Voices from the Dark Years (20 page)

Dr Kummel, whose authority as director-general of the Berlin museums stemmed from Reichsminister Josef Goebbels, next appeared at the head of a commission charged with ‘recovering’ the works of German artists. If Dürer and Cranach were among them, so also were Rubens, van Dyck and many others who had not previously been German. While this was ongoing, a Dr Posse from Dresden made his entrance, charged directly by the Führer to seize the best pieces for the greatest art collection in the world at his planned European capital of Linz.

By now the embassy was out of storage space, with canvases and statues and furniture stacked all over. So the Jeu de Paume museum in the Tuileries gardens was requisitioned to serve as a holding area where works could be assembled and sorted. Yet another agency, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), was later estimated to have looted 21,903 major works of art.
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Rosenberg, the Nazi ideologue and author of
The Myth of the 20th Century
– a fictitious elaboration of the origins of the German race – had been placed in charge of the nascent party by Hitler when in prison after the Munich Beer Hall Putsch because he was too stupid to be of any danger. The ERR representative in Paris was Dr von Behr, formerly head of the German Red Cross. He was now supposed to be collecting ‘cultural property’ for an institute where all the intellectual works of Jews and others would be kept and analysed, but was able to stretch the definition to include, for example, a Vermeer looted from a de Rothschild residence.

No one, however, outdid arch-collector Hermann Goering. In civilian clothes, the head of the Luftwaffe – then supposedly destroying the RAF prior to a sea-borne invasion of Britain – spent whole days in the Jeu de Paume, looking like a mobile tent in his ankle-length overcoat as he ambled among the works of art. With a shopping list including ten Renoirs, ten Degas, two Monets, three Sisleys, four Cézannes and five Van Goghs,
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he returned nine times, chalking on the works that took his fancy a large ‘G’ if he wanted them for his personal collection at his private palace named Karinhall (in memory of his first wife), or an ‘H’ if he decided they should go to the Führer, no matter who else might have selected them. He also bought on the open market, endearing himself to dealers by spending 100 million francs in cash from his apparently bottomless briefcase stuffed with untraceable notes.
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To support Metternich’s Kunstschutz, the Wehrmacht sought to prevent exportation of works of art by making no transport available, a measure that Goering circumvented by commandeering Luftwaffe trucks to convey his loot to his personal train named
Kanada
, in which it travelled eastwards. When a courageous Luftwaffe officer explained that exporting works of art was contrary to military law, Goering simply retorted that he was the ultimate authority on the law
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and as such was empowered to grab pictures by Goya, Rembrandt, Rubens, Franz Hals, Degas, Renoir, Manet, Sisley, Cézanne, Van Gogh and others.

One courageous woman was quietly observing all the pillagers. The sentries at the Jeu de Paume took no notice of the bespectacled, plain-faced and modestly dressed Rose Valland, a young curator at the Louvre who had taken the risk of hiding certain works of art there behind false walls. Each day, she crossed the gravelled courtyard between her office and the Jeu de Paume, surreptitiously compiling an inventory of the looted works of art, with details of who had seized them and when and whither they had been despatched. Her log was the principal tool used in recovering thousands of state and privately owned works after the war, a labour for which she received several decorations.

Vichy was also doing its best to limit the looting. Many private collectors had gifted their favourite pieces to the new French state in the hope of protecting them. Pétain’s government now declared that all works of art belonging to runaways, whether Jewish or not, automatically became state property. However, where the original owners were Jewish, the German ruling was that they were German property because transfer of ownership was due to Wehrmacht force of arms. As to the provisions of the Hague Conventions, these did not apply because Jews and their property were not protected by any laws.

What the Nazis called
entartete Kunst
, or degenerate art, presented a different problem. Berlin had sold off works of despised ‘un-Germanic’ artists during the 1930s through Swiss galleries for foreign currency. Similarly now pictures by Picasso, Braque, Pissarro and other modern artists were sold off at a fraction of their true value to French intermediaries, while five or six hundred others were simply taken outside the Jeu de Paume and burned on the terrace. Works of Klee, Miro, Susanne Valadon, Miró, Max Ernst and Picasso were reduced to a pile of ashes, as so many books had been in Germany. Typically, Goering obtained works of Jewish or other ‘degenerate’ artists by arrogating to himself the decision of who was Jewish and what was degenerate. The looting continued until the last train of thirty-seven trucks, whose contents included a Van Dyck, a Rubens and several Renoirs, was immobilised just outside Paris by the Resistance in August 1944.

The German expression
wie Gott in Frankreich
means more or less ‘as good as it can get’. Certainly the rear-echelon military, the administrators, the Gestapo and other functionaries who arrived in Paris in the wake of the Wehrmacht were delighted to be on the west bank of the Rhine where, to begin with, shop windows were filled with so many things unavailable in Germany. Many were genuine francophiles, like Ribbentrop’s ambassador Otto Abetz, whose elegant French wife immediately drew up lists of the great and good to invite to her lunch parties. The smooth-talking, Scandinavian-looking career diplomat Ernst Achenbach, who had been
en poste
in Paris before the war, estimated that most of those invited were patriotic French people trying to accommodate the occupiers, yet they included far-right activists like Eugène Deloncle. With financial backing from Eugène Schueller, owner of the L’Oréal cosmetic empire, Deloncle formed the Mouvement Social Revolutionnaire (MSR) in September. MSR, pronounced
aime-et-sert
, or ‘loves and serves’, was to have much blood on its hands by the end of the occupation.

Abetz, a reluctant Nazi who joined the party in 1937, adored quoting from his favourite French authors and had made many visits to France in the 1930s, courting influential people and arranging youth congresses so successfully that he had been banned from entering France in 1939 on the accusation that he was fomenting a fifth column. The same civil servants at the Quai d’Orsay who had banned him then now had to court him as the most important diplomat in Paris. That his post existed at all was due to Foreign Minister Von Ribbentrop’s insistence on having his own man among all the others scrabbling for power in Paris, for the role of German ambassador in a city that was not the seat of government was unclear to everyone, according to Hans Speidel, the first Wehrmacht officer to enter Paris and eventually become commander of NATO Land Forces Central Europe. Initially confined to dealing with the German military command in Occupied France, only later did Abetz’s remit include dealing with the French themselves. Meeting Laval on 19 July, while his wife Suzanne was still busy buying curtain fabric and furnishing their apartment in the embassy, Abetz was completely taken in by the dark, dynamic Laval hammering home his personal vision of Franco-German collaboration.

The embassy staff was divided between non-Nazis like Achenbach and die-hard followers of Hitler like SS liaison officer Dr Zeitschel, of whom Achenbach said, ‘Now that was someone we didn’t trust.’ According to Speidel, Schleier’s impeccable party credentials made him politically more powerful than Abetz. Gertsner, too, was considered by the diplomats an out-and-out Nazi, but became a mayor in communist east Berlin after the war, like many Nazis who found no problem in changing allegiance from one totalitarian regime to another.

On 8 July Dr Carl Schaeffer was ex-officio appointed co-director of the Banque de France as Director of the Bankenaufsichtsamt, overseeing
all
French banks, with powers to access and freeze any account. Resistance to what is today normal state intrusion in the banking sector vanished when twelve senior managers of Crédit Lyonnais were imprisoned for protecting clients’ accounts from scrutiny.
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Schaeffer also appointed commissioners to run the Jewish- and British-owned banks. Unlike many occupation authorities, Schaeffer’s operation was amazingly efficient, with two German officials sufficing to police 80,000 obedient bank employees. His failures included the seizure of all foreign currency in France for the Reich. The Bank of England immediately invalidated all its banknotes held abroad unless stamped by a British consulate before a certain date, with the numbers duly noted. Schaeffer’s next move was to open up the safe deposit boxes of British citizens and confiscate the contents. French citizens needing to open their boxes could only do so in the presence of an official of the Bankenaufsichtsamt or another German officer. Family heirlooms were not seized but uncut gems and shares in foreign companies were ‘taken into protective custody’.

Publisher Thomas Kernan returned to Paris in mid-July, to find the offices of
Vogue
on the Champs Elysées had been ransacked and its photographic studio and darkroom requisitioned for production of propaganda photographs. One of the proliferating German organisations, the Propaganda Staffel, had moved into National City Bank Building at 52 Champs Elysées to control the French press, radio, cinema and theatre. Its boss, a pleasant, overweight lieutenant named Weber, who married a dancer at the Lido nightclub, had been the pre-war Paris manager for German news agency Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro. Kernan had known him well, but when he walked along the deserted Champs Elysées to ask Weber’s permission to resume publication – the US being still neutral – he was surprised to find himself interviewed by an underling whom he also knew. A former freelance Paris fashion photographer named Maier, whose work had never been good enough for
Vogue
, was now wearing SS uniform with the grand title of ‘Sonderführer for illustrated magazines’.

Kernan was obliged to declare that
Vogue
’s US parent company Condé Nast had no Jewish capital or interests, but each time he filled in one questionnaire he was given another, with Maier inventing one set of problems because the French edition was produced and published by a French company and another because the parent company was American. Meanwhile, the editor of a
Vogue
clone entitled
Art et la Mode
, which had enjoyed a circulation of less than a tenth of the real
Vogue
, went around openly telling the fashion houses that she had been given the mission of replacing
Vogue.
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It was traditional in France for intellectuals, especially writers, to be politically active. Notwithstanding three wounds suffered in the First World War, author and pamphleteer Drieu la Rochelle had supported Franco during the Spanish Civil War and also attended the Nuremberg rallies alongside delegations of British fascists. He also edited
Dernières Nouvelles
, which folded for reasons unknown after a few months, leaving him free to run the well-established publishing house Nouvelle Revue Française until 1943. Collaboration came naturally to him, as it did to many younger writers such as Robert Brasillach and Lucien Rebatet, who contributed to the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper
Je Suis Partout.

Hermann Eich, a journalist in his mid-twenties who had been on the staff of
Berliner Tageblatt
, arrived in Paris on 20 June also with the title of
Sonderführer
to find himself working for Weber on the preparation of guidelines for the French press as to what it could and could not do. His
Wege der französichen Presse
was the bible, of which readings were given each week for editors, who sent their deputies, who swiftly dwindled in number until replaced by a handful of secretaries, who jotted down shorthand notes to be shared between several papers. Editors who transgressed Eich’s guidelines were out of a job.

With the blessing of the Propaganda Staffel, intellectual Henri Jeanson, who had been imprisoned during the
drôle de guerre
for his opposition to the war effort, took editorial control of the mass-circulation
Paris Soir
, starting with a vicious attack on Pétain and the government in Vichy. Due to paper shortage, Jeansson was limited to a two-page format with four pages twice a week. Disdaining his tabloid public, Jeanson soon persuaded the Germans to back his up-market daily
Aujourd’hui
, for which François Mauriac and publisher Bernard Grasset were happy to write – in Grasset’s case after he had returned to Paris from the safety of the Free Zone, protesting to author Alphonse de Châteaubriand that ‘however far back you go in both branches of my family, you will find neither a Jew nor a Jewess’.
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