Voices from the Dark Years

by Douglas Boyd

  Governments of the Third Republic had been preoccupied with the declining birth rate. Pétain’s regime took this one stage further. While elevating motherhood as a career and encouraging Mother’s Day national propaganda, the old marshal’s brand of national socialism also looked after the family unit, in which it had common cause with the Church. Three months after the Armistice, one of many magazine articles signed by him stated, ‘The rights of families precede and override those of the state and individual rights. The family is the essential unit of social structure.’13

  The strong Marian cult in the Church naturally approved. Smiling priests were photographed with children reciting prayers they had written asking Jesus to protect the marshal. The image of the Good Shepherd was applied to him and on 24 July 1941, the Church bestowed its final blessing on Pétain and all his works in a statement read out in every church: ‘We venerate the head of state and ask that all French citizens rally round him. We encourage our flock to take their places at his side in the measures he has undertaken in the three domains of family, work and fatherland.’14

  No head of state could have asked for more. On 12 August Pétain denounced as an ‘evil wind blowing through France’ those who refused to collaborate, saying, ‘In 1917 I ended the mutinies. In 1940 I put an end to the rout. Today, it is from yourselves that I wish to save you.’15

  On 13 August communist demonstrators came to blows in Paris with French police and German Feldgendarmerie units at Porte St-Denis and Porte St-Martin. The following day, sober bespectacled Pierre Pucheu, appointed Minister of the Interior by Darlan in July, expanded the Service de Police Anti-Communiste (SPAC) created by Daladier in 1939 by forming the ‘brigades spéciales’. The ambiguous title concealed a nationwide machinery for arresting and trying communists with no appeal system and only one verdict: death. Seeking to justify himself at his trial for collaboration in Algiers during 1944, Pucheu claimed that he had accepted the Interior Ministry under compulsion, and selected hostages to be shot from lists of known communists in order to spare the lives of ‘good Frenchmen’, but those who knew him at the time saw a man eaten hollow by the worm of ambition.

  Former law student Albrecht Krause, a legally trained observer, arrived in Paris on the day of the demonstrations to take up his post on the staff of von Stulpnagel in Operationsabteilung 1A. While convalescing after being wounded in the chest near Leningrad, he had attended the trial in Strasbourg of nineteen Alsatian and French communist activists. After hearing Roland Freisler, president of the Nazi Volksgerischthof, ranting and raving against the accused, allowing neither them nor their lawyers to speak, Krause left the hearings appalled and was taken to lunch by the GOC Strasbourg in a smart hotel where they saw Freisler and his cronies enjoy a three-hour feast before returning to sentence the seventeen men to death and the single female defendant to life imprisonment. On the spot, Krause decided that pursuing his law studies under such a regime was impossible.

  Because the German occupants are usually cast as villains in media depictions of the occupation, it is interesting that Krause found Otto von Stülpnagel an urbane and civilised soldier trying to fulfil an impossible task. As Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich, he was not only the ranking Wehrmacht general in France, but also responsible for ensuring that the troops under his command observed the provisions of international law, including the Hague Conventions, which for the most part they did, to begin with. The Waffen-SS was, of course, a parallel army, and not part of the Wehrmacht structure.

  Krause found life on Von Stülpnagel’s staff rather genteel, indeed old-fashioned. Although known officially as Stabshilferinnen, most of the secretaries came from good families and were nicknamed Edeltippsen (‘noble typists’). To avoid illicit liaisons, they were strictly segregated, except during working hours, had separate sleeping accommodation and their own canteen. Refusing the posting to his HQ of any officer who could not speak good French, and discouraging contact with Abetz’s staff in the embassy and SS-Brigadeführer Karl Oberg’s SS in Avenue Lannes and Avenue Foch, Von Stülpnagel had a number of intellectuals on his staff and enjoyed discussing history or mathematics with them in his private dining room of the Hôtel Raphaël. He also encouraged junior officers to use permanently reserved boxes at the opera and the best theatres when no high-ranking visitors claimed them. On these occasions, they wore civilian clothes in order not to disturb the audience.

  In his spare time, Krause used a Nansen passport to attend classes at the Sorbonne, which was forbidden for German personnel, and there continued his studies of Hebrew and Arabic, paying for his one-to-one lessons with food and clothing.16 With fluent French, Krause found contacts with ordinary French people very relaxed but, in common with many other Wehrmacht officers, was wary of approaches by French collaborationists. His arrival in Paris was perfectly timed to witness the start of the PCF campaign to tie down tens of thousands of German personnel who could otherwise have been sent to Hitler’s newly opened Russian front. On 13 August communist activists Maurice Le Berre and Albert Manuel hacked to death a German soldier with a chopper and a bayonet near the Porte d’Orléans. Six days later a German firing squad executed two other men arrested during a PCF demonstration – Henri Gautherot and Szmul Tyszelman, an immigrant only naturalised in 1939 and known in party circles as ‘Titi’, who were accused of thefts of explosives.

  On 21 August, during the morning rush hour at the Metro station Barbès-Rochechouart, a 22-year-old communist agitator and veteran of the Spanish Civil War who styled himself ‘Colonel Fabien’, assassinated a Kriegsmarine lieutenant in charge of a clothing store – allegedly to avenge the death of Titi. Pierre Georges, to use Fabien’s real name, may have been praised for this by fellow communists, but throughout the occupation until the Allied landings the population generally disapproved of acts of violence against German personnel, asking themselves what did killing one or 100 Germans achieve, except invite reprisals?

  The hostage ordinance.

  They were right. On the morning after the assassination, on every street corner Parisians perused a bilingual poster in German and French, in which Von Stülpnagel’s deputy Lieutenant-General Schaumburg promulgated the Hostage Ordinance.

  With minor differences between the French and German texts, it reads:

  On the morning of 21 August a member of the Wehrmacht was the victim of assassination in Paris. I therefore order as follows: 1. On and after 23 August any French person under arrest for whatever reason shall be considered a hostage; 2. On each future occasion a number of hostages corresponding to the gravity of the crime will be shot. [Signed by Lieutenant-General Schaumberg, Military Commander in France, Paris, 22 August 1941.]

  Initially, forty-eight hostages were shot at Châteaubriant, Nantes and Paris. Stülpnagel realised the PCF campaign was concerted by Moscow to alienate the population from the occupying forces but, in the absence of convicted perpetrators, he could not fail to take reprisals without inviting his forces to take matters into their own hands – as frequently happens in such situations. Although many innocent people were randomly executed during the next three years in reprisals for sabotage and attacks on German personnel, a large number of those shot were in fact previously arrested communist activists. One compromise way out was to blame the Jewish community, which was fined 1 million francs17 on the logic that the PCF activists ordering and executing the outrages were mainly Jewish immigrants like Tyszelman and illegals like Abraham Trzebucki, who was arrested while collecting money for an underground organisation, rapidly tried by one of Pucheu’s new courts and guillotined on 27 August.

  That was a day of bloodshed, some of it unlamented. Pierre Laval and Marcel Déat were at the Borgnis-Desbordes barracks in Versailles reviewing the first contingent of the LVF in their new Wehrmacht uniforms with a distinguishing tricolour badge and France on their left arms, when a 21-year-old recruit in the parade pulled out his revolver and fired five shots at them. Although neither target was badly wounded, the initial outrage
at the attack triggered a witch-hunt for the communists responsible. Colette was a far-right renegade and probably the hitman for Déat’s rival Deloncle, the body of whose secretary was found floating in the Seine, after she had been killed to stop her telling what she knew.18

  A poster warning that setting fire to crops would mean less bread for the French people.

  When, in September, saboteurs set fire to haystacks and standing crops in the Occupied Zone, prefects of police blamed communist saboteurs. As a government poster made plain, less corn meant less bread on the family table. The mathematics were simple: since the Germans took their 20 per cent levy of the total crop, it was the French who suffered the shortfall.

  In Moissac, Mayor Delthil had been one of the senators who voted to grant dictatorial powers to Pétain, and the prefect of Tarn-et-Garonne considered him to have handled his town’s problems wisely. Yet, old political enemies manoeuvred him out of office in January 1941 for ‘creating an island of resistance against the policies of the Marshal’ within the town hall19 and when compromise candidate Dr Louis Moles replaced Delthil on 31 March.

  Although the town council dutifully voted to change the name of la rue des franc-maçons to la rue des Compagnons de France nobody bothered to change the road signs. As the prefect dryly noted, ‘respect for the person of the head of state does not entail support for his policies of collaboration’.20 More importantly, as far as local people were concerned, the potato harvest had been poor, and long queues at the butchers’ shops and groceries caused grumbling. All over France posters appealed to those fed up with waiting to be served to let war-wounded men, pregnant women and mothers of small children go to the head of the queue. Hungry people who had traditionally had full stomachs might be expected to blame their leaders, yet senior Vichy official Pierre Nicolle noted on a visit to Paris how Parisians seemed to have stopped thinking for themselves altogether, being interested only in where their next meal was coming from.

  NOTES

  1. Burrin, Living with Defeat, p. 377.

  2. Quoted by L. Chabrun et al., L’Express, 10 October 2005.

  3. Diamond, Women and the Second World War, p. 23.

  4. La Vie à en mourir, ed. V. Krivopissko (Paris: Tallandier, 2003), pp. 43–6.

  5. Chronique de la France, p. 1,104.

  6. Webster, p. 141.

  7. Ibid., p. 143.

  8. Ibid., p. 140.

  9. Undated photocopy of cutting.

  10. Bédarida, Les Catholiques dans la Guerre, p. 139.

  11. Cahen-D’Anvers, Baboushka Remembers, pp. 210–12.

  12. Pryce-Jones, Paris, p. 117.

  13. La Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 September 1940.

  14. Pechanski, Collaboration and Résistence, p. 65.

  15. P. Pétain, Discours aux Français (Paris: Albin Michel, 1989), p. 172.

  16. Pryce-Jones, Paris, pp. 236–9.

  17. Ibid., p. 124.

  18. Ibid., p. 117.

  19. Boulet, ‘Histoire de Moissac’, p. 115.

  20. Ibid., p. 118.

  13

  SAVING THE CHILDREN

  In France the Scout and Guide movement was divided by religion into Protestant, Catholic and Jewish organisations, all under the Vichy-approved umbrella of Les Scouts de France. With the backing of the Jewish scouting organisation Eclaireurs Israélites de France (EIF), an extraordinary Romanian Jewess who had come to France in 1933 to study medicine persuaded the town council to let her set up a reception centre for children at risk in the municipally owned Maison de Moissac.1 From that humble start, Shatta Simon managed on a shoestring budget to save the lives of 865 children. One thing they all recalled in later life was her smile of welcome.

  Laure Schindler-Levine, who was 13 at the time, recorded her journey from the mud and malnutrition of Gurs concentration camp, where she had lived for months as an orphan after her mother was deported to be gassed in Auschwitz and her father disappeared into the men’s part of the camp. When Laure and three other released children were taken into a café by their guards on the way to the train station:

  it seemed extraordinary to us to be able to sit down at a table on real chairs and simply ask for food. We devoured the coffee and rolls, with the inevitable result that we had to run for the toilets. Then we took the train for Moissac with our chaperone. This was on 8 May 1941. We arrived at Moissac in the evening. Shatta gave us her wonderful smile and really became my ‘living mother’ at that moment. There were no embraces [because the children from the camps were verminous and probably carrying disease].

  Shatta called resident nurse Violette, to shave the heads of Eric and me because we were infested with lice and fleas, after which we were doused with insect powder. For a girl it was doubly humiliating. Because I had scabies too, Violette scrubbed me so hard that it hurt and then rubbed me all over with an evil-smelling sulphur ointment. From sheer exhaustion and fear and grief and pain and humiliation, I cried the whole time.2

  In view of the many diseases they might have brought with them, two weeks’ strict quarantine then ensued before newcomers from camps could join the other children. They emerged with memories of deprivation and horror fresh in their minds, to find themselves in a world of Scouts and Guides, where everyone used the familiar form tu for ‘you’ – even to Shatta and her husband Bouli. The food was pretty basic, with lots of beans and vegetables that would have been fed to the animals in peacetime, but it seemed to malnourished newcomers like feasting every day. As did many others, Laure saved some of her rations to send to her father, now transferred to the concentration camp at Noé.

  Food shortages and missing ration books made catering at the Maison de Moissac a constant headache. In addition, many children came from Orthodox families and refused to eat non-kosher food. Many could not speak French and used German or Yiddish. Some were traumatised by having to leave one or both parents behind in the camps, knowing they could be deported at any time; others had no living relatives left. Many of the youngest did not know their own names. A helper trying to identify one 4-year-old asked who he was, to receive the reply, ‘I’m Alex’s brother.’ Alex was dead. The helper tried another angle: ‘What did the concierge call your father?’ ‘She called him Monsieur,’ the boy replied.

  Once her hair began to grow again, Laure entered more easily into communal life with the other girls in her patrol, all detesting the obligatory daily dose of cod liver oil and adoring the family atmosphere fostered by after-dinner singsongs, the Friday night dinners and festivals. Daytime at No. 18 was as happy as Shatta could make it, while Bouli was the stern but caring housefather. After months of incarceration, children were amazed to discover that the front doors of No. 18 and the overflow houses were never locked. They were free to come and go, but where could they go? At night, memories returned in dreams. The problems the more disturbed children presented for their adult carers surpass imagination. The following extracts from personal files preserved after the war in the archives of the château de Laversine give some idea:

  Roger – Father deported in August 1942. No known relatives.

  Isaac – Very sweet and affectionate little boy. Arrived in Moissac aged seven after being in Gurs and Rivesaltes concentration camps May 1940 – April 1942. Both parents deported in August 1942. No news since.

  Bella – Mother depressed since father and son both shot. Mother refuses to take care of her daughter. The child has several times run away.

  Alfred – Unidentified orphan sent to us by WIZO.3 Has no idea who he is.

  Hannah – Father caught in a rafle in Paris 1941, but escaped from Pithiviers concentration camp, managed to cross into Free Zone and reach Moissac, where he worked as a tailor. Five months later, wife and children managed to join him here. In 1943 both parents caught in a rafle. Mother deported. Father escaped again and returned to Moissac, but was denounced. Escaped again, but was caught and sent to the mines. Caught by the Milice, taken to Drancy. During all this time, Hannah has been in Moissac.

&nbs
p; Léon – A good lad who wants to go into farming. To be sent to a rural group. Has one sister, who became insane after parents’ arrests.4

  Given the political situation, it sounds unreal today that the Moissac ‘children’s house’, or colonie as the locals called it, was run on the lines laid down in Robert Baden-Powell’s blueprint for the Scout movement, as adapted by EIF. Organised in patrols, children slept in dormitories with their patrol leaders. Each day began with fifteen minutes’ gymnastics, after which all but the youngest children had to make their beds and tidy the dormitories before washing in communal washrooms. Bouli’s morning room inspections were legendary: each mattress had to be turned every day. To prevent cheating, there was a mark on one side which had to be on top on even dates and underneath on uneven ones. The child who cheated by just pulling up and smoothing the blankets found all the bedding thrown onto the floor and had to start all over again.