A World at Arms (101 page)

The administration of the country proved more difficult than Seyss anticipated. All sorts of German agencies competed for control with him and each other, and the Dutch Nazis proved a troublesome lot. The most prominent of the latter, Anton Adrian Mussert, wanted to run an enlarged Dutch state as a German client, while the Dutch Nazi most agreeable to a direct fusion with Germany, Meinoud M. Rost van Tonningen, was happy to cooperate with the SS and to help its schemes to settle Dutch farmers in land taken from the Soviet Union. However, he had even fewer supporters in the country than the hugely unpopular and generally incompetent Mussert.
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As the country in Europe with the longest record of treating Jews decently, Holland was not the country in which to acquire popularity by deporting its Jewish citizens to be murdered in the death camps in occupied Poland. The first measures to implement this program provoked the first major strike in German-occupied Europe, that of February 1941. In spite of Dutch resistance and some secret sheltering of individual Jews-the case of the German Jewish refugee Anne Frank becoming the most famous–the vast majority of Dutch Jews, over 100,000 out of about 120,000, were killed by the Germans.
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Although in the Netherlands, as elsewhere in Europe, many local people cooperated in this process and some profited from it, there was more opposition here than anywhere else.

One of the saddest aspects of the German occupation was the impact of its economic exploitation combined with the way the front stabilized in the fall of 1944. The Germans had ruthlessly stripped the country, once a great food exporting nation, of its reserves. When the course of
the war left western Holland partly cut off from the rest of German-controlled central Europe, the most desperate food shortage ensued. The winter of 1944–45 was a time of famine in which many died in sight of liberation. At the very end, there were arrangements to bring in food from the Allies; but for many of the Dutch, this came too late. After World War I, many Dutch families had taken in German youngsters so that they could more quickly recover from the undernourishment of the war years. After World War II, the people of Holland for years retained bitter feelings toward a Germany which had repaid charity with death and starvation.

Belgium, like the Netherlands, was headed for inclusion in Germany, but with altered borders. On the one hand, the small pieces of territory transferred to Belgium after World War I as well as the piece ruled jointly with Prussia before that war were added to the adjacent German province.
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On the other hand, two departments (or–administrative districts) of northern France were joined with Belgium. During the war years, Hitler postponed decisions about the final configuration in this case. He placed a moderate general with substantial international experience in charge as military governor while casting about for a long-term solution.

General Alexander von Falkenhausen proceeded to run the least oppressive of all the German occupation administrations. Himself an opponent of Hitler and National Socialism, he tried to assert military rule against the economic and police agencies, to keep the exactions within reason, and to avoid or limit the sorts of horrors inflicted on other occupied peoples. Within the limits of the situation, he had some success in containing the efforts of Göring and Himmler to interfere, kept the people from starving in spite of low rations, and held the murder of Belgium’s Jews to some 25,000 out of a total of about 90,000, a terrible toll but still a sign of substantial opposition to the process.
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No wonder Falkenhausen was placed in a concentration camp, even though his contacts with the group which attempted to kill Hitler were not discovered at the time.

Repeatedly during the war Hitler thought of different Nazi Gauleiters to send to Belgium to take over,
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but it was not until July 1944, just before the Allies liberated most of the country, that he finally picked Josef Grohé to take over from Falkenhausen. Certainly King Leopold, who had remained in the country, would play no role. The leader of the Flemish Nazis, Staf de Clercq, had few followers, and Léon Degrelle, the Walloon Nazi, could do little better. Even Hitler’s backing and Himmler’s support could make little out of this self–anointed “French
speaking Nordic.”
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The Belgian economy worked effectively for Germany while much of the administrative apparatus remained in place.
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But there is no evidence that any substantial portion of the population looked on the Germans as anything other than invading barbarians who had come to ravish and loot the country for the second time in thirty years. They had even burned down the Louvain University Library once again as in World War I.
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On October 10, 1941, the representative of the German Foreign Ministry in Belgium, Werner von Bargen, had written to State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker that Germany could get the United States to stay out of the war and England to make peace if she would make a real peace in western and Northern Europe which assured the independence of the states there. The State Secretary could only reply that no one in the National Socialist leadership agreed.
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German victory would have meant the end of Belgian independence; German defeat brought its restoration.

France was defeated in 1940 under circumstances which gave the Germans an incentive to restrain Italy as well as themselves in order to keep the French government from continuing the war from North Africa and the French fleet and colonies from assisting Great Britain-and hence encouraging that country to keep on fighting. Otherwise, the Germans would do as they saw fit. The armistice of June 1940, which provided for the French government to continue to direct the administration in all of France, was broken before it was signed by the removal of Alsace and Lorraine from its purview and their effective annexation to Germany. Beginning in 1940, hundreds of thousands were deported from the two provinces, which were placed under the government of adjacent German Gaue, Saarland and Baden.
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In addition, the Germans treated the two French northern departments placed under the military commander in Belgium as prospective German territory and clearly intended to annex them.
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Furthermore, a line was drawn separating the area of northeast France curving from the mouth of the Somme river to the Swiss border, which was closed off from the rest of France; those portions of the country together with ports on the Channel and Atlantic coasts were also scheduled to be annexed to Germany. Hitler, however, did not decide on a border during the war.
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The majority of the remaining country was to be occupied by German troops while the southeastern quarter was left unoccupied for the time being. It was in the little town of Vichy in the unoccupied zone that the new government of France was temporarily located; and since the Germans refused to allow it back to Paris, it remained there
until abducted by the Germans in 1944, and came to be known as the Vichy government.

By allowing this puppet regime to operate, the Germans obviated a danger and a problem. The danger was the possibility of continued resistance from French North Africa; the problem was that of staffing an administrative apparatus for an area with over forty million inhabitants. With a tiny supervisory staff, the Germans directly or indirectly controlled an administrative and police apparatus of Frenchmen which functioned for them with a diligence and thoroughness they could never have provided themselves during wartime.

The continuation of the war by Britain worked to strengthen Vichy’s negotiating position vis-à-vis the Germans in a way neither the French, nor the Germans, nor the British had anticipated.
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The campaign in the East had a somewhat similar effect; and the Vichy authorities eventually became more reluctant to make concessions without obtaining concessions from the Germans in turn; but Hitler was determined not to make these under any circumstances.
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If Pétain dismissed Laval on his own in December 1940, the Germans forced the dismissal of Maxime Weygand as delegate for French North Africa as too anti-German and pro-U.S. a year later.
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The return of Laval in April 1942 made little difference: neither the Germans nor the French trusted him.
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Some of those running the Vichy system believed that in this way they could spare their people a worse fate; some hoped to use the defeat for a reorganization of French society; some genuinely believed in the possibility of reconciliation with the Germans; most were convinced that after the defeat of France, Britain would quickly succumb also. All were in error.

The German government included some individuals who also wanted a real peace with France, and these, not the French collaborators, effected some restraints on German policy and practice. The line set by Hitler, however, was uncompromisingly hostile to France, a country he both hated and despised. Pétain may have thought that France would rise from defeat as Prussia had once risen from defeat at the hands of Napoleon, but Hitler was determined to prevent anything of the sort.

Those who hoped to reorganize French society believed that the Third Republic was responsible for its own defeat and that a new structure, more authoritarian, more efficient, stressing not liberty, equality and brotherhood, but work, family, and fatherland, should rise from the ashes of defeat.
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With considerable resonance at first among a people stunned and disoriented, this vision of a new France was quickly and hopelessly compromised by the total failure of the hope for reconciliation
with Germany. The exactions of the Germans, the steady looting of the country,
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the exorbitant demands in violation of the armistice terms, the expulsions from Alsace and Lorraine, the rigidities of demarcation borders within France, the retention of French prisoners of war combined with the eventually forced recruitment of labor for work in Germany, and the increasingly terroristic measures employed by the Germans, disillusioned the most devoted believers in any real accommodation with Germany.
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Finally, the obvious turning of the tide against the Axis showed that the German victory, which most had taken for granted in the summer of 1940, would never come.

Pierre Laval, the symbolic advocate of collaboration, might urge the Germans to make peace with the Soviet Union so that they could concentrate all their forces on the defeat of the British and Americans and thereby remain in control of France, but most Frenchmen increasingly looked forward to liberation by the Western Powers. Ever larger numbers of them turned to resistance against the occupiers, and the vicious eagerness with which the Vichy militia hounded and slaughtered those who opposed the Germans served to discredit the regime they served. The extent to which the Vichy government inaugurated anti-Semitic measures and its police enthusiastically participated in the rounding up of Jews for deportation and murder remained as a blot that time did not erase but instead made more conspicuous.
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In November 1942, the Germans occupied the unoccupied zone and allowed the Italians to occupy a portion of it; but, true to the policy of fighting only the friends and not the enemies of the country, the French armistice army allowed to Vichy did not fire a shot against the soldiers of either Axis power.
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In September 1943, with the Italian surrender, the Germans took over the Italian zone as well; but this end to the old Italian demands on France brought no concessions from the Germans.
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The complete occupation by the Germans only facilitated both further exactions from the French
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and the murder of those Jews who lived or had taken refuge first in unoccupied France and later in the Italian zone.

Inside German-occupied France, a small number resisted the authorities, but they were handicapped by the overwhelming support Frenchmen originally gave to Pétain as well as by the surveillance of the Germans. There was, in addition, a reluctance to take actions which might provoke a brutal occupier into massive measures of retaliation against the population when liberation was obviously in the distant future. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, French Communists who had earlier stood aside or even welcomed the Germans joined the resistance
and eventually came to form an important part of it. Jews who had little or nothing to lose played a major role, one which post-war accounts of the resistance generally overlooked. Some support was provided by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), but well into 1942 this was greatly affected by a vast swindle, the so-called Carte network.
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The rivalry of British military intelligence with SOE produced a calamitous further disaster in which an intelligence agent ended up betraying to the Germans a large portion of the French resistance and numerous other British agents in 1943.
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In spite of all setbacks, resistance grew, stimulated in part by German measures, the obviously turning tide of the war, and the growing experience of the French themselves and of the British and eventually the Americans in aiding them.

The leader of the Free French organization which continued to fight on the side of the Allies after June 1940, Charles de Gaulle, proved a very difficult man for the Allies to deal with. Field Marshal Brooke commented in his diary: “a most unattractive specimen. We made a horrid mistake when we decided to make use of him!”
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The language is instructive: Brooke evidently believed that Charles de Gaulle could be used. Whatever might or might not be said about the proud and determined Frenchman, being used by others was not one of them. He made life as difficult as he could and dared for both Churchill and Roosevelt,
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but he always followed his own star. It took years of war for a steadily increasing number of Frenchmen to rally to him outside or to see him as their leader inside the country, but he proved more capable and determined than his rivals. By the end of 1942 he truly led and symbolized resistance to the Germans. By the end of the war, the leaders of various factions of French collaborators had formed competing “governments-in-exile” on different floors of a castle in southwest Germany, hoping for some last-minute reprieve as their German sponsors and abductors were going down in defeat. De Gaulle headed the French government in Paris.