by Geert Mak
That morning, pressure was put on Pius XII from all sides to issue a papal ban on deporting Jews from the ‘open city’ of Rome. Remarkably enough that pressure came from German circles as well, particularly from the civil authorities. Why, for heaven's sake, did the relative peace of Rome have to be disturbed by the psychotic Jew-baiters of the SS?
The Pope, however, in the words of the German ambassador Ernst von Weizsäcker, would not let himself be drawn into ‘any demonstrative expression against the deportation of Jews from Rome’. Five days after their deportation, almost all those families were gassed at Birkenau. Only fifteen Roman Jews came back alive.
In 1937, his predecessor Pius XI had voiced serious criticism of the deification of the German people, in his encyclical Met brennender Sorge. The papal letter was read aloud in Catholic churches all over Germany, and the Nazis did not impose a single sanction. A new encyclical against racism and anti-Semitism, Humani Generis Unitas, was being prepared when Pius XI died in 1939. Pius XII quickly withdrew his predecessor's draft. In his view it was not the Nazis but the Bolsheviks who formed the greater threat to the Church. In fact, in his eyes, Germany constituted the vanguard in the fight against the Red Menace.
This fervent anti-communism was also probably behind another shameful episode from the pontificate of Pius XII: the Vatican's involvement in the escape of hundreds of German and Austrian mass murderers right after the war. Dr Josef Mengele, the notorious camp physician at Auschwitz, Adolf Eichmann, the organiser of the transport of the Jews, Franz Stangl, camp commandant at Treblinka, and many others received money, shelter, false documents and an escape route to South America from Vatican prelates.
Roma, città aperta. Mussolini's imperial fantasies were charted on great stone tablets on the wall at the Forum Romanum. They are still there today: the Greeks, the Roman Empire, only the plaque with the little Italian Empire of 1936–43 has been removed for decency's sake. The Olympic district close to the Ponte Duca d'Aosta still glistens in all its Fascist glory, and the same goes for several bridges over the Tiber. Here, history has not been polished away.
I move with the flow of tourists down the Via Giulia. At number 23 there is a memorial plaque for Giorgio Labo and Gianfranco Mattei. This is where they were arrested by the Germans on 1 February, 1944, then tortured for days and finally executed, but they never spoke a word. In gratitude, from their comrades, a fresh wreath has been put here very recently.
This country was forced to drink the bitter post-war draught in silence. ‘Of course the Allies treated us harshly,’ former partisan Vittorio Foa once told me. ‘But after all, hadn't we misbehaved badly?’ After 1943 the Germans, in turn, viewed the Italians as traitors. Had Hitler not been so fond of Mussolini, he would probably have given Italy the ‘Polish treatment’. Dozens of villages were wiped out anyway – around Marzabotto, close to Bologna, more than 1,800 civilians were massacred in October 1944. Jews – Primo Levi among them – were deported by the thousand. Some 600,000 Italians ended up as German prisoners of war, an untold number of them died. The women were left to fend for themselves.
In March 1944, Ernie Pyle described how waiting American soldiers threw crackers and chocolate from a ship's deck to a group of hungry children on the dock at Naples. One little boy, wearing a pair of huge American GI boots, drew their attention by walking around on his hands. Then a few girls came for a cautious look. The sailors whistled and threw even more crackers. A skinny old woman stood a little to one side, until a seaman threw her a whole box of crackers. It was a good throw, and the old woman made a good catch. But she barely had it in her hands before the whole crowd pounced on her. ‘The poor old woman never let go. She clung to it as though it were something human. And when the last cracker was gone she walked sort of blindly away, her head back and her eyes toward the sky, weeping with a hideous face just like that of a heartbroken child, still gripping the empty box.’
Chapter FORTY-TWO
Vichy
AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE FRÉJUS ROAD TUNNEL STANDS A TALL policeman with hollow cheeks. All afternoon he stands preaching in word and gesture to the trucks and the perspiring car drivers: drive carefully, not too fast, keep your distance. Then comes thirteen kilometres of darkness, after which I drive into another world. The fields are not brownish-yellow but green, the houses, roads and rules are clear and well defined, all randomness has been abolished. But here, behind the Alps, the overwhelming Italian light has also gone out too. Within Europe, I realise, there is yet another essential dividing line: the light line.
After the tunnel the weather changes, it is raining and the evenings are already growing longer. In the villages the doors and shutters are closed, the only light comes from a clubhouse close to a church where a meeting is being held, or the aerobics night for the local women's club. I spend the night at a camping ground in a pine forest, a village of tents and caravans that seems drab even when the sun breaks through the next morning. The camping ground is inhabited primarily by single men. The roofs of their caravans are weathered, the canvas of their tents has turned grey, they appear to be gradually becoming one with this forest. ‘Most of us live here all year round,’ the man across the way tells me. He crosses the camping ground slowly, leaning on his cane, his head held stiffly at an angle, his swollen feet in a pair of slippers. A few couples live here as well, and a few illegal immigrants, but most of the campers are men like him. ‘I'm from Caen, that's right, a divorce. And life here is cheap, right?’ But what about the cold? ‘It only freezes here a few days each winter, most years, and I get along fine with my kerosene heater.’
The tent attached to the front of his caravan has curtains and a television with a satellite dish, and he has gladioli in his little garden. Everyone makes the best of his own poverty, here amid these silent trees.
I am on my way to the remarkable land of Marshal Philippe Pétain, that unoccupied territory ruled for four years from the casino and the Hôtel du Parc in the remote spa town of Vichy, that roped-off France which became a ‘hopeless observer of the war’ after the surrender was signed.
After June 1940, France was broken into six pieces. Marshal Pétain ruled over approximately two fifths of the country. (After November 1942 that part, too, was occupied by the Germans, leaving him little room to manoeuvre.) The south-eastern part of the country, around Nice, was in Italian hands. A few northern coastal départements, which had been more or less annexed to Belgium, were run by the German military authorities in Brussels. North-eastern France was reserved for future German colonisation – for the French it was the Zone interdite, the forbidden zone. Lorraine and Alsace had been incorporated into Germany without further ado. The rest fell under the authority of the Militärbefehlshaber in Paris. The French themselves had to pay the costs of the German occupation: twenty million marks a day.
Driving through the country now, one is struck by the peculiar way those boundaries were laid out: straight through provinces, sometimes even straight through cities and villages. It seems as though in 1940 someone simply drew a few lines on the map, with the same lack of concern the French had once shown in dividing up Africa. That, in fact, characterises the Vichy regime: this ‘free’ bit of France existed only as long as the German had no need for it.
The choice of the bathing resort of Vichy was also made more or less at random. With its 300 hotels, it was the only place where the ministries that been driven out of Paris could settle down without a problem. Pétain was immediately enthusiastic: the city had a fast train to Paris, the climate was mild, the citizenry consisted mainly of the prosperous and the conservative, and its remoteness made it a pleasant place of work for every bureaucrat who did not want to be bothered by the rest of the world.
Vichy was a town at loose ends, it was neither French nor truly cosmopolitan, it awakened in the spring and hibernated all winter. It was with Vichy that the word ‘collaboration’ assumed its modern connotation – but there it simply meant ‘cooperation’. What we now call defeatism, i
t called realism. Pétain was held in adulation. Vichy was at war with Great Britain: that, at least, was how people saw it. General de Gaulle, who had fled to London with his Free French Forces, was the great turncoat. That was the attitude during the first years of the war. After 1944, half of France made a complete about-turn.
These days the French are reasonably aware of what happened in their country between 1940–4. But at first, certainly for the first two or three decades afterwards, the country lived in deep silence when it came to the war. In 1971, cineaste Marcel Ophüls was the first to produce a clear-eyed and remarkable documentary about Vichy, Le chagrin et la pitié. One year later the young American historian Robert Paxton got the debate rolling among his colleagues. In his study Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, Paxton was the first to make use of German documents which had never been consulted by French historians. Inevitably, those documents showed that the story the French had been telling their children and themselves for years was wide of the mark. Vichy was in no way the product of an elderly president and a few hundred powerless French officials working under severe pressure from the German occupiers. On the contrary: it was a fresh new regime with great aspirations, supported and lauded by millions of French citizens. It was not merely the transitional stage, the provisional government that the official annals of French history tried to make of it. It was a regime with pronounced anti-Semitic traits, and with far-reaching plans to reorganise French society along authoritarian, corporative lines, more or less the same lines applied earlier in Portugal by the dictator Salazar.
Modern-day Vichy is not a city of lies, but definitely one of ‘lacunae and blank spots’. As if by a miracle, life there has halted in summer 1939. The shaded streets behind the hotels are full of the art deco villas and pseudo-oriental castles of the once-worshipped miracle doctors and masseurs. People still converse beneath the old plane trees and chestnuts in front of the casino, the town has a long covered walkway to protect strollers from rain and sun, and every day one still runs into Chekhov's ‘lady with the little dog’.
In Vichy itself, only one historical ‘fact’ remains visible: a high, pock-marked wall in the park along the Allier River, topped with shreds of barbed wire once put there by the Gestapo to shield its headquarters from prying eyes. That wall, along with a few coins and letters in the little municipal museum, is the only concrete reminder of ‘the period’, as the citizens of Vichy prefer to call the war years.
Otherwise it is only the names that continue to haunt. The Hôtel du Portugal, once the Gestapo headquarters, is still called Le Portugal, and the same applies to the Hôtel Moderne of the Milice Française, the paramilitary organisation of Vichy whose job it was to stamp out the Resistance.
The chic Hôtel du Parc, the seat of the Vichy government and Pétain's private residence, has been christened ‘Le Parc’, but otherwise everything remains the same: the balcony from which the marshal received the cheers of hundreds of Frenchmen during the Sunday parades, the pavements along which his supporters, standing five deep, raised their voices almost every day in the Vichy anthem:
Maréchal, nous voilà
Devant toi, le sauveur de la France.
Nous jurons, nous, les gars,
De servir et de suivre tes pas.
Marshal, here we are! Saviour of France, we, your men, swear to serve and follow in your footsteps.
In those days, in the streets off the boulevards, there were scores of smaller hotels where some 100,000 civil servants found shelter. Provisional ministries were set up in the Grand Casino, with dividing walls made of archive boxes. ‘In the streets of our city, the crowds of passers-by, hands in their pockets and collars turned up, scatter in every direction like nervous ants,’ a journalist wrote in the Progrès de l'Allier on 27 January, 1942. To combat the worst of the cold, the officials installed simple wood stoves. ‘Everywhere were the long black necks of pipes, sweating drops of sooty liquid.’
Most of the officials were young, and the atmosphere was one of excitement, often steamy and sensual. Marches were held regularly, and a concert was given each week by the Garde Républicaine. In 1940 Pétain was as popular with the average Frenchman as de Gaulle was at the time of the country's liberation in 1944. He signed his first laws in truly royal fashion, ‘We, Philippe Pétain …’, and the people loved it. From the very start he concentrated more power in his person than any French head of state since Napoleon. In old age he had his moments of weakness and confusion, but mostly he was clear-witted and full of vitality.
Pétain's ideal France was rural, personal, familial. It was the old, pre-revolutionary France that he hoped to resurrect in modern form, a France without individualism, liberalism, democracy and cosmopolitanism. Before me lies his credo, La France Nouvelle, a little booklet with a red, blue and white border that was read to tatters all over France during the war. The first lines of his manifesto: ‘Man has, by nature, certain fundamental rights. These can only be guaranteed him by the communities that surround him: the Family that raises him, the Profession that nurtures him, the Nation that protects him.’ I go on turning the pages, but nowhere do I find the language of Hitler or Mussolini. The book consists almost entirely of speeches and exhortations, and it is above all extremely Catholic: ‘The Social Politics of Education’, ‘On Individualism and the Nation’, ‘Message concerning the Pensioning of the Elderly’, ‘Message to the Mothers of France’, and so on.
The Vichy regime was not a National Socialist regime, it was not imposed by the Germans, it was home-grown. There were not very many French Nazis. There were, however, militant right-wing thinkers who hoped for a new, authoritarian order – a tradition present in France today. One of them, the author Robert Brasillach, wrote just before he was executed for collaboration in winter 1945: ‘We were bedfellows with the Germans and we must admit that we were fond of some of them.’ But above all, the regime was legitimised by respectable intellectuals and members of the upper middle class, upstanding French patriots who were none too willing to bow to their defeat, who desired no more war and were prepared to mould themselves to the Nazis’ new Europe.
In practice, their ‘collaboration’ meant that Vichy took a great deal of work off the Germans’ hands. The regime organised the country's own colonisation: the plundering of industry, agriculture and national reserves, the forced labour in Germany and, not least, the deportation of the Jews. The Vichy regime took the first anti-Jewish measures on its own initiative, without instructions from Germany, and with remarkable vigour. On 17 July, 1940, only one week after the regime came to power, it decided that public functions were to be reserved for those of French parentage: a measure with immediate repercussions for the some 200,000 Jewish refugees who had sought asylum in France. On 22 July, a committee was set up to review all acts of naturalisation. On 3 October, the Jewish Statute was implemented, the start of an avalanche of measures – professional bans, mandatory registrations, greater and lesser forms of discrimination – directed against the Jews. By late 1940, some 60,000 people, mostly non-French Jews, were already interned in around 30 concentration camps.
France's long tradition of anti-Semitism returned to full bloom after July 1940. Who else was to bear the blame but the internationalists, the decadent intellectuals, those who had ‘sullied’ the republic with ‘modern’ views, who else but the Jews? In December 1940, the Parisian anti-Semitic weekly Au Pilori (In the Pillory) started a contest among its 60,000 (!) readers for the best answer to how one could be rid of the Jews. First prize: a pair of silk stockings. Best entries: drop them in the jungle among the wild animals, or burn them in crematoria.
Vichy built upon this mentality, but in a different way from the Nazis. The anti-Semitism of the Vichy regime was more nationalistic than racist; for Vichy, it was about the creation of second-class citizenship for French Jews and the removal of non-French Jews, but not about the destruction of the Jewish race. Second only to Denmark, France remains the country with the highest proportion of Jewish
survivors: less than a quarter of the Jewish population was deported, as opposed to more than three quarters in, for example, the Netherlands.
In that part of France occupied by the Germans, however, the mass murders continued apace. The first trains loaded with deportees left Paris for Auschwitz in early 1942. On 16–17 July, 1942, more than 12,000 Parisian Jews were arrested during La Grande Rafle. Thousands of French policemen were involved in that razzia. Some sources speak of 9,000 policemen in total, but what is certain is that the SS could not have acted effectively without the assistance and organisational talent of the Paris police. At the same time, this series of raids was almost certainly sabotaged by the police as well: the SS had hoped to make 25,000 arrests. Annette Kriegel, fifteen years old at the time, described the start of the round-up along her own street, the rue de Turenne: ‘I saw a policeman carrying suitcases in both hands and weeping. I will never forget the tears running down that rough, ruddy face, for you will agree with me that one rarely sees a policeman cry in public. He walked down the street, followed by a little group of children and old people, all carrying little bundles.’ Annette escaped, but did not know where to go. Finally she sat down on a park bench and waited: ‘It was on that bench that I left my childhood behind.’
In Vichy and the surrounding countryside, the rounding up of Jews was a matter for the French themselves. In an enormous razzia held between 26–8 August, 1942, at least 10,000 policemen combed the woods and neighbouring mountains in search of runaway Polish and German Jews who had considered themselves safe in non-occupied France. In Marseilles, Lyons, Sète and Toulouse, too, the French police mounted large-scale raids.
