Hitler and the Holocaust (25 page)

Between June and December 1941, a string of Vichy decrees limited Jews to 2 percent of the professions (medicine, law, and others) and 3 percent of the students in higher education. Vallat also introduced a detailed census of all Jews in the Unoccupied Zone as well as proposals (which became law on 22 July 1941) to “organize” Jewish property and enterprises. The object was “to eliminate all Jewish influence from the national economy.” In November 1941, Jews were removed from a whole range of commercial and financial activities,
including banking, merchant shipping, real estate, and wholesale trading, as well as publicity, news services, publishing, film, theater, and radio. They were forbidden to buy land unless they cultivated it themselves. Vichy France, by this draconian legislation, evidently hoped to assert its own sovereignty in Jewish affairs while fulfilling the anti-Semitic program that was an integral part of its ideology.
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By the spring of 1942 the Germans had developed more far-reaching anti-Jewish projects for France. In May 1942, Vallat was replaced by Pellepoix—a move that followed in the wake of intensified German police operations in France. Already on 27 March 1942, the first trainloads of Jews had left the Drancy concentration camp for Auschwitz-Birkenau, ostensibly in reprisal for attacks on German servicemen in France. When more railway cars were made available in June 1942, more Jews were dispatched. But the Reich could not pursue its anti-Jewish actions in France unless it had the active help of the French administration, public services, and police force, not to mention railroad officials. The Germans did not, however, have to bargain too hard to persuade Premier Pierre Laval to agree to the deportation of foreign and stateless Jews; that was already an item in Vichy’s own program, though there is no evidence that mass extermination was any part of the French government’s plans. The Vichy regime was, however, eager to get rid of its foreign Jews (pressing the Germans to include them in transports), even as it opposed measures against the French Jews. On 4 July 1942, René Bousquet, head of the French police, relayed to the Gestapo the agreement of Pétain and Laval to the deportations as “a beginning” for removing “all stateless Jews from the Occupied and Unoccupied zones.” For the Germans, this was merely a temporary limitation. But Laval was certainly aware of the negative reactions in French public opinion to the radicalized German policy during the summer of 1942. The introduction by the Germans of the yellow star in the Occupied Zone, for example, provoked the first open resistance
to anti-Jewish persecution in wartime France. It exposed the full gravity of anti-Semitism in a much more concrete way to many French people who had previously gone along with racist laws against the Jews.
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The Germans in mid-1942 did not have enough men (no more than three battalions of police numbering just under three thousand) to carry out their policy of roundups, internment, and deportation. Hence, the far more numerous French police force, with its efficient card-file system, listing almost 150,000 Jews in the Parisian Department of the Seine alone, was indispensable to their aims. The vast collaborative effort in which the French police engaged with the Germans proved, then, to be the critical factor in the deportations. Perhaps the most notorious example of such collaboration was the Velodrome d’Hiver roundup of 16 July 1942 by the Paris police, who packed seven thousand Jews (including more than four thousand children) like sardines into an indoor sports arena, so that there was barely space to lie down. Altogether, 12,884 Jews were netted in the two-day
Aktion
, but this was less than half the number the Germans had hoped to seize.
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By September 1942, more than twenty-seven thousand Jews had been deported from both zones of France. A month earlier, Laval had told an American Quaker group that “foreign Jews had always been a problem in France and that the French government was glad that a change in the German attitude towards them gave France an opportunity to get rid of them.”
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It was evident to the American chargé d’affaires in Vichy, who also spoke with Laval about the deportations at this time, “that he [Laval] had neither interest nor sympathy in the fate of any Jews, who, he callously remarked, were already too numerous in France.”
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Pétain’s response seemed even more detached. He gave petitioners the impression that he only vaguely understood the full seriousness of the roundups and the deportations. Indeed, one of the blackest stains on Vichy’s record was that it offered to deliver the childern
of foreign Jews to the Germans for deportation even before the Nazis asked for or were ready to accept them. More than one thousand children under six years old as well as 2,557 under twelve years and almost 2,500 Jewish adolescents were packed off to Auschwitz-Birkenau at the French initiative during 1942 alone. For the Vichy administration, there was never any question of taking them in hand through public charity or rescuing them. In mid-September 1942, Laval made it crystal-clear that nothing would deter him “from carrying out the policy of purging France of undesirable elements, without nationality.”
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After women and children were put into the cattle cars by French police along with the men (some of whom were French citizens) and were never heard from again, public opinion began to turn. Voices of protest were raised in the Catholic Church (previously very supportive of Pétain and Vichy) and among the Protestants, led by Pastor Marc Boegner. Archbishop Jules-Gerard Saliège of Toulouse on 23 August 1942 drafted his famous pastoral letter, which attained a wide distribution: “That children, that women, fathers and mothers be treated like cattle, that members of a family be separated from one another and dispatched to an unknown destination, it has been reserved to our own time to see such a sad spectacle.”
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Saliège reminded the French public that Jews and foreigners “are real men and women … part of the human species,” who could not be abused without limit. Others like the bishops of Montauban and Marseille followed suit, though the protestors actually represented fewer than half of the prelates of the Unoccupied Zone. Laval tried, at first, with only partial success, to warn church officials against mixing into politics. But the initial crisis between the regime and the church had faded by the end of October 1942, and the furor in public opinion about the deportation of the Jews died down. Nevertheless, the legitimacy of the Vichy regime had suffered a blow.

On 11 November 1942, the period of full German occupation
began as Hitler’s armies swept down to the Mediterranean coast of France, to counter the American landings in North Africa. With regard to the Jews, the powers of the German police were now extended across France, though their manpower was severely overstretched in the southern zone. But the French police continued and even increased their repressive actions with mass arrests of foreign Jews in February 1943. In the northern zone, too, deportations from Drancy to Auschwitz-Birkenau resumed in January 1943. By 6 March, according to German calculations, approximately forty-nine thousand Jews had already been to the East. As the pressure intensified through 1943, some of the hunted Jews fled to Spain and to Switzerland or more often found refuge in French homes and religious institutions, especially in the countryside.

Through 1943, the French police continued to accompany convoys and escort trains carrying Jews for deportation and to hunt down escapees. But they were noticeably less enthused about deporting French Jews, and the Germans now felt that they lacked the requisite initiative in the “struggle against Judaism.” German pressure on Vichy to strip French Jews of their citizenship (denaturalization) grew in the summer of 1943. Darquier de Pellepoix ardently supported this idea, but Laval prevaricated and then retreated from this step on 7 August 1943. Pétain, too, resisted the idea of indiscriminate deportation of French Jews based on denaturalization. He had to maintain order in France, and for the sake of his own conscience he wanted to examine each case individually. Vichy’s newfound obstructionism was connected closely to shifting military fortunes and the increasing likelihood that Germany would lose the war. There was the growing anti-German mood in France to reckon with and the displeasure of the Vatican to consider. Foreign opinion, especially in the United States, also entered into the calculations at Vichy. Moreover, the French public itself was becoming more restive and disenchanted with the Vichy regime. German arrests of French
Jews were now regarded by growing numbers of French people as a national humiliation. As a result, even Laval was becoming less cooperative. The Nazis therefore turned to direct action, dispatching one of the most ruthless SS Jewish experts, the Austrian-born Alois Brunner, from Salonika (where he had helped to speedily deport more than fifty thousand Greek Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau) to take over the deportations from France. Brunner and his SS team descended on the south of France in the fall of 1943, continuing their sweeps until the spring of 1944, this time without much support from the French police. They were, however, assisted by the Milice, a French paramilitary force that relentlessly pursued Jews out of a certain level of ideological conviction.

Although they no longer had the full resources of the French police to help them, the Germans still managed to send 33,500 Jews to the east in 1943–1944. Most of them were gassed immediately—mainly in Auschwitz-Birkenau—and a mere 2,500 out of the deported eighty thousand survived.
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Nevertheless, from the Nazi standpoint, the overall results in France were disappointing: only one in four Jews had been trapped in the web of the “Final Solution.” From August 1943, some Gestapo officials were convinced that Vichy was no longer dependable and even sabotaged their work. But there is little evidence that Pétain and Laval consciously sought to protect native French Jews, though it seems clear that they did become obstructive once a German victory appeared in doubt, and they were certainly concerned at their loss of face in French public opinion. What is less obvious is when they realized the true meaning of the “Final Solution.” The official French (and German) line about the deportations was that Jews were being transferred to work colonies in Poland. But after June 1942, the inclusion of women and young children on the transports, as well as the sick and the aged, made this fiction seem scarcely credible. By the end of August 1942, Jewish organizations in France (like the Consistoire Central de Israélites de France) were telling Laval that
Jews were being exterminated “pitilessly and methodically,” though they could not yet verify the existence of a total plan.
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Pastor Boegner also talked with Laval in September 1942 about the mass murder but was fobbed off with stories about Jews building an agricultural colony in the east. Vichy officials nonetheless knew that many Jews would die, simply from looking at the atrocious conditions of departure from France. After 1943, French officials said as little as possible about the Jews, which in the circumstances can be regarded only as a guilty silence.

French complicity in the “Final Solution” cannot be separated from the deeply entrenched anti-Semitic tradition that had been sharpened by the trauma of defeat in 1940. Vichy’s racist measures against the Jews were inhuman, its despoliation of Jewish property rapacious, and its anti-Semitic propaganda repulsive, though it never sunk into the truly venomous abyss of the pro-Nazi French collaborationist press, based in Paris.
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Vichy did partially protect native Jews (as did Romania and Hungary before the German invasion), but its efforts were hardly vigorous or robust. It zealously volunteered to hand over foreign Jews from the Unoccupied Zone and to add Jewish children to the transports well before the Germans asked for them. These were actions of a particularly vile character. On the other hand, the Vichy leaders never deliberately planned to murder Jews en masse or encourage executions comparable to those in Germany, Austria, Croatia, Romania, the Ukraine, or Lithuania. Through its perfidious policy, Vichy sought to reduce the number of Jews in France by every possible means but its role in the “Final Solution” remained ambivalent.

While three quarters of French Jewry survived under Vichy, it must also be said that the French government proved much more severe toward the Jews than did the Italians. Laval was infuriated by Italian actions to help Jews in the eight departments of southern France that they occupied after November 1942, and he even requested German intervention,
though this failed to change the situation. In February 1943, the Italians not only blocked the attempts of French police and prefects to round up and transfer all Jews (French or foreign) from their zone but formally brought them all under Italian protection. As a result, thousands of Jews made their way to the the Côte d’Azur. Nice even became a Jewish cultural and political center under Italian military rule, much to the disgust of Berlin and Paris. Only with the Italian evacuation in September 1943 and the entry of the German forces did the anti-Jewish terror in the south of France begin.

The Italian sabotage of the Holocaust was at first sight all the more astonishing given that Italy was the leading ally of Nazi Germany in Europe. Until the coup d’état by Marshal Pietro Badoglio in July 1943, it had been treated by the Germans as a sovereign, independent state. Already in
Mein Kampf Hitler
had pointed to fascist Italy (along with Great Britain) as a natural ally for Germany against French hegemonic ambitions.
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He greatly admired Mussolini as the founder of fascism and had learned much from him about techniques of mass mobilization. It was from Mussolini that he adopted in the early 1920s the use of uniforms, colored shirts, and the extended-arm salute. Paramilitary methods, shock troops (
fascio di combattimento
), the Führerprinzip, militarism, extreme nationalism, and militant anti-Bolshevism were innovations of the Italian fascist program, adapted by the Nazis for their own needs.
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Both fascist and Nazi ideologies exalted youth, activism, and movement for its own sake. They thundered against the decadence of a moribund bourgeois era while declaring a war to the death against Marxism. Both looked back to myths of power and imperial greatness—Hitler to the German Reich and Mussolini to ancient Rome. But it was Mussolini who was the first to pioneer a new Caesarism based on mass politics and spectacular ritualized displays of power.