Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940-1944 (8 page)

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Authors: Allan Mitchell

Tags: #History, #Europe, #France, #Germany, #Military, #World War II

BOOK: Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940-1944

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Stepping back from the details to gaze across the scene in Paris, one can observe that an unspoken collusion had formed between the German Embassy and the Gestapo. It is no surprise that the most fanatical voices of the Occupation were to be heard at Sipo-SD headquarters in the Avenue Foch. Yet the Embassy, when it came to formulating policy toward Jews in France, was scarcely less strident. Abetz's original three proposals in August 1940 remained the basis of German designs, and in the spring of 1941 he and his staff continued to amplify them. On 24 March, the Ambassador's first assistant in the Rue de Lille, Rudolf Schleier, applauded the commencement of measures against foreign Jews and added ominously: “French Jews should later follow.”
¹⁹Within a few days, Abetz received a visit from Xavier Vallat, the newly appointed chief of the CGQJ. The two men could agree, because of demurrals from Vichy, that it would be necessary to proceed cautiously with any new anti-Semitic legislation. But Abetz urged persistence in hastening the detention of all Jews in France and explicitly asked his interlocutor to prepare their emigration. Vallat promised to comply.
²⁰

Another perceptible development in early 1941 was the erosion of reluctance in the Hotel Majestic. Stülpnagel was no hard-bitten Nazi. If he was not totally unaffected by racial ideology, that mattered far less to him than the maintenance of military discipline and public order. Yet the repeated waves of imprecation from Berlin and the steady undertow of anti-Jewish sentiment within his own administration in Paris were bound to eat away the foundations of his resolve. He trusted no one more than Best, whose attitude was finally less enigmatic than sometimes assumed. The day after Abetz's talks with Vallat, Best suggested to his superior that it would be advisable to negotiate directly with the CGQJ on the progressive elimination of non-French Jews and the planning for “a later emigration also of Jews with French citizenship.” Furthermore, as a long-committed SS officer, Best did not lack a clear vision of the ultimate purpose—“the complete
Entjudung
of Europe.” Whatever his reservations, Stülpnagel was forced to watch affairs spinning out of his control.
²¹

On 10 May 1941, precisely a year after the opening of military hostilities against France, the German Occupation released its third formal decree on the Jewish question (after those of 27 September and 18 October 1940). Its purpose was to emphasize the importance of moving more quickly with the program of Aryanization. Essentially, there was nothing new in this message, apart from its obvious sense of urgency. No later than mid-October 1940, apparently taking a cue from Hermann Göring, Brauchitsch had demanded more alacrity in evicting Jews from the French economy. He complained to Stülpnagel about the slow pace in Paris and requested that the MBF take a personal interest in the matter.
²²In November, Stülpnagel, in turn, passed that order on to Best with specific instructions “to end definitively the Jewish influence in the French economy.” But he added a significant caveat: every effort should be made to ensure that businesses continued to function without work stoppages or massive layoffs.
²³The result was a discernible ambiguity in practice. If the theory was “in no case” to retain Jews in important economic positions, their immediate dismissal should be demanded only “insofar as possible.” This implied that some Jews might still be retained as technical advisers or in subaltern posts. Stülpnagel's staff warned that a radical solution for Aryanization might otherwise cause “great economic dislocation.”
²⁴

Thus, as dozens of individual dossiers confirmed, progress (as measured by the Occupation) was agonizingly slow. Records of these complex transactions were kept in excruciating detail—now available in kilometers of microfilm—by the office of the Service du Contrôle des Administrateurs Provisoires (SCAP), an agency designated to execute German policy and intended to be its public face. These documents showed a growing frustration among Occupation officials with incomplete and often faulty reporting, despite their firm instructions that Aryanization must be pursued “until the Jewish influence is completely eliminated.”
²⁵It was this bothersome irritation with French bureaucratic meandering that led in the spring of 1941 to the third German decree and to the formation of the CGQJ, into which SCAP was then absorbed.
²⁶

Vallat's entrance onto the scene soon proved, however, to be a huge disappointment. In conference with German military commanders in early April, after consulting with the Sipo-SD, he confessed some confusion about the real locus of German authority. Stülpnagel's response was that he, as MBF, was “exclusively” in charge of Jewish affairs and that Vallat should report only to Best—a claim that could not fail to ring somewhat hollow in a city where stories about Stülpnagel's loss of grip were already widely circulated. Moreover, Vallat repeatedly cautioned against an excess of anti-Semitic zeal, stressing that the Occupation needed to respect a traditional French sense of justice and to honor with exceptions the special status of Jewish war veterans. Clearly, such qualifications fell short of the stated intention of German personnel overseeing the CGQJ to achieve “complete Aryanization.”
²⁷

Following Ranke's famous dictum about every epoch being “immediate to God,” more than one historian has remarked that, in order to analyze events, it is often better to ignore their outcome. Improbable though that may be, there is surely reason to evaluate the first phase of the German Occupation of Paris without reference to the known tragedies that were to ensue. When doing so, three generalizations stand out. The first is that the quotidian circumstances of Paris in the opening months of the Occupation were peculiar to that moment and far different from what they were to become. A single incident in the autumn of 1940 is perfectly adequate to illustrate the point. On an August evening, a gang of French youth cast rocks through the windows of nine Jewish shops on the Champs-Élysées. Detained by the police and charged with a misdemeanor, the boys explained that they were members of the Gardes Françaises, whose prime objective was the complete elimination of Jews from the French economy. An investigation by the Gestapo concluded that this had indeed been a “purely French action.”
²⁸However, that view was contradicted by the military administration, which discovered that the Germans, if not directly involved in the action, had been informed about it and, in fact, had provided office space for the group. Should the matter come before the French courts, therefore, the German role in the affair would unavoidably become known. Hence, there would be no trial and no conviction, and the youths were surreptitiously released.
²⁹This episode was characteristic of the caution and confusion with which the Germans were treating the Jewish question before June 1941. They were still inordinately concerned about the reputation of the military administration and careful not to tread too heavily on the feelings of the French populace. The policy of the Occupation at that time was to promote Aryanization by all means, but only if it were integrated into the larger political objectives of collaboration.

The second generalization—that the internal conflicts of the Occupation were uncontainable—is also observable in that example. Whether it was political tactics or propaganda, cultural activity or economic policy, confiscation of art or Aryanization of enterprise, there was a striking lack of single purpose. Such issues were seldom assigned to one sole agency. Instead, competing interests and clashing priorities were the rule, while the somewhat hapless Stülpnagel vainly attempted to maintain a semblance of military order. The direct lines to Berlin seemed to extend in every direction, and the MBF and his staff became entangled in the resulting web of intrigues and in-fighting. If unity of command is the first principle of warfare, it was certainly not the guiding tenet of the German Occupation in Paris.

The third generalization is that the beginning chapters of the Occupation demonstrated that it was an inextricable part of the continuum of French history and not an altogether exceptional period to be isolated from the rest. As a political structure, the Third Republic was gone, yet many of the personalities and prerogatives lived on—starting with Pétain, Laval, Darlan, and most of the other depressing figures huddled in Vichy. As for Paris, the Germans had undeniably taken over. But they, too, were obliged to contend with the past. To be specific, if the Occupation was asked to respect an abiding French sense of justice, it could also count on some traditional French xenophobia and anti-Semitism. In regard to the latter, the problem was sometimes dealing with too much of a good thing. Throwing rocks through Jewish shop windows on the Champs-Élysées could hardly be considered a contradiction to German policy, but such public disorder did not represent the countenance that the reigning military administration wanted to present. By the summer of 1941, then, while Nazi Germany indisputably ruled Paris, the Occupation exuded something less than an aura of complete harmony.