Voices from the Dark Years (39 page)

Pro-Vichy prefects all over the Free Zone attacked this humanitarian initiative, claiming that it had no popular support because most of the population blamed the Jews for the black market, but the prefect of Montpellier warned that public opinion had been disturbed by the pitiless nature of the persecution. Not all senior public servants were acquiescent rubber stamps: 200 prefects were among the several thousand civil servants dismissed as unreliable. Even the RG reported widespread disapproval of the government’s handover of residents in the Free Zone.

In the early hours of 2 October the flash of a torch from a field near Vendôme, midway between Orléans and Le Mans, was spotted by the pilot of an RAF Hudson whose passenger waiting to drop was one of the tragic players in what Kipling romantically labelled ‘The Great Game’. Colonel Buckmaster of SOE’s French Section was sending in an agent to build the largest network of the Resistance, for which Francis Anthony Suttil – a 33-year-old lawyer qualified in both Britain and France – had chosen the name of a fifth-century theologian, Prosper of Aquitaine. Having no idea that his Prosper network was to be a cynical deception plan costing the lives of several hundred French patriots, Suttil immediately set about recruiting agents throughout northern France with very poor security until several
thousand
people were involved. At the same time another far too large network known as Scientist was growing in the south-west.

At Norfolk House in St James’s Square in London was the office of Chief of Staff to the (future) Supreme Allied Commander. COSSAC was also the umbrella beneath which several shadowy sub-organisations lurked – in particular, the London Controlling Section. The ambiguous title cloaked a deception factory run by Colonel John Bevan, among whose creative brains was Wing Commander Dennis Wheatley, later to be a world-famous author. The first Controlling Officer, Colonel Oliver Stanley, had resigned rather than deliberately misinform Resistance agents regarding the Dieppe raid, with a view to letting them be caught and reveal under torture their false information in order to convince Hitler that the raid was a prelude to a full-scale invasion.

A stockbroker in civilian life, Bevan was made of sterner stuff. Like de Gaulle, he considered that in total war civilian lives could be spent with no more compunction than a general feels when sending his men to certain death in a militarily justifiable operation. It was already known in London that an invasion of the Continent could not be made before the spring of 1944, but Bevan’s plan was to use SOE’s Section F to pass to its agents in France ‘confidential’ information about an invasion in the spring of 1943 – as Churchill had promised Stalin. Some would be caught and divulge this information, causing Hitler to keep more forces than necessary in France, and thus weaken his eastern front. The name of the game was Operation Cockade.
⁶

Wary of the powder keg that was Lyons – the PCF was particularly active in France’s second city – Laval put a brake on the deportations, informing Oberg on 2 September that the Church’s attitude meant a slowing-down of the Final Solution in France, but not its abandonment. Oberg seems to have taken this in good part, knowing that Laval had other troubles. On 4 November the multi-venue annual congress of Doriot’s PPF brought to Paris 7,198 delegates from eighty-eight collaborationist organisations. Their in-fighting on hold for the moment, Eugène Deloncle shared the platform at the Vel d’Hiv with Doriot and Déat, whose Hitler moustache made him look more like the Führer than ever when his lank hair fell forward over his temple as he thumped the rostrum to hammer home his points.

So many PPF members were marching through the streets in their SS-type uniforms that Laval feared a coup was brewing and Abwehr officer Oskar Reile was paying 160,000 francs a month to a mole inside PPF headquarters to let him see files on Doriot’s ever-closer ties with the SS and SD.
⁷
To maintain the balance of power, Abetz now backed Laval in forbidding Doriot to make the closing address of the congress in the Vel d’Hiv, stirring 20,000 supporters to gather near PPF HQ in rue des Pyramides. Those within earshot heard Doriot say that Pétain should ask Germany to defend French interests in North Africa. Was he prescient, or was there a security leak? This was four days before the Allied landings in Morocco.

The PPF’s enemy at home was an easier target: transports totalling 10,522 prisoners had transited from the Free Zone by 15 September, the shortfall being made up by greater police activity in the Occupied Zone and a bending of the rules so that previously exempt categories could be arrested. Greek and Rumanian Jews numbering 2,000 were arrested in Paris and
rafles
were carried out in twenty provincial cities of the Occupied Zone to fill the cattle trucks of the forty-second and forty-third transports, which dragged their cargoes of misery eastwards on 9 and 11 November 1942 after an article on 8 November in
Au Pilori
by political editor Maurice de Séré stating that ‘the Jewish question must be resolved immediately by the arrest and deportation of
all
Jews without exception’.
⁸

That month Jan Karski arrived clandestinely from Warsaw with eye-witness reports on the Polish ghettos and Belzec extermination camp. During two weeks spent in Paris, what shocked him most was the apathy of the French population towards the occupation – a fact commented on by Abetz and others, and which was largely due to people’s preoccupation with getting the next meal, or extra clothing coupons, or grey market food at the weekends. The diary of a Parisian housewife for October 1942 goes some way to explaining this:

At 4 p.m. she had to be back at the tripe shop. At 5 p.m. came the dilemma: cheese or vegetables? And so it went on, day after day. In addition, there were effectively three price levels:

On some items the mark-up was grotesque: farmers sold potatoes for 3 francs per kg; in Paris they cost five times as much. With average wages frozen at 1,500 francs per month for men and 1,300 francs for women, shopping around was time-consuming and exhausting.
¹⁰

In September it became known that the appalling overcrowding, lack of sanitation and medicine and inadequate rations at Rivesaltes camp had claimed the lives of sixty out of 140 infants in the camp during the preceding two and a half months.
¹¹
Among the children released as a gesture to improve conditions, fifteen were sent to a Catholic orphanage near Montpellier, to put some fat on their emaciated bodies before travelling two weeks by train to Moissac. In the camps, the inadequate rations were often seized by the guards and sold to detainees with money. Prisoners without money or food parcels from outside were close to starvation.

A letter from Röthke to RHSA Ref IV B4 dated 6 November 1942 announced the departure from Drancy Le Bourget station of convoy 901/36 to Auschwitz under the command of Feldwebel Ullmeier. According to the last sentence, it included ‘1,000 Jews with rations for fourteen days’.
¹²
However, the deportees were given no food for the journey, which poses the question, was everyone on the take, even up to Röthke’s level?

On 8 November 1942 the Allied landings in North Africa caused Pétain to require the departure of Ambassador Leahy, who handed the embassy building over to
chargé d’affaires
Somerville P. Tuck. Tuck had been lobbying the marshal to let 5,000 children at risk to emigrate on State Department visas, but the initiative came to nothing.
¹³
At the time of the landings, General de la Porte du Theil was making a tour of inspection of the Chantiers
groupement
in Algeria commanded by regional commissioner Van Hecke, an ex-Foreign Legion officer. Shortly before leaving France, the general had been informed that Van Hecke had had ‘compromising’ contacts with US Consul Robert Murphy in Algiers but, true to his policy of leaving subordinates the maximum freedom of action, he did not broach the subject during the visit.

Van Hecke was in fact one of the ‘group of five’ officers conspiring with Murphy to smooth the path of the invading Allies. De la Porte du Theil decided to fly back from Constantine to France the very next day but, before leaving, delegated full powers to Van Hecke and ordered him to disregard any orders he might be obliged to send after his return to France. In Vichy, de la Porte du Theil reported to Pétain and Gen Weygand, who was arrested the following day by the Germans and deported as a hostage. At that moment, the creator of the Chantiers had no reason to think that he would one day follow in Weygand’s footsteps.

N
OTES

  
1.
  Amouroux,
La Vie
, Vol. 2, p. 29.

  
2.
  Burrin,
Living with Defeat
, p. 249.

  
3.
  Lewertovski,
Morts du Juifs
, p. 175.

  
4.
  Letter from ‘
ancien maquisard E. Roux
’ in
L’Express
, 10 November 2005.

  
5.
  Quoted in Webster,
Pétain’s Crime
, p. 182.

  
6.
  For full details, see R. Marshall,
All the King’s Men
(London: Collins, 1988).

  
7.
  Pryce-Jones,
Paris
, p. 178.

  
8.
  Ibid., p. 55.

  
9.
  Diamond,
Women and the Second World War
, p. 53.

10.
  Ibid., p. 60.

11.
  L. Lazare,
La Résistance Juive en France
(Paris: Stock, 1987), p. 105.

12.
  Facsimile of letter at Centre Jean Moulin, Bordeaux.

13.
  Nossiter,
France and the Nazis
, pp. 158–9.

PART 3