Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation 1940–44
- -
- 100%
- +
LIFE AND DEATH UNDER NAZI OCCUPATION 1940–1944
CHARLES GLASS
Copyright
HarperPress An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London, SE1 9GF, UK www.harpercollins.co.uk
Visit our authors’ blog: www.fifthestate.co.uk LOVE THIS BOOK? WWW.BOOKARMY.COM
First published in Great Britain by HarperPress in 2009
1
Copyright © Charles Glass 2009
Maps and Endpapers © www.joygosney.co.uk
Charles Glass asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins eBooks.
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2009 ISBN: 9780007321032
Version: 2016-03-14
To the memory and glorious spirit of Charles Glass, Jr.,
my father and unwavering partisan,
born 11 October, 1920, died 2 February, 2008.
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE: 14 June 1940
1 The American Mayor of Paris
2 The Bookseller
3 The Countess from Ohio
4 All Blood Runs Red
5 Le Millionnaire américain
6 The Yankee Doctor
PART TWO: 1940
7 Bookshop Row
8 Americans at Vichy
9 Back to Paris
10 In Love with Love
11 A French Prisoner with the Americans
12 American Grandees
13 Polly’s Paris
14 Rugged Individualists
15 Germany’s Confidential American Agent
PART THREE: 1941
16 The Coldest Winter
17 Time to Go?
18 New Perils in Paris
19 Utopia in Les Landes
20 To Resist, to Collaborate or to Endure
21 Enemy Aliens
PART FOUR: 1942
22 First Round-up
23 The Vichy Web
24 The Second Round-up
25 ‘Inturned’
26 Uniting Africa
27 Americans Go to War
28 Murphy Forgets a Friend
29 Alone at Vittel
30 The Bedaux Dossier
PART FIVE: 1943
31 Murphy versus Bedaux
32 Sylvia’s War
33 German Agents?
34 A Hospital at War
35 The Adolescent Spy
36 Clara under Suspicion
37 Calumnies
PART SIX: 1944
38 The Trial of Citizen Bedaux
39 The Underground Railway
40 Conspiracies
41 Springtime in Paris
42 The Maquis to Arms!
43 Résistants Unmasked
44 Via Dolorosa
45 Schwarze Kappelle
46 Slaves of the Reich
47 One Family Now
48 The Paris Front
49 Tout Mourir
PART SEVEN: 24–26 August 1944
50 Liberating the Rooftops
51 Libération, not Liberation
EPILOGUE
ENDNOTES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
INTRODUCTION
IN THE PLAZA WHERE THE Boulevard Saint-Michel approaches the River Seine, water cascades down stone blocks of a vast monumental tribute to those who endured the four-year German occupation of Paris. The Archangel Michael stands guard above an old memorial that was rededicated after the Second World War, above all, to the civilians killed nearby when the people of Paris finally rose against their oppressors in the summer of 1944. Reading the inscriptions and looking at the stone lions beside the shallow pool, I used to imagine life during the fifty months from 14 June 1940, when the Germans marched proudly into Paris, and 25 August 1944, when they retreated in shame. I wondered how I would have behaved while the Wehrmacht ruled the cultural capital of Europe. Many books and films on the period depicted French behaviour that varied from self-sacrifice and heroism to treason and complicity in genocide. But what would I, as an American, have done? Was it possible to survive until liberation day, 26 August 1944, without compromising or collaborating? Would I have risked my life, or the lives of my family, by fighting for the Resistance? Or would I have waited patiently with the majority of Parisians for the German retreat?
Nearly 30,000 Americans lived in or near Paris before the Second World War. Those who refused to leave were, paraphrasing Dickens, the best and the worst of America. Like the French, some collaborated, others resisted. The Germans forced some into slave labour. At least one was taken back to the United States to face a trial for treason. Americans in Paris under the occupation were among the most eccentric, original and disparate collection of their countrymen anywhere – tested as few others have been before or since. This is their story.
When Britain and France declared war on Germany for invading Poland in September 1939, American Ambassador William Bullitt advised United States citizens without vital business to leave France immediately. At least 5,000 ignored him and stayed. While many had professional and family ties to Paris, the majority had a peculiarly American love for the city that had its origins in the debt the young United States owed to the Frenchmen who volunteered with the Marquis de Lafayette to fight for American independence after 1776. The American love affair with Paris, where the United States opened its first diplomatic mission, was shared by Benjamin Franklin, John Adams (whose wife, Abigail, famously said, ‘No one leaves Paris without a feeling of tristesse’), Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James Monroe and generations of writers, artists, musicians, diplomats, journalists, socialites and financiers. It was with a certain pride that Walt Whitman wrote, ‘I am a real Parisian.’ A year or two in Paris was a vital component in the education of any socially acceptable young American.
Where the rich led, poorer painters, writers, singers and vagabonds followed. An African-American soldier expressed this love better than most, as his troopship from France cruised into New York harbour after the First World War. An officer asked him why he was saluting the Statue of Liberty, and he answered, ‘Because France gave her to us.’ The thousands of Americans who stood with the French during the humiliation of German rule from 1940 to 1944 found their relationships to Paris and America expressed in the famed lyrics of Josephine Baker, the quintessential American Parisian, ‘J’ai deux amours, mon pays et Paris.’(‘I have two loves, my country and Paris.’)
Among the few thousand Americans who remained in Paris throughout the war, four had pronounced reactions to the occupation that represented in relief the experiences of the rest of their countrymen. The French-born, naturalized American millionaire Charles Bedaux did business as he had before the war. If he compromised with the occupier, his rationale was that European industry had to be preserved for the post-war world. Sylvia Beach attempted to keep her English language bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, functioning as it had in the 1920s when it was a beacon for American, British and French writers. She preserved her humanity by defying the Germans in small ways and giving moral support to French friends whose resistance was more open and violent. Clara Longworth de Chambrun, whose brother had been America’s Speaker of the House of Representatives and husband to Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice, worked tirelessly for the benefit of the readers at the American Library of Paris – even when this meant dealing with German officials. For her, duty lay in holding firm, obeying a Vichy government that she believed was legitimate and waiting for D-Day to deliver France from its agony. Her relationship to the occupying power was complicated by the fact that her Franco-American son, Count René de Chambrun, was married to the daughter of Vichy France’s prime minister, Pierre Laval. Her husband, Count Aldebert de Chambrun, was a direct descendant of the Marquis de Lafayette and had been born in Washington, DC. The American Hospital of Paris, which the Germans coveted, was kept out of their hands through the deception and conscientious effort of this American citizen and former general of the French Army. The American Hospital’s chief surgeon, Dr Sumner Jackson, took the clearest decision of all: from the first day of the occupation, he resisted. Although he risked his life, and those of his wife and young son, the Yankee physician from Maine never doubted for a moment where duty lay: not in survival, not in cooperation, but in determined resistance to what he saw as the overriding evil of the age.
The Americans in inter-war Paris were young and old, black and white, rich and poor – as diverse a collection of opposed beliefs and backgrounds as in any American metropolis. Among them were communists and fascists, Democrats and Republicans, the apolitical and the apathetic, opportunists and idealists. They were writers, painters, musicians, businessmen, bankers, journalists, clergy, photographers, physicians, lawyers, teachers, diplomats, spies, conmen and gangsters. Until the Germans turned France into a version of their own prison-state, African-Americans, homosexuals, lesbians and bohemians felt freer in Paris than in the socially more repressive United States. German occupation was not enough to send all of them home.
In the spring of 1940, after nine months of the drôle de guerre or phony war, normality was returning to Paris. Parisians of all nationalities had become accustomed to war without battles and shared the illusion that the Germans would never penetrate the ‘impregnable’ Maginot Line. Most, apart from realists like General Charles de Gaulle and Ambassador William Bullitt, did not believe Germany would or could attack France. Restaurants were doing brisk business. Charles Bedaux was throwing lavish parties for European royalty. Josephine Baker reopened on the Champs Elysées with Maurice Chevalier in an extravagant song and dance revue. American Eugene Bullard’s Le Duc jazz club in Montmartre attracted sell-out audiences. Americans in the city led enchanted lives, discussing art and love affairs in cafés, some sending their children to the American school and most preparing for summer in the south. Even as the Germans were approaching in late May, the Runyonesque sports columnist of the Paris Herald Tribune, Sparrow Robinson, wrote, ‘Owing to unsettled conditions, the racing card scheduled for this afternoon at Longchamps has been called off.’
The ‘unsettled conditions’ referred to the Nazi blitzkrieg that conquered Denmark, Holland and Belgium. Refugees from the occupied countries escaped to France. Belgian cars and horse-drawn carts packed with clothing and furniture were the first omens that France would also fall. German Panzer divisions broke into France through the poorly defended Ardennes forest, beginning the Battle of France that Britain and France would lose in three short weeks. This engagement – a swift, merciless advance by Wehrmacht armour and Luftwaffe air power – suddenly altered the balance of power in Europe. The British Expeditionary Force retreated from Dunkirk, and the Germans captured more than a million French soldiers. The way to Paris lay open to Hitler’s armies. Most Parisians, French and foreigners alike, fled the city ahead of the Germans. Escape was a mistake. The Germans bombed refugee columns on the roads, but they did not bomb Paris itself. As fighting raged along the River Meuse, Ambassador Bullitt pleaded with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to provide the French and the British with aircraft to withstand the German invasion. Roosevelt promised surplus planes for shipment from Canada, but it was too late.
French Premier Paul Reynaud, preparing to flee to Tours with his government, declared Paris an open city and asked Bullitt to persuade the Wehrmacht not to destroy it. Bullitt, a one-time playboy and writer who co-authored with Sigmund Freud a psychological study of President Woodrow Wilson, spent the last nights of May 1940 in his wine cellar to avoid the Luftwaffe bombs. One nearly killed him. Bullitt was as close to France’s senior politicians, especially Prime Minister Reynaud, as he was to his old friend Roosevelt. Bullitt was the only ambassador still in Paris when the Germans arrived on 14 June 1940.
At first, Americans shared the French panic that the Germans would treat Paris as they had Warsaw – raping, killing and destroying as they entered. But the Nazis’ racist ideology accorded a higher place to the French than it did to the Poles. They did not target Americans, who were allowed to stay and work unhindered. The two most important American organizations, the American Hospital of Paris and the American Library of Paris, were open to Americans and French alike. A few courageous American consuls disobeyed State Department orders by issuing passports and visas to Jewish refugees and establishing safe routes to help them reach North and South America.
The African-Americans who stayed were not as lucky as their white countrymen. After Adolf Hitler’s only visit to Paris, on 24 June 1940, the Germans banned concerts by black American musicians. Proclamations published in the Officiel du Spectacle set out to eliminate what the Nazis called ‘degenerate Jewish-Negro jazz.’ A month later, the Germans ordered a census of all foreign nationals in Paris. Black Americans were ordered to report to the police, and the American consulate did not protect them. The famous American jazz trumpeter Arthur Briggs was sent in late June 1940 to a concentration camp at St. Denis, where he formed a classical orchestra with other black musicians from America, Britain and the West Indies. The Germans detained many other African-American performers, including Roberta Dodd Crawford from Chicago. She was a prominent singer, known as Princess Tovalou since her marriage in 1923 to Prince Tovalou of Benin. Another trumpeter, Harry Cooper, was sent to an internment camp. The African-American classical composer and musician Maceo Jefferson escaped Paris – only to be captured outside the city and interned at Frontslag 122. Henry Crowder, whose thirteen year affair with British shipping heiress Nancy Cunard shocked white America more than it did Paris society, was giving a concert in Belgium when the Nazis invaded. He escaped on the last train to Paris, but the Luftwaffe bombed it. Continuing to his beloved Paris on foot, he was taken by the Germans. Thus, the vibrant African-American community that thrived in the 1920s and 1930s was for the most part absent from Paris during the occupation.
Unlike other African-Americans, Josephine Baker was not interned, thanks to her fame in Paris and abroad. An entertainer who had captivated Paris in the 1920s with her topless Danse Sauvage, she was a much-married and much-loved social fixture. Her decision not to abandon France was moral: the Nazis represented an extreme version of the racial hatred she had escaped in the United States. She stayed at her chateau in the country at first and joined the new French Resistance. Her commander was Jacques Abtey, the police officer for whom she had worked spying on Germans in Paris before the war. Miss Baker smuggled documents out of France between the pages of her sheet music and took Resistance leaders disguised as band members to clandestine meetings in Portugal. She made her way to Morocco, where she entertained French and American troops after the North African invasion of November 1942.
The occupation threw up heroes and villains, but more often it produced in the people of Paris a determination to stand fast until the storm passed. In 1940, they did not know who would win the war. They doubted that the United States would give up its cherished neutrality to confront the Nazi menace. Choices were difficult, frequently involving alternatives that were less bad rather than clearly good or evil. When it was all over, the names of the Americans who stayed with their French neighbours for those fifty cruel months are invisibly etched alongside all the others honoured by the monument in the Place Saint-Michel.
PART ONE
ONE
The American Mayor of Paris
JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT ON Thursday, 13 June 1940, two men walked out of the American Embassy in Paris into the vast and deserted Place de la Concorde. The French capital’s blacked-out streets presented a strange spectacle to Robert Murphy, the embassy’s counsellor, and naval attaché Commander Roscoe Hillenkoetter. The government, the army and most of the population had abandoned Paris. Two million people, including the vast majority of the 30,000 Americans that Murphy estimated lived in Paris before the war, had fled in fear of the conquering Wehrmacht. Thousands of victorious German soldiers were poised to occupy the undefended city at dawn. American Ambassador William Christian Bullitt, whom the departing French government had effectively appointed mayor of Paris on 12 June, had assured the Wehrmacht’s commanders that Paris was an ‘open city’. Open cities waived their right to resist in exchange for a peaceful occupation. Paris had already given up. Twelve hours earlier, at noon, Robert Murphy barely recognized the previously vibrant avenue des Champs-Elysées: ‘The only living creatures in sight were three abandoned dogs cavorting beneath the large French flags which still hung at each corner of the great concourse.’ On the opposite, Left Bank of the Seine, sheep belonging to refugees from northern France grazed on the Hôpital des Invalides’ ceremonial lawns.
Amid the forlorn expanse of the Place de la Concorde, its Egyptian obelisk swaddled in sandbags and its roundabout eerily devoid of traffic, Murphy and Hillenkoetter watched four spectral figures approach out of the darkness. Murphy recognized Chief Rabbi Julien Weill, religious head of Paris’s Jewish community. With the Grand Rabbin were his wife and two friends. Murphy appreciated their fears. As head consular official for the previous nine years until he became counsellor, Murphy’s responsibility had been the well-being of France’s American community. When the Germans began their rampage through the north of France in May, American citizens demanded embassy protection. At the same time, fourteen million Belgian, Dutch and French men, women and children took to the road ahead of the Nazis. Knowing of German atrocities in Poland during the Blitzkrieg of 1939, Parisians, especially Jews, were understandably fearful. Murphy reflected, ‘We in the embassy felt more sympathy for these victims than we did for a considerable number of Americans who became panic-stricken at the last minute and behaved as if they were particular targets of the Nazis. They had much less reason to become alarmed, since we were not at war.’
Rabbi Weill could have obtained an American visa and gone to New York, where his brother, Professor Felix Weill, taught French and was a United States citizen. Despite Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany and the lands the German Army had occupied since 1938, he had chosen to remain in Paris. Knowing now that the French government itself – including the tough and patriotic Jewish interior minister, Georges Mandel – had fled Paris, the rabbi was reconsidering his decision. Murphy thought that Rabbi Weill had ‘very understandable reasons’ for changing his mind. The rabbi asked Murphy and Hillenkoetter whether he and his family might find places in an embassy car, with its diplomatic immunity, leaving Paris. It was too late, Murphy said. German Panzer divisions surrounded Paris. The exiled American Ambassador to Poland, Anthony Drexel Biddle, Jr, and Embassy Secretary H. Freeman Matthews had departed with the fleeing French government for Tours and were following it on to Bordeaux. No other diplomats were leaving Paris that night. Nonetheless, Murphy lent the rabbi and his family a car whose chauffeur drove them to the city gates. There, German sentries ordered them to return.
The two Americans continued their promenade. No cafés were open, as some usually were at midnight. No light shone from any window or street lamp. The prostitutes had vanished from their usual posts along the rue Saint-Denis and up in Pigalle. The great nighttime gathering places, the markets of Les Halles and the jazz clubs of Montmartre, were closed. Many of the vibrant American ‘Negro’ community, like night club owner Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith and band leader Benny Carter, had left Paris in the autumn of 1939 or were about to sail on the last America-bound ship from Bordeaux. Even the most celebrated American woman in Paris, 34-year-old chanteuse Josephine Baker, had left – first as a Red Cross nurse aiding the war’s refugees, then for the safety of her country chateau. ‘The few people who remained in the city were buttoned up in their shuttered homes,’ Murphy noted. The only light Murphy could see was arching across the sky north of Paris, each burst of artillery reminding him of a shooting star. Commander Hillenkoetter similarly recalled, ‘Contrary to rumors, the night passed quietly, although artillery firing could be seen and heard in the northwest.’
The night sky was at last clear of a week’s all-pervasive black smoke including that from the burning files of the French government and British Embassy. Most of the conflagration had come from the Standard Oil Company’s petroleum reserves. Standard’s man in Paris, William Dewitt Crampton, had set the stocks alight at the request of the French General Staff only after checking with the American Embassy. Robert Murphy, rather than let a full month’s supply of petrol fuel German tanks, had told Crampton to go ahead.
Murphy, the red-haired Irish Catholic diplomat from Milwaukee, and Hillenkoetter, a 43-year-old Annapolis graduate from St Louis, returned to the rue de Boissy d’Anglas at the northwest corner of the Place de la Concorde. They heard, coming along the Seine from the east, the gigantic bells in the Cathedral of Notre Dame’s spires tolling midnight to herald the new day, 14 June 1940. The embassy’s iron gates, opposite the façade of the now-shuttered Hôtel Crillon in its brooding Palladian majesty, opened to admit Murphy and Hillenkoetter. They entered the chancellery, where, along with Ambassador Bullitt and a skeleton staff, they waited for the German army. Theirs was the last walk anyone took through free Paris.
The American community in Paris, the largest in continental Europe, had little to fear from the Germans. The United States stood aloof from the war between Germany and the Allies, and it enjoyed the respect of both sides. Although Ambassador Bullitt had advised American citizens without vital business to leave when France and Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, about half had elected to stay. The drôle de guerre, which the Germans called the Sitzkrieg and the British and Americans the ‘phoney war’, dragged on for the next eight months. Only the occasional air raid drill or the sight of sandbags around the monuments disturbed their routine. In May 1940, the German advance through Holland and Belgium into France was so swift that the Americans who feared life under German occupation fled south from Paris. Three weeks before the city fell, as the French and British armies retreated, The New York Times’ front page announced, ‘Most Americans Staying in Paris’: ‘The United States Embassy said that of the slightly more than 3,600 Americans in the Paris district on Dec. 31, about 2,500 are still here. They are mostly businessmen and members of their families and newspaper men, more of whom have been arriving recently.’