Priscilla

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  The sale never took place. A furious German air attaché alerted Göring to Miedl’s undesirable publicity, and on Göring’s instructions took the paintings into care. Rumour was that the air attaché gained permission to conceal them in the embassy of Germany’s ally Japan, from where they vanished. There is no record to this day of their fate.

  Miedl was not located by the Allied Intelligence services for another four months. At 6.30 p.m. on 12 April 1945, he opened his door in Madrid’s Hotel Capital to someone he had been told was interested in buying his twenty-two pictures. The young man who stood there was an American Naval Intelligence officer. Lieutenant Rousseau ‘at once informed Miedl of the situation’.

  A communiqué to the American Embassy in Madrid hoped that ‘we may be able to list him as a War Criminal or at any rate as a near War Criminal.’ But Miedl was never extradited, and continued to live in Madrid with Dorie. Placed on the Allied Expulsion list of Germans to be repatriated from Spain, Göring’s great friend and banker knew how to defend himself and his fortune. He spent time in Switzerland and South America and died on 4 January 1990 aged eighty-six.

  ‘Miedl has up till now only told part of the story.’ Not once in all their ‘brandy-laced’ discussions did Miedl disclose to Rousseau what was inside the box that he and Otto Graebener had crossed the border to collect; what paintings, what diamonds, what gold and securities. But Allied Intelligence believed that Miedl and Priscilla’s lover were ‘connected with a scheme to finance the future operations of German subversive organisations or to find a safe haven for Göring’s fortune’. One source speculated that Göring had dipped deep into funds connected with the Four Year Plan, and these may have been in the box, and that Miedl’s intention was to ‘start a bank or some other kind of business organisation’ – and to launder looted art into cash ‘to finance the Nazi’s Abwehr espionage ring’.

  Rousseau was driven to speculate what had happened to the box. Argentina was a likely destination. Miedl had used a firm in Irun, Baquera Kutsche y Martin SA., which shipped to the River Plate. In Buenos Aires, a German banker sold pictures on Miedl’s account. It is easy to imagine the contents dispersing south to hang on remote walls in the dust bowl of Rio Pico, or north to Cordoba where another of Göring’s friends, Friedrich Mendl, owned a castle.

  All these improbable elements combined in the Occupation. When Louis Malle consulted an historian of the period before making Lacombe, Lucien, he was advised that he could put anything he wanted in the film ‘because everything happened’.

  29.

  GRAEBENER

  ‘In my thoughts I took you so many times in my arms – oh Darling Pris. Whenever I can do anything for you just let me know. You are still a little baby and I must take care of you . . .’

  Otto Graebener was not so high in the Nazi pecking order as Alois Miedl or Hermann Brandl, but his connection with the German administration in Paris was influential enough to secure Priscilla’s release from her SS cell in Rue des Saussaies and to protect her until the Liberation.

  Graebener was forty. A friend in the Abwehr described him as ‘about 1.60m tall, medium build, light red hair, left eye brown, right eye green, round face, pink complexion, married, one daughter’. Priscilla was twenty-seven when they met.

  He was the son of a well-heeled German family who owned food stores in Karlsruhe. His English was fluent, the product of two years at an exclusive boarding school in Zuoz, ‘the Swiss Eton’, modelled along English lines, where he learned to play fives and cricket, and was a member of a dining club, the ‘Heidelberger Kreis’, which held annual asparagus dinners. The motto of the Lyceum Alpinum was ‘Mens sana in corpore sano’. Over a lunch facing Lake Geneva, the oldest alumnus told me: ‘We didn’t have a song.’

  Graebener was one of those who came behind the Panzers, hastening to Paris after the German Occupation to buy up food for the Reich. He acted as a top purchasing agent for Bureau Otto, taking Robert Doynel’s milk and grain to Germany after first transporting it to Spain to be dehydrated in a factory that he part-owned in Navarre. His filing card in the Paris police archives notes that he was a member of the Cercle Européen and an ‘important industrialist involved in the manufacture of concentrated food products – powdered cream, soup cubes, flour’. He had offices in Karlsruhe, Hamburg, San Sebastian, Lisbon, Paris, and an apartment at 3 Avenue Bosquet. A one-paragraph report on him by Allied Intelligence mentioned simply the date of his arrest with Miedl, and confirmed his cover: ‘In business with Trebijano Company in Spain. Had an Abwehr Ausweiss to get him out of fighting forces. Miedl says he is anti-Nazi.’

  He had powerful links with the Abwehr, though. One of these was an Abwehr art trafficker, Wilhem Mohnen, whose chief activity was to buy paintings on behalf of Göring and Hitler’s principal scouts in the Paris art market. Mohnen regularly met up with Graebener at the Hôtel Lutétia, where he boasted of having an ‘unlimited amount of foreign funds at his disposal’.

  Which begs the obvious question: was Otto Graebener’s snout in the same trough? Zoë Temblaire had visited Otto’s apartment with Priscilla and observed the canvases on the walls. ‘He told Zoë he dealt in pictures,’ wrote Gillian. ‘He certainly did! All the loot went back to Göring & Co.’

  ‘Please wire collect immediately whereabouts of goods.’ The depth of Graebener’s involvement in Nazi art-trafficking is suggested by this frantic message made to his office in San Sebastian in January 1945 – six months after he had organised the passage of Göring’s crates into Spain. Graebener was in no position to reply, still under interrogation in Paris. But it hints to why he might have become such a close associate of Göring’s banker Alois Miedl – and why the Free French lieutenant at Hendaye told Miedl that ‘he would not expose so much as his little finger’ for Otto Graebener.

  All this allowed Priscilla to have the lifestyle she led with Otto.

  ‘We were so sweet together and Pris is carved very deeply in my heart.’ Their affair began in the summer of 1943 and continued into the following year. Emile Cornet was conveniently imprisoned in Fresnes. Graebener’s wife had returned to Karlsruhe with their six-year-old daughter. Priscilla and Graebener were free to ride bicycles into town and take lunch with Zoë. With Graebener’s car and Ausweiss, they went further afield than Priscilla’s conditions would have permitted. ‘I love to see you on the bike or swimming or guiding the car from Dijon to Paris.’

  The precise development of their relationship remains unclear. Graebener complained that Priscilla was always surrounded by too many friends, and yet he introduced her to his. A man called Johnny (Jean Duval?). ‘Just think of it, our old good friend Johnny is dead. While driving his car, very lately, in 1945, he had an accident and was instantly killed. I know you liked him so much. We, you and I, lost a really good friend.’ Another man called Wolff (Marcell Wolff, picture dealer in Spain, close contact of Miedl and Hofer?): ‘Once he told me you are a remarkable young lady – and he was right.’

  Did Otto escort Priscilla to auctions at the Hôtel Drouot in Rue Rossini, or to Serge Lifar’s ballet evenings, or to dinner with Alois Miedl – when Miedl came to Paris in April 1944 to arrange his Spanish visa? Compared to Priscilla’s other love affairs, we have very few documents from Otto Graebener: a letter, three photographs (even though Germans were forbidden to give girls their photos), but nothing more. Most of my information comes from Gillian’s interview with Zoë Temblaire.

  According to Zoë, Otto often invited Priscilla to Maxim’s in Rue Royale, the preferred dining place of the Nazi elite, where one had to book a week ahead and meals cost 1,000 francs. I imagine Graebener transferring Priscilla from one arm to another so that he can give the Heil Hitler salute. I see men coming in, shaking hands with him, greeting Priscilla who sits there in the navy dress that he has bought her – feeling what? Shame, fear, sickness? Or does part of her enjoy the frisson of being saluted? I see women at other tables, the clandestine bend of their necks, their glances of envy or commiseration. O
r do they avert their eyes, like women meeting in a brothel? I see her trying not to look around, concentrating on the caviar brought back from Russia. I wonder if she recognises from a snow-covered courtyard in Besançon the tall black man in an apple green turban who brings Priscilla her coffee. And if so, what does she say?

  The whole nation was up to it, if you believed one of France’s most famous journalists, the anti-semitic writer Robert Brasillach. ‘Whatever their outlook, during these years the French have all more or less been to bed with Germany.’ And the memory of it remained sweet, he added. That was in February 1944. One year later Brasillach was executed as a collaborator. After the war, it became necessary to play down any connection with the Germans to save your skin.

  What inferences would Priscilla’s friends have drawn had they spotted her in Maxim’s with Otto Graebener? Pass by stiff-necked, without a nod? This was not Zoë Temblaire’s reaction. Her Jewish husband was a POW, but Zoë was happy to enjoy Graebener’s hospitality when Priscilla invited her to join them; by accepting Otto’s story that he was Swiss, she participated in the same deception and self-deception as Priscilla. The neutralising choices that both of them made were not innocent, more a matter of selective ignorance.

  Generally speaking, it would have been considered compromising to be seen at the same table with a German. On her return to Paris from Boisgrimot in October 1940, Priscilla had picked up a leaflet in the Métro which enjoined every self-respecting Frenchman to slap a woman who paid too much attention to a member of the occupying forces. In February 1942, another underground newspaper, Défense de la France, warned those who slept with the enemy: ‘You so-called French women who give your bodies to a German will be shaved with a notice pinned to your backs “Sold to the Enemy”!’ In November 1943, armed men burst into a café in Plouhinec south of Boisgrimot, disarmed a German officer and shaved the head of the girl sitting beside him.

  Between 1940 and ’41, the writer and biographer Gitta Sereny worked as a nurse looking after abandoned children at Château de Villandry in the Loire. ‘The atmosphere of Occupied France was very tendu, very tense,’ she told me. ‘It was important not to be seen talking to a German, oh my God.’

  After 1941, the same rule applied to the occupying forces. The Wehrmacht introduced tough measures following the first attacks on Germans. No overly intimate relations with French women. No taking the arm of ‘any female person’ in public. No riding with a woman in a vélo taxi. No exchange of photos. No marriage.

  Sereny examined two figures at the core of the Nazi regime: Franz Stangl, Commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp, and Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect and Minister for Armaments whose Organisation Todt oversaw the building of the Atlantic Wall. She knew personally both men and in writing their biographies had the courage to explore their good qualities as well as their faults, Speer in particular.

  I had sought Sereny out before when in search of an explanation. She was the one I trusted most to place Priscilla’s situation in context. The experience that Sereny shared with me of her time as a young Hungarian nurse in Occupied France, living in the same chateau cheek by jowl with German soldiers, and accepting invitations to dine at Maxim’s, was illuminating.

  ‘The Occupation was quite dangerous. It was also exciting in its own way. If you were against the Germans in your mind but able to communicate with them, you were in a good position. If you were polite, they readily gave you food, medicine – anything. I was looking after children, sixteen refugees. They gave sweets to the children and the children backed away and finally put their hands out.’ It did not disgust Sereny to observe herself mimic the children. ‘The Germans were very strong, very sure, very handsome. They were well dressed, in uniforms that were always fitting, and never looked untidy. They were everything that the English, so far as we knew, were not. And they had won the war. I had quite a life. I didn’t sleep with them. But I was on good terms with them, both officers and men, and they were happy to listen to a young Hungarian aristocrat. They were lonely, everyone loathed them. For an attractive young girl to talk to them as human beings and take their minds off what they were doing was a thing for them. Let’s face it, the Germans were actually quite nice, you know. I quite liked the Germans.’

  A surprising number of Frenchwomen liked the Germans. The actress Arletty: to whom was attributed, probably wrongly, the saying ‘My heart is French but my arse international’, and who lived in the Ritz with a Luftwaffe colonel. The couturier Coco Chanel: who in a small room also at the Ritz conducted her affair with an Abwehr officer in charge of pricing textiles for Bureau Otto. By October 1943, some 85,000 French women had children fathered by Germans – 4,000 in Rouen alone; enough to populate a town, or go on the First Crusade.

  There was a dearth of available men, for one thing. More than a million had died in the First War. Nearly two million were prisoners in Germany. Young Frenchmen were most lacking in those areas to experience the largest influx of Germans – Paris, the north and east, the Atlantic coast. ‘The prestige of the stranger, the hint of perversity and adventure, the persuasive white dress uniform of a Luftwaffe pilot, the dinner in sumptuous surroundings – a German boyfriend offered immediate and solid advantage’, argued the historian Hanna Diamond. She quoted a woman in the Toulouse resistance who remembered how women ‘wanted to enjoy themselves, to make the most of their lives, because they saw that the years were passing by and that things would not change.’ Going to bed with Otto Graebener did not make Priscilla anti-French or anti-English; it was not proof of political affiliation. It made her a woman who wanted, in the drabness of that moment, to be a woman. In the memorable words of Joseph Paul-Broncour, France’s representative to Switzerland, to his mistress Marga d’Andurain (alias Magda Fontanges, alias Madeleine Coraboeuf, alias Baronne Thévenin), a woman of charismatic liability who seduced Mussolini and later became Henri Chamberlin’s mistress: ‘When I think of your lovely body, I don’t give a damn about Central Europe.’

  The pressure of wartime meant not only French and Germans jumped into bed. Most Englishwomen imprisoned with Priscilla in Besançon took comfort in physical relationships.

  Jacqueline Grant before her arrest had a lightning affair with an English Spitfire pilot based in Le Touquet – ‘very good-looking, I can’t remember his name, the quickest love affair on record’.

  Some affairs were even more peremptory. Rosemary Say was seduced by a young French soldier on a train from Dijon to Paris: ‘Our conversation had run its course. He rose and jammed his heavy kit bag up against the carriage door. The blinds were still down, so no one could see in from the corridor. He sat next to me and gently lowered me on to the carriage bench without a word being said. We made love. It was brief, perfunctory and almost totally silent. We both felt comforted.’ She made love on another occasion in a brothel in the Septième, with a tall, fleshy police officer from Toulouse, moustached, who had agreed to post a letter to her parents. The price was to go to bed with him. In the charged atmosphere of the Occupation where so many interests coincided, Say’s Besançon friend Sofia Skipwith had fleeting sexual encounters with numerous strangers. A relative of Skipwith elaborated on her promiscuity: ‘When I say promiscuous, I mean the sleeping-with-the-window-cleaner-and-postman-sort of promiscuous.’

  At least two fellow internees shared Priscilla’s experience of falling for the enemy. Antonia Hunt was arrested by the SS following her release from Caserne Vauban and, like Priscilla, felt a debt of gratitude to a member of the Gestapo who had been tactful. Starved of affection, and believing that she owed her life to him, Hunt encouraged her German interpreter at Rue des Saussaies, Karl Gagel, to fall in love with her. ‘I was content to let each day happen. With my naturally affectionate nature, I trusted him and thought I loved him too. He kissed me . . . it was in the Tuileries Gardens. There was nothing unusual in France about a young man and a girl kissing each other in public, but I wondered what on earth they would say if they knew that one was a G
estapo interpreter and the other an English prisoner.’

  Elisabeth Haden-Guest courted greater risks with a young SS officer billeted on her in a chateau near Saint-Briac. In his scarlet-lined cloak, black boots and with a book of poetry in his hand, the ‘more than handsome’ Fritz Reinlein was irresistible. ‘We became lovers: it was his first time. We made love often, with urgency and passion.’ If discovered, she knew that it might mean death for both of them. ‘I remember so well how death seemed worth it . . .’ Her love life, as with two of Haden-Guest’s previous lovers, both French, was predicated, like Priscilla’s, ‘on the fact that we had no hope of a future because in the future there was war and death. My relationships with them were entirely based on catching the last bit of life and poetry and music and Christmas, drinking it in and storing it up for the time to come of coldness and aloneness. I shall never forget or regret the intensity of those lovers born out of despair.’

  Few women embodied these contradictions more succinctly than the double-agent Mathilde Carré, the Kleines Katchen of the Abwehr of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Priscilla was seven months into her second marriage when she had to endure the details of Carré’s trial in January 1949, after Carré was charged in Paris with the crime of Intelligence with the Enemy. How many of the ‘little cat’s’ experiences did Priscilla recognise? The effect of Stuka dive-bombing near the Maginot Line, where Carré had worked as a nurse – ‘in moments of great personal peril a person’s entire being responded with almost sexual anticipation’. The ride back in the rear of an unmarked Abwehr car. The villa in Maison Lafitte. The seduction by the Intelligence officer – in Carré’s case, a short-sighted sergeant called Hugo Ernst Bleicher, who entered her bedroom, locked the door.