Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (162 page)

Ophuls’ film, a documentary about the wartime occupation of Clermont Ferrand in central France, was based on interviews with French, British and German subjects. There was almost nothing in it about the Holocaust and not much about Vichy: its theme was the widespread venality and daily collaboration of the war years: Ophuls was peering behind the self-serving post-war story of resistance. But even this was too much for the authorities in the last year of De Gaulle’s presidency. And not just the authorities: when the film was finally released two years later, not on national television but in a small cinema in Paris’s
Quartier Latin,
one middle-aged woman was heard to comment, upon exiting the cinema: ‘Shameful—but what do you expect? Ophuls is Jewish, isn’t he?’

It is a point of some note that in France, uniquely, the breakthrough into a more honest engagement with wartime history was the work of
foreign
historians, two of whom—Eberhard Jäckel in Germany and Robert Paxton in the US, both of whose major books were published between the end of the Sixties and the mid-Seventies—were the first to use German sources to demonstrate how much of Vichy’s crimes were undertaken at French initiative. This was not a subject that any native-born scholar had felt comfortable addressing: thirty years after the Liberation of France, national feelings were still acutely sensitive. As late as 1976, on learning the details of an exhibition planned to memorialize French victims at Auschwitz, the
Ministère des Anciens Combattants
(Ministry of Veterans’ Affairs) requested certain changes—the names on the list ‘lacked a properly French resonance’”
⁴¹²
.

As so often in France in those years, such sentiments probably had more to do with wounded pride than with unadorned racism. As recently as 1939, France had been a major international power. But in three short decades it suffered a shattering military defeat, a demeaning occupation, two bloody and embarrassing colonial withdrawals, and (in 1958) a regime change in the form of a near-coup. La Grande Nation had accumulated so many losses and humiliations since 1914 that the compensatory propensity to assert national honour on every possible occasion had become deeply ingrained. Inglorious episodes—or worse—were best consigned to a memory-hole. Vichy, after all, was not the only thing that the French were in a hurry to put behind them—no-one wanted to talk about the ‘dirty wars’ in Indo-China and Algeria, much less the torture practised there by the army.

De Gaulle’s departure changed little in this respect, even though a younger generation of Frenchmen and -women showed scant interest in national glory and had no personal investment in the myths surrounding France’s recent history. In coming years the French undoubtedly became more aware of the Holocaust and sensitive to Jewish suffering in general—in part thanks to the outrage that followed De Gaulle’s notorious press conference of November 27th 1967, in the aftermath of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, when the French President referred to Jews as ‘a people sure of themselves and domineering’. And the 1985 documentary film
Shoah
, by the French director Claude Lanzmann, had a dramatic impact upon French audiences, despite (or perhaps because of) being concerned almost exclusively with the extermination of Jews in the East.

But even though French historians—following in the wake of their foreign colleagues—were now establishing beyond question the overwhelming responsibility of France’s wartime rulers for the fate of Jews deported from French soil, the official French stance never varied. From Georges Pompidou (president from 1969 to 1974) through Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (1974-1981) and on to François Mitterrand (1981-1995), the line remained the same: whatever was done under or by the Vichy regime was the affair of Vichy. Vichy may have taken place in France and been the work of certain Frenchmen. But Vichy was an authoritarian parenthesis in the history of the French Republic. Vichy, in other words, was not ‘France’, and thus France’s public conscience was clear.

President Mitterrand, the last French head of state to experience World War Two as an adult (he was born in 1916), had special reason to maintain this Jesuitical distinction. A former Vichyite civil servant, Mitterrand built his subsequent political career in large measure by obscuring the compromises and ambiguities of his own biography and by projecting those ambiguities onto the country at large. He studiously avoided any reference to Vichy on public occasions; and while he was never reluctant to speak out about the Holocaust in general—whether in Jerusalem in 1982 or at home on the fiftieth anniversary of the July 1942 round-up of 12,884 Parisian Jews—he never let slip any suggestion that this was an affair in which France had debts to pay.

The taboo that Mitterrand enforced, embodied and would surely have taken to his grave was finally broken (as so often in this matter) by a series of trials. In 1994, after nearly fifty years in hiding, Paul Touvier—an activist in Vichy’s wartime Milice—was caught and brought to trial for the murder of seven French Jews in June 1944 near Lyon. In himself Touvier was unimportant: a cog in the Vichy machinery and a collaborator of Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo head in Lyon who had been captured and tried in 1987. But Touvier’s trial—and the evidence that came out concerning the Vichy authorities’ collaboration with the Gestapo and their role in the deportation and murder of Jews—served as a kind of
ersatz
for other trials that never happened: notably that of René Bousquet, the senior police administrator at Vichy. The prosecution of Bousquet, who in 1942 personally negotiated with the German authorities for the delivery of Jews, might have provided France with an occasion to confront the truth about Vichy. And not just Vichy, for Bousquet had lived unscathed for many decades in post-war France, protected by friends in very high places—including Mitterrand himself. But before he could be brought to trial Bousquet was conveniently assassinated (by a ‘lunatic’) in June 1993.

In the wake of Touvier’s condemnation, and in the absence of Bousquet, the French judiciary at last found the courage (after Mitterrand’s death) to inculpate, arrest and prosecute another major figure, Maurice Papon. A sometime government minister and police chief of Paris under De Gaulle, Papon had been employed as secretary-general of the Bordeaux administrative region during the war. This was a purely bureaucratic post, and his stint in Bordeaux in the service of Pétain had proven no impediment to Papon’s successful post-war career as a public servant. While in Bordeaux, however, Papon had been directly responsible for authorising the arrest and despatch of the region’s Jews to Paris and thence into deportation. It was for this—now defined under French law as a crime against humanity—that he was placed on trial in 1997.

The Papon trial, which lasted six months, revealed no new evidence—except perhaps about the man himself, who displayed an astonishing absence of pity or remorse. And of course the trial came fifty years too late: too late to punish the octogenarian Papon for his crimes; too late to avenge his victims; and too late to save the honour of his country. A number of French historians, called to testify as expert witnesses, declined to appear. Their task, they insisted, was to recount and explain what had happened in France fifty years before, not deploy that knowledge in a criminal prosecution.
⁴¹³
But the trial was exemplary nonetheless. It demonstrated conclusively that the fine distinction between ‘Vichy’ and ‘France’ so carefully drawn by everyone from De Gaulle to Mitterrand had never existed. Papon was a Frenchman who served the Vichy regime and the subsequent French Republic: both of which were fully aware of his activities in the Bordeaux prefecture and neither of which was troubled by them.

Moreover, Papon was not alone—indeed both the man and his record were decidedly commonplace. Like so many others, all he had done was sign the death warrants of people he never met and to whose fate he was indifferent. The most interesting thing about Papon’s case (and that of Bousquet, too) was why it had taken official France nearly fifty years to locate them in its midst—and why, at the very end of the century, the crust of silence finally broke open. There are many explanations, not all of them flattering to the French political class or national media. But the passage of time, together with the psychological significance of the ending of an era, is perhaps the most pertinent.

So long as François Mitterrand remained in office, he incarnated in his very person the national inability to speak openly about the shame of the occupation. With Mitterrand’s departure, everything changed. His successor, Jacques Chirac, had been just eleven years old when France was liberated in 1944. Within weeks of taking office, on the fifty-third anniversary of the same round-up of Parisian Jews about which Mitterrand had always been so circumspect, President Chirac broke a fifty-year taboo and pointedly acknowledged for the first time his country’s role in the extermination of the Jews of Europe. Ten years later, on March 15th 2005, at the newly inaugurated Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, Chirac’s Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, solemnly declared:
‘La France a parfois été le complice de cette infamie. Elle a contracté une dette imprescriptible qui l’oblige’.
‘France was at times an accomplice in this shame. She is bound forever by the debt she has incurred’.

By the end of the twentieth century the centrality of the Holocaust in Western European identity and memory seemed secure. To be sure, there remained those occasional individuals and organisations—‘revisionists’—who persisted in trying to show that the mass extermination of the Jews could not have taken place (though they were more active in North America than in Europe itself). But such people were confined to the extreme political margins—and their insistence upon the technical impossibility of the genocide paid unintended homage to the very enormity of the Nazi crime. However, the compensatory ubiquity with which Europeans now acknowledged, taught and memorialized the loss of their Jews did carry other risks.

In the first place, there was always the danger of a backlash. Occasionally even mainstream German politicians had been heard to vent frustration at the burden of national guilt—as early as 1969 the Bavarian Christian Social leader Franz-Josef Strauss relieved himself in public of the thought that ‘a people that has achieved such remarkable economic success has the right not to have to hear anymore about “Auschwitz”.’ Politicians of course have their reasons.
⁴¹⁴
What was perhaps more indicative of a coming cultural shift was a widespread urge, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, to re-open the question of
German
suffering after years of public attention to Jewish victims.

Artists and critics—among them Martin Walser, Habermas’s contemporary and an influential literary voice in the post-war Federal Republic—were now starting to discuss another ‘unmanaged past’: not the extermination of the Jews but the under-acknowledged other side of recent German history. Why, they asked, after all these years should we not speak of the burning of Germany’s cities, or even of the uncomfortable truth that life in Hitler’s Germany (for Germans) was far from unpleasant, at least until the last years of World War II? Because we should speak instead of what Germany did to the Jews? But we’ve spoken of this for decades; it has become a routine, a habit. The Federal Republic is one of the most avowedly philo-Semitic nations in the world; for how much longer must we (Germans) look over our shoulder? New books about ‘the crimes of the Allies’—the bombing of Dresden, the burning of Hamburg and the wartime sinking of German refugee ships (the subject of
Im Krebsgang
, ‘Crabwise’, a 2002 novel by Günter Grass)—sold in huge numbers.

In the second place, the new-found salience of the Holocaust in official accounts of Europe’s past carried the danger of a different sort of distortion. For the really uncomfortable truth about World War Two was that what happened to the Jews between 1939 and 1945 was not nearly as important to most of the protagonists as later sensibilities might wish. If many Europeans had managed to ignore for decades the fate of their Jewish neighbours, this was not because they were consumed with guilt and repressing unbearable memories. It was because—except in the minds of a handful of senior Nazis—World War Two was not about the Jews. Even for Nazis the extermination of Jews was part of a more ambitious project of racial cleansing and resettlement.

The understandable temptation to read back into the 1940s the knowledge and emotions of half a century later thus invites a rewriting of the historical record: putting anti-Semitism at the centre of European history. How else, after all, are we to account for what happened in Europe in those years? But that is too easy—and in a way too comforting. The reason Vichy was acceptable to most French people after the defeat of 1940, for example, was not that it pleased them to live under a regime that persecuted Jews, but because Pétainist rule allowed the French to continue leading their lives in an illusion of security and normality and with minimum disruption. How the regime treated Jews was a matter of indifference: the Jews just hadn’t mattered that much. And much the same was true in most other occupied lands.

Today we may find such indifference shocking—a symptom of something gravely amiss in the moral condition of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. And we are right to recall that there were also those in every European country who
did
see what was happening to Jews and did their best to overcome the indifference of their fellow citizens. But if we ignore that indifference and assume instead that most other Europeans experienced the Second World War the way Jews experienced it—as a
Vernichtungskrieg
, a war of extermination—then we shall furnish ourselves with a new layer of mis-memory. In retrospect, ‘Auschwitz’ is the most important thing to know about World War Two. But that is not how things seemed at the time.