An Infinity of Mirrors

by Richard Condon

  The City of Paris and its environs were governed by a military commander for Gross-Paris who was directly responsible to the Military Governor.

  An Oberkriegsverwaltungsrat attached to City Hall was put in charge of the Paris budget, municipal taxes, public assistances, and pawnshops, the city’s public utilities, the Métro, and all markets.

  The rate of exchange was fixed at one French franc to each five reichsmarks, and a law was passed that German money must be accepted throughout France.

  On July 15, 1940, an order was issued requiring all art treasures whose value exceeded one hundred thousand francs to be reported to the German authorities within thirty days.

  The army really believed that they had managed to exclude the SS from France.

  On June 14, 1940, at five fifty-nine A.M., SS Standartenfuehrer Eberhard Drayst, temporarily detached from duty with the Security Police, arrived in Paris with a party of twenty which had been lodged in small military vehicles in the center of von Kuechler’s Eighteenth Army.

  As the body of the Eighteenth prepared to enter the city, Drayst’s specialists hurried along the deserted rue La Fayette and across the empty Avenue de l’Opéra to settle into their preselected accommodations at the Hôtel du Louvre. Because they all wore regulation GFP uniforms of the Wehrmacht military police, the army was not aware that Drayst’s group had accompanied the Eighteenth into France. The Fuehrer had solemnly agreed with the General Staff that the SS was to be barred from the West at the time that the SS had simultaneously occupied Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland with the army. The criminal conduct of the SS in Poland had so shocked the world that the military believed that the Fuehrer had at last seen the monstrous black corps in its true light.

  It was to offset this tactical disadvantage that the Reichsfuehrer SS ordered General Heydrich to organize a task force to establish a foothold for the SS in France. Because of his distinguished record, his ability to speak French, and his charm, SS Colonel Drayst was selected to head this independent special mission.

  The Drayst unit had a quiet dinner at the Hôtel du Louvre. On the morning of June 15th, still wearing his GFP uniform, SS Lieutenant Gutwillig went to the French Prefecture of Police and requisitioned all French police files indicating the whereabouts of Austrian and German émigrés, all political personalities known to be hostile to the Occupation, and all Jews.

  All members of the Sonderkommando were outstanding men, and all except two were the personal choices of SS Colonel Drayst. The exceptions were the Gestapo commander, SS Captain Sperrena, a veteran police officer with eyes like brass carpet tacks, who had been chosen by General Mueller, and Captain Joachin Strasse of Section IV4b of the Gestapo, the Jewish-affairs section, who had been assigned to France by SS Lieutenant-Colonel Eichmann. Strasse was a top Jewish expert. He had been in charge of the first deportation of Jews from Stettin in February, 1940, when he took thirteen hundred of them into the Lublin area of Poland after they had voluntarily signed a general waiver giving up everything they owned. It had been a political test to see whether the Jews would be willing to walk to their own doom under their own power; to see what the general reaction of their neighbors would be when they discovered all those Jews gone in the morning; and to see how a foreign government would respond when they were suddenly presented with so many Jewish refugees. Everything had turned out very satisfactorily. There was no need for anxiety; the population at large, throughout the world, could not have cared less.

  Drayst had two good men from the Waffen SS, Schwartz and Lazar, to do what Heydrich called “the hard details.” They were weapons and demolition experts whose gear included burglary tools and anti-personnel mines. They remained together at all times, as though to keep a careful watch on each other, and their conversations consisted largely of technical discussions of the merits of various guns, grenades, gas capsules, mortars, and other equipment.

  SS Captain Wilhelm Gohrmann was Drayst’s specialist in civilian police management, and SS Lieutenants Gutwillig and Megrau were college lads who handled the SD Ausland Section and the Economics Section respectively. They were both twenty-six years old and had been with the SD since 1935, but both had been at the university working for their degrees until early in 1940.

  Each member of the task force represented some category of the complex files the Gestapo had maintained on all activities of the French police since 1935. The SS had been very thorough. For each section of files—administrative, criminal, cultural, political, religious, economic, and artistic—maintained by the French police, a corresponding section in Berlin had been created. After five years of day-and-night duty, filing and memorizing wholesale information bought from French agents, the SS men assigned to Paris knew intimately the regional psychology, the habits, and all there was to know about the private lives, financial holdings, inner convictions, personal peculiarities, and all other facets of character of all important personalities in France.

  SS Colonel Drayst had spent the first eight months of 1939 in Paris, polishing his French, studying the press, meeting and evaluating political agents and informers. Drayst had become an important figure; he had been awarded the Iron Cross second class, in peacetime, for his wounds and for his heroism against the only pocket of armed resistance during the Jewish uprising in Berlin on November 9, 1938.

  On the third day of the occupation, Colonel Drayst reported, most unexpectedly, to Dr. Sowa, director of the army’s military police, to offer his credentials as an SS officer and to ask that his unit be placed under full army control. He apologized most engagingly for the presence of his little SS unit by explaining earnestly that he and his little staff were there on the track of German and Austrian exiles, Communists, Jews, and Freemasons. If it should turn out that any arrests were required, he would most certainly ask for army cooperation. Dr. Sowa was so flattered by Drayst’s manner that, convinced the SS had learned its lesson, he gave his grudging approval. After all, Drayst’s unit had only twenty men against twenty-five hundred GFP’s—and that twenty-five hundred was about to become six thousand. Dr. Sowa could not foresee that when the SS, SD, and Gestapo became fully operative in France within a very short time, the GFP would almost entirely disappear—twenty-three out of its twenty-five groups would be disbanded and the men sent to the Eastern front.

  A second unit of twenty SS joined the Sonderkommando in July, and a third arrived in August. Among them they spoke eleven languages, and they included a wine seller who could talk wine for hours the way the English could discuss the weather; a divorced countess who was an expert on the French aristocracy; and one female schoolteacher from the Sudeten-land who was put in charge of charwomen and all wastepaper. Her name was Fräulein Levinthal and she developed an uncanny gift for suppressing any scrap of information which might escape to the world at large.

  The jurisdiction of the SS eventually stretched to twelve cities in provincial France. Though this enraged the army, they could not help but admire the way Drayst showed such enormous and detailed respect for all regulations which they imposed upon him. He did everything with correctness. There was none of the former, eastern SS brutality.

  Not that Drayst did not have operational troubles. So much time was being wasted by placating the army that Colonel Drayst telephoned General Heydrich again and urgently recommended that he be provided with a “cover” officer of sufficient rank to put the SS on an equal negotiating footing with the army and other potential friction points. Within ten days Drayst was provided with the services of SS Brigadefuehrer Johannus Koltrastt, whose SS rank was the equivalent of major-general. Theoretically, Koltrastt was in charge of all SS, SD, and Gestapo operations for Northern France and Belgium, but Drayst ran the show and Koltrastt was a stooge.

  Luckily, Koltrastt was used to being a stooge. He was a pink-skinned, small-boned, white-moustached, forty-seven-year-old fixer who dreaded responsibility, whose daughter was General Heydrich’s mistress, and who was further related to the General through a grandson. He had be
en the first SS leader in Berlin eleven years before; his previous job had been at the city garbage dump, where he had been an “engineer.” To welcome him to Paris—and to annoy the army—General Heydrich personally addressed a mass meeting of French police officers.

  Koltrastt’s job was to wear his uniform and insignia smartly for negotiations with the army and the representatives of the Jewish Affairs Office of the Vichy Government, to act as the representative of the Chief of Police of the Sûreté Française, and to handle liaison work with Herr Abetz, the German “ambassador” to France (it was felt that the title of Gauleiter would not have gone down well with the French people). Koltrastt moved into a splendid building at 57 Boulevard Lannes, spent half of his time in France, half in Belgium, and three quarters of his waking hours in the bars and the boîtes of both:

  Colonel Drayst was the Befehlshuber der Sicherheitsdienst. His offices and residence were in a palatial building at 72–84 Avenue Foch which was furnished with everything that systematic looting could provide. Altogether there were six Gestapo sections under Drayst’s command. One of these was called Gestapo-France, because it was manned entirely by a French staff headed by Henri Chamberlin, a former mess orderly of the Paris Prefecture of Police, who had been interned in 1939 for his pro-German activities. He had been enlisted by the Drayst unit at the start, first as an informer, later as an interrogations leader. Under the name Lafont, he and an ex-police inspector named Bony picked for their underlings criminals serving sentences. These men were marvelously well-suited as interrogators, imaginatively departing from the standard Gestapo methods of torture. They were enthusiastic because some of them received reprieves of as high as twenty-seven years at hard labor, and because their new work provided them with a special identity card licensing them to carry and use arms.

  Only SS Captain Strasse, Chief of the Jewish Affairs Section, lived and worked apart from the other members of Drayst’s unit. Just as Colonel Drayst was not accountable to General Koltrastt, Captain Strasse, although a Gestapo officer, was not under the authority of Drayst. Strasse reported only to SS Lieutenant-Colonel Eichmann in Berlin, who in turn reported to General Mueller, chief of the Gestapo.

  The SS and police tribunals were installed at Boulevard Flandrin in the sixteenth arrondissement. Captain Strasse decided which of those arrested were to be tried and which were to be deported without trial. The routine of arrest, interrogation, and trial was precise. Interrogations took place within ten days after arrest. The luckier ones—those not held for interrogation—were diverted to the internment camp at St. Denis.

  Gestapo agents spoke very correct French, but many of them spent a great deal of time explaining that their accents were Alsatian or even Baltic. This hard core was augmented by an organized force of twelve thousand French informers who were paid for each arrest and who ranged in cast from prostitutes, to concierges, to members of the upper classes who could use the extra money. The third line of information came from the usual resources of the French police.

  The Gestapo preferred to make arrests early in the morning. The Santé and the Cherche-Midi prisons held thirty-four hundred prisoners and were always filled. All prisoners had the right to counsel, but only from a reserve of attorneys who had been approved by the Gestapo, and the advocate could speak to his client only on the day of trial. To maintain an appearance of impartiality, the judges usually dismissed prisoners falsely accused, but then remanded them immediately to prison as a security measure.

  Aside from the SD, SS and the Gestapo, there were six other rival German intelligence organizations operating in France. The Bureau Ribbentrop was unofficial, but it commanded extensive facilities. Ernest Bohle’s Auslandorganisation was the official overseas secret service apparatus. Dr. Rosenberg’s Aussenpolitischesamt tried desperately to keep up with the others. The Reichsmarschall’s Air Force Research Office conducted extensive and mindless wire tapping which, bureaucratically burgeoning, ultimately impelled its zealous technicians to tap the lines of the Reichsmarschall, as well as those of the Fuehrer himself. (All of the tens of millions of telephone conversations held during the twelve years of the Thousand Year Reich were transcribed in duplicate and filed by a corps of librarians for easy reference if blackmail or betrayal were needed.) Military intelligence was under the direction of Admiral Canaris, and lastly, in addition to his unofficial bureau, Foreign Secretary von Ribbentrop, who was capable of being confused even by a picture book, maintained an official intelligence service so that he might receive contrasting assortments of intricate information daily.

  Behind all of these, moving like a black cat in the night and striking to maim and to kill, was Colonel Drayst’s SD, which eventually would consume all of its competitors. The chain of command flowed out of Berlin from the Reichsfuehrer SS to General Heydrich to General Mueller, Gestapo chief, to Colonel Drayst or, if Jews were involved, from Mueller to Eichmann to Strasse.

  Late in 1941, Strasse had a scene with the Jewish Affairs Agency of Vichy, which had been fighting stubbornly against giving up French Jews for extermination, insisting that Strasse take foreign-born or stateless Jews of which, they maintained, there were plenty available in France. Strasse finally agreed, but when he set out to round up a trainload of Jews for extermination at Auschwitz, he discovered that he had only one hundred and fifty prisoners to ship, and he was sick over the trouble this was going to make for him in Berlin. As usual when he was in trouble, he went to Drayst with the problem and sat in the Colonel’s office while a call was put through to Eichmann. Normally Captain Strasse was chalk-pale with a face like a cartoon rodent, but when Drayst picked up the receiver Strasse seemed green, and under his arms large, dark wet circles of perspiration had soaked through his tunic.

  “Hello?” Drayst said. “Is that Eichmann?”

  “This is Eichmann. Is that Strasse?”

  “No. This is Drayst.”

  “Is that Paris? They told me I was talking to Paris.”

  “This is Paris. This is the BdS in Paris.”

  “Ah … Drayst! Hello. How are you, Drayst?”

  “The same to you, Eichmann.”

  “Where is Strasse?”

  “Strasse has urgent business with the French. We have bad news here.”

  “Bad news?”

  “The train which was due to leave on the second had to be canceled.”

  “Canceled? Strasse canceled a train? Why?”

  “He had no choice. I can bear him out on this.” Drayst looked across the desk at Strasse, who nodded with sick gratitude. The Colonel knew about the problems of coordinating departures and arrivals, the difficulties of wangling rolling stock from the Ministry of Transport at a time when the Wehrmacht was constantly demanding priority, and above all, the necessity of having the trains filled to capacity with Jews so that no train would be wasted.

  “Why? I don’t follow this, Drayst. He knows the problems. I don’t follow it and I don’t like it at all. How could Strasse cancel a train?”

  “They could only get one hundred and fifty Jews in Bordeaux and there was no time to find others to fill the train.”

  “Then Strasse has let us down—again. This is a disgrace. There is also a question of prestige here, Drayst, you know. The French go too far with us.”

  “But Eichmann, only one hundred and fifty Jews—”

  “Does Strasse realize even dimly the length of time we had to negotiate here with the Minister of Transport in order to get this train for him? We do our job here one hundred percent, and then Strasse claims he can’t get Jews. Is this a comedy? I don’t know what to say, Drayst.”

  “It is better, believe me, Eichmann, to store the one hundred and fifty Jews here at Drancy than to waste a train.”

  “It’s a disgrace. I must speak with Strasse.”

  “He is with the French. He is so angry that he has told them he may take the matter to Ambassador Abetz.”

  “I certainly don’t want to have to report this matter to General Mueller, but th
e blame for Strasse’s failure must fall directly on his own shoulders. He forces me to consider whether it would not be better to do without France altogether as an evacuation center.”

  When Eichmann had hung up Drayst put the telephone down and said, “Listen, why not put them on the train and fake the bill of lading a little?”

  “I would do that in a minute,” Strasse said. “But then they wouldn’t get the same count at Auschwitz. This morning I was going to put them on the train and burn it to the ground, but then I’d get in even more trouble for losing a few rotten railroad cars.”

  “Well, be sure to call Eichmann before Monday. Heil Hitler!”

  Strasse got up. His face was bitter, partly because of fatigue. Captain Strasse had one very peculiar obsession: a compulsion to own and operate night clubs. During the day he worked on the final solution to the Jewish problem, but at night he supervised eleven night clubs which he had commandeered from Jews. Most of the time he was wandering around in a daze of fatigue; the night before, for instance, the barman in his rue Lapin club had not shown up for duty and he had been obliged to work the shift himself until closing time. “Heil Hitler,” he said, and shuffled wearily out of the room, as Fräulein Nortnung, the Colonel’s secretary, called, “I have Charles Grimaux on the line, Colonel Drayst.”

  “Put him on.” Drayst waited and stared out the window at the Musée d’Ennery. “Hello, Grimaux? How are you? Fine. Fine … Sunday evening?” He pulled an engagement book toward him. “Hm. I think so … The astrologer? Marvelous. Yes, I am free, Grimaux. Excellent. My very best to Mme. Grimaux. How nice … Ah, yes—there is one little thing, yes. Might you invite another guest?… Ah, how very kind of you. It is Frau General Paule von Rhode, the wife of—ach, you know her differently here. Here she is Paule Bernheim, the daughter of your great actor. Please don’t mention my name … Yes, yes, that is the one. The mistress of the Duke of Miral.”