Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation

by Charles Glass

  During a Luftwaffe raid over liberated Algiers one evening, Bedaux spoke to a group of American reporters on the balcony adjoining his at the Hôtel Aletti. When journalist John MacVane realized the man speaking to him was the famous Charles Bedaux, he asked why the efficiency engineer was in Algeria. Bedaux answered, ‘I am carrying out an industrial mission for the Vichy government. A big communications plan in Morocco. I was caught here by the invasion of our American troops.’ In MacVane’s book, War and Diplomacy in North Africa, his publishers removed the section on Bedaux over his objections, in which MacVane wrote, ‘He did not seem happy at the arrival of “our American troops.” “All my plans are now upset,” he said. “Naturally I am going to see Admiral Darlan and the American authorities about the possibility of carrying through the scheme anyway.”’ MacVane distrusted Bedaux: ‘His voice dripped with cordiality but no one who saw those hard, shifting eyes behind the heavy spectacles would have trusted him on sight.’ The next night, during another German raid, MacVane was hosting Americans from the ‘political-warfare section’. Bedaux invited the men to watch the spectacle from his balcony. ‘I tipped off the political warriors as to who he was and we went out on the balcony,’ MacVane wrote. One of the Americans was Edmond Taylor, a former Chicago Tribune correspondent in Paris who had signed on with the Office of Strategic Services.

  Bedaux needed American approval to cross US army lines with his long truck convoy. He wrote to Robert Murphy on 17 November, congratulating him on ‘work well done’ and declaring that he was ‘ready to place myself at your disposal as soon as the French Government cancels the Mission Order I have’. With French officers ignoring orders from Vichy to fight the Americans, it was unclear why Bedaux was waiting for Vichy to cancel his. When American forces requisitioned the Hôtel Aletti, Bedaux and his son found an auberge not far from Algiers at ’Ain Koussa. From there, he tried to contact Murphy. One letter to the diplomat, written the day his survey mission should have begun, 15 November, argued that the pipeline was in America’s interests: ‘Carrying through the study of the laying of a pipeline for water and fuel across the Sahara would be a fine opportunity for the United States to show to the world that French Africa far from suffering from the occupation can reasonably hope to receive from America the first practical link between its northern and central sections. At the present exchange the whole project would cost only sixteen million dollars.’ Bedaux ended on a personal note, ‘Will you remember August 1939 when we gave you Candé as an annex to the Embassy and realize that in my desire to be usefully active today I ask your help.’

  Murphy came under strong criticism in the press and among the Free French for leaving Vichy officials in office, appointing former Vichy Interior Minister Marcel Peyrouton as governor general and allowing the résistants who had obeyed his orders on 7 November to be arrested. Many of his Jewish agents, including Dr Henri Aboulker, were imprisoned by the very men they had detained on Murphy’s orders. When Pierre-Jérôme Ullmann, the Jewish stepson of Fernand de Brinon, learned that many of Murphy’s Jewish agents had been taken into custody, he left Bedaux’s employ and went south to British territory.

  When Dr Aboulker and the colleagues who seized Algiers for the Americans were finally released, the aged doctor told A. J. Liebling, ‘It is almost impossible for one of us to see Murphy. He shuns us like a case of an extremely contagious disease.’ Murphy, in the aftermath of the invasion, was also ignoring his former host and frequent source, Charles Eugene Bedaux. Bedaux’s letters to Murphy went unanswered.

  The New York Metropolitan Opera opened its thirty-eighth season at the beginning of December with a lavish production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment. The French-born soprano Lily Pons, wearing a demure white gown and revolutionary stocking hat, waved what Life magazine called ‘the Fighting French Cross of Lorraine instead of the Tricolor while the entire company renders the Marseillaise’. The Cross of Lorraine was the symbol used by Charles de Gaulle and the Free French in homage to the Lorrainers, who had endured German occupation from 1870 to emerge once again as free Frenchmen in 1918. The rousing anthem, which was not in Donizetti’s original, may have convinced some of the audience that, with American help, France would be freed of German troops as Lorraine was in 1918.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Alone at Vittel

  ON 10 DECEMBER, Dr von Weber informed Drue Tartière that she could leave Vittel the next day. Dr Lévy took her aside and asked her to visit his mother in Paris. Drue thanked him for all his help, which he had offered at the risk of his life. ‘His eyes filled with tears,’ she wrote, ‘and he went out.’ Noel Murphy and Sarah Watson were released with her. Collaborationist friends in Paris had obtained Mrs Murphy’s release, while Sarah Watson’s patron had been the rector of the University of Paris, to which her American girls hostel was attached. A Hungarian priest with connections at Vichy may also have interceded for her. The three American women travelled under German guard on the overnight train from Nancy to Paris.

  The departure of Sarah Watson and Drue Tartière left Sylvia Beach on her own in the hospital. Nights grew lonelier, and the German censor had still not returned her copies of the complete works of William Shakespeare. She read her bible. She wrote letters, most of which never arrived. And, as she wrote to Adrienne, she had ‘migraines toujours’.

  ‘Suddenly, on Christmas Eve, we were told that all Americans were to move to the hotel reserved for us,’ Sylvia wrote. The move was not much of a Christmas present.

  Ours [the Hôtel Central] was carefully picked as very rundown, though it had been good in its days, apparently. It was a shabby, dirty old building, with plumbing out of order: the room I was to share with the other Sylvia, the Giraff, had dirty water over the floor which one of my fellow prisoners, the Princess Murat, was mopping up into a goldedged chamber pot with ‘Grand Hotel’ emblazoned on it. In the middle of the room, a large rathole. The kind of room in which my librarian friend said ‘you slit your wrists.’ … The bathroom, I discovered, had no water, and the tub was for some reason full of mud.

  The ‘Giraff’ was released before she could share the room with Sylvia. Sylvia believed that the woman’s husband, a French colonel, had arranged it. Maurice Saillet sent Sylvia a Christmas hamper of treats from himself and Adrienne that Sylvia thought was ‘magnifique’. Adrienne’s sister, Rinette, sent her home-made gingerbread. Sylvia’s thank-you letter for the presents to Adrienne ended, ‘Dis à notre ami tu dors.’ Tu dors, you sleep, was her play on the name of their friend Tudor Wilkinson, an aged American millionaire from St Louis, Missouri, who was doing his best to obtain Sylvia’s release. A former thoroughbred owner, he had given up racing when he decided the fences were harming his animals. Wilkinson had amassed an art collection that included Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of George Washington and some of the finest Holbeins in private hands. Hermann Goering knew of Wilkinson’s paintings and, on a pre-war visit to Paris, stopped by his flat at 18 quai d’Orléans on the Ile Saint-Louis to see them. Although this acquaintance gave him access to Goering and his minions, the American was no collaborator. Behind the carved mantelpiece of his lavish apartment overlooking the Seine was a cache of short-wave radios and weapons for the Resistance. His wife, Kathleen Marie Rose, had been the most famous dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies under her stage-name, Dolores Rose. She was also helping the Resistance and the downed Allied airmen whom Drue Tartière brought to her. Wilkinson had assured Adrienne in November that Sylvia would be released within a few weeks. Sylvia, however, remained interned, to Adrienne’s disappointment.

  Christmas at Vittel was nonetheless merry. The Dramatic Society’s 150 members staged plays, and internees watched a series of films in the 1,000-seat camp auditorium: The Corsican Brothers, Fort Dolores, Stage Door and If I Were Boss. Midnight Mass was held on Christmas Eve in three different chapels for Catholics and Protestants, and on Christmas Day the women held a big party for the children. On New Year’s Eve, there was a ‘Fancy Dress Ball’
.

  When Sylvia moved out of the hospital to lodge with the main body of American internees in the Hôtel Central, she threw herself into work as camp postmistress. She sorted and delivered letters, much as she used to collect mail and put it in cubby holes at Shakespeare and Company for her writer friends. ‘Every day I went over to the Grand Hotel where the mail was deposited, and brought ours in a pouch to the hotel where we lived,’ Sylvia wrote. ‘Some of the internees were rather unreasonable and when I was unable to produce a letter for them accused me of keeping it back.’ Organizing the kitchen in the new location was more difficult: ‘There were no utensils to cook our miserable soup in nor to make our acorn coffee in.’ Nor was there any china, as in the Grand Hotel. The task of making the kitchen function was assigned to ‘a young, pretty woman with high heels and a long cigarette holder: to my surprize [sic], she took hold of the kitchen problem which was serious when we were suddenly installed in our hotel … This blonde girl made such a row that the articles we needed were finally provided. Every day at noon we filed up for the soup–hot water with a hint of potatoes, cabbage and little else–and the bowls were to contain enough for supper as well as lunch.’ Only Mabel Gardner, the Montparnasse sculptress with the golden hair, liked the prison food. All she took from the Red Cross packages was cigarettes. She happily spent her time carving firewood into voluptuous statues.

  THIRTY

  The Bedaux Dossier

  IN ALGIERS, EDMOND TAYLOR, the former Chicago Tribune correspondent, was working for the OSS and the US army’s Psychological Warfare Branch. His memoirs, Awakening from History, contain his account of the decisive role he played in Charles Bedaux’s life:From acquaintances in the Deuxième Bureau [French military intelligence], responsible at the time for counterespionage activities in Algeria, I had learned that Bedaux had been stranded in Algiers while on an economic mission to West Africa on behalf of the German High Command in France. Since he was a naturalized U.S. citizen–though a Frenchman in every other respect–there appeared to be a prima facie case of treason against him. The Deuxième Bureau professed to be mildly surprised that the American authorities were uninterested in the matter. Its own interest, however, was no more than tepid, mainly, I gathered, because Bedaux was a frequent dinner guest at tables of several influential and politically conservative French hostesses who were currently launching the post-invasion social season in Algiers; several of my superiors on Gen. Eisenhower’s staff, it was intimated, were on occasion his fellow guests. That, as far as I was concerned, made Bedaux a convenient symbol of the unwholesome political promiscuities and of the collusion between defeatism and resistance that the Murphy-Darlan accords had inevitably encouraged … Without looking deeper into the affair, I made up my mind to have him put behind bars, and eventually, by grossly misrepresenting the French feelings about him to the Americans, and the American attitude to the French, thus making each side feel its good faith was being questioned by the other, I succeeded.

  Taylor’s memoirs made no mention of the fact that he met Bedaux with journalist John MacVane at the Hôtel Aletti two weeks earlier during a Luftwaffe attack.

  On 5 December, a French officer of the Brigade of Surveillance drove to Bedaux’s hotel and announced, ‘I’m very sorry, Mr Bedaux, but you and your son will have to come with me.’ The Bedauxs were under arrest. The French locked them up in a police station overnight and took them to the Italian Club, which had been converted into a filthy and overcrowded prison. The Bedauxs were crammed into a makeshift cell with twenty other inmates, who had shared an open lavatory in a corner. Charles Bedaux, lord of the Château de Candé, slept on a hard concrete floor beside his cellmates from all corners of French Africa and waited for charges to be brought against him.

  Eisenhower’s confidant and aide, Commander Harry C. Butcher, wrote in his diary for 8 December 1942, ‘Charles Bedaux, the stretch-out promoter with whom American labor leaders raised hell when he was discovered as the advance man for the Prince of Wales and the Duchess’ visit to US, has been arrested here by the French on charges of being a Nazi agent … They have photostats of certain letters appointing him as an industrial agent by the Germans … may be hung.’ The photostatic evidence had been given by Bedaux himself to Robert Murphy. Murphy did not reveal who gave it to the French.

  The press did not report Bedaux’s arrest, although journalists in Algiers who learned of it attempted to. ‘I tried to broadcast the story,’ John MacVane wrote. ‘The censor stopped it. After submitting the story every day for ten days, I brought it up at an open conference with a high American authority. He said that not all the evidence had been collected and it was thought better not to break the story just yet. Other reporters then tried to write the story but could not get it passed.’

  The affairs of Charles Bedaux had been under scrutiny in the United States for some time, however, before Edmond Taylor came upon Bedaux in Algiers. Percy E. Foxworth, the FBI’s assistant director in New York, was running the investigation into the case of Charles Eugene Bedaux. It had begun for him in February 1942 when he received a register of suspected Axis sympathizers in the United States from the Office of Naval Intelligence. The suspects were to be investigated and, if judged security threats, detained without trial. On 18 February, Foxworth forwarded the names of the ‘German, Italian, French, Spanish and miscellaneous suspected sympathizers to be considered for custodial detention’ to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. One of the ‘miscellaneous’ was ‘Bedaux, Charles Eugen [sic]’. Bedaux’s name–or variants of it, including Henri Bidaux–had been circulating in the intelligence community since September 1941, when the State Department received the cable from Vichy in which Bedaux disclosed his intention to develop the trans-Saharan Railway and gave his opinion that Germany would win the war.

  The cable also said that Bedaux had asked the embassy for a copy of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, adding the accusation that ‘he was perhaps trying to magnify the social problems which face the United States’. (Or he may have wanted to read a book that the Nazis had banned in Paris.) The case against Bedaux gained momentum in November 1941, when the American Consulate in Lisbon reported the allegations of Fern’s old friend, Katherine Rogers, about Bedaux’s work for the Germans. Additional information originated with Bedaux himself during his many candid conversations with American diplomats in Vichy and Algiers. Everything he told Robert Murphy and his colleagues ended up in cables to Washington, where his activities excited increasing suspicion.

  In April 1942, Percy Foxworth thought he could close the Bedaux file. He wrote to Hoover from the New York office that, as Bedaux was not in the United States, ‘no further action is being taken relative to this matter’. However, on 4 May, S. Pinckney Tuck, American chargé d’affaires in Vichy, wrote to the secretary of state, ‘Mr. Charles Bedaux, who is now in the United States, remains on the best of terms with Marshal Goering.’ Bedaux was not in the United States, but in France. Tuck saw him there shortly after he sent the cable. Nor was it likely Bedaux was ‘on the best of terms’ with Goering. When Bedaux had bragged that he knew the Luftwaffe chief, he was probably bluffing. The Bedaux file stayed open and grew thicker. Worthington E. Hagerman, Consul General in Lisbon, relayed a denunciation of Bedaux from Russell M. Porter, an American who had left Paris on his way to the United States. Porter told Hagerman that Charles and Fern lived at the Ritz, ‘where they frequented German officers, many such being regular clients of the hotel’. Hagerman, who had lived at the Château de Candé in 1940 and was on amicable terms with Bedaux, added his own observation about Charles’s brother, Gaston: ‘Mr. Bedaux’s brother, of whom I do not know the first name, had the reputation of being a Gestapo agent.’

  On 10 July 1942, J. Edgar Hoover sent Percy Foxworth an urgent directive: ‘I desire that an appropriate investigation be instituted to ascertain the present whereabouts of Charles Eugene Bedaux, and whether he is engaged in any activity inimical to the interests of the United States.’ Foxworth devoted more
and more man-hours to the investigation of ‘Bedaux, Charles E.–Espionage–G[erman]’. All letters from Charles Bedaux to the United States were subjected to censorship. Bedaux’s friend, Frederic Ledebur, and his secretary, Isabella Waite, were also put on the Watch List for varying periods so the FBI could read their mail to assess their involvement with Bedaux. Foxworth read with interest Bedaux’s letter to Frederic Ledebur, inviting him to join the North African expedition. Hoover wrote to the New York office on 1 August 1942, asking to know where ‘Fred’ Ledebur was. He added, ‘It is also requested that the identity and activities of Mrs. Waite be ascertained inasmuch as she may be acting as a mail drop for enemy agents.’

  While Frenchmen were denouncing one another to the Germans and to Vichy, it seemed Americans were imitating them. Not only was Gaston Bedaux falsely accused by an American diplomat of working for the Gestapo, wild charges about Frederic Ledebur and Isabella Waite were stacking up in the FBI’s files. The Bureau’s San Francisco office wrote of Ledebur, who hated the Nazis so much he had cut relations with his brother Joseph, ‘He is reported by the person who has his greatest confidence to be definitely pro-German, to have made numerous inquiries regarding ship production of the West Coast, to be interested in plane production, and to carry at all times a moving picture camera equipped with telescopic lenses.’ The New York office added, ‘Fred Ledebur is alleged to have Nazi propaganda in his automobile. ’ Percy Foxworth echoed Hoover’s allegation that Isabella Waite was providing ‘a mail drop for enemy agents in this country’.