Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940-1944 (3 page)

The French constabulary was much involved in two broader actions of law enforcement in the early days of the Occupation. One was the arrest and incarceration of British civilians left behind in June 1940, mostly in Paris, while their troops were hastily evacuated during the disastrous military operations that ended on the beaches at Dunkerque. A German police report in early August listed 662 English subjects who had been jailed at Fresnes, just south of Paris. Other prisoners of various types were meanwhile being held on the fringes of the capital at the former tuberculosis sanatorium of Aincourt, also at Clairvaux and Fort Romainville, and in downtown Paris at the Centre des Tourelles.
¹³
A second category of special note was composed of Communists, who were described on police blotters as “active” and whose agitation was “ever increasing.” These terms were relative, however, and one military staff memo suggested that the populace of Paris was in fact astonished that the Germans were not reacting more harshly to repress them.
¹⁴
With the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 still in force, Occupation authorities were apparently content to leave such measures to the French, and the Prefect of Police, as always prodded from above, dutifully began to keep a regular box score of persons arrested and imprisoned. The count reached exactly 988 by 1 December 1940 and more than 1,700 by 20 February 1941, and was to exceed 2,400 by late June 1941.
¹⁵
Yet such statistics must be treated with some skepticism, since they were compiled by French police officials eager to ward off criticism by the Germans that they were performing with inadequate zeal. To evaluate these figures properly, one would need to know much more about who was apprehended, why, and to what effect. How were prisoners actually charged? What was their punishment, if any? When were they released? These unanswered questions left ample ambiguity about the actual role of French police and the extent of German oversight. One conclusion nonetheless remains clear: the permanent lack of sufficient German personnel made collaboration between occupiers and occupied a necessity. Without it, circumstances in Paris and the rest of the Occupied Zone would have been far removed from the
Ruhe und Ordnung
prized among Nazi Germany's top priorities in France.
¹⁶

In this context, it is appropriate to record the first mention of the word “hostages” (
Geiseln
) within the German military administration. This tender subject was initially broached in a long memorandum by Alfred von Streccius on 12 September 1940. At its origin were a few incidents in August when German guards were personally attacked in Paris, during one of which three were wounded by gunfire in the vicinity of the Bois de Boulogne. In response, German authorities threatened “measures of retaliation” (
Vergeltungsmassnahmen
) without specifying what was thereby intended. Certainly, one idea discussed was the detention of French civilians who would be made available for public retribution in case of recurring violence. It was this notion that Streccius now sought to define. The selection of hostages, he wrote, must be conducted with the “greatest reserve” out of consideration for a populace with whom the Occupation wished to collaborate. Those chosen as hostages should consequently have an “especially close solidarity” with the presumed criminals, that is, they should come from the same socio-economic group or political affiliation (a transparent allusion to Communist sympathizers in the working class). In all cases, alone as Chief of the Military Administration, Streccius would decide on any possible sentence for the execution of prisoners. Fortunately, during the initial stage of the Occupation, the occasion did not arise.
¹⁷
The only other notable reference to hostages at that time came in mid-October when the German Embassy informed Berlin that it had requested the Gestapo to detain fifty French Freemasons, just in case. But this measure did not conform to the precise terms of the previous Streccius memo, and nothing further came of it.
¹⁸

In the vocabulary of the early Occupation, another common term became current: “resistance” (
Widerstand
). Its usage in the autumn of 1940 was at first in loose reference to scattered gangs or groups in unoccupied France, then eventually to those in the Occupied Zone as well. Not until early February 1941 was there explicit mention in Sipo-SD reports of a French “Resistance movement” (
Widerstandsbewegung
) that merited a capital letter. This expression, however, was usually reserved for irregular Gaullist cells detected in such provincial towns as Dijon, Nancy, and Reims. There was no hint of large dissident organizations in Paris despite continued Communist activity there and the mounting number of arrests by French and German police.
¹⁹

In all of this commotion, it is striking that the SS and other German security officials managed to maintain a low profile. There are several explanations. For one, Stülpnagel was determined to preserve military discipline and prestige, often repeating that he did not intend to allow France to become another Poland. For another, the ranks of the Sipo-SD were seriously understaffed and were at first headed by a scholarly young officer, Helmut Knochen, who regarded his assignment to be mostly information gathering and who thus accepted a modest role subordinate to his august superiors at the Hotel Majestic. Perhaps most significantly, as mentioned, the situation in Paris and in France altogether was still generally calm, without the bloodshed that was to occur in the summer of 1941 after the German invasion of Russia, an event that would mark the opening of a second phase of the Occupation.
²⁰

For the time being, in short, the Occupation seemed to have everything in hand. Relations with the French police went from “correct” to “painfully correct.” The criminal police of Paris received special praise for their effort “to execute orders of the German military administration promptly and thoroughly.”
²¹
Among them was the duty of tracking down information provided through “denunciations” (
délations
), frequently anonymous handwritten notes that today choke the archives, in which one French citizen seeking advantage, employment, or revenge tipped off police authorities about some alleged impropriety of another.
²²
In the meantime, individual arrests and razzias continued. Of the latter, the most extensive in Paris were those of late August, early October, and mid-December 1940 in which hundreds were taken into custody.
²³
Another public campaign, at German insistence, was the rapid removal of Communist graffiti (such as the hammer and sickle), scrawled signs of “V” for victory, and Gaullist crosses of Lorraine. For the most part, the Germans opted to push the French police into action and, as Werner Best described it, to oversee “discreetly” the operations that unfolded.
²⁴
But, if veiled, the iron fist of the Occupation was omnipresent. After an untoward fracas occurred on the day of Jeanne d—Arc, 11 May 1941, Commandant Schaumburg announced in no uncertain terms: “I do not intend to tolerate a repetition.” He thereupon issued instructions that French police should henceforth quash any public disorder with necessary force, including the use of weapons. No person arrested by the French, moreover, should be released without Schaumburg's explicit permission.
²⁵

Like his assistant Schaumburg, Stülpnagel also attempted in the spring of 1941 to buttress his own administrative authority. Shortly after his formal designation as MBF, he issued two sets of policy guidelines. The first delineated the precise duties to be allocated to German police forces, the Sipo-SD, namely, the surveillance of “Jews, Communists, emigrants, [Masonic] lodges, and churches.” In addition, the Gestapo should “secure” valuable documents in libraries or archives and throttle any anti-German political activity by Freemasons and the clergy. All of which was to be coordinated with the German Counterespionage Section (Abwehr), housed in the Hotel Lutétia on the Left Bank, along with the law enforcement agents of the GFP, who were patrolling Paris in mufti. Supervision of the French police would remain under the MBF's administrative staff. These details suggested that all police matters would be directed by the military command in Paris rather than from Berlin.
²⁶
The second decree, thirteen pages long, outlined Stülpnagel's policy regarding hostages—or, in official language, “atonement measures” (
Sühnemassnahmen
)—that would be enforced on the French population in cases of major sabotage. In most regards, these guidelines closely followed those already drafted months before by General von Streccius. But Stülpnagel's version was much more emphatic that German retaliation for acts of violence would be conducted with “
all severity
.” He also shifted somewhat the definition of hostages, who originally were to have a similar social or political affiliation with the perpetrators. Instead, hostages would be selected according to geographic proximity—“the populace at the scene of the crime or in the immediate vicinity.” Therewith Stülpnagel hoped to place responsibility more obviously in the hands of the local citizenry, “
who must thus in every instance be
publicly threatened
” with retaliation. Although he repeated Streccius's caveat that the “greatest reserve” should always be observed in the choice of hostages, with this announcement Stülpnagel openly associated himself with a policy that was later to be his undoing.
²⁷

Meanwhile, Stülpnagel's firm assertion of his preeminent right to govern in the Occupied Zone brought him increasingly into conflict with the German ambassador to France, Otto Abetz. Fluent in French, married to a French woman, and long a proponent of Franco-German rapprochement, Abetz was an ideal advocate for the vaunted cause of collaboration. At first only a staff member in the Hotel Majestic, he was elevated to ambassadorial rank by Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in early August 1940 and moved to the Rue de Lille. There the German Embassy soon became a Left Bank counterweight to the Stülpnagel-Schaumburg regime across the Seine. It was Abetz's contention that his assignment, blessed by the Foreign Office in Berlin and by the Führer himself, was to deal with all matters political in France, whereas Stülpnagel's concern and competence were strictly military in nature. Alas, this view did not sit well in the Majestic, where there was scarce inclination to make fine distinctions between politics and military administration. Harsh words ensued on both sides in early April 1941, until Abetz finally announced that it was “purposeless” to pursue the issue any further.
²⁸
A fortnight later, however, Stülpnagel attempted to resolve the question, not without more recriminations, by concluding that he would henceforth handle all military affairs; should they contain a political aspect, the Embassy would be duly informed. No reply was forthcoming from Abetz until 5 May, when he declared that he was in “complete agreement” and that the debate was after all “totally inconsequential.” These categorical phrases very poorly rendered the ambiguity or the outright hostility that existed at the heart of the Occupation and that would fester until its final days.
²⁹

Yet by the beginning of the summer of 1941, Paris was quiet. The Germans could congratulate themselves on having established a military administration that, although admittedly shorthanded, was functioning efficiently enough to maintain public order in the city and its suburbs. Partly this control had been accomplished through measured doses of force coupled with a latent threat of more severe measures, if required. A system of military tribunals was created in Paris and the provinces of the Occupied Zone, and it was known that on various occasions they had ordered the execution both of German soldiers (usually charged with desertion) and of French civilians who had been caught possessing arms, distributing enemy propaganda, or committing acts of sabotage. Even listening to broadcasts of foreign radio stations carried a possible death sentence.
³⁰
The consequence was the start of another box score. A staff report of the military administration in early March 1941 listed eighteen death sentences for French civilians and three for German soldiers; a month later another added, respectively, eight and two. But not all such judgments resulted in executions, and one study of this question has concluded that only fourteen Frenchmen were put to death at the order of German military tribunals before the beginning of June 1941.
³¹
Complaints and pleas by French officials to the Armistice Commission at Wiesbaden were of no effect in deterring the military courts under the Commandant of Greater Paris from meting out justice as they saw fit. Consequently, jails and prisons began to fill up, and more were required. Most notorious among them in the vicinity of Paris was a facility near a railway stop at Drancy on the city's northern edge. There a large tenement complex, shaped like a horseshoe, was confiscated by the Germans and converted into what was at first euphemistically called a “prisoner assembly center” (
Gefangenensammelsstelle
) or “internment camp” (
Interniertenlager
). As if it were too crude for Paris, the term “concentration camp” (
Konzentrationslager
or KZ) was for the time being avoided—although it was meanwhile used, for example, to designate a similar penitentiary at Besançon. One can only observe that reality, neither for the first time nor the last, far surpassed official rhetoric.
³²

Chapter 2

R
ULES AND
R
EGULATIONS

T
he German presence changed the appearance of Paris. After nearly a century since Baron Haussmann's rebuilding of the city, during which time thousands of private dwellings were heated with bituminous coal and few edifices were cleaned, the capital had a general pallor of dull gray—appropriate, it seemed, for the period of Occupation. Otherwise, much was different. Most conspicuous to the visitor were perhaps the thickets of black-and-white German direction signs on every street corner, pointing the way to this or that military post. Nor to be overlooked were huge banners, hanging from the façade of the National Assembly building and the Eiffel Tower, with their block letters: “DEUTSCHLAND SIEGT AN ALLEN FRONTEN” (Germany is everywhere victorious). There were wooden or metal barriers and hundreds of sandbags strewn in many of the streets, enabling the Germans to cordon off protective zones around hotels and public buildings. Those obstacles quickly became so numerous, in fact, that orders were issued to remove some of them “so that the impression of the urban space will not thereby be disturbed.”
¹
But Parisians could scarcely avoid the sight of dozens of swastika flags throughout the city or the groups of uniformed soldiers roaming its boulevards. Moreover, the passing traffic looked different. Bicycles were everywhere. Interwar Paris had been crazy about automobiles, but now they were mostly gone, except for official German military vehicles. There were also fewer busses running, so that patronage of the subway system rose suddenly by 25 percent to well over two million passengers a day.
²
In the inner city, around the Place de la Concorde, everything came to a stop at dawn and dusk to allow passage of an ostentatious parade of German troops and the changing of guards at the main military command post (
Hauptwache
) on the corner of the Rue de Rivoli and the Rue de Castiglione, near the Hotel Meurice where the Commandant resided. Another major transformation occurred at night through a mandatory blackout. Paris was no longer the city of light.
³

The first and most pressing problem of the Occupation was to house all of the German military and civilian personnel who had flooded into the twenty urban
arrondissements
of Paris and the outlying
banlieue.
The obvious solution was to confiscate or construct barracks for the troops and to requisition hotels for officers with their staffs. A primitive telephone directory of the military administration was issued on 21 June 1940. It was largely a listing of the city's fanciest hotels, fabled names like the Majestic, Meurice, and Lutétia, as well as the Crillon, Raphael, George V, and so forth. These were ideal facilities, providing bedrooms, restaurants, bars, and office space, all with impeccable service at French expense. According to the terms of the armistice, the French agreed to pay daily a tidy sum of 20 million German marks—that is, 400 million French francs—to cover the costs of the Occupation. During the next four years, therefore, German officials would lead a charmed life in the most comfortable and elegant surroundings imaginable.
⁴

In the first stage of the Occupation, at least, life for the common soldiers was doubtless less princely but hardly less exciting. German records leave no question that there was a great deal of drinking and whoring, despite explicit orders to the contrary. From Fontainebleau, General von Brauchitsch reminded all officers that they were to be “exemplary representatives of the German army” and that he would therefore expect of them an “iron discipline.” This message was passed on down the line. Troops were instructed to observe a model behavior: “every single soldier” would be required to display “the sharpest discipline, exemplary conduct, and enthusiasm for the duties of security and occupation.”
⁵
When walking in the streets, uniformed personnel were prohibited from smoking or loosening their tie. They should observe all French traffic signs and signals at crosswalks. Speed limits were posted (and often ignored) for Paris: 40 kilometers an hour by day, 20 by night.
⁶
Military persons were forbidden at first to enter French cinemas and were restricted to special
Soldatenkinos
in the inner city. True, restaurants and cafés were another matter. Yet even there regulations applied. Soldiers were confined, like French civilians, to ordering solely three-course meals, and they were warned about illegal cocaine sales at neighborhood bars.
⁷

Ideally, military authorities would have wished nothing better than a blanket policy of non-fraternization, but enforcement was impossible. Consequently, before long, the Occupation had created a maze of social restrictions and prohibitions—in sum, an elaborate new public etiquette. There would be no swimming in the Seine, no dancing in public, no singing in the streets, no horse riding in the Bois de Boulogne (to avoid “grotesque scenes” there by the untutored), no purchases of pornography, and certainly no association with “black and Jewish women” (
Negerinnen und Jüdinnen
), both because such contacts were an offense against the Reich's racial laws and because they were simply “unworthy of a German soldier.”
⁸
Also, military persons were discouraged from frequenting French shops (although many did) and from picking up “collectibles.” Detailed instructions concerning “spoils of war” (
Kriegsbeute
) were sent from Berlin by Field Marshal Keitel himself. In principle, he noted, everything that was portable could be so classified: gold, weapons, horses, etc. Yet they must be seized only by the state, not by individuals. Plundering, apart from items of urgent military necessity, was forbidden. To be sure, soldiers might obtain souvenirs of little or no monetary worth without official approval, but they must not steal any valuable property.
⁹
Nor was hoarding (“as has happened”) to be tolerated. Whenever possible, shopping should be done at German military department stores and liquor outlets. Organized bus tours in the capital would care for visiting troops, who were deposited at special military boutiques near the Bois de Boulogne to make any desired purchases before leaving the city. When in the capital, soldiers naturally wanted to explore and carouse, despite being told that such behavior was “strictly forbidden.” One junior officer complained that these restrictions created an “impossible circumstance” and requested that more free time be accorded for strolling and shopping. Military personnel stationed in Paris were meanwhile urged to spend their time at
Soldatenheime
, in effect, army clubhouses where they could find newspapers, snacks, and parlor games to play.
¹⁰

But, understandably, some men had other ideas. They moved about freely in Paris, frequently making use of the metro to do so. It was thus a common experience for French civilians literally to rub shoulders with German soldiers during a subway ride. Reserving first-class carriages for Germans (“ABTEIL FÜR DEUTSCHE”) did not entirely solve the problem of close quarters at rush hour. The French especially objected to young German passengers in uniform occupying seats normally reserved for the elderly, the handicapped, or pregnant women. While recognizing the justice of that complaint, Commandant Ernst Schaumburg was nonetheless firm: “In general, the director of the metro has been advised that all German military personnel have priority over the French.” Here a single sentence unmistakably spoke volumes.
¹¹

German soldiers also went to brothels. Indeed, from beginning to end, prostitution was one of the Occupation's insoluble problems. A list of forbidden brothels had been circulated in late June 1940, along with an admonition that most French whores carried venereal disease. In mid-July more than 300 restaurants and 750 hotels were declared off limits because of “wild” prostitution. Then, during the months of that autumn, several notifications of brothels approved for German troops appeared. At first more than thirty were so designated, a number that was later winnowed down to seventeen in the inner city of Paris and seven in the suburbs.
¹²
Countless reports later conceded that these restrictions were rarely observed. For example, in early November three cafés in the Boulevard de Clichy were proscribed due to the presence of prostitutes, pimps, and drugs. A fortnight later, the Hotel Fairyland (sixty-four rooms) at the nearby Place Blanche was also sanctioned because of an altercation there between soldiers and shady women. In December, a nightclub next to the more decorous Moulin Rouge came under the same order. Such instances, among many others, were sufficient to preserve the already established international reputation of the area around the Place Pigalle.
¹³

To control all of this sexual enthusiasm was well beyond the capacity of Occupation authorities. They did appoint a “morality commission” (
Sittenkommissariat
) for the city, which ordered French police to close down 300 locales that allegedly had “colored” (
farbige
) or Jewish owners and guests.
¹⁴
They also sent patrols to some of the more disreputable Parisian hotels, where it was confirmed that soldiers were taking prostitutes to their rooms. The German Commandant let it be known that this practice, if unchecked, would be “damaging in the highest degree to the reputation of the army” and that those guilty would receive “severe punishment.”
¹⁵
Yet the truth remained that the sex business was thriving in Paris and that police raids on hotels and “houses” were ineffective in containing it. Alarmingly, as a consequence, measures to combat the spread of venereal disease were “practically unenforceable,” as the army's chief staff physician admitted, since it was simply impossible for German doctors to examine every prostitute in Paris. The matter would have to be left to the French.
¹⁶

By no means was this the Occupation's only unresolved issue. Another was the enforcement of a curfew in the entire Occupied Zone, which was thought a suitable means to curtail untoward activity at night. But its application proved to be vexing and variable. In the first place, all clocks in occupied France had to be set to German time. Rural dwellers were required to be in their homes by 9:00 PM, whereas in cities the curfew hour would be fixed by each local military commander. Initially, that limit was put at midnight for Paris, with restaurants and cinemas forced to close at least a half hour earlier in order to allow enough time for guests to return to their residence to meet the deadline. This rule was later tightened to 11:00 PM but then relaxed once more to midnight.
¹⁷
The ensuing confusion was manifest, compounded by various exceptions and violations too numerous to count. Repeatedly, there were reports of both German soldiers and French civilians on the streets after midnight, and yet “an intervention by the French police,” one report read, “was nowhere to be observed.” In part, this indiscipline was encouraged by the blackout regulations forbidding public lighting or open fires after dark. Hence, it was relatively easy to avoid detection. As usual, French police were instructed to exercise “strict control” of non-compliance, and placards were mounted throughout the city with a warning that violations would be “most harshly punished.” But neither uniformity nor regularity was ever achieved, and the question of a curfew remained a source of irritation for everyone concerned.
¹⁸

Even the most harmless forms of public comportment in Paris could be a headache for the Occupation. It must be recalled that many of the occupying troops were young boys far from home who were dazzled by the big city and who harbored no hostile or haughty attitude toward its citizens. The report by a Lieutenant Dietsch to his military superiors in November 1940 described a Catholic mass in the cathedral of Notre Dame at which about twenty German soldiers were seated in the congregation among French worshippers. Either they did not realize that such commingling was forbidden, Dietsch remarked, or else they were knowingly violating army regulations. “A sense of nationality seems to escape these soldiers altogether,” he concluded.
¹⁹
At the same time, French youth also presented difficulties. Particularly bothersome for the police was the rowdy behavior of audiences at Parisian cinemas. Packed together, seated in the dark, they would emit “loud whistles” during newsreels at the appearance of Hitler or Göring, and there was “strong applause” for scenes of destruction caused in Germany by British bombers. On one occasion, English soldiers were shown on the screen singing “It's a Long Way to Tipperary,” whereupon about fifty voices joined in the chorus, which ended with vigorous clapping and cries of “Vive l’Angleterre.”
²⁰
The Germans were eager to quell such outbursts and issued orders through the Prefecture of Police that movie theater managers, at the first sign of disorder, should turn on the house lights. If the trouble continued, the cinema was to be emptied and, if necessary, closed. Strict enforcement in this case did eventually achieve some success. By the summer of 1941, restrictions were lifted and Parisians could once again watch newsreels in a fully darkened auditorium.
²¹