Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (24 page)

Pétain announced his decision to dispense with Laval’s services ‘for reasons of internal policy’ over French radio the next day. He sent Hitler a letter that arrived early on Saturday morning, 14 December, informing him of Laval’s dismissal and arrest. Pétain, while thanking Hitler for returning the Duke of Reichstadt’s ashes, declined his invitation to the interment. Hitler exploded, cancelled his trip to Paris and threatened to invade Vichy’s Free Zone immediately. ‘This is a heavy defeat for Ribbentrop and his Abetz,’ Ulrich von Hassell, a former German Ambassador to Italy and anti-Nazi conspirator in the Foreign Ministry, wrote in his diary. ‘Even if we now force them to take Laval back into the Cabinet the situation has shifted much to Germany’s disadvantage. Hitler has ordered preparations for occupying all of France.’ Hitler accepted Ribbentrop’s advice to send Otto Abetz to Vichy to see Pétain and free Laval, before resorting to an expensive invasion.

On Sunday, 15 December, Abetz presided at the delayed midnight service for the Duke of Reichstadt without either Hitler or Pétain in attendance. Unimpressed Parisians, freezing that winter, said they preferred coal to ashes. The ceremony was so tawdry that some of the German-supported Paris newspapers did not report it. Abetz sped early in the morning to Vichy and demanded Laval’s immediate release. At two o’clock, Laval was brought from Châteldon to Vichy to see Pétain, who apologized for his arrest but refused to reinstate him. A few hours later, Josée de Chambrun and her mother heard motorcycles at the head of a German Embassy convoy bringing Pierre Laval back to the Château de Châteldon. ‘I saw for the first time the Germans,’ Josée wrote in her diary, ‘their initiative perhaps [saving] the life of my father.’ To her, these Germans were ‘intelligent and pleasant’. Quoting ‘a great writer’, she switched to English: ‘The people from Auvergne never forget; children remember those who hurt their fathers and they don’t forget those who give them help or relief in days of stress.’ She added in French, ‘I’ll never forget, but what great sadness.’ Laval, free but out of office, went straight to Paris, ‘where he is safe’.

Josée sent a telegram from the post office in Vichy to her husband René in the United States: STAY AMERICA STOP NO REASON TO WORRY EXCEPT FOR THE COUNTRY STOP ALL LOVE. René de Chambrun’s morale was already low, because his second mission to the United States was failing. His cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, did not return his calls and refused to provide US government humanitarian aid to the Free Zone. Few American officials accepted René’s contention that his father-in-law was not pro-German. In New York, René wrote, ‘I spent the saddest Christmas of my life.’

Laval’s removal cost Charles Bedaux his most effective contact in the Vichy administration. Worse came the next day, 15 December, when Bedaux’s friend Count Joseph von Ledebur was recalled by the army from Paris to Germany. The allies he could call on were disappearing. He needed small favours, like German identity cards to travel to Vichy and North Africa, and larger ones, especially the return of his international company’s assets in German-occupied Amsterdam. His relations with Ambassador Abetz remained cordial, so he went the next day, 16 December, to the German Embassy. Discovering that Abetz was out, Bedaux dropped in on Fernand de Brinon, who had just escaped from the Vichy putschists. De Brinon, preoccupied with his political survival, asked Bedaux to wait a day. They could talk in the morning while driving to Vichy.

On Tuesday morning, 17 December, the two men, with de Brinon’s chauffeur and bodyguards, crossed the line of demarcation from the Occupied to the Free Zone. De Brinon, without explaining himself to Bedaux, was using him as a shield. The Pétain associates who hated him as much as they did Laval may have wanted him dead. But they were unlikely to risk antagonizing Washington by killing an American citizen beside him. In Vichy, de Brinon called on Maréchal Pétain to propose himself for a cabinet post. He also saw his Jewish wife, Lisette, who was in Vichy at the time.

While de Brinon conferred with Pétain, Bedaux met various Vichy officials to discuss projects in France and North Africa. His final meeting was with Robert Murphy at the American Embassy in the Villa Ica. For the past week, Murphy had been reporting to Secretary of State Cordell Hull and President Roosevelt on the machinations at Vichy. The interior minister, Marcel Peyrouton, had informed Murphy in advance of his intention to arrest Laval. It undoubtedly met with American approval. Murphy wrote later, ‘We played no concealed part in Laval’s overthrow there in 1940, although we did emphasize in all our talks with Pétain’s ministers, including Laval himself, that the American Government was convinced that its interests demanded the defeat of Nazi Germany.’ Laval’s dismissal made it easier for the secretary general of Vichy’s Foreign Office, Charles Rochas, to issue Murphy a permit to tour North and West Africa that Laval’s faction had been delaying. Bedaux and Murphy, already acquainted from Paris and the Château de Candé, discussed Murphy’s coming mission to French Africa. President Roosevelt had asked Murphy to assess the need for American aid to the region. Murphy did not tell Bedaux about his other objective: to place twelve spies in North Africa undercover as US consuls. Their nominal task as ‘food control officers’ would be to certify that American aid went to the inhabitants, not to Germany. Bedaux was sufficiently informed on the Algerian and Moroccan economies to brief Murphy.

That night, Fernand de Brinon drove Bedaux back to Paris. They arrived at Bedaux’s hotel at about three o’clock in the morning. ‘Now, you can put aside your gun,’ de Brinon said. Bedaux did not carry a gun. De Brinon, whose bodyguards were armed, seemed surprised. According to Bedaux, he said, ‘You are worth a thousand men.’ Vichy announced later on 18 December that de Brinon would succeed General de la Laurencie as delegate general of the French government in the Occupied Zone, Vichy ‘ambassador’ in Paris with ministerial status in the government. Abetz had personally demanded de la Laurencie’s removal after the general, as part of the anti-Laval coup, had arrested the pro-Nazi French politician Marcel Déat in Paris. (Déat headed one of two political parties, the Rassemblement National Populaire, permitted by the Germans in the Occupied Zone.) Forcing Pétain to accept an obvious German puppet like de Brinon as de la Laurencie’s successor was part of Germany’s retribution for Laval’s dismissal. Other punishments were to rename Vichy’s ‘Free Zone’ the ‘Unoccupied Zone’; to restrict further the food supplies in Paris; and to renege on promises to release some of the French prisoners in Germany. If collaboration had benefits, non-cooperation incurred costs. Abetz made Pétain accept a directorate under Admiral Jean-François Darlan, then naval minister, to advise the cabinet and, incidentally, keep an eye on the Vichy government for Abetz. The new regime at Vichy sought to collaborate with the Germans just as Laval had. For Charles Bedaux, the elevation of de Brinon partly compensated for the loss of Laval.

When Abetz returned to Paris, Charles Bedaux met him at the German Embassy in the Hôtel de Beauharnais. (When the anti-Nazi diplomat Ulrich von Hassell visited Paris at the time, he wrote in his diary, ‘The beautiful palace seems dishonoured by the present incumbents. ’) Despite the chill of the Paris winter, Abetz invited Bedaux outside for a walk in the Hôtel de Beauharnais’s magnificent garden courtyard. This may have been to avoid the devices with which Hermann Goering’s
Forschungsamt
, Research Office, listened to the conversations of most second-rank German officials, many of whom were pursuing contradictory policies in France and other occupied territories. As they strolled around the frosty grass, Abetz confided to Bedaux that Laval’s arrest had been ‘frivolous’. Abetz was impatient with French politicians and mentioned that even Laval, despite his charm, was superficial. Bedaux, who had a professional obsession with order, said Laval was ‘an artist with a horror of orderliness’. Laval had once said to Bedaux, ‘I like to look at you and see an example of what I wouldn’t be for anything on earth.’ Bedaux took the remark as a compliment.

As the two men circled the garden, Abetz said he was considering a scheme to please Hitler and undermine Vichy. Bedaux was part of the plan. Still out of earshot of the embassy’s hidden microphones, Abetz told Bedaux he knew of his intention to meet General Maxime Weygand at the Kenadsa mines on his coming trip to North Africa. Weygand, who had been Pétain’s minister of defence in the emergency cabinet of 10 July 1940, had been exiled to Algiers as military governor-general because his strict adherence to the Armistice Agreement annoyed the Germans and the collaborationists. Would Abetz ask the general to succeed Pétain as head of a new French government in Paris? Bedaux thought it was a joke, because Weygand hated Germany. Abetz explained, ‘We would rather have in France at the head of the government a freely spoken enemy whom we respect than a collaborator whom we don’t know.’ Bedaux agreed to carry Abetz’s offer to Weygand, his first political mission for the Germans. Abetz, at the same time, promised more support, including heavy machinery, to Bedaux’s coal mining operation at Kenadsa. Abetz did not mention that Kenadsa’s coal might fuel the North African railways for eventual use by the Wehrmacht.

 

On 23 December, the German occupation forces in Paris executed 23-year-old Jacques Bonsergent ‘for an act of violence against a member of the German Army’. The violence was a minor scuffle between some German soldiers and young Frenchmen, all of whom but Bonsergent ran away. On the order of the military commander in France, General Otto von Stülpnagel, Bonsergent became the first Frenchman executed by the Germans in Paris.

As a gesture to win Parisian goodwill, the German command extended the curfew on Christmas Eve from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. Cafés and restaurants were permitted to remain open until 2.30 a.m., serving food and drink to the Parisians who could afford to pay. The Germans had seized over 90 per cent of the forty million tons of coal France required, as well as the barges used to transport it along canals to the Seine, depriving the capital of fuel. The city’s inhabitants, including about 2,000 Americans, endured the coldest winter in fifty years without enough coal to heat their homes.

 

In New York, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein released the hit song of the Christmas season, ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’. It was the first number the duo, composers of Broadway musicals like
Show Boat
, had written to stand on its own. Kate Smith sang the lyrics over national radio, reminding some Americans of their relatives cut off in Paris:

ON A FROZEN NEW YEAR’S MORNING, a train left the Gare de Lyon in Paris for Marseilles. Among the passengers entrusted by the German occupiers with an
Ausweis
to cross the line into the Vichy zone was Charles Bedaux. Having left Fern at home with their guests in the Château de Candé, he planned to take a short flight from Marseilles to Algiers and drive over the Atlas Mountains to Kenadsa on Sahara’s northern fringe. His rendezvous with General Maxime Weygand, military governor general of French North Africa, had the stated purpose of discussing coal production. But Bedaux had a secret agenda: to relay German Ambassador Otto Abetz’s offer to place Weygand at the head of a pro-German government in Paris.

The train moved slowly south amid the heavy snows of a treacherous French winter, until it stopped suddenly in bleak countryside north of the Provençal town of Avignon. Thick, packed snow blocked the line. With the train immobilized, Charles Bedaux could not remain passive. He trudged through snow drifts to a farmhouse, telephoned for horse-drawn wagons, and hired men to find provisions for the passengers and the train staff. The delivery of food and other supplies continued for eight days, with Bedaux arranging logistics as he had on the trail in British Columbia. ‘Charles was amused by this little adventure, ’ his brother Gaston remembered. When the snow was cleared from the line, the train reversed north to Lyons. Bedaux flew to Marseilles, but technical problems delayed his flight to Algiers another day. Bedaux reached Algiers by chartered plane on 10 January 1941. General Weygand, who had already left Kenadsa, sent a message asking Bedaux to visit him in Rabat, capital of Morocco.

General Maxime Weygand had been a hero of the Great War and was one of the officers with Maréchal Ferdinand Foch in the train at Compiègne when France and Germany signed the Armistice Agreement of 1918. Twenty-two years later, as the French and British armies were retreating from the German front, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud recalled Weygand to replace General Gamelin as commander of the French armed forces. Weygand, after declaring Paris an ‘open city’ in June 1940, joined the defeatist camp in Reynaud’s cabinet, along with Maréchal Pétain, in seeking an immediate armistice with Germany. Pétain made him minister of national defence in his July 1940 cabinet. In September, he was reassigned to North Africa as Vichy’s delegate general and armed forces commander. Pétain’s instructions were to keep the region out of the hands of the British, the Germans and General Charles de Gaulle. In the meantime, all three courted Weygand. De Gaulle asked him to attack the Italians in Libya from French bases in Tunisia while the British launched an offensive in the east from Egypt. Expelling Italy from Libya would remove the Axis from North Africa, thus securing the entire southern Mediterranean for the Allies. Weygand refused.

When Bedaux met Weygand in Rabat, he delivered Abetz’s proposal. Would the general preside over a new French government in Paris? ‘I consider this a great compliment,’ Weygand told Bedaux, ‘but the Germans cannot fool me with great compliments. I have one superior. I could not ask for a better one: Maréchal Pétain. I will ask for his orders.’ Weygand informed Pétain at once. Charles Bedaux’s role as messenger did not endear him to Pétain, who may already have suspected his friendships with Pierre Laval and Fernand de Brinon.