Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation

by Charles Glass

  Two weeks after the Allies landed, Pierre Laval declared, ‘We are not in the war.’ But the war was in France. The Wehrmacht was forcing the Allies to fight hard for every acre of French ground they conquered. In Paris, freshly painted black and white signs with the words Zür Normandie Front pointed north where troops headed to stop the Allied invasion of the German-occupied continent. The Resistance did its part, blowing up trains, tracks and bridges to disrupt Wehrmacht supply lines. But, to Parisians, the American and British armies were taking too long.

  ‘The star of hope was now far above the horizon,’ Clara de Chambrun wrote. ‘The troops of General Eisenhower had obtained firm-footing in Normandy; we knew that the British were on the march towards Rouen while the American contingents were taking an oblique line which skirted Paris in a southerly direction. But progress was slow, and they still seemed desperately far away.’ Neither Clara nor the other inhabitants of the French capital were aware that capturing Paris was not part of General Eisenhower’s strategy. Ike planned to chase the German army from France and defeat it in Germany as rapidly as possible, leaving Paris’s German garrison to surrender later. He needed all his resources, especially fuel for his armoured divisions, to do it. Occupying Paris and feeding its two million inhabitants would only divert the Allied armies from their goal.

  Paris, as its supply lines were cut, experienced more hunger and greater danger than at any time during the occupation. The railways and roads out of the city were either cut or blocked by Wehrmacht transports, and the majority of Parisians who normally spent August in the country or by the sea were confined to the city. The Metro stopped running from eleven in the morning until three o’clock every afternoon to conserve electricity. Without electricity and cooking fuel, people made fires with paper balls to boil water and to fry what little food there was. With no meat or vegetables coming in from the countryside, the city became a farm. People grew vegetables in their gardens and on their roofs. Many kept chickens, ducks and rabbits on balconies and in cupboards. The smoke that covered the city when the Germans advanced on it in June 1940 returned. Then, the French government had burned its files and its oil reserves. Now, it was the Germans’ turn.

  To the leaders of the Resistance movement that Clara disparaged, Paris had only one option: to liberate itself.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Via Dolorosa

  IN MID-JUNE, AFTER INTERROGATING Sumner, Toquette and Phillip Jackson, the Gestapo sent the family on a circuitous journey that would be hard to follow. Phillip wrote,One fine day, I can hardly call it day, as there was no light and no air in my cell, where I remained shut up for 14 days, only getting out once –then we were transferred to the German military prison at Moulins. During the journey I sat next to my father, in the same bus and we saw my mother who traveled in another bus. Once arrived at Moulins, my mother and ourselves were enclosed in the prison, an old medieval dungeon, where we had to go up 118 steps to our cell. My father and I were in the same cell, my mother in another part of the building. We remained 21 days at Moulins, conditions not too bad, but we suffered from hunger. Examined once more, my father, my mother and myself, this time by a German of the Gestapo. Declarations nil from my father and for myself–for my mother I do not know.

  Through the Swiss, the State Department learned that the Jacksons ‘finally had been sent by the Germans to the Prison in Moulins’. The Americans asked the Swiss where Moulins was, and Leland Harrison cabled their reply to Washington in August: ‘Inquiry of Swiss Foreign Office reveals nothing (repeat nothing) in files indicates exact location Moulins … Further inquiry impossible as all (repeat all) communication cut.’

  On 22 June, Toquette wrote to her sister, ‘I saw my son and my husband the other day during an inspection. They are together and that makes me happy.’ At seven in the morning on 7 July, father and son were handcuffed together and moved again. Toquette was left behind at Moulins. Phillip recalled, ‘Journey by bus, rather trying, without water, in a burning sun. We had left Moulins at 7 a.m. and reached Compiègne the next day at 3 a.m. We were handcuffed from the start at Moulins till the arrival the next day at Compiègne.’ Sumner had been imprisoned in Compiègne before, in September 1942, as an internee. When he and Phillip arrived, the American and other enemy alien internees had been moved. The Compiègne camp, now a holding pen for political prisoners, retained some of the privileges of its first years. Phillip noted that there were ‘Red Cross parcels–no work; the only trouble was vermin, fleas lice en masses’.

  As in 1942, Jackson’s stay at Compiègne lasted only a week. In 1942, that seemed a long time. In 1944, it was too short. This time, General de Chambrun did not know where Dr Jackson was and did not drive there to take him home. On 15 July, which Phillip called ‘a fatal day’, he and his father were force-marched with about 2,000 other political prisoners to the train station ‘where we are pushed into cattle wagons for Germany’. Groups of sixty men at a time were packed into the hot and airless cattle wagons. Each man was issued one piece of bread and a sausage for what would be a three-day journey across France and Germany. The prisoners had no room to lie down and very little water. One psychotic guard fired into one of the cattle wagons, killing a prisoner. Seventeen men escaped, and the Germans shoved the other forty-three from their cattle wagon into one that already had sixty men in it. ‘We were escorted by German gendarmes in French uniforms, incredibly brutal,’ Phillip wrote.

  Our convoy was to go to Dachau but, on July 18th, we arrive at Neuengamme, 30 kms. South of Hamburg, in the curve of the River Elbe. There we are horsewhipped out of our carriages, by the S.S., and marched to the camp, guarded by S.S. men with machine guns under their arms and dogs on leach [sic]. At the camp, we are packed into two gigantic cellars, then taken out into small groups to the shower room where rings, false teeth, orthopedic belts are taken from us, after our heads have been shaved.

  The men’s bare bodies were inspected by guards. Each prisoner was given old and tattered clothes, ‘not fit for a beggar to wear’, and wooden shoes. Sumner was prisoner Number 36,462, his new identity stamped on canvas strips sewn into his jacket and trousers. Phillip was Number 36,461. Sumner Jackson and his teenage son became American slaves of the Third Reich. It was 18 July, the day that the Allied armies finally broke out of Normandy on their way to Paris.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Schwarze Kapelle

  AT FOUR THIRTY ON THE AFTERNOON OF 10 July, selected German Army officers in Paris received coded news from the Wolfsschanze, Wolf’s Lair, Adolf Hitler’s fortified headquarters near Rastenburg in East Prussia. They passed the word among themselves: ‘Hitler’s dead. Perhaps Himmler and Goering too. It was a terrible explosion.’ A bomb had been placed beside Hitler at a staff meeting in his fortified compound. The culprit was a young Wehrmacht colonel, Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg. Von Stauffenberg, who had taken offence at the triumphant and nihilistic parades of Nazi power when Paris fell in June 1940, told his colleagues then that Hitler should be killed. Four years later, Stauffenberg attempted the deed himself. Hearing the thunderous detonation of his bomb-laden briefcase as he drove away from the Wolf’s Lair, he passed word to his co-conspirators in Paris that his assassination had succeeded.

  General Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel, Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich (Military Governor in France), gave orders for the arrest of the Gestapo, SS and SD in Paris. The Wehrmacht in France was supporting the installation of Colonel-General Ludwig Beck as Germany’s new head of state. Beck planned to make an offer of peace to the Allies. Unfortunately for the conspirators, Hitler survived the explosion. The Gestapo officers the army held under arrest in Paris turned around and arrested their jailers later that night. Stauffenberg was executed immediately after his assassination attempt, and most of his comrades were soon hanged with wire nooses or committed suicide. Stülpnagel was ordered back to Germany, and he attempted to kill himself. When he recovered in August, he too was put to death.

  Stülpnagel had been an acquainta
nce of Charles Bedaux, providing the engineer with authorization and supplies for his African pipeline. Other Bedaux friends in the German administration had also been involved in the coup. One was Dr Franz Medicus, who fled when it failed. Another, Joseph von Ledebur, escaped across the border to Spain and onto Argentina. Oddly, Dr Keller, the psychotic Nazi who had proposed to André Enfière that Bedaux should mediate between Germany and the Allies, had also been involved in the plot and had to leave France. Medicus and Keller had been attached to the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris’s military intelligence branch. Abwehr plotters against Hitler included Canaris himself, Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law, Hans Dohnanyi. All three were arrested, tortured and sent to concentration camps for subsequent execution.

  It was only after the failure of the 20 July plot that Charles Bedaux’s son, Charles Emile, now serving in the US army, learned that the band of anti-Hitler conspirators were called the Schwarze Kapelle, the Black Orchestra. During their intimate conversations at El Biar in 1943, his father had said to him gravely, ‘It is better that you don’t know what I have done to deceive the Germans. Just remember the words Schwarze Kapelle. I shall say no more.’ That may have been what Edmond Taylor of the OSS meant when he wrote that he arrested Charles Bedaux in Algiers to halt ‘the nightmare of a shadowy yet tightly organized international conspiracy working for a compromise peace’.

  FORTY-SIX

  Slaves of the Reich

  ONE OF THE PRISONERS AT NEUENGAMME when Sumner and Phillip Jackson arrived was Michel Hollard, the head of France’s Agir Resistance network. Hollard had done more than anyone else to tell the Allies the secrets of the V-1 rocket. The Gestapo captured him and subjected him to the baignoire, a torture that would later be called ‘water-boarding’, in which he was forced backwards into a bath of water and held under for varying periods. His repeated half-hour sessions, dunked and dragged up from the water, left him vomiting and sick. He did not betray the other members of his network, and he was transferred to the Fresnes prison in Paris and then to Compiègne. The SS took him to Neuengamme, where he became prisoner Number 33,948, in early June 1944. Sumner and Phillip met Hollard shortly after their arrival. Hollard told his biographer of ‘a remarkable American called Jackson, formerly a doctor at the American Hospital at Neuilly’. Jackson, like Hollard, had helped the Allies to eliminate much of the V-1 threat when he passed along the plans that Erich Posch-Pastor had brought to his office. The American and French résistants became friends, surviving twelve-hour days at hard labour in the Walther small arms factory.

  ‘Nobody knew why they had been deported and Jackson never talked about it,’ author George Martelli wrote, with help from Hollard himself, in The Man Who Saved London.

  A man of sixty [in fact, fifty-eight], very upright, with white hair, strong features, and a stern, almost hard expression, he appeared as a person of great energy and forceful character. He was extremely reserved in manner and this and the dignity with which he supported [i.e., stood] the camp life immediately aroused the sympathy of Michel, with whom he soon established a tacit understanding. During their weekly meetings few words were exchanged and those only of a strictly practical use.

  To survive Neuengamme was almost impossible. Polish, Russian, Danish, French and other prisoners were worked to death, and many were murdered. For the slightest infraction, men were hanged in the camp square. The Nazis secretly hanged many more in a row of cells from ropes permanently attached to rings in the ceilings. As at Auschwitz, a crematorium disposed of the bodies.

  Jackson told Michel Hollard of his desperation to let his family in America know that he and Phillip were alive. Hollard smuggled a post-card out of the camp to his sister in Switzerland. She wrote to Jackson’s sister, Freda Swensen, a nurse living in Belmont, Massachusetts. When Freda read the letter, she notified the American government. The United States was certain at last that Dr Jackson was alive. But the American army was a long way from Neuengamme.

  In early August, another friend of Sylvia Beach’s died. The writer Jean Prévost, whom she and Adrienne had nurtured as a youthful author in the 1920s, had joined the Resistance early in 1943. Not content with being an écrivain résistant, circulating illicit pamphlets, the writer whose head was so hard that Hemingway had broken his thumb on it became a fighter in the Vercors. Using the nom de guerre Capitaine Goderville, he commanded maquisards in ambushes on German positions. Three days after the Allies invaded France, his unit mobilized to confront German troops throughout the hilly region in eastern France. Prévost and his band fought hard in the forests for six weeks. Then, at seven in the morning on 1 August, they were ambushed and killed. It was another hard loss for Sylvia, whose consolation was that another friend in the Resistance, Violaine Hoppenot, was still alive.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  One Family Now

  AS THE ALLIES SURROUNDED PARIS and the Germans prepared to defend it to the end, the Laval and de Chambrun families withdrew into a tight family orbit. Aldebert and Clara found themselves in a unique position to observe the Vichy regime’s final political manoeuvres. They turned up at the prime minister’s official residence at the Hôtel Matignon for their usual family dinner on the night of 12 August. Pierre Laval himself was unexpectedly absent. He called his wife from Maréville, a town near Nancy. When Jeanne Laval hung up, she explained to Clara, Aldebert, René and Josée that her husband had just freed Edouard Herriot, the president of the Chamber of Deputies, and his wife from German captivity. Ambassador Otto Abetz and Foreign Minister Ribbentrop had approved the release. Laval’s old adversary Herriot was the parliamentarian whom Dr Keller at the German Embassy had offered to exchange for the release of Charles Bedaux. Laval was bringing Herriot to Paris to reconvene the National Assembly. His purpose was to ensure a legal transfer of authority from parliament to Charles de Gaulle and to avert a civil war between collaborators and résistants. Clara remembered that, when the dinner ended, ‘we all went home happy, and learned next day all had gone well’.

  Laval appeared to have the assent, not only of the German Foreign Office, but of the United States. He was secretly dealing with America’s Office of Strategic Services chief in Switzerland, Allen Dulles, through André Enfière. Enfière, as a senior member of Charles de Gaulle’s Committee of National Resistance, had been attempting to obtain Herriot’s release for almost a year. He met Dulles in Berne on 15 July 1944 on behalf of Herriot. Enfière, whose American intelligence code name was Lamballe, told Dulles, ‘Kindly make it clear that regardless whether Herriot is alive or dead, I carry with me the backing of his supporters for the reinstitution of a democratic and parliamentary republic.’ Dulles reported that, while Enfière supported de Gaulle, he and his colleagues ‘desire to have genuine republicans surrounding de Gaulle’. Enfière informed Laval on 6 August that President Roosevelt would not oppose a provisional Herriot government. Roosevelt, who would never recognize Laval, had misgivings about Charles de Gaulle and had been looking in vain for alternative French leaders. With a deniable hint of Allied endorsement, Laval went ahead in the hope that a peaceful transition from Pétain to de Gaulle would imply de Gaulle’s recognition of Vichy. De Gaulle, however, had never recognized Vichy or the abrogation in July 1940 of the 1875 Constitution. Laval intended to present the Allies and de Gaulle with a fait accompli that they could hardly reject without disavowing France’s last elected parliament. He had not reckoned, though, with Paris collaborationists Marcel Déat and Fernand de Brinon, who informed the SS chief in Paris, General Karl Oberg, of the machinations. Oberg’s chief, Heinrich Himmler, opposed transferring power to anyone and intended to keep the Vichy puppet government intact–even in exile.

  On the morning of 13 August, Laval deposited the Herriots at the Prefecture of the Seine in a wing of Paris’s Hôtel de Ville. Members of parliament began arriving at the Hôtel Matignon to endorse Laval’s scheme. Laval also sought and received the approval of the eighty mayors of the Paris region, the local prefe
cts and chiefs of police. Preparations to convene the National Assembly with the members who had not joined de Gaulle or were unable to reach Paris went smoothly until the night of 16 August. That evening, the last German civilians were departing with all the wine, radio sets, rugs, haute couture dresses and even bidets that they could carry home in their convoys. Laval was having dinner with Jeanne, Josée and René at the Matignon, when he received a call from the Hôtel de Ville. The Gestapo had just arrested Herriot. Laval went straight there to protest that confining Herriot ‘constituted the gravest offence against me’. He called Ambassador Abetz to come to the Hôtel de Ville. When told Himmler himself had ordered Herriot’s arrest, Abetz was at a loss to justify the confusion in Germany’s command structure since the 20 July attempt on Hitler’s life. He and the Foreign Ministry, like the army, had lost influence to the SS, SD and Gestapo. Herriot and his wife remained at the Hôtel de Ville.

  On the morning of 17 August, Abetz took the Herriots to the German Embassy and then, at twelve thirty, to the Hôtel Matignon for lunch with the Lavals and René de Chambrun. Before the guests ate, Laval recorded, ‘A notice of arrest was served on me.’ René de Chambrun recalled Abetz’s first words to Laval: ‘President Herriot and you are prisoners in the Matignon. President Herriot will be transferred, after lunch, to the Prefecture of the Seine. You will leave with the government in the evening, in the direction of the east.’ Lunch went ahead in the grand dining room. Liveried servants poured vintage wines from the prime minister’s cellars for Abetz, the Herriots, the Lavals and René and Josée de Chambrun. Josée remembered:It was a marvelous summer day in that handsome old Hôtel Matignon, with its windows wide open on one of the most beautiful gardens in the world … The lunch was good. Everyone tried to cover up the anxiousness of the situation with pretended lightness. Abetz began by asking if it was true that, in Lyons, Herriot’s city, there was a statue dedicated to a ‘good German’? Madame Herriot then told us of the statue of a rich German merchant of the sixteenth century who had showered the city with good works.