Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940-1944 (11 page)

At the root of ambiguity was the essential, and essentially unanswerable, question of how independent the French police should be. That issue was explicitly broached in a December 1941 memo by the head of the MBF's administrative staff, Dr. Jonathan Schmid. In it, he offered the Delphic formula that French law enforcement should function with complete independence except in those cases when German interests were directly or indirectly involved.
²⁷
But how were those circumstances to be identified? A clarification would not emerge until many months later, and it came with a startling new development after the resignation of Otto von Stülpnagel. Manifestly unhappy about the disharmony and unsettled conditions in Paris, OKW in Berlin took advantage of the change in regime there to announce the appointment of a “Supreme SS and Police Leader” (
Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer
) in the person of Carl Oberg.
²⁸
A Nazi down to his polished black boots, Oberg would formally be under the MBF's administration in the Hotel Majestic. But his own office in the Boulevard Lannes and his vast responsibilities were to be in fact separate. He would preside over both the German and French police forces, participate in “all questions relevant to France's domestic political situation,” and take charge of all “retributions against criminals, Jews, and Communists.”
²⁹
Accordingly, the GFP directorate of Heinrich von Stülpnagel's command was disbanded shortly after his arrival in Paris, and the entire staff of Knochen's Sipo-SD unit came under Oberg's authority. The importance of this fresh consolidation of power in Paris was underscored through a visit to the capital by Heinrich Himmler's chief adjutant, Reinhard Heydrich, in early May 1942 (only a few weeks before the latter's assassination), when Oberg was introduced to his new surroundings and underlings. The future significance of his role was perhaps best defined by Stülpnagel, who remarked that Oberg would soon become to France what Himmler was to Germany.
³⁰

Oberg's official installation on the first day of June 1942 was accompanied by a general shake-up of the military administration. Best was relieved of his duties and made available for “special assignments.” In fact, he soon left for Denmark and was replaced by Franz Medicus. Suddenly taken ill, Schmid resigned his post, which was assumed by Dr. Elmar Michel, who also retained his command of the MBF's Economic Section.
³¹
Yet apart from Oberg himself, the most important change arguably occurred on the French side with the appointment by Vichy of a former prefect, René Bousquet, as Secretary General of the nation's police. Always in favor of more centralization, the Germans thereby obtained what they wanted: a single, ranking police official who would follow Oberg's every instruction in maintaining public order. But Bousquet likewise benefited from the bargain, he felt, because he would be allowed the latitude and independence to do so. A formal accord to that effect was reached late in that summer. As Bousquet put it, there would henceforth be a concerted effort “to reinforce and coordinate the action of the different services” so that the collaboration of French police forces with the German military administration would assume “a totally new importance.”
³²

So it did, and with devastating consequences. On 6 July 1942, a military convoy containing a thousand political prisoners, mostly Communists, left Compiègne for the East. Oberg followed shortly with a tough new policy to be enforced on hostile acts against German personnel. Namely, for the first time, he specified that “severe punishment” would be inflicted on the
family
of perpetrators if they were not apprehended within a brief period after the crime. When Bousquet questioned the wisdom of such a regulation, Oberg countered that it was decided in consultation with Stülpnagel and Abetz, and that it had the personal approval of Himmler. His orders were expressly intended to shock the French public, Oberg added, and he had reason to believe they would do so.
³³
When the insurrectionary violence nonetheless persisted, Oberg reacted without qualms. In mid-August 1942, he ordered the execution of 95 (allegedly Communist) prisoners, of which 88 were shot by firing squads at Mont Valérien. A month later he condemned another 116 to death, of which 46 also fell at Mont Valérien, the rest elsewhere in the Occupied Zone.
³⁴

Not since the opening days of the hostage crisis in the autumn of 1941 had executions on this scale occurred under the Occupation. It is obvious that the Germans were prepared neither by their military training nor by Nazi ideology for the practical problems that were entailed. The killing and disposing of so many humans proved to be a grotesque nightmare, which was rumored throughout the city and recorded by the military administration in graphic detail. Clearly, it was Oberg who took charge of the operation, and he preferred to do so without interference from Heinrich von Stülpnagel. But such on-the-job training was admittedly bound to cause “conflicts of competence,” as one German official noted, and therefore “a clarification of the limits of responsibility is eminently and immediately necessary.”
³⁵

Before the eighty-eight executions on 11 August 1942, those who carried them out had but very general guidelines. A death sentence would ordinarily be pronounced only a few hours before the event, leaving just enough time for prisoners to gather their belongings and write a few farewell notes. In provincial towns, the executions would take place near the local prison, but in Paris that was unfeasible, and the condemned would have to be gathered and transported to Mont Valérien. Once the executions had taken place, corpses had to be put in coffins and turned over to French burial officials.
³⁶
But things did not go quite as planned. Those responsible for transportation were not notified until 24 hours before the scheduled executions. Scattered as they were throughout the Paris region, prisoners had to be hastily assembled at Fort Romainville, east of Paris, whence they needed to be conducted through the capital to Mont Valérien, west of Paris. Phone connections were bad. There were not enough busses or trucks, and sufficient fuel for them was lacking. The drivers were uncertain about the routes to be taken, and the vehicles became separated, with resulting delays. There were not enough handcuffs or cords to bind the prisoners during transport or to secure them to stakes once they arrived. Coffins were too few in number, since only twenty-five were delivered (at 42 francs each) on the day of execution. The men of the Ordnungspolizei (Orpo), who were charged with organizing the firing squads, were suffering from “strained nerves” and needed to be supplied with
Schnaps
and cigarettes. Moreover, they refused to untie the corpses and place them into coffins. There were not enough disinfectants or gloves for handling the dead. A precise schedule of executions should have been provided and provisions made for disposal of the personal possessions and final writings of the victims.
³⁷

As a result of such confusions, the killing at Mont Valérien that day went on for more than four and a half hours—from 7:00 to 11:40
AM
—under the direction of an Orpo officer, Major Schütze. That same night, the bodies were loaded onto trucks and taken to the cemetery of Père Lachaise, where they were to be cremated. Unfortunately, one of the two ovens there was out of commission, so that the burning required three days to complete. Thereupon, the urns needed to be picked up and “quietly” distributed for burial in various Paris cemeteries, of which Ivry—again, to the east of the city—afforded the most available space. When, or indeed whether, the families of the deceased might be notified was a matter of dispute. Oberg's decision was that they should not be informed of the exact site of burial lest they make a memorial of the graves. Parisians nevertheless flocked to cemeteries to leave flowers and wreaths at freshly dug plots.
³⁸

More detailed guidelines were made available. All executions of males should be by firing squads, of women by beheading. Each firing squad would comprise ten men in two rows at a distance of five paces. Executions must be conducted promptly after the pronouncement of a death sentence, from which pregnant women and the mentally ill were to be exempted. The commanding officer present should decide how the prisoners were to be arranged, bound, and blindfolded. A chaplain of the prisoner's faith should be in attendance—if possible, a French-speaking German or, if not, a French cleric. While the firing squad stood at ease, a military officer should read the sentence. After the cleric spoke a word, the order to fire would be given. A medical person should confirm the death, and the corpse was then to be removed for cremation (if possible) and burial. If an execution were to be conducted at sea, the body should be pushed overboard at once.
³⁹
These details give some idea of the unexpected complications and difficulties experienced by Occupation authorities when faced with an unpleasant reality about which they were clueless. They suggested that in the event that a program of ridding occupied France of undesirables should be expanded and prolonged, some other procedures might need to be envisaged.

Another issue was raised by Bousquet on the same day, 16 September 1942, that the execution of eighty-two more
Sühnepersonen
was ordered for Paris and Bordeaux. He wanted the German military administration to concede that no persons identified and arrested by the French police would be designated for execution or deportation. The Germans received this request with due caution, noting that exceptions were always possible to any principle and that they might act otherwise if (unspecified) conditions required. It would be well in any event to keep reserves of prisoners near Paris for “unanticipated cases.” In regard to this question, a census of French prison inmates was meanwhile conducted: in twenty French detention centers, including Drancy, a total of 8,362 prisoners currently resided. This number included precisely 2,047 political prisoners (that is, presumably, Communists), 2,162 Jews, 2,169 Gypsies, 591 foreigners, 110 prostitutes, and assorted others.
⁴⁰
To this, Knochen soon added a list—without exact enumeration of their ever changing population—of German penitentiaries that included the camp at Compiègne, directly under the Sipo-SD, and the previously mentioned one at Fort Romainville, which served as a collection point of the condemned.
⁴¹

One other telling set of statistics must catch the eye. In early October 1942, Heinrich von Stülpnagel released an account of nearly a hundred executions ordered since 6 April by the German military courts (Feldkriegsgerichte), a number not to be confused with mass hostage shootings. Of these, slightly more than a third, thirty-five of ninety-four, were conducted within the jurisdiction of the Commandant of Greater Paris. But some provincial courts-martial were also quite busy: Dijon (FK 669) was responsible for three, Rouen (FK 517) for eight, and Nancy (FK 591) for twenty. Imperfect as these records may be, they show beyond question that a killing machine had been set in motion as the Occupation struggled to cope with an insurrection it could not contain.
⁴²

The extent to which the residents of Paris were aware of these facts and how they reacted to them are not subjects that allow definitive proof. Many of the events described here transpired out of sight in distant and forbidding surroundings such as Mont Valérien. Outwardly, the city appeared much the same, although a few aspects of its existence could not have escaped notice. The familiar rear-deck Parisian busses were no longer running, and the passenger use of the metro had consequently risen by 60 percent over pre-war levels. The black market was still thriving, as was the sex trade, sometimes reported in exquisite detail, such as the story of a German NCO's escapades with French women that revealed “how a soldier in the big city can lose every sense of honor.”
⁴³
The Germans were in the meantime busy with an inventory of bicycles in the capital, raising fears among Parisians that they might soon be confiscated. Danger in the city streets and bars of Paris remained a concern shared by occupiers and occupied alike, in view of which German military personnel had instructions to carry a loaded weapon at all times, even when off-duty.
⁴⁴
Yet the military administration remained convinced that the general populace displayed above all a tentativeness born of “resignation and passivity” that bordered on fatalism. Despite the many attacks and sabotages of months past, there was still no major public disturbance in sight. As one observer said it so well, only a few hours before the Allied invasion of North Africa in early November 1942, “the fear of German reprisals is greater than the courage to act.”
⁴⁵

Chapter 8

S
TRICT
C
ONTROLS AND
S
TRINGENT
Q
UOTAS

T
he relatively stable and prosperous condition of the French economy during the first phase of the Occupation did not survive the second. True, the winter of 1941–1942 was less severe in France than the year before, and the harvest from early autumn was somewhat improved. The production of potatoes, for instance, was better by a third, although still 20 percent below the pre-war norm. Disruptions and irregularities of foodstuff shipments to Paris were nevertheless evident. Rations of meat, fruit, and vegetables were reduced in October 1941. And fuel—coal, wood, electricity, and gas—was at times scarce. What good were potatoes, some Frenchwomen were heard to mutter, if there were no hot stoves to prepare them?
¹

The first serious remonstrance about “certain difficulties” in the food chain was recorded during a conference at the Hotel Majestic in the early summer of 1942. These included “completely insufficient” transportation from southern France, lack of proper security because of inadequate numbers of occupation troops, and passive resistance by French peasants when it came to provisioning the capital. Moreover, it was agreed that “a complete procurement of the necessary quantities is not possible if the requisition apparatus is composed solely of German forces. Rather, the cooperation of French government agencies is an absolute precondition.” This was to touch on the most sensitive nerve of economic collaboration: just how much could the French be squeezed before they became recalcitrant? As things stood, Pierre Laval was willing to meet German quotas for farm products, but he was asking in return certain concessions, including the reattachment of two northern departments (Nord and Pas-de-Calais) to the Occupied Zone, a reduction of daily occupation costs, and the return of POWs from German captivity. A representative of the German Ministry of Agriculture responded to this agenda by promising to submit the question to the head of the Four Year Plan, namely, Hermann Göring, with confidence that modest concessions would secure the delivery of expected food supplies.
²

Three rounds of talks ensued. First, the current French Minister of Agriculture, Gabriel Le Roy Ladurie, was called in to consult on the anticipated “difficulties of immense proportion,” especially the flagging shipments of meat to Germany.
³
Second, Laval was summoned to meet with the chief of the MBF's Economic Section, Dr. Elmar Michel. Laval stated the obvious—that France's capacity to meet agricultural quotas would depend largely on the 1942 harvest. His regime would attempt to observe the prescribed levels of rationing, Laval said, but it would be helpful if the French had greater freedom in fixing prices. That, Michel replied, was a “very delicate” question for German authorities in all of occupied Europe, although Heinrich von Stülpnagel was not personally opposed to certain increases.
⁴
Third, on one of his infrequent visits to Paris in early August, Göring conferred directly with Stülpnagel. An across-the-board 12 percent reduction in French rations had already been announced. The portly
Reichsmarschall
now insisted that it be enforced and that also newly elevated food quotas for Germany be introduced: over 2,000,000 tons of grain, 350,000 tons of meat, 300,000 tons of potatoes, 150,000 tons of vegetables, 300,000 tons of fruit, and 6,000,000 hectoliters of wine. Furthermore, Göring demanded that a plan for the fulfillment of this program be submitted to Berlin within a fortnight.
⁵

Not surprisingly, Stülpnagel and his staff were appalled at the enormity of these disconcerting instructions. Michel's office let it be known in Berlin that it “in no way approves such an absolutely inoperable plan.” Stülpnagel himself, after more consultations with the French, concluded that it was “out of the question” that they would accept the quotas, which could not be realized without further cuts in their rations, a corresponding sag in French production, and the risk of strikes by railway workers, which the Occupation would be hard pressed to contain with its “hardly sufficient” personnel. He also contacted his immediate superior, General von Brauchitsch, who agreed that hard feelings produced by excessive German requisitions might have dangerous repercussions in case of an Allied landing on the Continent. Perhaps, then, the entire issue should be reconsidered from a military standpoint.
⁶

At another high-level conference in Berlin in September, the matter was again aired, rather plaintively, by Occupation representatives from Paris, but to no avail. The quotas, they were told, must be met. A personal plea from Stülpnagel to Göring—that “the fulfillment of the total demands…is not possible”—was likewise rejected.
⁷
The floodgates were now open. Not only massive quantities of foodstuffs, but all manner of French natural resources and manufactured goods—for example, according to one reckoning in late September 1942, 55 percent of aluminum, 80 percent of magnesium, all locomotives, and countless machines—would be requisitioned for the German war economy. In textiles, France would retain only 30 percent of woolens, 16 percent of cottons, and 13 percent of linens. Food deliveries altogether were to surpass five million tons. No wonder German authorities back in Paris feared a “total collapse” of the French economy and warned Berlin of a “serious danger to the German arms industry in France.”
⁸
Here was one of the few occasions when the German Embassy in Paris fully supported the military administration. The imposition of Göring's quotas was “not possible” without sinking French rations “far below a minimum standard of living,” Otto Abetz stated, with the result that “revolts, most serious disruptions of public order, and the immediate resignation or overthrow of the existing regime would be unavoidable.”
⁹
Although these dire predictions later proved to be exaggerated, they at least illustrate once more the extent to which the perspective in Paris differed from that in Berlin.

While these tensions ran their course, problems over price fixing continued to plague the Occupation. Hypothetically, the regulation of wages and prices in Paris was administered by Jacques Barnaud, the French Minister of Economy and Finance, but the Germans had their own Price Oversight Office (Preisüberwachungsstelle), which kept a close watch. As in so many other instances, the policy was to give French officials direct responsibility, with the German military regime intervening only when their performance was unsatisfactory. This arrangement did not function particularly well. The Laval government felt hamstrung by regulations it did not actually control, and inflation was scarcely held in check. Vichy was simply told that wage increases in Paris were
verboten
. If the French needed to earn more to meet unfortunately rising prices, they could either work longer hours or volunteer for labor assignments in Germany.
¹⁰

Exact statistics are as always elusive, but the MBF's Economic Section estimated that, the black market aside, the cost of living in Paris had risen from August 1939 to July 1942 by 65.5 percent. In other words, inflation had jumped by nearly 50 percent since the beginning of the Occupation.
¹¹
One obvious problem was that the black market could not be set aside. A useful barometer with regard to its importance was the surveillance of restaurants. Basic ingredients for cuisine were both scarce and dear. By early 1942, grain prices had doubled or trebled since 1939, and the same was true of potatoes.
¹²
Since restaurants were obliged to display menus with prices outside the premises, they could easily be checked for signs of inflation. One control in October 1941 forced eight of them to close temporarily. The reasons were various: offering fish or
gigot d—agneau
on the wrong day, serving extra vegetables or some dish not on the regular menu, or allowing clients to carry off extra portions of butter. But an illegal rise in prices was the key.
¹³
A flurry of similar inspections in the spring of 1942 produced lists of eighteen and eight closures. That July,
Le
Petit Parisien
reported that six restaurants
hors classe
had to be reprimanded for violating price controls. To date, the paper said, 686 investigations of restaurants, brasseries, and bistrots had uncovered 183 infractions. A later German memo listed 53 violations alone for the fortnight from 25 June to 10 July 1942.
¹⁴
Stülpnagel was not pleased. French attempts to halt price increases had attained “no notable success,” he fumed, and allowing restaurants to ignore established limits could “no longer be permitted.”
¹⁵
One may easily guess the rest: more rigorous rules, sporadic attempts to enforce them, frequent exceptions and evasions.

No less perplexing than obtaining food supplies was the procurement of fuel, especially coal. With the national railway network operating with tolerable efficiency, and the Allied bombing campaign still in its infancy, faulty transportation was seldom advanced as a cause of shortages in the second phase of the Occupation. Two other explanations were more prominent. The first was strikes. A brief walkout of coal miners near Lille in the summer of 1941 caused a temporary shortfall in deliveries to Paris. If not crippling for the French economy, strikes were considered potentially serious enough to convene a series of conferences at the Hotel Majestic in mid-September. What should be done to avert a strike threat? Raise wages? Simply forbid any more work stoppages? Intervene “by all available means”? An eight-page memorandum from the military administration attempted to summarize the agreed-upon answers to these questions. In the event of unrest in mining regions, French police should be dispatched in an attempt to calm the situation “in an amiable manner.” That failing, they should arrest any agitators and seize the enterprise in order to isolate the insurrection. German troops might then be deployed, but only as a last resort.
¹⁶
Wildcat strikes nonetheless persisted. Yet they were neither intended nor assumed to be revolutionary or part of an organized resistance movement. Rather, they represented scattered protests over wages, hours, and rations. That being said, they were still troubling enough for Occupation authorities to worry about “an increased reserve, even rejection by the populace” of the German presence.
¹⁷

A second explanation for the fuel shortages, strange to say, was the weather. Southern France was undergoing a prolonged dry spell. In the autumn of 1941, a first alarm was sounded. Due to a lack of adequate rainfall, the amount of hydroelectric energy available was restricted, and power for the Paris region would instead need to be produced by coal. Allocations in the capital were therefore reduced for all but the absolutely essential arms industries. Furthermore, in view of this “highly critical situation,” it was announced, gas and electricity must be curtailed by 50 percent.
¹⁸
There was something almost absurd about the notion that French industrial production depended on the weather. However, consider the following sequence. In late December 1941, notice was given of a 30 percent cut in electricity starting in January 1942. At the outset of February, this order was rescinded due to unexpectedly heavy rainfall in the Midi and snow in the Alps. But at the end of that month, an “acute” coal shortage was again declared, and a 25 percent reduction for the arms industry was demanded by MBF headquarters in the Majestic. This pre-emptory order was “decisively rejected” by the Wi Rü Stab Frankreich on the grounds that it would diminish French industrial production for the Reich. After a prickly debate, the figure for energy cuts in the capital was lowered to 17 percent. In mid-March, these restrictions were also rescinded when a sudden thaw in the Alps once more increased the supply of water power.
¹⁹
Such fluctuations and indecision made statistical calculations somewhat dubious, but in general the Germans concluded that the total coal resources supplied to French industry from northern mines had dropped by about 50 percent since pre-war years, and imports from Belgium were down by the same proportion. As an unavoidable result, by the summer of 1942, monthly iron and steel production had declined from 52,000 to 28,000 tons. Perhaps the unkindest cut of all was a notification in October 1942 that in Paris warm water would henceforth be available in German military barracks only twice a week.
²⁰

The problem of sustaining the productive capacity of industry and agriculture in France, while at the same time harnessing the French economy to the German war effort through quotas and requisitions, pointed to a fundamental contradiction of German policy regarding the Occupation, which can best be illustrated by an examination of labor recruitment for the Reich. Throughout the year 1941, this program was conducted on a voluntary basis and directed by the military regime in Paris. However, the nature of the program changed drastically in 1942, when Germany's manpower requirements, after the invasion of Russia, became ever more pressing. As earlier observed, recruitment efforts began with foreign workers but increasingly shifted to French labor, particularly in the metal trades, which often accounted for more than half of the contingents exported across the Rhine. Large numbers of women laborers were also welcomed, but no children. In some cases, recruiters attempted to attract entire teams of workers from various French enterprises—what the Germans called
Firmenwerbung
. These efforts were not without success, but they manifestly failed to slake Berlin's thirst for labor, notably skilled labor, as the war continued.
²¹