Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation

by Charles Glass

  The friendship that developed between Bedaux and Medicus made Medicus one of the three closest people in Bedaux’s life–the others being his wife, Fern, and Friedrich von Ledebur. Both men had American connections: Bedaux as a US citizen, Medicus as son of a father with such affectionate memories of living in the United States that he gave his son the middle names ‘Horace Greeley’. Despite Medicus’s involvement in drafting the anti-Jewish Nuremberg laws of 1935 and in transferring French-Jewish businesses to Aryan ownership, Bedaux saw the Nazi functionary as a civilized scholar. Medicus had degrees in medicine and law and punctuated his French, English and German conversations with Latin and Greek aphorisms. He photographed France’s cathedrals in his spare time for a book he was writing. Bedaux excused Medicus for disposing of property stolen from Jews: ‘He is a man drafted and has to obey orders or die.’ Not everyone accepted Medicus’s self-portrayal as a gentleman-scholar forced to serve the Nazi cause. Even Pierre Laval, who became cordial with Ambassador Otto Abetz and other German officials, wrote in his diary, ‘During this preliminary period [autumn 1940] the Germans with whom I came into contact said nothing to which I could take offence, if I except General Medicus who reminded me that we had been beaten.’

  After his first, jovial dinner in the lavish dining room of the Hôtel Majestic with Charles Bedaux, unconstrained by German rationing regulations, Medicus agreed to give Bedaux’s engineers back their houses. In return, Bedaux employed German army clerks in his avenue de Friedland offices. The Germans would thus have access to information on all of Bedaux’s clients, among whom were France’s most important industrial enterprises. Medicus supplied Bedaux with petrol ration tickets and ‘WH’ licence plates reserved for Germans, a cut above the ‘SP’, Service Publique, insignia granted to certain French doctors, actresses popular with the German high command and important allies of the occupation. Since 16 June, two days after the German arrival in Paris, all other cars had been requisitioned or otherwise banned from the streets of Paris. His dinner with Medicus at the Majestic committed Bedaux to work as much for Germany as for France. He convinced himself he was doing nothing wrong. To be safe, he kept Robert Murphy and other American diplomats informed of his activities.

  It was not long before the Germans gave the Château de Candé back to Bedaux. American Embassy staff moved in again, and German officers stayed at weekends. The chateau became a salon for Germans, Americans and French, who mingled under crystal chandeliers with drinks served by footmen in livery. Dr Franz Medicus was a regular weekend guest. So was the Comtesse de Brinon, wife of Comte Fernand de Brinon. Before the war, de Brinon had written pro-Hitler propaganda in the French press and sent intelligence to Berlin while simultaneously accepting subsidies from Parisian Jewish bankers Rothschild and Lazard. De Brinon and Abetz had been colleagues in a pre-war Nazi-front organization, the Comité Franco-Allemand. The Germans declared de Brinon’s Jewish wife, Lisette, whose name at birth was Jeanne Louise Rachel Franck, an ‘honorary Aryan’. This attractive divorcée, whose first husband had been a wealthy Jewish banker named Claude Ullmann, had her first marriage annulled and converted to Catholicism to marry de Brinon. Her sons, Pierre-Jérôme and Bernard Ullmann, were not accorded Aryan status. Bedaux gave Pierre-Jérôme work under a false name to avoid Nazi scrutiny, while the younger Bernard remained with his mother. De Brinon himself found it inconvenient to be seen with his Jewish wife, although he maintained contact with her through Bedaux and other friends. (His wife’s absence afforded him more time with his secretary and mistress, Simone Mittre.) For her part, Lisette de Brinon socialized as comfortably with the Germans as she did with Robert Murphy of the American Embassy. Before the war, her circle of acquaintances included the Jewish socialist ex-prime minister Léon Blum and the anti-Semitic writer Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. Much of the French collaborationist set, who doted on their German masters, found a home at Candé. Charles Bedaux navigated among his French, German and American guests with less interest in their politics than in keeping their champagne glasses full and his eye open to business opportunities.

  ELEVEN

  A French Prisoner with the Americans

  ON 6 JULY 1940 , AN AMERICAN AMBULANCE brought two wounded French prisoners to Neuilly from the Hôpital Foch in Suresnes, which the Germans had just requisitioned. One of the two casualties was André Guillon, classified as dying from wounds he received fighting on 6 June at Beauvais. Guillon noticed, as he was wheeled into the Memorial Building, ‘the flowers, the walkways, winding through impeccable lawns, the very beautiful trees, an oasis of calm and silence, and yet something troubled us the moment we entered this magnificent hospital … the coldness of our welcome’. He soon realized that what he took for indifference was ‘neutrality that we quickly understood and that was absolutely necessary’. Another aspect of the hospital made a stronger impression: ‘There were no sentries at the door and no one controlled the entrances or the exits of the hospital.’ The Germans, however, had established their Neuilly headquarters, the Kommandatur, opposite the hospital’s main gate.

  One of the first patients Guillon met in his ward was a Jewish officer he called Captain M., who told him, ‘Because I’m Jewish, someone [a German officer] refused to accept my word of honour as a French officer. Now, morally, I must try to escape.’ He asked Guillon what he should do. Guillon advised him to flee. ‘That, moreover, is what he did.’ As Guillon observed, Captain M. was not the only one. Dr Sumner Jackson, far from discouraging escape, looked the other way and falsified hospital records to say the men were terminally ill or had died.

  Neither Guillon nor any of the other French prisoners saw Donald Coster, the American ambulance driver, in his basement hideout. Some time in mid-July, Sumner Jackson brought him documents to cross the Line of Demarcation and the Spanish border. Then, like Captain M., Coster disappeared from the hospital. When he reached Lisbon, his fellow drivers George King and Gregory Wait were waiting for him. They said that their fourth colleague, John Clement, had gone to Switzerland to work for the Red Cross. Coster returned to the United States. Writing about his experiences in the Reader’s Digest, he did not say why he went back to Paris from Belgium or that Sumner Jackson had helped him. Later, it was revealed that Coster was in the American consular service.

  Sumner Jackson examined André Guillon’s wounds, which were not healing. Guillon wrote, ‘I remember Dr Jackson, who advised me to use sun therapy to reabsorb my wounds which were extensive and infected with a green pus bacillus. I went out every day to expose myself to the sun on the terraces of the hospital.’ Little by little, the wounds dried and healed.

  During his time at the hospital, Guillon grew fond of Elisabeth Comte, who was sometimes called ‘Head Nurse’ but was listed on the hospital register as ‘assistant to the director’. Guillon observed two types of nurses, professionals and volunteers. Many of the latter were ‘daughters of Paris high society’. The rest were Swiss, American, Australian, Norwegian, Austrian and White Russian. ‘This ethnic group in particular … very much sympathized with the wounded, maybe a little too much for the Administration. There were flirtations, even marriages. We came to know the many varieties of caviar and vodka!’

  Guillon appears not to have done much flirting himself, probably because his fiancée was visiting him. He got to know one French nurse who had worked in a leprosy colony in Madagascar and another who had been a race car driver. Two Canadian sisters, who were only 18 and 16, worked long hours as nurses and tended to his wounds. They had moved to France in 1939 to study the organ with the virtuoso organist of Saint-Sulpice Church, Marcel Dupré. The Germans had interned them in a concentration camp with other enemy aliens, but they escaped to the hospital.

  ‘The nurses imposed a regime that was as strict as it was necessary,’ Guillon commented. They ordered him to rest, but he was unable to lie still in bed every day.

  I went out regularly in Paris. The attraction of liberty was that it helped me regain my strength. I found myself on the boulev
ard des Filles du Calvaire, when I felt I was going to faint. I managed despite this to go down into the Metro and transfer at La République (never had the wait seemed so long). Two hours later, I was in the American Hospital and my room where I climbed into bed. My neighbour alerted Mademoiselle L. [an Austrian nurse] about my catastrophic trip: my wounds were suppurating, my temperature passed 39°...! Sententiously, Mademoiselle L. told me, ‘You’re not going out to Paris again.’ Next day, my temperature went down. Eight days later, I went out again to Paris, but I was more careful!

  Although the hospital tried to keep Germans out, Guillon came across a German physician observing procedures in the orthopaedic centre. He was Professor Schacht of the Berlin Faculty of Medicine, brother of former Reichsbank chief Hjalmar Schacht, who had been Charles Bedaux’s contact in Berlin. Hospital records ignored Professor Schacht’s visit as well as the treatment given to a German medical officer in June. He had broken a leg while working during the Battle of France with refugees near an American medical team. ‘He was taken to the American Hospital, where he spends his time praising the institution, ’ the New York Times reported on 29 June. ‘He hates to think of leaving.’

  TWELVE

  American Grandees

  WHILE CLARA DE CHAMBRUN assumed greater responsibility for preserving the American Library, her husband found himself tasked with saving the other major American institution, the American Hospital in Neuilly. Aldebert served on the hospital’s board of governors, whose members were were the grandees of American Paris. The president was Nelson Dean Jay, who had come to Paris during the Great War as an aide to General John Pershing. He had stayed on to work with J. P. Morgan’s Paris bank, Morgan & Cie, expanding its business from a convenience for expatriate American depositors into a major corporate investment house. Dean Jay and his wife, Anne Augustine, lived at 58 avenue Foch, just down the street from Dr Sumner Jackson. The couple entertained most of the prominent Americans, like Charles Lindbergh, IBM chairman Thomas Watson and Allen Dulles of the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, who came to Paris between the wars. The managing governor and first vice-president was Edward B. Close. The popular ‘Eddie’ Close owed his fortune to his ex-father-in-law, General Foods founder Charles William Post. Mr Post had been so fond of Close that he left him a vast inheritance despite his divorce from Post’s daughter, Marjorie, in 1919. The board’s secretary was William DeWitt Crampton, John D. Rockefeller’s man in France, officially vice-president of Standard Française des Pétroles. Like the other members of the board, he lived in the lavish 16th Arrondissement on the Right Bank, at 23 rue Raynouard. A 1914 Columbia graduate, he had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order by the British and become a Chevalier of France’s Legion of Honour during the Great War. Crampton belonged to the gentlemen’s Travellers’ Club on the avenue Champs-Elysées, not far from his office at number 82. He and his wife, the former Maude Evelyn Billin, golfed at the Chantilly and Le Touquet golf clubs. It was Crampton who, just before the Germans entered Paris, had obtained Robert Murphy’s approval to torch Standard’s oil reserves. Other board members were treasurer Bernard S. Carter, lawyer Max Shoop, Laurence Hills, J. S. Wright and General Aldebert de Chambrun.

  The occupation did not interrupt the board’s monthly meetings. On 26 July, most of the board appeared for the 6 p.m. conference at 25 avenue des Champs-Elysées. Count de Chambrun was in Le Puy, but Dr Edmund L. Gros, the hospital’s chief of staff, attended ‘by invitation’. ‘At present,’ the minutes noted, ‘we have approximately 125 serious fracture cases in the Hospital, most of which will take several months to recover.’ The first item of business was to order a plaque in memory of Dr Thierry de Martel. The governors voted to pay salaries of 5,000 French francs monthly to Miss Elisabeth Comte, assistant to the director, and Mr Otto Gresser, chief superintendent. The Count de Chambrun had praised the two Swiss nationals for their ‘intelligence, courage and exceptional devotion’. The board also recommended that the managing governor ‘should endeavor to slow down our gratuitous activities vis-à-vis soldiers and an endeavor should be made to reduce our expenses in connection with this work, the principal reason being that we at the present time cannot see ahead nor formulate any definite financial program for the future due to conditions brought about by the present situation’.

  In August, Dr Sumner Jackson’s wife and son, Toquette and Phillip, returned to Paris from the lake house at Enghien. Sumner wanted them back to protect their empty apartment in the avenue Foch from requisitioning by the Germans. Even with a red US Embassy seal, the Jacksons’ apartment in the avenue Foch was vulnerable if no one lived in it. The Nazis had already taken houses in the avenue Foch for the Gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst, the party’s secret police known as the SD. At the same time, Sumner asked Toquette’s sister Alice, nicknamed Tat, to remain at Enghien to protect the vacation house from seizure. Dr Jackson continued to sleep at the hospital in case of emergencies. He tried to get home at weekends, and Toquette and Phillip visited him in Neuilly.

  Like most other Parisians, the Jacksons made the transition from driving cars to riding bicycles. Jackson ordered an extra large bike, because he was too tall for those made for the average Frenchman. The family cycled everywhere, even an hour away to Enghien. While visiting the lake in the late summer, Sumner and young Phillip cut firewood to be ready for winter.

  The board of governors met again in September amid the uncertainty of an occupation that was making new rules every week, closing theatres and allowing some to reopen with German licences, changing the hours of curfew, gradually tightening the restrictions on Jews and permitting different German bureaus to set conflicting policies. The board had urgently to decide how the hospital would manage if the governors were forced to leave France. More than 2,500 American civilians and many French and British prisoners of war depended on the facility. The governors unanimously approved a motion that ‘in the event of prolonged illness, absence or inability to act for any other reason of Mr. Edward B. Close, Aldebert de Chambrun be and hereby is appointed Managing Governor ad interim in the place and stead of Mr. Close, with the same powers as those now held by Mr. Close’. Eddie Close told the board that Wayne C. Taylor of the American Red Cross had asked him to increase the number of beds for military use to 200, effectively adding fifty beds for French and British war casualties. The board ‘unanimously carried’ a resolution to make the 200 beds available and ‘not to call upon the Red Cross for financial assistance at this time’. Fortunately for the hospital, the American Society for French Medical and Civilian Aid, a fund-raising committee that Bullitt had asked Winthrop Aldrich of the Chase National Bank to establish in New York at the beginning of the war, had already transferred $40,000 to cover running costs. The last item of business was to commission a report for a fee of 7,500 francs from a Mr Sage on the hospital’s performance during the Battle of France, the ‘War History Report’.

  When the meeting ended at 6.45 p.m., General de Chambrun went back to the business of keeping the hospital open and free of German control. A veteran of the First World War, he still called the Germans ‘Boches’. Despite the policy of collaboration adopted by his in-law, Pierre Laval, Aldebert vowed never to give a bed to a Boche soldier.

  Aldebert de Chambrun, Sumner Jackson, Otto Gresser, Elisabeth Comte and the rest of the staff improvised so that the hospital could function without many of the necessities the Germans had either requisitioned or prohibited. The Germans did not seize the American Hospital’s ambulances, and the governors voted to donate six or seven of the fleet of ten to ‘services or municipal organizations where they could be utilized in the best interest of the parties concerned’. Without petrol, ambulances had to be converted to run on gazogene. The remaining ambulances were vital, not only for transporting patients, but for bringing food from farms around Paris to feed 500 people a day. ‘The Winter 1940–1941 was exceptionally cold,’ Otto Gresser remembered, ‘and no fuel oil was available. The Boiler-Room had to be converted to be heated with co
al of very bad quality. The hospital cars were run with charcoal. Contracts were drawn up with farmers for supply of potatoes and other vegetables and fruits and sometimes beef was hidden in the car and covered with salad.’

  Dr Jackson challenged Gresser one day about the food shortages. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘we have so many patients and so little meat and it’s absolutely insufficient. If we can’t do any better, some patients are going to have malnutrition.’ Gresser asked a butcher he knew to send the hospital more meat. A week later, when Gresser came to work, he saw a large German car parked in the courtyard. ‘Then I noticed,’ the superintendent recalled, ‘that they were unloading three hundred kilos [of beef] into the storeroom. I immediately called the butcher and asked what the devil was going on since there were Germans at the hospital delivering meat. And he answered, “Well, these are not Germans, these are French volunteers in German uniforms having joined the German Army and they brought it in a German car from out in the country. You don’t risk anything.”’ Nonetheless, Gresser was worried, especially with the German Kommandatur only a few hundred yards away.

  The next day, German officials paid a visit to the hospital and demanded to see Mr Gresser. ‘They asked me if I had seen a German car at the hospital with such and such a number, and I replied that I never took note of car numbers.’ When they asked how much meat was in the kitchen, Gresser admitted only to the legal limit of 60 kilograms. ‘After more questions,’ Gresser said later,they wanted to talk to the Chief Cook to verify my story. Trying to act calm and not cause suspicion, I offered them seats in the lobby and slowly left to go to the kitchen where at this exact moment they were in the process of taking care of the three hundred kilos of meat. I said, ‘Throw that meat out in the garden. I don’t want to see it. And you go up and tell the Germans you have sixty kilos and you are not responsible for the purchasing of the meat supply.’ The Chief Cook answered the Germans’ questions. They seemed satisfied, said they would make a report and left.