A Dangerous Woman

by Susan Ronald

  Meanwhile, Florence arranged for Baron Édouard de Rothschild and his wife; Arletty and her children; her friend Antoinette d’Harcourt; and Hervé Alphand, financial adviser to the French embassy in Washington, D.C., to flee to the Gould home at Maisons-Laffitte. Undoubtedly, Florence felt that hiding her friends, including the Jewish Rothschilds and Arletty (who had been married to the Jewish swindler Stavisky), was not an act of bravery (which it was) but was rather something a friend should do. Florence’s private code of ethics swung in favor of the vulnerable this time. Later in the war, she was reputed to have hidden downed Allied pilots, too, although neither Florence nor any pilots ever came forward with the proof.17

  Others with something to fear fled as well. Colette took her daughter and went to the Château de Curemonte in Corrèze near Limoges. Matisse headed for the Riviera and Picasso to Royan, to weather the Nazi storm. Winnaretta Singer, the aged Princesse de Polignac, found herself in England at the time the Blitzkrieg against France began, and returned to the Wigwam near Torquay in Devon, where she wrote to her niece, Marie-Blanche, “my father came from Paris in 1870, fleeing the Germans and the Commune.… I feel less dispossessed [here] than elsewhere in England, where I spent my childhood.…”18 Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge, that wealthy jack-of-all-trades, was now a member of the French Economic War Mission in London, having joined Charles de Gaulle’s “outlaws,” as Pétain called them. Faucigny-Lucinge tried, unsuccessfully, to bring the Princesse de Polignac back to France.

  The armistice agreement between France and Germany was signed on the evening of June 24, 1940, in the same railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne where Germany was humiliated by signing the Versailles Treaty, just a tad over twenty-one years earlier. A separate armistice agreement was signed by Pétain, effectively “willing” two-thirds of France to the Third Reich. A line west of Cheverny at the Loire was drawn southward to the Spanish border. The Atlantic and Channel coasts were to remain part of the Occupied Zone, with the Mediterranean coastline in France’s “Free Zone” of Vichy. The new American ambassador to Vichy was Admiral William Leahy, an old friend of Frank’s, who set up shop in the Gould palatial residence, Villa Inca, in the town.19

  Simultaneously, the German high command sequestered hundreds of buildings in Paris and elsewhere to house their new machinery of state. The Luftwaffe took over the Ritz Hotel; the Gestapo, the Hôtel Le Meurice across from the Jardin des Tuileries. The Kunstschutz (ironically, this translates as the Art and Monuments Protection Office) was headquartered along with the Military Authority at the Hôtel Majestic on avenue Kléber. Counterespionage activities were based out of the splendid art nouveau Hôtel Lutetia, on Paris’s Left Bank. The fearsome Jewish affairs bureau, or IEQJ,* sequestered the former headquarters of the Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg, at 21 rue de la Boétie. Rosenberg had already fled for his home near Bordeaux, and was en route to New York with his entire family. Finally, Otto Abetz, returned in style as the German ambassador to France, ordering only the best pieces of furniture and artworks to adorn the embassy, from the collections of Edouard de Rothschild, and the French art dealers and collectors Paul Rosenberg, François-Gérard Seligmann, David David-Weill, Alphonse Kann, and Josse and Gaston Bernheim-Jeune.

  The Gould estate at Maisons-Laffitte and the divine duplex apartment at 2 boulevard Suchet were also sequestered by the German high command, along with the Goulds’ other investment properties in the heart of Paris. The 2 boulevard Suchet duplex would eventually become the Paris home of the German navy, which also paid through the nose for the exclusive rights to Rozan Chocolats in a deal with Florence.20 However, in 1946, Florence told her American interrogators that she had gone to Maisons-Laffitte in the company of a Swiss friend, Jean Guisan, where “two Adjutants of the municipality appeared and asked me for the requisition of the property. I told them that I was a neutral. I arranged this affair amicably and they gave me three weeks to remove all the objets d’art.”21

  There are several curious and later contradictory statements that stem from this period, too. Florence claimed that the ERR,† the art-looting operatives, under the command of Dr. Kurt von Behr’s offices at avenue d’Iéna and led by General Franz Medicus, searched the house at Maisons-Laffitte for a cache of weapons early in 1941. The problem remains that ERR never searched for weapons, only valuable artworks. Nor was General Medicus an art expert. Of course, no weapons were concealed. Still, a fifteenth-century “valuable triptych and two precious single pieces were found.” To save these from pillage, Florence maintained that if she agreed with General Franz Medicus then and there to offer the triptych to Göring, that he would, in turn, gift it to the Cluny Museum in Paris “to which the Gould family had intended to will it.” The two single and precious ivory pieces would remain in Göring’s possession as recompense. “Mrs. Gould declared,” so an official report by the German army states, “that she wanted to contribute the entire stock of wine for the soldiers on the Eastern Front; all the copper and brass, which filled an enormous cellar room … to [the] German war industry.”22

  However, this reported deal occurred much later in Paris, in March 1942 to be precise, once Florence was ensconced within the German hierarchy, and living a life of ease at Paris’s Hôtel Bristol.23 At that time, Kurt von Behr was no longer attached to the ERR, much less the Kunstschutz, which, under the sympathetic Count von Metternich, truly tried to protect art in the first year of the occupation, until Metternich was transferred. From January 1942, von Behr, always decked out in his Red Cross uniform, headed the odious confiscation of Jewish and other “ownerless” property in France, codenamed M-Aktion.24

  Another query arises from Florence’s earlier reported date of the looting. If the confiscation of Florence’s artworks occurred in early 1941, the former head of the “führer’s social brigade” who was now Germany’s ambassador, Otto Abetz, could have undoubtedly still intervened. Abetz and Florence had been well acquainted since 1934, and she would have felt that the only honorable thing for Abetz to do was to rescue her as the eponymous damsel in distress. But by March 1942, the ERR was operating under the misguided hand of Dr. Hermann Bunjes, and Abetz held no further power to either restitute or loot for his own account.

  There was no love lost between Abetz and the ERR, who were constantly vying for power. Why hadn’t the diligent and honest Count von Metternich, who was still involved at the Kunstschutz in early 1941, intervened? The report describes valuable medieval artifacts, yet there are other things that are quite striking about this incident, too. The report is essentially about the Rothschild family’s valuables. It is silent about who told the ERR that Edouard de Rothschild had hidden at the Gould mansion at 5 avenue Picard, Maisons-Lafitte, as the Germans were dismembering Paris. Also, if Florence’s artworks were indeed purloined by the greedy Field Marshal Göring, why were they never reported as being officially looted to either the French or American authorities after the war? Was this all some sort of window dressing in the event the Rothschilds got wind of Florence’s complicity regarding their looted valuables? Or had they ever belonged to Florence in the first place? Was she claiming ownership to cover up the more heinous crime in German eyes of harboring Jewish refugees? “‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ cried Alice” in her Adventures in Wonderland, as anyone might do in trying to comprehend the diverse accounts of this one incident, since Florence would tell a completely different story to the OSS* after the war.

  Still more curious was how Florence managed to swing a semipermanent laissez-passer between the Occupied and Free zones, and, incredibly, unadorned access to gasoline from the first days of the occupation. The fairy tale she would weave into the imaginary fabric of her history after the war was that Frank was able to handle only the assets in the Free Zone of Vichy, while she could handle only their northern investments. Nothing could be further from the truth. Florence was, from the time of the occupation of France, in charge of absolutely everything in the Goulds’ French empire.

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  LUDWIG

  The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL

  Sometime shortly after June 14, 1940, a former German Luftwaffe officer, Ludwig Carl Adolf Vogel, arrived at Bordeaux to take over the French airplane manufacturing plant there. Tall, handsome by all accounts, fair, and in his mid-thirties, Vogel was put in charge of, or, to use the new term, Aryanized, the Bordeaux-based aeronautics company, Société Nationale des Constructions Aéronautiques du Sud-Ouest, or SNCASO. Its owner, known only as Mr. Francezon, was deported eastward on Vogel’s orders, never to be seen again. Madame Francezon, however, continued to live a subdued existence in an apartment at 135 avenue Malakoff in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris.1 Soon enough, Vogel became her next-door neighbor at number 133, thanks to Florence’s money. He would also become Florence’s most significant lover during the war.

  While he was in the same place at the same time as Florence from the summer of 1940 onward, and equally able to provide her with her first laissez-passer from the Occupied Zone to Vichy, or the Free Zone, Florence maintained that she met Vogel only after she returned to Paris to live in 1941. Her maid, Marcela Arnaud, asserted that Vogel was introduced to Florence by Jean Guisan, a distant relation of General Alphonse Joseph Georges, who was serving in the Resistance in North Africa. Guisan was also related to the commander-in-chief of the Swiss army, Henri Guisan. Florence said that Vogel was introduced to her by Werner Klingeberg, Melchior de Polignac’s old friend from the International Olympic Committee and the German games.2 Klingeberg also headed the DNA, the entity in charge of the press and all censorship in occupied France. Its main office was located at the infamous Hôtel Majestic along with the SS at the RHSA’s* headquarters there.

  So who was Ludwig Carl Adolf Vogel?

  He was born in Stuttgart on May 26, 1909. His first trip to the United States was in May 1928, when he shared accommodation with a friend, Reinhold Schempp, also from Stuttgart. For his first three months in New York Vogel worked at Will & Bauer Candle Company before moving on to Rochester to work at North East Electric Company until June 1929. He tried, unsuccessfully, to be accepted at Cornell University to study engineering. As the Great Depression hit hard, he was forced to migrate from factory to factory, finding die-casting work in Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, before finally landing in Newark, New Jersey. When the last factory shut down, Vogel looked for another job in the tristate area for two months without any luck, and so he returned to Germany. He made his way home by working as a member of the crew aboard a steamer.

  In 1930, Vogel enrolled in the airplane mechanics technical school FAG (Flugtechnische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Gruppe), earning his certificate of airplane mechanical engineering in 1933. At the same time, he learned about aviation at the nearby Deutsche Luftfahrt. In 1932, he was awarded his pilot’s license, category B-2, for single-engine airplanes of any size. He also received his acrobatics license, and soaring and gliding certificates at the same time. Then he was employed in a glider school near Stuttgart that advertised widely throughout Europe and the United States to attract foreign clients. In March 1933, the newly elected Nazi government in Germany militarized the glider school. That’s when, Vogel claimed, he left.

  Applying to emigrate to the United States again in May 1933, Vogel was told at the American embassy that he had to first sort out his “exit permit” that the new Nazi Germany demanded. When it was requested, so Vogel later told the authorities, he was threatened that if he left the country, his parents would come to harm. That is certainly one explanation for his disappearance from view for two months.

  That said, he re-enrolled in the flying school to obtain his C-2 license to fly multiengine aircraft, while also working as an instructor for single-engine aircraft pilots. In what seems to be a rather apocryphal story, Vogel asserted that he created a mutiny among the instructors of the flying school, where all of them refused to join the air force when personally confronted by General Werner von Blomberg in 1934. Vogel further alleged that their rebellion went unpunished for all other officers except himself—since he was the ringleader—and that he was sent to Ohrdruf concentration camp for four weeks to become more pliable. Vogel swore that he remained an ardent anti-Nazi.

  The hero story continues. On his release, he was snapped up by Emil Kropf at Standard Oil in Hamburg. There, Vogel was employed to organize flights, supervise test runs, test engines, help write Standard Oil’s aviation handbook, and obtain contracts for gasoline supply to German aircraft manufacturing facilities, including the Göring Corporation and Focke-Wulf.

  In 1935, Vogel landed Focke-Wulf as Standard Oil’s biggest client. That year, he made several trips for his new client to Austria, Hungary, Turkey, Romania, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, and Russia. Five years later, Ribbentrop traveled to Moscow with Vogel and introduced him to Stalin. Again, curiouser and curiouser.…

  In the 1936 international Olympiad flying rally, Vogel flew the Standard Oil airplane and won. Officially, he claimed never to have worked for the Göring Corporation, nor did he mention it as a client of Standard Oil, even though the Göring Corporation sent him to France in 1936 to set up its sales organization there. In addition, the Göring Corporation became heavily affiliated with Focke-Wulf by 1937. Instead, Vogel admitted that he worked for the Focke-Wulf Corporation from 1939 to 1944 in Paris. In truth, he quit Standard Oil in 1937 to become a test pilot and the head of all export activity for Focke-Wulf, and was promoted to head up their entire operations in France in 1938.3

  Finally, Vogel averred that he helped the French resist the German war effort, keeping SNCASO, which he directed beginning in June 1940, from collaborating with Germany through various ruses. In fact, his resistance began in 1943, when it appeared impossible for Germany to win the war. Vogel did refuse to sabotage the factories he controlled in July 1944, as Hitler’s orders demanded, but then again, General Dieter von Choltitz also disobeyed Hitler when ordered to set Paris ablaze.

  At no time, Vogel stated, had he been a member of the Nazi Party.4 He hated the Nazis. Evidently, his memory had become clouded by the war, until it was later jarred by the OSS, which revealed that his Nazi Party membership card number 1335256 showed his membership in the NSDAP from 1932 to August 1933, at precisely the same time he tried to immigrate to the United States, and that he had served in the Luftwaffe during this period.5 Later, the FBI questioned if he was a failed spy who had at last found success with the Nazis in the late 1930s. Oddly, too, Vogel did not recall that he was responsible for the deportation to a concentration camp of SNCASO’s main director, Mr. Francezon.

  Whatever the truth of Vogel’s interrogation statements made after the liberation of France, he was married to a German-Bolivian woman, Elfriede K. Elsner, and had fathered a daughter, Renate Vogel, by the time he met Florence. For a portion of his work, he reported directly to a man known only as Dr. Colonel Bosse of the secret Organisation Otto, who, in turn, headed the confiscation of certain highly prized metals and jewels. Additionally, Vogel had significant authority within the dreaded Organisation Todt, the mass construction and slave labor outfit. Interestingly, when Florence’s Italian butler, Diego Zanini, who had been in her employ since April 20, 1937, received his papers to report to the Organisation Todt to “serve the Reich” in 1940, it was at her behest that Vogel had him spared.6 So much for meeting Vogel in 1941. Florence never dreamed that in asking Diego to sing her praises after the war, she was exposing her own untruths to investigators.

  Still, Florence’s maid since June 1940, Marcela Arnaud, swore she became aware of the liaison between Vogel and her mistress only in the summer of 1941. When Florence returned to Paris to live at the Hôtel Bristol, “people she knew, but who were not of her circle before the war,” like Jean Guisan, visited her regularly at her suite of rooms at the hotel. Guisan, as a Swiss citizen, would become crucial to Florence’s ability to fund her activities during
the occupation, as he was able—somehow—to pass in and out of Switzerland at will to cash Florence’s checks drawn on her American account. Like many opportunists during the occupation, Guisan successfully provided a valuable service to like-minded survivors.7 It was a great symbiotic relationship.

  Above all else, Florence was determined to survive and to thrive despite the occupation, just as she had done her entire life. If that meant joining the legions of women who chose la collaboration horizontale—bedding Germans for a better life—then so be it. And bed them she did. If it meant paying bribes, she would. At the outset, she may have seduced Vogel, fourteen years her junior, with the sole purpose of getting her laissez-passers and surviving well, but soon enough, the pair became a couple, and they couldn’t spend enough time together. They were both survivors, both opportunists.

  Frank, of course, asked to meet Florence’s new addition to her gallery of lovers, and heartily approved. According to Vogel, by 1941 Frank was no longer able to fulfill his functions as a husband. Still, did Frank know that Florence was keeping company with some of the more notorious characters in the SD and Gestapo, like the dashing Helmut Knochen, the Sicherheitspolizei commander in Paris during the occupation, or General Carl Oberg, the pig-faced high commander and police leader of France—who deported 40,000 French Jews to certain death? There were others, of course, just as Vogel had other mistresses, like Emma Schlesser, whom he used to take to “parties” given by the ubiquitous Dr. Colonel Bosse at the Villa Brandt in the Bois de Boulogne.8 Before the war was over, Florence, too, would attend the parties there—including the colonel’s farewell-to-France party, held on July 26, 1944, a month before the liberation of Paris.9