Voices from the Dark Years (34 page)

In mid February, Heydrich imposed SS-Brigadeführer Karl Oberg as Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer Frankreich to oversee the work of Danneker and Knochen. A tubby little caricature of Himmler, Oberg had been responsible for police repression in Poland and now took overall responsibility for security work in France. Since he could not speak French, he used Knochen to control French officialdom.

That month the underground newspaper
Défense de la France –
which would become
France Soir
in 1944 – published an article condemning women who slept with the enemy:

You so-called French women who give your bodies to a German will be shaved, with a notice pinned on your backs Sold to the enemy! So will you shameless girls who trip around with the occupiers be shaved and whipped. On all your foreheads a swastika will be branded with hot iron.
⁴

Who were these shameless women and girls? If some were prostitutes, others were single mothers needing a protector, a source of money or extra food; others were just young girls seeking some fun in the dark years when a new dress or a pair of pretty shoes was otherwise only a dream. But a good number were respectable women employed in hotels, restaurants and other places where the clientele was German. Even if they tried at first never to smile or to reply other than frigidly to questions, daily contact soon made it plain that most German soldiers had no more desire to be in Hitler’s armed forces than the French had to see them in France.

Raymonde Z worked in an abbatoir near St-Malo, plucking and gutting twelve chickens an hour. It is easy to see why she fell for her elegant lover Fritz in his dark-blue Kriegsmarine uniform. After the Liberation their son Gérard was singled out by all the other children at school as
le fils du Boche
and his mother abused him daily as the incarnation of her shame. Interviewed for
L’Express
aged 55, he said bitterly, ‘She should have aborted me, or given me away.’
⁵

Perhaps some of the women sought to escape from the crushingly patriarchal Pétainist philosophy in which they had no political rights or representation, no influence of any kind outside the home. But many others genuinely fell in love, never thinking that there would be a price to pay for the hours or weeks or months of happiness before their lovers were posted, perhaps to die shortly afterwards on the Russian front. One such was Thérèse Y, who worked in her mother’s bar at Lillebonne, halfway between Rouen and the coast. Her mother slept with Germans for cash, and turned a blind eye to what her 17-year-old daughter was up to with Josef, a music-loving pharmacist who sang operatic arias to her after the bar closed at night. To have a sexual relationship with a racially inferior French woman outside an approved brothel was an offence under military law, so her dream ended when she told him she was pregnant.

After he stopped seeing her, she found a job as waitress in a requisitioned château where, among the men she served at tables, was her ex-lover, pretending not to know her. His regiment posted elsewhere, Josef vanished, only to reappear in Lillebonne three days after the lonely birth, apparently full of remorse. After briefly holding in his arms the daughter who had been christened Marie-José after him, he vanished forever, leaving her to grow up wondering, ‘When will Daddy come back for me?’ Unlike many of France’s war babies, Marie-José was told the truth by her mother when young, but it was not until 2002 that they travelled together to the Wehrmacht Archives Service (WASt) and there, among 18 million personal files, they found that of Josef, who had died unmarried in 1984.
⁶

On 19 February at Riom the Supreme Court began hearings of ‘those responsible for the defeat of 1940’. Thus, only 35km from all the foreign correspondents in Vichy, Édouard Daladier stood in the dock beside Léon Blum and General Maurice Gamelin, indicted for military incompetence. It was a costly error on Pétain’s part. An adroit parliamentarian, Blum defended himself partly with counter-accusations that the marshal shared responsibility for French unpreparedness, having been Minister for War in 1934. This received widespread circulation abroad and clandestinely in France.

On 23 February the long wait of Boris Vildé and the six other men of the Musée de l’Homme network ended in a volley at Mont Valérien, the three women condemned with them being deported to the camps. In his last letter to his wife, Vildé hoped that no one would hate the Germans for his death. He continued:

Forgive me for deceiving you when we shared that last kiss. I knew the execution was for today. Try to smile when you receive this letter, as I am smiling while I write it. I just looked in the mirror and found my face quite normal. A little quatrain runs through my head: As ever, impassive / and brave pointlessly I’ll have twelve German rifles / pointing at me.
⁷

It was typical of a linguist like Vildé to end his verse with a pun: the French word
impassible
means both ‘impassive’ and ‘not punishable’. He ended:

Keep my engagement ring [CENSORED]. It is a beautiful thing to die healthy and lucid, in possession of all my spiritual faculties – so much better than falling at random on a battlefield or dying slowly, eaten away by illness.
⁸

On 24 February diplomat Ernst Achenbach was despatched by Abetz to Vichy with the message that Admiral Darlan
must
be replaced by Laval, now recovered from the assassination attempt. His unbeatable trump was the bluff that refusal to reinstate Laval would result in Hitler appointing Reinhard Heydrich as Gauleiter for France.

At the Maison de Moissac, Laure Schindler was too excited to sleep when at last given permission to visit her father in the camp at Noé. On the appointed day she was up and dressed hours before her chaperone was ready to leave. Called into Shatta’s office at the last moment, Laure wept to hear that there was a serious epidemic at Noé, as a result of which the camp was temporarily closed to visitors. There was no epidemic – or at least, nothing worse than usual. It was Shatta’s way of breaking gradually to Laure the news that a parcel of food scraps she had sent her father had been returned marked ‘Addressee deceased’.
⁹

On 2 March Shatta and the children welcomed Chief Scout General Lafont, who came with the head of the Protestant Scout movement on an official visit to show solidarity. They pronounced themselves impressed with the work being done and the educational activities. After lunch and singing of Hebrew and French songs including
La
Marseillaise
, the afternoon was marred by a visitor who had come looking for trouble. Lawyer Guy Botreau-Bonneterre found in the Lion patrol’s dormitory a portrait of Pétain apparently being threatened by exercise clubs arranged on both sides of it. He reported the childish prank as an act of treason to the prefect in Montauban, who was obliged to appoint a Special Branch commissioner to conduct an enquiry, which found ‘no evidence of dissidence’.

The spiritual head of Shatta Simon’s little community was philosopher Edmond Fleg, who placed a great emphasis on the importance of manual labour for character building. For twelve months his ‘rural group’ of adolescents had been reclaiming a 58-hectare estate near the town that had been uncultivated for years. Epitomising the ideal of the marshal’s unsuccessful back-to-the-land programme, the project earned the Maison de Moissac Brownie points with the authorities.

Just over a month later General Lafont was obliged to inform the heads of the various scouting organisations in France that EIF had ceased by law to exist. Mastering the double-talk necessary in the Vichy state, his letter continued: ‘There will be no further mention of EIF in future publications of the Movement. EIF will not participate in our events unless they are specifically invited by the Authorities. However, internal relationships within the Movement will continue to be governed by the spirit of scouting fraternity.’
¹⁰
Obliged to dismiss Otto Von Stülpnagel for his vacillation over the execution of hostages, Keitel at OKW replaced him in March with Karl Heinrich Von Stülpnagel, a cousin of Otto working with the Armistice Commission in Wiesbaden. With the similarity of name, the French civil population hardly noticed the handover.

In March a bevy of the most popular male and female French movie stars travelled by train to show solidarity in Germany. They had return tickets – not so the 1,112 deportees who followed them on 27 March, when a column of gaunt and famished prisoners was herded from the concentration camp at Drancy in the Paris suburbs to Le Bourget railway station, where they were loaded in freight cars at a siding called
le quai aux moutons
because it was normally used for sheep being transported to the slaughter house. Among the crowd of local residents watching them shuffle past were wives, who had travelled out from Paris to say goodbye after hearing on the prisoners’ grapevine that their menfolk were about to be deported. Although no Germans were present – the camp was under the aegis of the Paris Préfecture de Police – the gendarmerie guards would only allow them to wave farewell from a distance. Half of the deportees had French nationality, giving the lie to Vichy’s pretence that sacrificing foreign Jews was saving French lives. The Wehrmacht refusing to supply guards for the train, the gendarmes were replaced at the last moment by sixty Feldgendarmerie men, commanded by a triumphant Theodor Danneker, who stayed on board for the three-day trip to Auschwitz before returning to France to continue his mission. Only twenty-two of the unwilling passengers on that train came back.

This was the first of eighty-five transports from the Paris area involving 75,721 prisoners, of whom less than 3,000 survived the camps. In the process, 69,619 Jewish homes, 38,000 of them in Paris, were emptied of all personal belongings, theoretically sent east for Germans setting up home in the occupied territories. In practice, much disappeared into neighbours’ possession or was filched on the way. Many richer Jews had taken the precaution of moving to the Italian-occupied pockets in south-eastern France because Mussolini refused to have anything to do with the Final Solution. The
département
of Alpes Maritimes had 12,217 Jews registered in the 1942 census, causing anti-Semites to jibe that Cannes should be spelled Kahn, a French variant of Cohen. However, when the mayor of the town sounded out opinion among his councillors over action to be taken, the influential hotel-owners and shopkeepers protested that the refugees were their best customers for years.

For the few German civilians in France, life was far more relaxed and pleasant than at home. Thanks to the influence of an uncle who was a Luftwaffe general, whose advice to become a
Blitzmädchen
she had refused, on 1 April 21-year-old Ursula Rüdt von Collenberg took up a civilian post with the German Archive Commission. She was stunned to find American and English books and neutral newspapers on sale in Paris. Another pleasure was to find silk and other fabrics for sale – at a price – and a White Russian émigrée dressmaker to extend her wardrobe way beyond what she could have afforded in Germany.

Ursula’s job was to extract from files in the Quai d’Orsay dating back to the time of Cardinal Richelieu any documents useful for propaganda, for example clashes with Britain in nineteenth-century colonial Africa. Von Ribbentrop’s Foreign Office had requisitioned the Hotel d’Orsay, where she lived in style with a suite all to herself. An ample breakfast and dinner were eaten there, but an equally plentiful lunch was eaten at the embassy in the rue de Lille. Most of her colleagues were anti-Nazi but patriotic, genteel to the last man and girl; when a photocopyist looted some gold-tooled leather wall hangings from the Quai d’Orsay, she was immediately dismissed. With her well-connected German friends in Paris, Ursula visited the opera, theatres and art exhibitions. Using public transport, she explored the north of France as a tourist, finding no hostility anywhere, and continued enjoying life in France until October 1943.

It’s not just the English who keep a stiff upper lip. When nearly 200 people were killed by an RAF raid on Longchamps racecourse on 4 April, the PA commentator signed off with thanks to the organisers for a good day’s racing ‘despite a slight contretemps at the start of today’s card’.
¹¹
The previous day the RAF had targeted the Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt, where production of vehicles for the Wehrmacht was temporarily reduced by 40 per cent, 367 civilians were killed and 361 were badly injured.

On 16 April pupils from the Parisian Lycée Buffon defied the prohibition on demonstrations to protest against the arrest two weeks previously of Raymond Burgard, a teacher at the school and founder of the Valmy network. The teenage protest march was brutally broken up by the police with many arrests. Five of the youths would be shot at Mont Valérien on 8 February 1943, their sacrifice pointless: Burgard was deported and eventually beheaded in Cologne on 15 June 1944.

Furious that the trial of Blum and the others at Riom had provided a public platform on which the policy of collaboration could be attacked, Hitler ordered Abetz to have the trial called off. It was suspended on 14 April, but that was not the end of the affair. Whether or not Hitler blamed Darlan for organising the trial, Abetz used that excuse to finally manoeuvre the admiral out of office as head of government, although he remained the marshal’s
dauphin
when Laval was reinstalled on 18 April.