parti Néo-Socialiste, a socialist turned fascist and an intellectual; member of the central committee of the PPF, served on the Eastern Front with the LVF in 1943.He was then chief of the Milice in the Northern Zone. Condemned to death in absentia. After the war, as well as running the école Briam in Madrid, he published two volumes of reflections on the fate and ideology of French fascism. Never brought to justice.
Pierre Combes, January 1999.
De Monzie was seventy-one. His funeral was held on 11 January 1947. Ramy Debrand was his sole legatee; she left everything to her niece Mme Fournié.
Le Procès du Maréchal Pétain,pp. 483ff.
According to contemporary polls, 40.5 percent felt Pétain should receive the death penalty, 40.5 percent punishment short of death.
Laval was kept under supervision in Spain, and then returned to Austria, where the U.S. forces turned him over to France.
Taittinger was released on 25 February 1945. He was fined 600,000 francs and prohibited from holding any public position. His business affairs, most notably the Taittinger champagne empire, suffered not at all.
Venner, p. 558.
Le procès de Charles Maurras et de Maurice Pujo,pp. 470, 506; Weber, Action Française, p. 472. “Ignore” in the original should have been translated as “not know about.”
Warner, p. 409.
Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946): Director of Hitler's Office for Foreign Policy, edited its official journal, wrote voluminously. Famous for his book on racial theory, The Myth of the Twentieth Century. Reich Minister of the Eastern Occupied Territories 1941–45.
Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893–1946): Wounded and decorated First World War veteran, salesman, Nazi from 1932. Hitler's Minister of Foreign Affairs 1938–1945. Inadequate ambassador to Britain in 1936; arranged the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939.
Otto Abetz (1903–58): After his release from prison in 1954, spent considerable effort attempting to rehabilitate his reputation and rewrite his history. Burnt to death in a car accident on the autobahn outside Düsseldorf.
Carl Theo Zeitschel (1893�
��1945): Staunch Nazi and Abetz's specialist on Jewish affairs at the embassy. Condemned to forced labour in perpetuity by the French courts in 1954, but he was already dead, killed in the Berlin bombardment of 1945.
Helmut Knochen (1910–?): Arrested with Oberg in 1944. Sentenced by British Military Tribunal to life imprisonment in 1946, then to death by hanging in 1947. Extradited to France, he was sentenced to death for war crimes in 1954. Released in 1962. Said to have worked in insurance in Offenbach, then to be in retirement in Baden-Baden.
Karl-Albrecht Oberg (1897–1965): Condemned to death in Germany, extradited to France in October 1946. Condemned to death by the French courts October 1954. Commuted to twenty years' forced labour in 1958. Pardoned in 1962.
Theodor Dannecker (1913–45): After Paris, Dannecker served in Bulgaria, Hungary and Italy. Arrested by the Americans, he hanged himself in the American prison at Bad Tölz in Bavaria.
Ernst Heinrichsohn (1921–?): Dannecker's assistant. After the war he was elected mayor of Burgstadt. Brought to trial by the West German government in 1979, sentenced to six years' imprisonment.
Ernst Achenbach (1909–91): As a corporate and defence lawyer, after the war Achenbach worked tirelessly in pursuit of amnesties for his Nazi colleagues— in particular for Otto Abetz. Deputy in the German Bundestag 1957–76. His nomination as German representative at the EEC in 1970 was annulled when the campaigner Beate Klarsfeld made public the dossier of his involvement in the deportation of the Jews. Otherwise never brought to justice.
Heinz Röthke (1913–66): Theological student, lawyer and civil servant. Ferocious anti-Semite who disliked any contact with Jews, and seldom visited Drancy but enthusiastically organised and—with Brunner—oversaw deportations until the end of the war. His extradition was never requested by the French government. Never brought to justice.
Rudolf Schleier (1899–1959): First World War veteran, tradesman from Hamburg, a Nazi from 1933. Promoted from Consul General at the embassy to Plenipotentiary Minister during Abetz's absence from Paris in 1943. Released from internment in Dachau by administrative error in December 1947.Rearrested November 1948, extradited to France and tried as a war criminal, but by 1951 he was a free man living in northern Germany, helping his old boss Otto Abetz and making an application to visit the UK.
Dr. Peter Klassen (dates unknown): His department in the Information Office of the embassy was called the Politisches Lektoren. He was specifically concerned with anti-Jewish and anti-Masonic propaganda, working closely with the IEQ J. As he was also responsible for ensuring that German control was seen to be discreet, and that instructions for Jewish and Masonic persecution should be carried out only by the French, he found the inadequacy of Darquier particularly painful. With others from the embassy, he followed Pétain and company to Sigmaringen, and then seems to have disappeared from public view.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Henri-Louis Destouches, 1894–1961): After his return to France he carried on, as ever, from his house in Meudon.
France-Revolution, “Fifteen Minutes with Louis Darquier,” 31 October 1943.
Serge Klarsfeld quoted in the Observer, 5 March 1998.
Laubreaux was not the only source of conflict: fascist journalist Maurice-Yvan Sicard (1910–2000) had coruscated Darquier in public at a meeting of the Salle Wagram on 22 January 1944. Sicard joined Doriot's PPF in 1936, was editor of its newspapers and a member of Doriot's bureau politique, and finally his political deputy. Like so many of Doriot's men, he fled to Spain. Condemned in absentia to hard labour in perpetuity, in 1957 he gave himself up and was granted amnesty. In Spain, under the pseudonym of Saint-Paulien, he transformed himself into an art historian and novelist.
Natalie Barney, Chalon.
Bill Coy, July 2001.
Beryl Coombes (Clifton), April 1999.
AN 3W142—letter of 5 January 1946 from French Ministry of Foreign Affairs to French Ministry of Justice, France.
The investigatory team for the High Court knew where Louis was in March 1945; Jean Darquier and Louise, until then “in one of her states” (Lacaze), by February 1946 if not before.
Teresa.
Bertrand Leary, chief executive of Les Grands Moulins de Strasbourg, is the grandson of Henry Lévy and the son of Jean Lévy/Leary who fled to the Unites States and changed the family name there. After the war Jean Lévy reacquired the mills from the man of straw who had been handling them (not without cost). After leaving Argentina, René Darquier was in Manila for the Worms Bank shortly before his death, in 1958–59.
SRD.
Beryl Coombes (Clifton), April 1999.
Heythrop Hall moved to become part of London University in 1970; its records are unavailable, so I am unsure whether Anne was baptised at Heythrop or Oxford.
A medical contemporary and friend of Anne Darquier.
Tasmania J; Teresa.
SRD.
Myrtle to René, 11 January 1933.
Vallat was sentenced to ten years in prison in December 1947, but was freed in December 1949. He wrote for Aspects of France—as Action française was renamed in 1947—and ran the paper from 1962 to 1966, wrote his memoirs, and died in 1972.
LXXIV-11, Paule Fichot, 9 December 1947.
AN 3W142 and Bernard Lecache in Le Droit de vivre, December 1947.
Others in Spain at this time were: Général Eugène Bridoux, Laval's Minister of War (sentenced to death in absentia), Maurice Gabolde, Vichy's last Minister of Justice (sentenced to death in absentia). Different courts sentenced to death in absentia Alain Laubreaux and Georges Oltramare—who arrived in Spain in 1950.
Lexie's will, 5 May 1948.
Tasmania J.
Teresa.
Pierre Orliac, January 1999.
Henri Fernet, September 1999.
Teresa.
Dominique Jamet: Son of Claude Jamet, professor, journalist and intellectual, a socialist and pacifist and collabo. His son Dominique is also a journalist and is the author of Le Petit Parisien (Flammarion, 2000).
A medical contemporary and friend of Anne Darquier.
Gun, “Les Enfants au nom maudit,” pp. 47ff. A great number of those I interviewed who knew Anne spoke to me about her hatred for her father. These quotes are culled from half a dozen of them.
CHAPTER 21
The Cricket Team
INTERVIEWS AND CORRESPONDENCE: Consuelo Alvarado, Paulette Aupoix, John Booth, Colette Calmon, Bernard Charles, Maria Clark, Pierre Combes, Beryl Coombes (Clifton), Bill Coy, Michael de Bertadano, Anne-Marie Fiel, Elaine Fraser, Colin Gale, Pierre Gayet, Jean-Louis Huberti, Jean Ibbitson, Yvonne Lacaze, María de Carmen Mansilla, Hilda Moorhouse, Pierre Orliac, Alistair Rapley, Simone Reste, Isobel Rhodes, John Rigge, Natalie Rothstein, Teresa. Sources: SRD; AGA (a), 24 October 1963; AGA (b); AMAE, ref. P571–37890; AN 3W142; Ayuntamiento de Madrid Area de Culture, Archivo de Villa; CDJC CCXXIII-76.Publications: Charroux, Ici Paris Hebdo, undated; Dictionnaire de la Noblesse; l'Humanité, 6 November 1978; Isis, 9 September 1949; Frank Margison, obituary of Robert Hobson, Guardian, 29 November 1999; Randa, Dictionnaire commenté de la collaboration française; Anthony Stevens, obituary of Anthony Storr, Guardian, 20 March 2001.
In Isis, 9 September 1949, Godfrey Smith complained about such views as aired by Robert Robinson. Robinson was editor of Isis in 1950; Smith was president of the Oxford Union in 1950.
Comments from Anne's contemporaries at St. Hilda's, in letters to me, 1997: Natalie Rothstein, Elaine Fraser, Hilda Moorhouse, Isobel Rhodes.
Bill Coy and Alistair Rapley, October, 1999.
Bill Coy, October 1999; July 2001.
The vicar at the time was the Rev. E. N. C. Sergeant, father of the political journalist John Sergeant—see his memoir Give Me Ten Seconds.
Beryl Coombes (Clifton), April 1999.
Colin Gale, Archivist of the Bethlem Royal Hospital, November 2004. In 1958 they were two hospitals—there still are—the Bethlem is in Beckenham, the Maudsley in Denmark Hill, both South East London, today part of an
even bigger and more complicated trust.
Medical contemporary and friend of Anne Darquier.
Anthony Storr, Obituary by Anthony Stevens, the Guardian, 20 March 2001.
Medical contemporaries and friends of Anne Darquier.
Frank Margison, Obituary for Robert Hobson, in the Guardian,(29 November 1999.)
Teresa.
Mathieu Laurier, Randa, p. 115.
The Central School is part of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Louis worked for the Foreign Office from 1 January 1951 to 1 January 1964, and for the Ministry of Information and Tourism from 24 October 1963 to the end of 1976.
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