A Dangerous Woman

by Susan Ronald

  Florence went into hiding with Ludwig Vogel. As Charles de Gaulle marched his Free French army down the Champs-Élysées to cries of joy, women who had fraternized or slept with Germans had their heads shaved in the tens of thousands across the country, as an outward sign of their shame. Others were paraded naked through the streets, while still more women who consorted with Germans were kicked, beaten, or brutalized publicly. Some died at the hands of their avengers. Indiscriminate revenge attacks and denunciations became the food of the starving masses. Hundreds of thousands were accused of being members of the Gestapo or Milice.

  Florence’s “zoo” of writers—notably Jouhandeau and Léautaud—feared for their futures. Jouhandeau was receiving hate mail and death threats by telephone.10 Drieu de la Rochelle attempted suicide once, and failed. Céline retreated with the occupiers in search of safety. Brasillach was arrested and awaited trial. Paulhan tried to reassure Jouhandeau, while wistfully wondering whether Heller and Jünger were safe. Though a resistant editor of Les Éditions de Minuit, Paulhan believed both Germans were friends of French literature.

  Unsurprisingly, de Gaulle was named by the Allies as the president of the new French provisional government. He tried to put a halt to the savagery redolent of the French Revolution by introducing the offense of indignité nationale into law. Collaborationists convicted of the crime could expect the death penalty. Those who took the law into their own hands faced severe punishment, too. Anyone found guilty lost their right to vote and was banned from public service or the right to work in the media or trade unions. Further sanctions, depending on the severity of the crime, included confiscation of property and jail. Drancy, which had once held Jews and résistants en route to eastern concentration camps, now housed collaborators. Arletty, who gave such pleasure and so much escapism through her films during the occupation, was thrown into the dungeon of La Conciergerie, where Marie Antoinette had been imprisoned before her execution in 1793, until she was transferred to Drancy.11

  Florence knew that her own role as Vogel’s lover—not to mention her relationship with one of Germany’s biggest war criminals in France, Helmut Knochen—put her at the forefront of the hated collabos horizontales. She hadn’t been starving or without succor, as so many of the poorer women of Paris had been, and had no excuse for her blatant fraternization with the occupiers other than egotism, self-gratification, and opportunistic investments. Worse still was her knowledge of Vogel’s activities and his role in the black market, where his responsibilities for MUNIMIM netted the Reich 3.588 billion francs in essential war materiel such as wolfram and radium, as well as converted funds from looted diamonds, platinum, machine tools, and quinine.12 Vogel, too, was at the heart of the nefarious organization that helped prolong the war and starve France. Now that “liberation” had come, Florence, as if merely changing her chemise, preferred to see herself, henceforth, as a fellow victim of the occupier. Her instincts for survival were at their most acute.

  * * *

  As an intelligent woman, Florence recognized that the French—not to mention the Americans—would certainly believe the worst. As an unmitigated snob and egotist, she gave a Gallic shrug, knowing that Gould money would talk in the end. If the Allies ever discovered Vogel’s real role, then so be it. The Banque Charles debacle was bad; but it was nothing she couldn’t handle. Still, did Florence know that both the Abwehr and the Gestapo viewed her as one of their own?13

  With the arrogance of the super-rich, or perhaps the hardened criminal, Florence thought that she could hoodwink the Allies with the fantasy that she had invested in Banque Charles purely to save Frank. Besides, the attempted kidnapping of her husband in Nice was proof she was concerned. That Frank was unable to walk any distance or lie down to sleep made absolutely no difference in her mind to the veracity of her claims.14

  So, in late August, Florence and Vogel first sought sanctuary at the Prophylactic Institute of Dr. Arthur Vernes, just as she had done in the early days of the occupation. From there, they went to other homes belonging to her or Frank. Once she could be sure that the Kriegsmarine had vacated her duplex apartment at 2 boulevard Suchet, the couple hid there. It was at boulevard Suchet that they agreed on their separate futures and the necessary course of action to protect each other in the aftermath of the liberation.

  Toward the beginning of September, Florence moved Vogel to the home of the Italian pianist Joseph Benvenuti at 6 rue du Colonel Moll. Benvenuti had gone to Spain on several occasions for Florence, handling clandestine activities that, for the most part, remain her secret.15 Simultaneously, further instructions were issued by Florence to Benvenuti regarding a proposed rendezvous with Szkolnikoff in the Basque city of Santander in Spain.

  Vogel, too, was still gambling on making a fortune. While he declared that he was never an ardent Nazi, and probably never was, he took advantage of the chaos that reigned in Paris just before the liberation. Like a common thief, Vogel emptied the Focke-Wulf’s bank account of 5 million francs before disappearing with Florence. His theft made it impossible for him to return to Germany. He told Florence that he was desperate to immigrate to America before his own war crimes were discovered by the French. Had Florence been in on the “heist” from Focke-Wulf beforehand? Were the 5 million francs meant to compensate Florence for her losses from investing in Banque Charles? Or had she agreed to help him hold on to his booty? Their precise plan or her involvement never came to light.

  On September 6, 1944, Vogel finally surrendered to the French and was taken to Fort Noisy-le-Sec prison. During his incarceration there, Florence funneled over 75,000 francs to safety for him.16 Still, Vogel quickly came to the attention of his Americans co-jailers since he was successfully getting messages out of prison to Florence. He was immediately transferred to Drancy. It was the Americans, not the French, who became suspicious of Vogel’s American lover. Evidently, Vogel claimed that Florence would vouch for him. If that was what they had agreed, it was a mistake. The Americans asked the French military security to investigate Madame Gould as a matter of the utmost urgency on October 7, 1944. A week later, a second but still urgent note was penned demanding discreet inquiries by the French military police.17

  Florence’s Aryan supervisor, Hans Dietrich Warzinski, escaped to Spain, as did Horscher of Maxim’s. As had long been suspected, U.S. agents discovered close links between Warzinski and Horscher in the hotel business in Germany prior to the war. When the Allies liberated Monaco at the beginning of September, they found that many of the subjects of their economic warfare investigations, like Michel Szkolnikoff and August T. Gausebeck, also had bolted to Spain. Gausebeck was last seen in April 1945 at the Hotel Ritz in Madrid, before suddenly decamping to an unknown address in Barcelona, presumably to handle the affairs of Banque Charles there. In the same wire from Madrid, it was agreed that Szkolnikoff would be blacklisted.18 Baron Charles, however, was held in custody in Monaco while the military investigators poured over the paperwork relating to the bank named after him.

  At the same time, Szkolnikoff met with a representative, more than likely Benvenuti, in Santander, Spain, to conclude a deal with “a private American group owning hotels in France.” The object was to sell the Americans his investment portfolio of buildings, hotels, and his fictitious stake in SBM. Given that all his acquisitions had been made with German “flight capital,” it was a dangerous deal to contemplate on all sides. Hidden in plain sight on the cover of one of the Szkolnikoff files at the National Archives in Paris are the scribblings of its main investigator, who wrote “Gould chases the hotels.” On May 29, 1945, The New York Times reported that the Goulds were behind the Anglo-American group offering $10 million for a controlling stake in SBM.19 The U.S. army intelligence officer Lester Blumner, stationed in Nice, took an immediate interest in the affair, and linked the Goulds to Szkolnikoff.20 But could Blumner prove it?

  What Florence, Vogel, and even Szkolnikoff more than likely ignored was that the London Treaty of January 5, 1943, declared that the Ax
is Powers serving the Third Reich and all neutral territories were put on official notice. The Allies “intend to do their utmost to defeat the methods of dispossession practised by the Governments with which they are at war against the countries and peoples who have been so wantonly assaulted and despoiled.”21 In other words, since the Third Reich made the murder of millions of civilians and the looting of their property a cornerstone of its occupation and its primary objective of the war, the Allies were intending to make economic warfare waged by the Axis Powers a serious war crime. Any flight of personal or private Nazi capital to evade capture after the treaty date became a war crime. Anyone aiding and abetting risked treason charges. Given these facts, Florence should have realized that a file numbered RG 65—“RG” for record group and “65” being the number assigned to treason files—was opened in her name from the moment Vogel began talking his way out of his tight corner inside Drancy. Florence was, indeed, in hot water.

  * * *

  On October 19, 1944, Florence was called to her first interview with the DGER, the Direction Générale des Études et Recherches, Deuxième Bureau, which investigated high crimes against the French state. She did not acquit herself well, being described by several DGER officers during her interviews as “haughty, arrogant, and part of the worldly set.” The officers insinuated in their reports that Florence took advantage of her position in high society and her vast fortune to flout the black-market regulations and continue to live well. Vogel was also named from the outset as her lover. While they noted that she was concerned for her ill, rather than invalid, husband, the tone of the initial report is very dry.22 At that point, DGER questioned only her economic activities at Banque Charles. No one asked why she brought paintings from her home at Juan-les-Pins to Paris in 1942 or later. No one asked about her purchase of looted art or art made available through forced sales at Hôtel Druout, Galerie Charpentier, or from Wildenstein’s man in Paris, Roger Dequoy.

  Meanwhile, Florence was a woman on a mission, setting in motion the Vogel plan, calling upon all the American contacts she could muster to have him freed from Drancy. She bigged him up with the new American ambassador, the veteran diplomat and somewhat laconic Jefferson Caffery, claiming that Vogel had significant military information that he wanted to share with the Allies. She even used the tapestries stored at the American embassy before the occupation as impressive proof of her wealth and status. Frank became embroiled, too, contacting old friends in high places, intimating that Vogel could be of tremendous use to the Allies, particularly in the location of airfields. While Frank was estranged from his wife, obviously he felt that was no good reason to abandon Vogel.

  Some ten years later it emerged that “during his incarceration secret papers belonging to him [Vogel, were] concealed and protected by Mrs. Gould.” The letter quoted was addressed to the Inspector General of Special Investigations of the Air Force and written by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover elaborated further, writing that Vogel was “released from incarceration through Mrs. Gould’s efforts; secured employment and protection of the U.S. Army through Mrs. Gould’s efforts” and that Vogel was “employed by X-2 [foreign unit] (from December 1944); rendered information to the American and British air services concerning production, location of plants, and German personalities.”23

  Although the conditions in which the French and American jailers held their prisoners were not as horrid as those under the Germans, each day that Vogel spent in captivity risked revealing his main activities in the economic warfare machinery of the Reich, not to mention his victims sent east to certain death. Florence knew the stakes she was playing for, but not taking the gamble was more dangerous for both of them. Her work paid off. Vogel was released on October 29, 1944—after seven weeks a prisoner—and taken into the protection of the U.S. Army. Still, Vogel remained in danger so long as he stayed in the European theater of war, where French and German eyewitnesses could point the finger at him.

  Florence appeared before her French interrogators again on November 2, only four days after her last deposition to free Vogel. Again, they grilled her about her relationship with him and other, more prominent, Nazis. Again, she was described as haughty and quite above the whole sordid procedure. What she didn’t know was that a captured German prisoner of war, under interrogation in England, had declared that she was an agent of the Abwehr.24 The French saw through her silky lies but, for the moment, concluded that since she claimed American citizenship, and the Americans were in France, she could be their problem.

  Florence believed that it was all over. She had saved Vogel, herself, and Frank. Vogel was posted to the multilingual X-2 unit, actively fighting against his former colleagues and betraying their secrets. No one understood that Vogel also left her with 500,000 francs in cash, presumably from the 5 million stolen from Focke-Wulf. Nor had they learned yet that she was licensed by the Abwehr to carry a concealed weapon during the occupation, making her a person of some significance and trust to the Nazis. What Florence did reveal, however, were some of the secret documents that Vogel had also liberated from his employers’ offices in Paris, proving that halting any investigation of Vogel, and protecting him, could prove beneficial to the Allied war effort.25

  Frank, by now, was aware of the kidnap scheme and Florence’s true role in Banque Charles. He decided that their alleged enforced separation brought on by the occupation should become a separation in deed. Too much had happened that divided them. Florence, too, was troubled by Frank’s payment of $400,000 to Anne Marie Vilbert de Sairigné for her help at the precise moment that Florence had paid Marie Bell and the Maquis to kidnap Frank for his own safety.

  Simultaneously, the Americans discovered the Banque Charles affair. In February 1945, Florence was hauled back in for questioning. Jouhandeau remarked to Paulhan that something seemed to be preying on Florence’s mind—perhaps it was the sudden departure of her butler Diego? Or perhaps it had something to do with Benvenuti? Two weeks later, Jouhandeau declared, “I can’t intervene on behalf of Diego … don’t you think that Madame [Gould] is in danger if her valet who has seen all and the rest is captured.… Florence faces a Cornelian dilemma, Hobson’s Choice, between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, if you will.”26

  Jouhandeau was right to pick up on Florence’s mood swings and worries. The previous December, the French had tipped off the Americans that Florence was a principal in a company “organized for the purpose of removing German and collaborationist capital from the jurisdiction of the French authorities.” On August 23, while the Allies were breaching the outskirts of Paris, the capital of Banque Charles was increased from 80 million francs to 150 million. By February 1945, Treasury Secretary Morgenthau and FBI Director Hoover were already on her case. “Our hostess is distracted,” Jouhandeau wrote to Paulhan, “detached, almost aggressive.”

  Florence fought back in the most public way she knew how. She contacted her old friend Joseph Kennedy and asked for help. America’s former ambassador to Britain contacted the veteran Associated Press war correspondent, Ed Kennedy. He wrote how Mrs. Gould’s plight had been created by a desire to save her husband from being sent to a concentration camp. “It was a sort of blackmail payment, the business manager for the former Florence Lacaze asserted.” Mrs. Gould told Kennedy she “undoubtedly was ‘the wife of a very prominent American’ mentioned by Secretary Morgenthau as being under investigation by the French authorities.”

  Privately, Florence was enraged with Morgenthau, since she knew from her interview with the French that it had been within his power to protect her and Frank from a new investigation. At that point, she most likely hadn’t realized that her RG 65 file for treason was becoming ever thicker. “I haven’t the slightest fear of this investigation,” she brazenly told Kennedy. “Not half this story has been told. Mr. Morgenthau should have known the full details before he spoke.” What she hadn’t counted on was the equanimity with which Kennedy would approach her dilemma. When Morgenthau was asked to comment, he confirmed
that “the United States had told the French government it would assist in a French investigation of a ‘very famous’ American couple suspected of collaboration with the Nazis.”27

  Kennedy then detailed Frank’s personal and family backgrounds: Frank’s father, his ex-wives, his horses, hotels, and casinos. In a more revealing exposé than Kennedy perhaps wanted to make, he belabored Frank’s eye for the ladies, and, unwittingly, Florence’s ability to put on a great show as an actress. Kennedy continued:

  She received me in her home in the most fashionable part of Paris, a large and beautiful apartment but chilly for the lack of fuel like the poorer homes in the city. She wore a heavy blue robe that hung down to her ankles, and a thick fur piece on her shoulders. Mrs. Gould said that she had spent the first part of the war as a nurse in a Paris military hospital, assisting surgeons during operations. Just before the occupation of southern France she attempted to go to Bordeaux with her daughter* in hopes of getting to America, she added, but was blocked by the Germans and became a nurse at a military hospital in Bergerac.28

  Florence insisted to Kennedy that the sequestration of the Gould assets by the French was a mere “administrative one.” After all, “if I were a collaborationist would I be here now? Of course not. I wouldn’t be free.”29

  * * *

  Frank must have been outraged by his careless wife. Hadn’t he avoided interviews in the past, or, when confronted unexpectedly, simply replied, “No comment”? The article raked over the embers of his past life, making public some of their most private matters as a couple, too. It painted him, a proud man, as impotent in the most public forum. The very last thing Frank wanted was to upset the men in American corridors of power, men like Henry Morgenthau. Now the Banque Charles investigation would bring out into the open the reckless way Florence had acted and her real economic collaboration with the enemy. Business remained a matter to be conducted in private for Frank, particularly as he hated paying those federal taxes. He knew how the most innocuous business transactions could be open to misinterpretation, much less ones where an opportunistic prospect was pounced upon. Whether Florence had intended to “save” him or not, the entire affair made him appear as an invalid publicly. It was deeply distressing. He would never forgive her.