Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940-1944 (9 page)

PART II

C
RACKING
D
OWN

(June 1941–November 1942)

Chapter 6

T
HE
H
OSTAGE
C
RISIS

A
profound surprise.” That is how the Prefect of Police summarized reactions in Paris to the arrival of the astounding news on 22 June 1941 of Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union. Until that date the internal situation in occupied France had been dominated by the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, which dictated a measured restraint on the part of French Communists in their opposition to the Occupation. Now all previous bets were off.
¹
It did not take long to detect signs of increased Communist activity, especially in the traditional working-class strongholds in the eastern suburbs. Such reports were soon gathered from Ivry-sur-Seine, the Porte des Lilas (seven arrests), and the Porte d—Aubervilliers (apprehension of ten “notorious Communists”). After the first surprise, it seemed obvious that a concerted pro-Soviet campaign was commencing that encouraged sabotage and other “brutal action,” including labor strikes in the capital.
²

The first reaction of the German military administration may be described as moderate in theory but efficient in practice. General instructions came directly from the OKW's Wilhelm Keitel in Berlin. The Occupation should respond with firmness, he wrote, but its tactics must be weighed in light of relations with the French that might be harmed by “an excessively rigorous procedure.” It would therefore be mandatory to consult with Berlin before taking any extreme retaliatory measures, namely, executions, which might be thought necessary.
³
Arrests for suspicious activity in the streets of Paris meanwhile continued at an accelerated pace: in all, 3,052 were recorded during the first month after the beginning of the Russo-German War. Of these, by the end of July 1941, twenty-two French civilians had received death sentences.
⁴
A spike in acts of sabotage was likewise evident. The total of such incidents reached nearly 3,000 by early August and was listed as exactly 3,250 by the end of that month.
⁵

The first bold act of open defiance took place on 14 August 1941, when a Communist manifestation trooped along the Right Bank boulevards between the Place de la République and the Porte St. Denis. A messy brawl erupted at the Porte St. Martin, pitting the police against about eighty French youths, of which six were taken into custody. Within hours, a similar scuffle ensued near the Gare St. Lazare, where seventeen were detained, and another took place at the metro station Barbès-Rochechouart near Pigalle. In the latter instance, the crowd of demonstrators, who were brandishing at least a dozen tricolor flags, was estimated at one hundred. As usual, accounts of these outbursts varied. Whereas French police officials tended to downplay such melees, Helmut Knochen's report for the Gestapo called them “noteworthy.”
⁶

Indeed they were. Paris was perceptibly a city under increasing tension, and a certain strain became palpable. Otto von Stülpnagel was visibly worried and told Otto Abetz that the differing opinions within the Occupation now made it “urgently necessary” to agree about uniform procedures to deal with a possible insurrection. It was, as an administrative staff report concurred, “absolutely necessary” to restrain public demonstrations. Ominously, in a formal announcement posted throughout the city, Stülpnagel specified that any Communist activity whatever would henceforward be regarded as “abetting the enemy” (
Feindbegünstigung
) and that those found guilty must reckon with a death penalty.
⁷
On 18 August, Commandant Ernst Schaumburg issued an advisory about the methods of enforcement to be employed. Whenever possible, the French police should be utilized in the first operations of repression. Only when they were “no longer master of the situation” should German security forces be deployed. All must be prepared to use firearms if provoked, since the mere threat of drawing weapons was seldom effective. When on duty or strolling on the boulevards, German soldiers should appear only in groups, and they should in particular avoid carousing in the vicinity of Montmartre. Thus, by mid-August, German apprehensions about potential trouble in Paris had been clearly expressed, and even the most likely location of a serious incident within the city had been identified.
⁸

On 18 August, Stülpnagel departed from Paris on a brief furlough, leaving Schaumburg as customary in charge. Three days later, a German naval cadet, Alfons Moser, was shot in the back and killed at the metro Barbès-Rochechouart. What to do? Schaumburg's reaction, in the form of an official “notification” (
Bekanntmachung
), was tentative and cautious. First, any person taken prisoner by or for the German Occupation would be considered a hostage. Second, should a further fatal incident occur, a corresponding number of hostages would promptly be shot. One must be struck by two features of this announcement: that there would be no immediate reprisal, and that the number of executions, if any, was in effect left an open question. Whether Stülpnagel would have responded more forcefully or with less vagueness, had he been on duty in Paris, is of course impossible to determine.
⁹

At the same time, Schaumburg also sent a message to military headquarters in Fontainebleau in which he provided additional details on the murder of Moser but remained ambiguous about the policy to be adopted as a consequence. The number of hostages that should be executed in the future, he simply commented, must be “in accordance with the severity of the deed,” which might therefore lead to death sentences for “several Jewish-Communist leaders.”
¹⁰
Mention should be made here of a simultaneous incident at Versailles, where, during a public ceremony, both Pierre Laval and the rightist politician Marcel Déat were wounded by gunmen. Presumably, however, this was the work of anti-government conspirators and was consequently dismissed by German authorities as irrelevant to the events in Paris.
¹¹

Finally, on 28 August, after a full week had passed since the shooting near Montmartre, a headline appeared in the official German press organ in the capital, the
Pariser Zeitung
: “Three Communists Executed.” The accompanying explanation was markedly short on specifics. After the initial judgment of a French special court, the death sentences were carried out at dawn. In addition, other persons—no numbers supplied—were condemned to forced labor.
¹²
Was it at least established, then, that one German life was worth three French? Not at all, it appeared, when German naval personnel complained that their branch of service was receiving inadequate support from the military administration. The navy had in fact been promised six executions, they claimed, and their commanding officers were “most deeply disappointed.” Hence, pressure was exerted, and later requited, for the execution of more hostages.
¹³

In the meantime, Knochen's Sipo-SD department warned of “a very large increment” of Communist activity in the capital, a report confirmed by news of a second German murder victim, Ernst Hoffmann, at the Gare de l’Est on 3 September. The engine of reprisal was then revved up as thirteen more hostages were executed on 6 September at Mont Valérien, on the capital's western extremity.
¹⁴
Since Stülpnagel had returned to Paris by that time, it must be assumed that this act of a firing squad occurred with his knowledge and tacit concurrence. Nonetheless, it is notable that a French memo was circulated from the office of Werner Best to the effect that, because Communists were the putative perpetrators of most of the violent acts, it would be “unjust and regrettable” to blame the French population as a whole for the murders or to destroy innocent lives as a result.
¹⁵

Another jolt struck in mid-September. This time the operative event was a fatal attack on Captain Wilhelm Scheben, and again OKW responded directly from Berlin with a portentous message: the Führer was demanding “the most severe measures” of retaliation, since previous retributions in Paris had been unable to tamp down the random violence. In this communiqué, unmistakably, there was a scarcely veiled criticism of the Occupation's relative moderation. Yet what measures, precisely, would be deemed sufficient? Tighter curfews were announced, but that was not likely to assuage Berlin. Thus, on 20 September, twelve hostages were executed at Mont Valérien. Three days later, three more passed before a firing squad, evidently intended to placate the naval staff for the Moser murder nearly a month before.
¹⁶
The French police were also activated, and, according to a fresh set of statistics, since the invasion of Russia they had made 1,064 house searches and 195 arrests, in addition to confining 638 suspects.
¹⁷

These numbers, let it be said, are difficult to evaluate because of a failure to distinguish carefully among hostages, criminals, and political agitators. So far as can be established, more than fifty executions of French civilians were conducted between late June and the end of September. Because no more attacks on German military personnel had occurred since 16 September, an impression (false, as it proved) was created that calm had been restored and perhaps the hostage crisis resolved. The first half of October appeared to confirm that impression—until news reached Paris on 22 October that a German
Feldkommandant
had been killed in Nantes. Once more Berlin intervened. Orders from OKW were that fifty hostages were to be executed at once, and fifty more if the assassins were not captured within a few days. Manifestly appalled at this prospect, Stülpnagel was thus exposed, as he later wrote, to “the most severe pressure.” Reluctantly, he agreed to the first round of executions in Nantes. Then, two days later, reports arrived at the Hotel Majestic that a German civilian official and an army major had been murdered in Bordeaux. Stülpnagel's authority now came completely unraveled. His information was that the assassinations were the work of “small terrorist groups,” and consequently he opposed the mass execution of hostages. Yet it was he who had earlier set into motion the Occupation's hostage program and, just hours before, had already approved the elimination of the first fifty hostages for Nantes. Acutely suffering from a bad case of buyer's remorse, he could not now find reason to oppose the same drastic measures for Bordeaux, even though he found them to be “inappropriate” for the Occupation. Yet orders were orders and,
à contrecoeur
, Stülpnagel submitted.
¹⁸

Surely no less squeamish, the Vichy government could only plead for an indefinite delay of the second round of executions, as did Marshal Pétain in a personal letter to Hitler. But, acting as bureaucracies do, the military administration provided a justification to refuse, even though innocents might be put to death, with the argument that the German treatment of hostages rested on “a firmly established legal concept.”
¹⁹
For its part, the German Embassy in Paris remained unmoved, tending for once to side with Stülpnagel with the observation that harsh reprisals could be justified only if the French populace was overwhelmingly anti-German. But, Abetz contended, after the famous handshake between Hitler and Pétain at Montoire on 22 October, and in view of German military advances into the Soviet Union, that was clearly not the case. He therefore recommended a postponement in implementing death sentences for the second batch of one hundred hostages.
²⁰
There is no golden scale upon which to weigh the relative effect of Stülpnagel's protests, Pétain's pleas, and Abetz's reservations. In any event, Berlin finally relented and agreed to defer further executions to an unspecified future. With undisguised relief, Stülpnagel announced in the
Pariser Zeitung
that the planned retribution was “provisionally suspended” in order to allow the population an opportunity to assist in capturing the criminals, and he expressed the hope of the Wehrmacht that any such measures would become unnecessary.
²¹

Parenthetically, we may note a misfired trial balloon from the office of Hans Speidel, according to which the Nantes and Bordeaux attacks had actually been fomented by a small gang (“parachutists!”) trained by the British secret service , who were therefore in all probability not Communists but Gaullists. This fanciful hypothesis proved, however, to be a non-starter and was not heard again.
²²

During the months of November and December, Paris remained calm and tense. The shock produced in the capital by the sensational aftermath of events in Nantes and Bordeaux was recorded by the Prefect of Police, who confirmed that Communist activity there had “further slackened.” A strict overnight curfew remained in force, and although minor incidents of sabotage continued, no major instances of violence ensued after mid-October. Meanwhile, police activity reached a higher pitch. One razzia in St. Denis, for example, netted 117 arrests.
²³
Yet again, because the extant evidence is imperfect and fragmentary, such numbers afford only a faint reflection of the daily reality. A detailed administrative report tallied 249 death sentences between June and late November 1941, of which 108 executions resulted. However, it is impossible to disaggregate statistics of the hostage victims from others. This confusion was compounded by another box score of Jews arrested and condemned, as well as the deportation of persons to the East, to be considered subsequently. The only absolute certainty was that the German military administration continued to gather lists of hostages with no respite in sight.
²⁴