Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (34 page)

Sylvia, Adrienne and the other women of Paris coped with privation and German decrees, but they did not give up everything. ‘Even the electricity restrictions did not prevent women from going to the hairdresser, ’ wrote Ninetta Jucker, an Englishwoman who remained in Paris throughout the occupation and had many American friends, ‘though we often had to come away with damp heads.’ Night was the worst time. Mrs Jucker recalled, ‘After eight o’clock the centre of the city was almost deserted, and though many people risked boarding the last train for the pleasure of a few hours’ “escape” at the theatre or cinema–never have places of entertainment been so full as they were during the Occupation–as soon as the little crowd dispersed from the entrance to the metro, the city recovered its deathly silence, broken only by the occasional tramp of nailed boots.’ She and many other Parisians lived in dread of
la botte allemande
, the German boot:

After two months of house arrest, which in the opulent Château de Candé’s 1,200 hectares would not have been intolerable, Charles and Fern Bedaux were told they could travel again. They immediately requested permission to return to the United States. France must have seemed less attractive than before, now that their country was at war with Germany and their influence with German and Vichy officials had proved inadequate to prevent their detention. The Germans denied the request, given Charles’s knowledge of their military and industrial production. Moreover, Nazi officials suspected Fern’s adherence to the Christian Science Church, which they rightly accused of involvement with British military intelligence. A condition of their release was that one of them must remain in France at all times, effectively as hostage for the return of the other. Bedaux immediately took advantage of his liberty to lobby for restoration of the property and files that the Germans had seized from him as an enemy alien after Pearl Harbor. At just the right moment, an ally emerged within the German administration.

In February 1942, Rittmeister Joseph von Ledebur, Bedaux’s friend and former employee, returned to Paris. It seemed that Bedaux’s appeals had succeeded in saving Ledebur from further combat in the Soviet Union. The timing of his deployment to France, as well as his appointment as a custodian of enemy property, could not have worked more to Bedaux’s advantage. Colluding with Bedaux’s other close friend in the German administration, Dr Franz Medicus, Ledebur arranged for German officers to accompany Bedaux to Holland to reclaim the International Bedaux Company’s files on more than two hundred of the most important industrial concerns in German-occupied Europe. Charles returned to Paris with all his dossiers and with his Amsterdam office manager, Alexandra Ter Hart. The former Miss Lebowski feared denunciation in Holland as a Jew. Bedaux gave her a false Aryan identity to work for him in Paris, where no one knew her or her family history.

As an American citizen, Bedaux was no longer permitted to run a company in any of the lands of the Third Reich. His brother Gaston, with his French citizenship, could. He wrote later that Charles was not permitted to sign contracts with belligerent powers: ‘I was therefore authorized by the Minister of Public Works to administer my brother’s company.’ Charles made Gaston promise to return the company to him at the end of the war and, if anything happened to Charles, to provide for Fern.

Gaston was not surprised that Charles’s first concern was his wife’s welfare. He recalled a conversation with his brother, when ‘Charles told me one day, at the beginning of the war, that if he were separated by events from Fern or if his wife disappeared he would have no reason to live.’ With no company responsibilities, Charles was free to pursue a scheme that had been germinating in his imagination for more than a year. ‘In 1941,’ Gaston wrote, ‘he adopted the idea of the pipeline.’ The ‘pipeline’ was to be a bridge between the French territories in black Africa and those in the Arab north. Its functions were to carry water from the fertile areas of Algeria into the desert and to funnel food oil in the opposite direction from the Niger Valley over the inhospitable Sahara to the Mediterranean. Dual-use efficiency appealed to his engineer’s instincts. The Trans-Sahara Railway, on which he had already been working, would run beside the pipeline. The railway and pipeline companies, both to be owned by the French state, would share the costs. Bedaux would assume an interest in the peanut oil refineries he planned to construct on the River Niger. The refineries would have a ready market in a Europe starved of edible oils. Gaston commented, ‘This idea crystallized one day in his soul, and he became obsessed with it.’ The Trans-Sahara Pipeline was undoubtedly Charles Bedaux’s most ambitious undertaking, which, if realized, would make him the French Cecil Rhodes.

Gaston was involved from the beginning, as he wrote,

Fearing his brother’s dream may not have corresponded to reality, Gaston invited ‘the most qualified’ engineer in France, Monsieur Rouelle, to speak with Charles. Rouelle, Gaston’s colleague at the Department of Highways and Dams in Beauvais, listened to the elder Bedaux expound his proposal. Charles, an accomplished salesman more than anything else, specified the pipeline’s measurements, distances between pumping stations and materials that could withstand the desert heat. Rouelle left to study the project in detail. Gaston wrote, ‘My friend returned to see me fifteen days later. “It’s fantastic,” he told me, smiling, “but you know your brother is no fool at all. I’ve done the calculations. And I find them as sensible as he does. He’s right. It’s possible. All that remains is to set the means for its realization.” ’

Bedaux faced two immediate challenges. The first was to persuade Vichy and the Germans to commit money, material, labour and the permits necessary for regular travel between France and French Africa. The second was to organize an accurate survey of the pipeline’s route. The reconnaissance mission was the kind of adventure across deserts and through jungles that Bedaux relished, but this would be his first without Fern. To guarantee he would not escape, she had to remain at Candé. An old friend from past transcontinental treks, however, would be welcome. Charles sent an invitation to the Austrian whom he had said was more like a son to him than his son, Friedrich von Ledebur. Ledebur had organized his previous African expeditions, taking care of the rifles and managing the many native porters. Needing him again, Bedaux wrote to Ledebur on 23 March. The letter was enclosed in an envelope, postmarked Lisbon, to his New York secretary, Mrs Isabella Waite. He wrote,

Frederic, as Friedrich called himself in the United States, was living with wealthy friends in southern California. He and the actress Iris Tree had recently divorced. A ranch outside Burlingame, near San Francisco, occasionally employed him to care for its horses. He spent part of each year in New York, sleeping in reduced rate servants’ quarters at the Gladstone Hotel on East 52nd Street. If the offer of another adventure with Charles Bedaux tempted the penniless aristocrat, he managed to resist. Bedaux’s allusion to his brother Joseph, with whom he had had a falling out in 1939 over Joseph’s dedication to the Nazis, may have deterred him. The FBI read the letter before Frederic did, and its forensics laboratory determined it had been ‘written on a typewriter with Continental Pica Type … of German manufacture’. Frederic did not write back.

 

America’s entry into the war made no immediate impression on the French. American soldiers were not invading France, and no American planes were bombing the Germans. Having lost much of its fleet at Pearl Harbor and training an inexperienced army to fight in both the Asian and European theatres of the global war, the United States needed time. In early February 1942, the Royal Air Force dropped three million leaflets over occupied France stamped with three Victory Vs, one each in red, white and blue. The pamphlets quoted Franklin Roosevelt’s goals for America’s first year of war: to produce 185,000 planes, 120,000 tanks and eighteen million tons of shipping, quantities of arms unprecedented in the history of warfare. Roosevelt’s words were designed to encourage all peoples under Axis occupation: ‘Our overwhelming superiority in armament must be adequate to put weapons of war into the hands of those men in the conquered nations who stand ready to seize the first opportunity to revolt against their German and Japanese oppressors and against the traitors in their own ranks, known by the already famous name of Quislings. As we get guns to the patriots in those lands, they too will fire shots “heard round the world”.’ Roosevelt was promising to help the partisans in German-occupied Europe to liberate themselves. Slowly and cautiously, the French were listening. But convincing the majority that resistance was not hopeless called for more than American leaflets dropped from British planes. The French had to know that, as in 1917, the Yanks really were coming.

The RAF opened its air offensive against occupied Paris on the night of 3 March 1942, when 200 bombers demolished factories in the suburbs. Bombs weighing 2,000 pounds hit the plants, some of which supplied the Nazis with weaponry, and killed 400 people. Maréchal Pétain called the bombardment ‘a national catastrophe’. When Vichy Ambassador Gaston Henry-Haye protested to Washington, Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles called it ‘an entirely legitimate bombing’. Despite Allied attacks on French soil, Washington and Vichy preserved their diplomatic relations.
Life
magazine offered a succinct explanation: ‘The U.S. is polite because Vichy owns some very strategic colonies and a vital fleet. Vichy is polite because the U.S. may win the war and Vichy may lose the rest of her empire.’ Vichy politesse extended to American citizens in the Unoccupied Zone, who were still not interned like some of their compatriots in Paris.

THE AMERICAN LAW FIRM SULLIVAN AND CROMWELL, the world’s largest, closed its Paris offices. This left American lawyer François Monahan unable to practise. Like his friend René de Chambrun, Monahan had dual American–French citizenship and belonged to the New York Bar Association. But he was not licensed to plead in the French courts. To speed up the process to qualify, he sought help from René. René explained the origin of their friendship: ‘His father-in-law, Captain [Charles] de Marenches, had been an aid to my father, then Colonel de Chambrun. The two together, from 1917 on, directed the liaison between Pétain and Pershing, the commanders of the French and the American armies.’ Charles de Marenches, like Aldebert de Chambrun, was married to an American. Together, they wrote a book,
The History of the American Army during the European Conflict
, with the cooperation of Pershing and Pétain. Alexandre de Marenches, François Monahan’s brother-in-law, supplied the American Hospital at Aldebert’s request with vegetables from his land near Paris. Monahan was on the board of governors at the American Hospital of Paris and occasionally served as its secretary. An official at the Palais de Justice had suggested his admission to the French bar would be accelerated if he inserted in his file a copy of his father-in-law and General de Chambrun’s book, signed by Maréchal Pétain. The bureaucrats would take the hint. Monahan asked René to obtain Pétain’s signature. René had avoided Pétain since the Maréchal dismissed and arrested Pierre Laval on 13 December 1940, so he took the book to Dr Bernard Ménétral, Pétain’s physician and adviser, in Vichy.

At the Hôtel du Parc, René walked up the stairs to avoid Maréchal Pétain in the lift. Dr Ménétral’s office was next to the Maréchal’s, but René slipped in without difficulty and explained what he wanted. Ménétral agreed to ask Pétain to sign the book for Monahan. As René was about to leave, Pétain came in. Surprised to see his old friend’s son, he said, ‘
Tiens, c’est toi, Bunnie!
’ He took Bunny into his office and said, ‘Sit down in this chair, a little closer, so I can hear better. How is Josée? How are your parents?’ He asked, ‘Is your father-in-law still angry with me?’

René explained that Laval was less angry about his arrest on 13 December than about the harm he believed the Maréchal had done to France. It was Laval’s contention that, when he was dismissed, the Germans were about to make major concessions: the release of 150,000 French prisoners of war, a huge reduction in French payments to cover Germany’s occupation costs and the restoration of the northern provinces, then governed by a German
gauleiter
from Belgium, to French administration. Pétain, according to de Chambrun, blamed his subordinates for Laval’s arrest in 1940. He added, ‘Laval knew how to talk to the Boches, how to gain time. Darlan is a good sailor, but on land he can’t cope.’