Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (48 page)

Joe appealed to Dr Jackson for help. Jackson took him into his office, which Joe remembered as ‘a nice place, well furnished. A citation framed on the wall caught my eye and I believe it was the French Legion of Honor.’ After giving Joe a thorough physical examination, Jackson asked Elisabeth Comte to lodge the airman in one of the rooms for patients. ‘Everything, bed and linens were spotlessly white,’ Joe wrote later. When they could not find a safe house for him, the Jacksons invited Joe to their apartment at 11 avenue Foch. They had taken the precaution of asking Toquette’s sister, Tat, to keep Phillip at Enghien for a few days. ‘I suppose my mother thought that at fifteen, being with an American B-17 gunner was a bit too much for me,’ Phillip told his father’s biographer, Hal Vaughan, years later. ‘I think my father brought Joe to the apartment on the back of his bike.’ Even without Phillip there, Joe’s presence was a hazard. A neighbour might denounce them to the Nazi SD secret police, whose bureau was just down the road at Number 19, or to the Gestapo at Number 43. Sumner knew the danger of mixing different Resistance networks. The American Hospital was part of one, and Goélette-Frégate was another. Sumner had kept them separate to avoid the possibility of a captured
résistant
revealing under torture the secrets of
both
. Toquette fed Joe on their meagre rations, and she contacted the escape networks to get him out of Paris before the Germans found him.

Gilbert Asselin of another Resistance group, Libération, was the man Toquette decided could provide Joe with false papers and a safe route to Spain. When she asked Asselin to take responsibility for Joe, the Frenchman did not hesitate. He moved him into the flat of his mistress, Lise Russ. Joe spent long, dull hours there, waiting to go outside again. At any moment, he knew, a neighbour might guess he was there and inform the police to claim Oberg’s reward. The Germans were searching everywhere for Joe and the rest of his B-17 crew, arresting French men and women whom they suspected of assisting them. After three weeks, everything was ready. Asselin presented Joe with well-forged documents and delivered him to another safe house near Sainte-Foy-la-Grande. From there, Joe was taken to Toulouse in southwest France to wait for an escort to lead him over the border to Spain. In late October, along with RAF Squadron Leader Frank Griffiths, he was taken across the Pyrenees. Spain did not automatically mean freedom. Spanish police arrested Joe and Griffiths in Barcelona, where a German officer was allowed to interrogate them. For more than a month, they were moved with other Allied airmen from prison to prison. At the end of November, the Spaniards released them to the British Consul and allowed them to cross the border to Gibraltar. Back in England, Joe gave a full account to US military intelligence of his escape route and the help he had received from Sumner and Toquette Jackson.

IN THE AUTUMN OF 1943, the war appeared to turn in the Allies’ favour. The British, American and Free French had secured North Africa and the Middle East. The Anglo-American invasion of Italy from Tunisia led to a new Italian government that switched sides and declared war on Germany on 13 October. Five days later, Countess Clara Longworth de Chambrun marked rather than celebrated her seventieth birthday. The matriarch remained vigorous, working daily at the library, helping its staff to endure occupation and completing her book on Shakespeare. Her son and his wife lived as if nothing had changed. In September, they had gone with Seymour Weller, the American manager of the Château Haut-Brion vineyards in Bordeaux, to watch the harvest and sample one of the world’s finest wines. René rarely missed a horse race at Longchamp, and Josée was a regular buyer of dresses from Elsa Schiaparelli. In Paris, the couple attended the premiere of Jean Delannoy’s film
L’Éternel retour
and, with the actress Arletty, opening night at the Comédie Française of Paul Claudel’s
Soulier de satin
.

Clara, struggling to keep the American Library open, bore her son’s vilification in the American press with characteristic stoicism. Friends in Cincinnati were reading that her family in France had somehow become traitors–a stain on a patriotic American family and on Lafayette’s descendants. Moreover, the Gaullists in London let it be known that there would be scores to settle with those who collaborated with the occupier. First on the list for retribution was Pierre Laval. His son-in-law was not far behind.

The American press campaign against René de Chambrun intensified in November and December 1943, when the
New York Herald Tribune
published three front-page ‘exposés’. ‘Count de Chambrun in His Role of U.S. Citizen,’ the first headline trumpeted on 28 November. The paper called his dual citizenship ‘nebulous’, although both his parents were American-born and he had demonstrated his right to American citizenship in court when the New York Bar Association admitted him in 1930. ‘At present he is attached to Fernand de Brinon, Vichy’s Ambassador to Paris, former public relations counsel of Nazi Germany in New York,’ journalist Paul Wohl wrote, without naming his source. René was an unofficial adviser to Laval, but he did not work for de Brinon. In the next article, ‘Laval’s Fortune Reported Safe in U.S.’, Paul Wohl claimed that Laval’s money was ‘brought to America in a diplomatic valise in September 1940, by his son-in-law and personal assistant, Count René de Chambrun, when he visited the United States for the second time after the French defeat with his wife, Countess José [sic] Laval de Chambrun’. No proof was offered that Laval had ever sent money to the United States. René admitted that he had taken cash the other way, from Americans like John Jay and Mrs Seton Porter, to friends in France.

Wohl’s articles accused René and Josée of engaging in ‘anti-British propaganda’ in the United States, although it was René who had campaigned for the United States to send weapons to Britain. The assault on his character extended to his family. Wohl wrote that Aldebert de Chambrun and his brother, Charles, were ‘shrewd opportunists’. He did not mention that the third brother, Pierre, had been the only senator to vote against capitulation in July 1940 and that Pierre’s daughter, Marthe de Chambrun Ruspoli, had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 for providing civilian clothes to escaping Allied soldiers. Clara was upbraided as well, because ‘she did not leave Paris in June, 1940’. The final proof of disloyalty was, ‘The Paris building of the National City Bank of New York, of which General Aldebert is the nominal head, now houses Marshal Goering’s staff. It was one of the first buildings turned over to the Nazis.’ Two floors of the building had been requisitioned, not by Marshal Goering, but by Joseph Goebbels’s Propagandastaffel. Its tenants, including the National City Bank and René’s law firm, were not consulted. (Goering’s Paris headquarters were in the Palais de Luxembourg opposite Clara and Aldebert’s house in the rue de Vaugirard.) The most likely source of the disinformation was British intelligence, which had clashed with René over food supplies to southern France. Although the charges against René de Chambrun and his family in Paris were for the most part fabrications, they were beginning to stick.

 

The FBI had heard in January that one of the Bedauxs, Charles or his son, had cabled relatives ‘giving his best wishes and so forth’. At the FBI’s request, the army sent a wire from Washington to Algiers ‘instructing that they be kept strictly incommunicado and also that the guards be carefully checked’. In October, Fern Bedaux wrote at least three letters to her husband. It is not clear from the FBI files whether he received them or how she sent them. There was no mail between occupied France and North Africa, but Fern may–as her husband had done in the past–have sent letters with friends to be mailed from neutral Portugal. The US army’s Adjutant General’s office intercepted them and translated them from French into English for the Department of Justice. The first, dated 4 October, said,

The second dwelt on business, which she appeared to be monitoring for her husband. Gaston was doing good work, and Candé had an ‘excellent new overseer’ named Guy. ‘I travel at will between Paris and Candé,’ she wrote. ‘My life is very simple–I always see the same persons–the real friends–Joseph [possibly Joseph von Ledebur] is traveling a lot.’ At the top of her third letter, dated 28 October, she wrote, ‘Sunday, your birthday was a sacred holy day for me. I feel your nearness.’ The letter began: ‘My own precious darling, I am told that you have had another letter. How I wish they could all arrive–and one day I will have a few words from you.’ It continued:

If Charles wrote back, using the same clandestine route Fern’s letters had taken, the letters did not survive.

The case against Bedaux was gaining momentum in Washington, mainly on the basis of the documents and statements he provided. On 30 November, after the FBI failed to unearth evidence against Charles Junior, he was allowed to leave detention at El Biar. He immediately enlisted in the US army. Because of his command of languages and knowledge of continental Europe, the army assigned him to its intelligence branch, G-2. He went back to El Biar to bid farewell to his father before he took up his first posting in Oran. The older man’s parting words were, ‘Goodbye, good luck, be kind.’ Separation had been a recurring motif in the relationship between father and son, but Charles Junior felt this would be the last. His father stayed on in the villa under the surveillance of the MPs. Two weeks later, just before Christmas, a US army colonel escorted him to the airport. With his Trans-Sahara Pipeline reduced to a dream, Charles Bedaux was going home.

The army delivered Bedaux to Miami on 23 December. At 6 a.m., an hour after his plane landed, he was released and given $2,300 in cash that had been taken from him at the time of his arrest. He went to a hotel, but the Immigration and Naturalization Service found him there and arrested him soon afterwards. INS patrolmen took him to the Immigration Detention Center at 525 North East 30th Street in what had been an opulent beach house near Biscayne Bay. Bedaux was lodged in the former chauffeur’s apartment above the garage, the latest of his many prisons. He had been in custody without charges for more than a year.

When he was first arrested on 5 December 1942, Bedaux had in his possession what Janet Flanner called ‘an invaluable, meticulous source of information on himself, for it had always been his custom to carry with him a small library of private papers and a whole gallery of photographs of his family and his interesting friends’. The FBI, after examining the files, gave the full list to Miss Flanner. She recorded that, in addition to the Vichy and German documents that Bedaux had copied for Robert Murphy, there were

The French Brigade of Surveillance had returned his effects to him when they let him go on 29 December 1942. Bedaux apparently did not re-examine them before he gave them to the US army Judge Advocate’s office on 17 January 1943 for safekeeping. The three weeks the French held the papers would have been long enough for someone to remove–or to insert–documents without his knowledge. When he arrived in Miami on 23 December, the weapons that could destroy him were waiting.

 

At Christmas 1943, the usual festivities were held at the American Library and Hospital. Those who had been to the three previous Christmas celebrations recalled their resolutions of those years: ‘This time it really is the last; next Christmas we shall be free.’ At the library, Boris Netchaeff had recovered sufficiently from his wound to brew his traditional Christmas rum punch. The chef at the hospital once again slaughtered and roasted the pigs he had been hiding from the Germans. The celebration was melancholy, if only because the occupation, far from abating, was becoming more oppressive. Food, coal, soap, clothing and shoes were in short supply. The Germans, with Pierre Laval’s assistance, were drafting more French workers for labour details in Germany. They were also executing more hostages as Resistance attacks on their troops increased. Jews, already suffering brutal discrimination and the yellow star emblem, were sent with Vichy’s cooperation in greater numbers to the Nazi death camps in Poland. Clara and Aldebert, who kept the two main American institutions in occupied France functioning while their names were sullied in the American press, exhibited a brave front to the doctors, nurses and patients gathered for their fourth Christmas under occupation. When Christmas dinner ended, they left the hospital to reach the avenue de Vaugirard before curfew.