Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (25 page)

Robert Murphy, in North Africa ostensibly to assess the area’s humanitarian needs, cabled Secretary of State Cordell Hull, ‘Weygand and his associates are laying the foundation for substantial military action against Germany and Italy.’ Perhaps Weygand’s dislike of the Germans swept Murphy along, but the general did nothing to challenge the German military. Murphy, meanwhile, reached a humanitarian accord with Weygand that released frozen French funds in the United States for France to purchase civilian provisions for North Africa. The Murphy–Weygand agreement allowed the United States to install American vice-consuls in French North Africa, who would certify that no American aid went to Germany and, secretly, send military intelligence to Washington. ‘To demonstrate his confidence in the United States Government,’ Murphy wrote, ‘General Weygand made an unprecedented concession: our consular staffs, including the twelve new “vice-consuls,” would be permitted to use secret codes and to employ couriers carrying locked pouches, a privilege usually restricted to diplomatic missions and not extended in wartime to consular offices in French North Africa.’

In Algiers, Murphy saw Bedaux several times, and in February they called together on Weygand. Bedaux’s presence may not have been an asset. Weygand called Bedaux a bandit, because his bill to the French government for installing the Bedaux system at Kenadsa was exorbitant. Bedaux kept Murphy informed of his work at the coal mines, but it seems he did not tell him of Abetz’s proposal to Weygand. Murphy referred to it neither in his messages to the State Department nor in his memoirs,
Diplomat among Warriors
. When Bedaux told Abetz that Weygand had declined his proposal to replace Pétain, Germany ordered Pétain to dismiss Weygand. If he did not, the Germans would occupy the Unoccupied Zone. Weygand’s loyalty to Pétain earned him dismissal by Pétain. He retired to his farm in the south of France. Soon afterwards, the Germans arrested him.

Bedaux returned to Paris to brief Dr Franz Medicus on Kenadsa. Medicus agreed to push the military to release more heavy machines to augment the mines’ coal production. It was as much in Germany’s interest as France’s to produce coal for the trains of French North Africa. With Medicus’s support, the Germans handed over more than $200,000 worth of compressors, diggers and other equipment. Bedaux needed thousands of workers to build a new rail line and mine the extra coal, and the Nazis helped with that as well. To supplement Berber and African labourers in the Sahara, the Germans sent Polish and Czech prisoners of war. From Spanish Sahara, Franco contributed Loyalist prisoners who had fought against him in the Civil War. Bedaux was about to go beyond speeding up low-paid workers in American factories to using slave labour in one of the hottest terrains on earth.

 

In January 1941, Sylvia Beach received news of the man to whom she had given attention and love for most of her adult life, James Joyce. With his wife and son, he had finally crossed the Swiss border and settled in Zurich on 17 December 1940. Although safe after six months’ waiting to exit France, Joyce was consumed with worry. He had left his daughter in a French asylum, and he was short of money. The hostile critical reception of his recently published book,
Finnegans Wake
, preoccupied him. His health, never robust, deteriorated. After emergency surgery for an ulcer and peritonitis on 13 January, the author of
Ulysses
died. To Sylvia, the loss combined with the death of her father in California two months earlier to send her into depression. Her dearest friends, Adrienne Monnier and Françoise Bernheim, offered some consolation. But the deaths of those she loved outside France hurt more than anything in her own precarious existence in occupied Paris. It was a cruel winter.

 

Although some Americans were leaving France in early 1941, René de Chambrun was returning. He had completed his second and final wartime journey to the land of his parents’ birth. But his mission was only half accomplished. On his first visit, he had persuaded Franklin Roosevelt to send arms to Britain. On his second, however, cousin Franklin rebuffed his request for American government food shipments to hungry French and refugees in the Vichy zone. René left New York dejected and, after a rough thirteen-day sea crossing, arrived in Lisbon. On 6 February, Josée was waiting for him just over the Spanish border in Toulouse. They spent the night together before flying to the Laval chateau at Châteldon. Josée noted in her diary that René brought her presents from America: ‘Bunny gave me a lovely little dress, a sweater, a magnificent golden cigarette case and some cigarettes.’ Two days later, the couple went to Paris to see Clara and Aldebert. The next few days’ lunches and dinners were spent in the new Paris with German Ambassador Otto Abetz and his French wife, embassy counsellor Ernst Achenbach and his American bride, German consul-general Rudolph Schleier, Luftwaffe General Hanesse and famed French actress Arletty. For a soldier who resisted the German invasion and a lobbyist who opposed the Germans in the United States, René adapted quickly to the new order that his father-in-law and wife were introducing him to.

 

The American Hospital’s board of governors’ meeting in Aldebert de Chambrun’s offices on the Champs-Elysées on 13 February 1941 officially appointed Dr Sumner Jackson
Médecin Chef
(Chief Physician)
ad interim
to replace Dr Edmund Gros, who was too ill to return to Paris from the United States. At the time, the hospital was caring for seventy French soldiers, twenty-five British patients and sixty ‘needy French children’. Dr Jackson and Aldebert de Chambrun worked together to keep a patient in every bed so that the Germans would have no excuse to take over the institution. A month later, Edward B. Close reported to the board: ‘Another hospital year, and probably the most difficult in the history of The American Hospital of Paris, has again come to an end.’ He stated that the number of patient days over the previous year came to 38,952 for wounded French soldiers and 14,103 for civilians. He added, ‘I report with great pleasure that we were able, during the year, to care for all American citizens who applied for treatment in our Out-Patient Department or for admission, and that those, who were not able to pay, were treated absolutely free.’

IN APRIL 1941, Aldebert and Clara de Chambrun invited the ranking American diplomat in Paris, Maynard Barnes, to lunch at 58 rue de Vaugirard. Barnes had been chargé d’affaires in Paris and at the Château de Candé since Ambassador Bullitt’s departure a year earlier. The Chambruns had regarded him as a friend for some years, and they believed he understood France better than his colleagues. In Vichy, Bullitt’s successor as US Ambassador to France, Admiral William D. Leahy, thought Barnes ‘had a higher opinion of Laval than prevailed generally’. Over the modest, rationed lunch, Barnes told Clara and Aldebert that the United States would undoubtedly declare war on Germany. ‘Please tell her not to delay much longer,’ General de Chambrun admonished the diplomat. Clara shared her husband’s view that America must, at last, fight for the Allied cause. This was a change from her conviction in October 1939 on a visit to the United States for the publication of her
History of Cincinnati
, when she told the
Cincinnati Times-Star
, ‘Why should the United States even consider getting in the war? The question should be decided purely on the grounds of American trade and American rights … As for the allies wanting America to enter the war, they already have more men to feed than they need to maintain what can only be a deadlock.’ After the Germans broke the deadlock in the spring of 1940, the occupation of France made American intervention acceptable to Clara. At lunch, she pressed Barnes on American intentions. ‘Do not worry,’ he told her. ‘We will be there even if England is beaten. We cannot afford, after the war, to see our trade cut off from Greece, Italy, Spain, France, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Holland, and the Scandinavian Peninsula.’ Barnes, who was preparing to close the Paris embassy under orders from the Germans, asked whether the Chambruns wanted to send anything with him to the United States. Aldebert entrusted him with two Purdey shot-guns that had been made for him in London. If the Germans found them hidden in the linen cupboard, he and Clara would be sent to prison.

While America remained neutral, Clara wrote, ‘Extreme politeness was still the rule towards citizens of a country that Hitler hoped would stay out of active warfare.’ She added, ‘A considerable number of American businessmen remained and continued to work under these new conditions … American residents contributed generously to the “Secours National [National Aid],” organized by the Marshal [Pétain], and which helped almost miraculously to keep up the morale of the unfortunate, and to give material help everywhere.’

On 14 April, considering the possibility of a changed American status in France, the American Hospital in Paris asked Count Aldebert de Chambrun to become its director. Although an American citizen, General de Chambrun was also French and, more importantly, connected to the upper reaches of French society and politics that the hospital might have to call upon to survive. Clara lamented that 14 April became the day ‘my husband and I were obliged to separate’. She wrote, ‘As he seldom does things by halves, he felt that, to begin with at least, he must take up his residence in the hospital building, learn the ropes and become acquainted with his large staff.’ On 15 April, the hospital’s medical board, including Dr Sumner Jackson, voted unanimously to appoint General de Chambrun president. But, like the American Library, the hospital needed a legal mechanism to spare it from German seizure if the United States and Germany broke relations. Aldebert adopted ‘the same formula that proved so efficacious in the case of the American Library’. That is, he turned it over to a French organization, the French Red Cross. Officially, the American Hospital became the
Centre d’Hospitalisation pour Blessés de Guerre Libérés
, the Hospitalization Centre for Liberated War Wounded. General de Chambrun’s policy was to provide medical care to anyone–American civilians, Belgian refugees, wounded British and French soldiers–except Germans.

 

As 1941 progressed, the United States sent more and more supplies to Britain. In March, Congress passed the Lend Lease Act to exchange British bases in the western hemisphere for surplus American destroyers. This made the United States, if not a combatant, at least a partisan in the struggle against the Nazis. A German U-boat sank the American merchantman
Robin Moor
on 21 May 1941 off Brazil. President Roosevelt condemned the attack as an ‘act of piracy’. The following October, Nazi submarines torpedoed the American merchant ship
Kearney
and sank the US Navy destroyer
Reuben James
off the coast of Iceland. A hundred American sailors from the
Reuben James
died in frozen waters, giving rise to Woody Guthrie’s song with its refrain, ‘Tell me what were their names?/Did you have a friend on the good
Reuben James
?’ Another folk song popular in the United States demanded, ‘What are we waitin’ on?’

In this atmosphere, many Americans in Paris realized that their neutrality would not last much longer. Some decided to leave of their own accord, while others were persuaded by family and employers that remaining would be dangerous. On 5 May 1941, Edward A. Sumner informed the Rockefeller Foundation that ‘a cable was sent to Miss Dorothy Reeder, Directress of the Library, recommending her immediate return to the United States, and a cable to the Comtesse de Chambrun, First Vice President, authorizing her to employ a non-American substitute for Miss Reeder. Whether Miss Reeder will be willing to accept this recommendation of the Board of Trustees remains to develop.’ Dorothy Reeder did not want to leave, but she accepted the board’s advice. In mid-May, she obtained permits to cross the Spanish border and booked a berth on a ship from Lisbon to the United States. Clara wrote, ‘When our popular directress Miss Reeder departed, after a whirl of cocktail parties and as much cheer as bunches of souvenirs could give, she left on the desk which was to become mine, a card solemnly delegating me to fill her place together with the verbal encouragement: “Of course you will never be able to keep open.”’

Clara, ignoring the board’s recommendation that she find a non-American to run the library, decided to take on the job herself: ‘Accordingly, here I was, obliged to add to my duties of directing the Library, a position for which no previous training fitted me. What I did possess though was long human experience, a sense of justice, perhaps not too frequent among my sex, and a sense of humor capable of carrying me over very rough ground.’ Clara ‘wangled’ coal from unnamed suppliers, undoubtedly black marketeers, when other establishments were freezing. Nonetheless, there were times when the library lacked enough coal to heat the whole building and the staff worked in ‘overcoats, mufflers and gloves’. When the Germans attempted to conscript male employees to work in Germany, she wrote stern letters stating that ‘the individual designated was absolutely indispensible [sic] to the proper functioning of the Library’. Her appeals worked, even for Russian Boris Netchaeff after Germany invaded its former Soviet ally in June 1941.

As directress of the library, Clara became acquainted with one of the ugliest aspects of the occupation:
la dénonciation
. The German authorities were inundated with correspondence, often anonymous, from Parisians denouncing their fellow citizens as Jews, communists, Freemasons, black marketeers and
résistants
. Earning anyone’s animosity could lead to denunciation and, thus, arrest. One day, a woman who was upset at having to wait in a long check-out queue at the library threatened to denounce ‘our long-suffering librarian’, Boris Netchaeff. Clara lost her temper. ‘Take back your subscription and never darken our doors again,’ she ordered. The woman began crying and, in what Clara called ‘the greatest tribute ever given us in wartime’, said, ‘I cannot get along without the books I find here.’ Clara told her, ‘In that case, you may come back, apologize to Boris and take out your book.’ The woman apologized.