German soldiers in Paris could enjoy pleasures unlike any they could have known in their native Germany. First-class tickets to the city’s artistic and cultural wonders were theirs for the asking. For the most part, only Germans could drive cars or ride in taxis in Paris because of the lack of gasoline. Parisians had to content themselves with walking, taking the Métro, or riding the bicycles that soon filled the city’s streets. Even then, Parisians had to cede their place on public transportation and yield on the sidewalks to German officers. Many extended the same courtesy to German enlisted men out of reflex or out of fear. The allure of Parisian women may have trumped all of the city’s other legendary charms; German soldiers could now approach these women with money in their pockets and an aura of power surrounding them. Few of these women could have envisioned the bitter reprisals they would face once their German lovers left.
Like most occupiers, the Germans took the best of the best whenever they wanted to do so. The Luftwaffe took over the city’s most beautiful palace, the Palais du Luxembourg, formerly the home of the French Senate; its magnificent gardens became parking lots for the Luftwaffe’s vehicles and, eventually, for German tanks. The city’s best hotels served as residences and headquarters for German officers; the dining room of the elegant George V hotel (named for the British king who had allied with France in World War I) became a fancy mess hall for senior German officials. Theaters began to put on shows in German, often with distinctly anti-Semitic themes, although French theater continued with little direct censorship. The German commander of the military district of Paris took possession of the French president’s box at the famous Longchamp racetrack, and his officers took the first-class seats alongside well-connected collaborationists. Street signs, too, began to appear in German, and even the clocks were adjusted one hour to conform with German time. The Germans also banned the flying of the French flag, the playing of the French national anthem, and the celebration of French republican holidays.
Still, in the early months the Germans did what they could to conduct the occupation as lightly as possible. Rather than brutally oppressing the conquered French, as many Parisians had feared, the Germans came to Paris in 1940 trying to seem agreeable, appearing as lambs rather than wolves. Few German soldiers wanted to ruin the cushy and privileged assignment they had doing occupation duty in Europe’s most beautiful city. At least in the early months of the occupation, one Parisian recalled, German soldiers were “sweet and affable. . . . They smiled at children, gave them candy (which they had taken from us), paid properly in the stores (with money they had assessed from us), gave their seats to ladies, and picked up the gloves [that women] had dropped.” They also applied surprisingly few restrictions on French literature, art, and drama. Nor did Parisians have a curfew until April 1942. All in all, Paris had, at least in the early stages, avoided some of the worst aspects of occupation. It had certainly avoided the miserable fate of conquered and contested cities in Eastern Europe like Warsaw, Leningrad, and so many others. In Leningrad alone more than 1 million Soviets died, most of them civilians. Collaborationists took much of the credit, often blaming the British for continuing the prosecution of an unnecessary war and a blockade that shut off much of France’s commerce (and food supply) from the outside world.10
Over time, of course, German avarice and collaborationist vengeance began to take their toll. As one Briton living in France during the war noted, the occupation began “‘correctly,’ but degenerated into an orgy of assassination. We were plunged back into the horrors of the Middle Ages.” Three events in particular changed the character of the German occupation and concurrently undermined the legitimacy of the Vichy system. The first was the new regime’s targeting of its traditional enemies and scapegoats. As early as September 1940, the Germans began taking a census of the Jewish population in France and dissolved the French Communist Party. By the following summer, Germany and the Soviet Union were at war, meaning that the Communist Party became an even more intensive target of German and Vichy repression. The communists went underground and formed the core of what became the key arms of the French Resistance inside Paris: the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI), the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), and the Comité Parisien de la Libération (CPL).11
Mass arrests of communists and laws banning Jews from public service soon followed. Anti-Semitic propaganda, such as that published in the right-wing journal Je Suis Partout and dramatized in films like Le Juif Süss, appeared across France. As they had done in Germany, the Nazis—with the help of their Vichy collaborators—forced French people to either acquiesce in the persecution of their fellow citizens or be exposed as Jewish or communist sympathizers. While some brave French people did hide Jews or wear yellow stars on their own clothes to protest the discrimination, most stood by, unable or unwilling to help.
The worst of the collaborators looked for ways to make money from the plight of their fellow citizens, buying and selling the possessions of the deported and often denouncing others for personal gain. In most cases, the Vichy state began its anti-Semitic actions well before the Germans did the same in the occupied zone, suggesting that indigenous French anti-Semitism, rather than German pressure, accounted for the hatred. Roundups of France’s Jews began in May 1941 in both zones, starting with foreign-born Jews who had come to France in the 1930s seeking liberty, equality, and fraternity from Nazi tyranny. In July 1942 the Paris police rounded up 3,031 Jewish men, 5,802 Jewish women, and 4,051 Jewish children, almost all of them French citizens. They went first to a cramped indoor bicycle racetrack called the Vélodrome d’Hiver, or, as most Parisians called it, the Vel d’Hiv. From there they went to the notorious camp at Drancy, located in an unfinished housing complex in the northeast suburbs of Paris. Drancy had no heat in winter, no electricity, and just one working latrine for the entire complex. From Drancy, the Germans sent both French and foreign-born Jews to Auschwitz, where nearly all of them died in the gas chambers. Collaborationists not only looked the other way but were often eager participants. Political prisoners, too, increasingly went to jail and to concentration camps, most often starting at the squalid and unsanitary prison at Fresnes, located just south of Paris near Orly airport.12
The muscle for these operations came not just from Germans and the Paris police but also from the violent paramilitary Vichy force known as the Milice whose members swore a personal oath to Pétain. Its chief was a veteran of World War I named Joseph Darnand, described by one man who knew him as “exceptionally brave but completely unintelligent.” Darnand, on the far right politically, was one of the truly despicable people of the new regime who saw in Vichy not the subjugation of France, but an opportunity to use the power of the new state to murder his real and perceived enemies. He had close links to France’s most violent and vicious collaborators, including the man who nominated him to head the Milice, Xavier Vallat, Vichy’s minister for Jewish questions. The Milice, 30,000 strong and largely funded by Germany, attracted thugs and dedicated fascists from a variety of backgrounds, including middle-class youths and members of the French aristocracy. They had in common a hatred for communism, Jews, and the members of the French Resistance, whom they labeled “terrorists.” The Milice’s oath included the words, “I swear to fight against democracy, against Gaullist insurrection, and against Jewish leprosy.” The members of the Milice were active within occupied France as well as in Vichy itself, and most Frenchmen came to despise them even more than they despised the SS, the Gestapo, or the German Army.13
The second major change in the nature and character of the German occupation came in November 1942 in response to the Anglo-American landings in North Africa. The Germans reacted by taking formal control of the unoccupied zone, but they left most of the Vichy officials in power. Vichy politicians and functionaries now worked for, rather than with, the Germans in both the occupied and unoccupied zones. Consequently, Vichy officials looked less like independent, if unequal, partners with the Germans and more like their outright
puppets. Soon Vichy leaders, such as Prime Minister Pierre Laval, were urging the French to volunteer to fight the Soviets on the Eastern Front and openly wishing for a German victory over the British and the Americans.
Fewer than 3,000 Frenchmen volunteered to fight on the Soviet front (those who did, however, received blessings at Notre Dame from the archbishop of Paris). Nevertheless, widespread anger at the British helped to reinforce the Vichy argument that France’s future had to be tied to that of Germany. On July 3, 1940, fearful that the Vichy fleet might work with the Germans to interfere with British maritime operations in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, the Royal Navy attacked the French fleet’s main Mediterranean base at Mers-el-Kébir in Algeria. The attack killed 1,297 French sailors and led Laval to call Britain France’s “inveterate enemy.” Vichy propagandists noted that the British had thus killed more French than German sailors to that point in the war. In response to the attack, Laval claimed that there was “only one way to restore France . . . to the position to which she is entitled: namely, to ally ourselves resolutely with Germany and to confront England together.” Although few Frenchmen wanted to go to war with Britain, the anger and suspicion that many Frenchmen felt toward their erstwhile allies later played an important role in generating suspicion over Anglo-American intentions for the future of France.14
Events that followed the Allied landings in North Africa laid bare Vichy’s true character as little more than a German puppet. The Vichy Army did not resist the Germans when they violated the terms of the armistice and invaded the unoccupied zone. Nor did Vichy soldiers respond to the calls of Resistance groups to turn over or destroy their arms and equipment before the Germans seized them. Instead, they stood by meekly as the Germans took control of the whole of metropolitan France. Vichy soldiers in North Africa fired on Allied soldiers coming to liberate France, inflicting approximately 4,000 casualties on American and British forces. No longer could even the most obtuse Vichy supporter believe, as many had in 1940–1941, that the Vichy regime was working to pursue the interests of France. Vichy’s true face as a German pawn was now obvious for all to see.15
The third, and probably most important, change in the relationship between the French people and their occupiers resulted from the introduction of the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO) in February 1943. The STO required Frenchmen aged eighteen to sixty and childless women aged eighteen to forty-five to register for a two-year period of mandatory labor service in Germany if the occupiers so demanded. The STO constituted recognition on the part of the Germans that a previous policy, whereby French prisoners of war from 1940 could be traded for men voluntarily agreeing to work in Germany, had failed miserably. Although the Germans anticipated finding 250,000 skilled workers through this scheme, they got only a small fraction of that number, made up mostly of the desperate and chronically unemployed. The jobs these men did, moreover, were back-breaking and poorly compensated. Some of the deportees worked twenty hours a day in near slave conditions making weapons. Eventually, about 20 percent of all workers in Germany, or 5 million people, were foreigners there against their will.16
The STO, and its Paris chief, an SS general named Julius Ritter, were intensely unpopular. Applied arbitrarily and often unfairly, the STO reminded many Frenchmen of the despised corvée, or labor tax, during the feudal era, which had required citizens to devote a portion of their time to fixing roads and improving buildings on their master’s estates. At least under the corvée, however, Frenchmen had stayed at home. Under the STO they were forcibly deported to Germany. Its unpopularity, even among many Vichy officials, who later claimed that they did all they could to reduce the number of men deported, made the power differential between the Germans and Vichy starkly obvious. While Vichy leaders chose to show their displeasure with the STO with empty words, the French Resistance had slightly more latitude; indeed, the Resistance scored one of its great successes in September 1943, when agents assassinated Ritter in broad daylight—symbolically, right in front of the Arc de Triomphe. The Germans reacted by executing fifty French political prisoners and threatening even wider reprisals if Resistance activities continued.
The STO was a German idea with a Vichy face on it; Laval became its chief public advocate, and the Milice was responsible for ensuring that men reported. But the program had an unintended consequence: Thousands of young men, afraid of the fate that awaited them in Germany, where they might die of overwork or Allied bombardment, escaped to the countryside. There they formed bands of men known as maquis, a Corsican word used to describe the thick woodlands of that island’s interior. Many maquis cells had links to the French Resistance. Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont, an early member of the Resistance, called the STO “the greatest coup de main that the Germans could have given us.”17
The defiance of these young men undermined the STO and infuriated an increasingly frustrated German occupation authority. In March 1944, for example, only 13,000 men reported for the STO out of a German demand for 270,000. The Germans responded by threatening to deport every Frenchman under the age of twenty-five to Germany. Some men formed French Resistance cells instead, choosing to resist rather than accept deportation. Their efforts to defy the STO showed just how much the French had come to hate the occupation, even if there was little they could do about it without assistance from Britain or the United States.
The lack of help from the outside was the main impediment to the French Resistance becoming an important factor in the war. Hopes for an Allied invasion across the English Channel in 1942, and then again in 1943, came to naught as the Allies went to North Africa and then to Italy instead. French Resistance members, known as résistants , could point with great pride to the contribution of Free French troops to both theaters at places like Bir Hakeim in Libya and Monte Cassino in the Italian mountains, but they wanted to see French troops return to French soil as liberators. Only with the support of an Anglo-American army on the continent, furthermore, could the résistants stand any chance against the powerful German military. Until such an Allied force arrived, the Resistance’s options remained limited to localized, small-scale engagements that could frustrate, but not overthrow, the occupiers.18
At first, most members of the Resistance were as interested in dodging the STO as in making political or patriotic statements, but over time they developed the capability to derail trains, blow up bridges, and deny the Germans unfettered access to large portions of France. The maquis mostly based themselves in the countryside, where they could melt away and conceal themselves from the Milice and from German Army patrols. Some of the maquis groups were highly successful and were able to depend on the active help of local farmers. They could also depend on more regular Allied air drops of ammunition and weapons than their comrades in the cities could. The most powerful such group ruled the so-called national redoubt on the Vercors plateau near Grenoble in the French Alps. This group, with 3,500 members of the maquis, declared the restoration of the French Republic and defied German authority until July 1944.
The maquis was a mostly provincial phenomenon. Inside Paris, the Resistance was mainly centered inside labor unions and led by members of the French Communist Party. Loosely organized into independent cells containing members of mutually antagonistic political groups, which ran the spectrum from monarchists to communists, the Resistance inside Paris had little choice but to stay underground. The Allies maintained a policy of not air-dropping weapons or other supplies into cities, leaving the Resistance with few means of self-defense. German and Vichy infiltration into the Resistance, moreover, was a constant problem, especially in the early years before the résistants learned how to cover their tracks by developing codes. They also devised a more professional military system of organization. Until 1943, the Resistance in Paris was less important and less active than the Resistance in Lyon, which sat in the unoccupied zone and therefore was spared the direct vigilance of the Germans, at least for the early phase of the war. In March 1943, however, shortly after the Germans
took control of Vichy, the Gestapo and its Vichy allies broke the Lyon Resistance, arresting eighteen of its leaders and driving many others, such as the daring socialist Léo Hamon, to Paris. The main Resistance newspapers—Franc-Tireur, Combat, and Libération—all moved to Paris as well. Thereafter, the capital of France was also the capital of the Resistance.19
The German presence in Paris centered along the traditional power axes of the city. The headquarters of the German commander of the Military District of Greater Paris were in the luxurious Hôtel Meurice, located next to the Tuileries gardens and the Louvre. Just a short walk northwest along the famous arcades of the Rue de Rivoli would bring a traveler to the beautiful Place de la Concorde, the most famous buildings of which, the Hôtel Crillon and the French Navy Ministry, now served the German occupiers. Continuing north and west through this upscale section of Paris would bring a pedestrian to the heart of official Paris, the Place Beauvau, home to the Élysée Palace, the residence of the French president, and the Hôtel Beauvau, the traditional place for foreign dignitaries to stay while in Paris.
As it is today, the Place Beauvau was then also home to the French Interior Ministry, accessible through an entrance on the narrow Rue des Saussaies. Inside the rather innocuous-looking building at number 9, the Gestapo had set up a torture chamber complete with meat hooks hanging from the wall and bath tubs in which to submerge their victims in icy water until they cooperated. The screams from the Rue des Saussaies kept neighbors awake at night and made most passersby cross the street to walk on the other side. Eventually, Parisians learned to avoid the street altogether unless absolutely necessary.20
The Blood of Free Men Page 2
