Vallat’s assignment was to restore French law and administration over Jewish matters in the Occupied Zone, or as he put it to Dr. Werner Best of the German military administration, to “harmonize the two zones.” This seemed the best way to stop the German infiltration of the French economy through “Aryanization” and to forestall possible further future dumping of foreign Jews in the unoccupied zone. Vallat asked Dr. Best on 23 June 1941 to “withdraw” the German ordinances when proposed new French laws went into effect.
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The law of 2 June 1941 tightened up the Vichy quota system already set up by the law of 3 October 1940. The list of jobs entirely forbidden to Jews was expanded beyond senior public service, education, and cultural affairs to include advertising, banking and financial matters, and real estate agencies. Quotas were imposed on Jews in a nearly total range of jobs—“liberal, commercial, industrial, or artisanal professions” and lower public posts and functions in the legal-judicial system. Limits of 2 percent were set for various professions in a series of decrees over the following months: lawyers (16 July 1941), doctors, pharmacists, and midwives (11 August 1941), architects (24 September 1941), and dentists (5 June 1942). The stage, film, and concert worlds were supposed
to be closed altogether to Jewish performers (except by special permission) by a decree of 6 June 1942. Jewish students were limited to 3 percent in secondary school and universities on 21 June 1941. This meant, to take one example, that alongside 5,410 non-Jewish doctors in Paris, 108 Jewish doctors (2 percent) could be licensed to practice. The German authorities were complaining in March 1943 that there were in fact 203 Jewish doctors still in Paris. The Vichy government did, however, take the Jewish purge seriously. After his first six months, Vallat could boast that 3,000 civil servants had been dismissed, with similar proportions dismissed from positions in the press, radio, movies, and “in all the areas where their functions gave them power … over minds.”
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Jewish power in the economy was an even more sensitive area. Determined to wrest “Aryanization” from German hands, Vallat forced through the law of 22 July 1941 on the basis of a German promise to cancel their own ordinances in the Occupied Zone.
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The law’s stated purpose was to “eliminate all Jewish influence in the national economy.” It empowered the commissioner-general to name a provisional administrator to any Jewish business or real estate. The provisional administrator took the owner’s place in every respect. He could sell the property to a non-Jew, depositing the purchase price in a blocked government account, or if he could find no seller and the enterprise was not of value to the national economy, he could liquidate it. Some of the proceeds were to go to the support of “indigent Jews.” Thus the sordid business of forced sale of Jewish property, and the development of a Vichy clientele of jackal-like profiteers, was extended to the unoccupied zone. Statistics of the total spoliation of Jewish properties in the unoccupied zone are not so complete as those for the Occupied Zone, but figures of 231
businesses placed under provisional administrators at Toulouse, of which 117 were actually “Aryanized,” may give some idea of its extent.
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The Darlan government returned from this particular ride on the inside of the tiger. Far from reasserting French sovereignty over the Occupied Zone, anti-Semitism became a major avenue for German influence over Vichy. From their early stance of lofty indifference to France’s share in the “purification” of Europe, the German authorities turned, with the new policy and with Abetz’ genuine interest in collaboration, to trying to bring France into the pale of the New Europe. The veiled German promptings of early 1941 become a direct German share in preparing the new legislation of mid-1941, through French hopes that it would be applied to the Occupied Zone. It never was. Then the Germans used the new French machinery to impose their own more drastic “final solution” on the unoccupied zone.
The over-chauvinistic Vallat having been boycotted by the Germans in March 1942, he was replaced in April by Louis Darquier de Pellepoix (the noble patronymic was phony), a genuine genetic racist and street brawler, president of the Association of the Wounded of 6 February 1934, and a member of the Paris City Council. Darquier had quit the Croix de Feu in December 1935, accusing Colonel de La Rocque of being a “rosewater dictator.” He had served three months in prison in 1939 for “excitation to racial hatred” in his newspaper,
La France Enchaînée.
In the fall of 1940, he founded a French Union for the Defense of the Race, to replace his prewar Rassemblement Anti-Juif. Darquier’s regime was scandalous financially as well as ideologically, according to surviving papers in the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris, but he could be removed only if he were replaced by someone equally fanatical. Laval seemed to have found the man in February 1944 with Charles Mercier du Paty de Clam, a lawyer and former French official in Syria, son of the notorious anti-Dreyfusard officer. Du Paty won acquittal after the war by proving that the administrative disorder of the Commissariat for Jewish Questions under his guidance was intentional. But long before then, all real initiative had passed to German hands.
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Through Darlan’s regime, it seems arguable that the Vichy government wanted only to hasten the reemigration of foreign Jews and the assimilation of long-established French Jewish families. Even Hitler had exempted the Nobel Laureate biochemist Dr. Otto Warburg because he was afraid of cancer. In Vichy France, exemptions were legion: Professors Louis Halphen and Marc Bloch; General Darius-Paul Bloch; the deputy Achille-Fould, descendant of Napoleon III’s financier, who had voted “yes” in July 1940, for example.
Meanwhile, in Berlin something far more ruthless was taking shape. There were forewarnings even in 1941, when the French police agreed to cooperate in the first mass internments in the Occupied Zone: 3,600 Polish Jews around Paris in May 1941, another group of foreign Jews in August 1941. Then, during the wave of assassinations in late 1941, came the arrest on 14 December of a thousand Jewish notables and the imposition of a fine of a billion francs on the Jewish population of the Occupied Zone. Hitler gave up his Madagascar resettlement scheme and laid plans for extermination at the Wannsee Conference at the turning of 1941–42. The first systematic deportations of stateless Jews from camps in the Occupied Zone began in May and June 1942. Jews in the Occupied Zone were required to wear a yellow star after May 28, 1942, as in the rest of Hitler’s Europe. Finally, on June 11, 1942, Himmler set massive quotas for deportations from the west to the extermination camps at Auschwitz: 15,000 from Holland, 10,000 from Belgium and Northern France, and 100,000 from France, “including the Unoccupied Zone.”
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The Final Solution had begun, and the Vichy zone was about to be drawn into it.
The first mass deportations began with the notorious roundup of some 13,000 Jews in the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris on July 16, 1942, before being shipped to a camp at Drancy and then on to
the east. That spectacle of human misery, which prompted formal opposition from the Catholic hierarchy, was only the beginning. Laval was caught in the trap of trying to maintain some French participation. He agreed in July to deliver 10,000 foreign Jews in the unoccupied zone to the German authorities on the understanding that French Jews would be deported from the Occupied Zone only if foreign Jews fell short of Himmler’s quota. On 2 September 1942 General Oberg assured him that there would be “no further demands in this area” after France had handed over all German, Austrian, Czech, Polish, and Hungarian Jews. In February 1943 Laval was still trying to hold the line at foreign Jews but was offering to go further if France could get “some kind of political security” (Zusicherung) about French territory as advantageous as that which an American victory would offer.
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Pawns in these fruitless bargains, Jewish refugees in the Vichy zone were divided rather between rich and poor than between French and foreign. Those with money and connections still managed to hang on in southern cities, trying desperately to get visas and boat passage to a new world that was doing little to help them. The poor were already in work camps, helpless. The German occupation of the rest of France exposed them to direct Nazi presence after November 1942.
There remained one unexpected asylum. Mussolini’s Italy, never more than lackadaisically imitating the 1938 Nuremberg decrees, took up active defense of Jewish refugees in the Italian occupation zone east of the Rhône in 1943, partly because of the important Jewish contribution to the Italian imperial presence in Tunisia. The Italian government had objected strenuously to French anti-Semitic measures in Tunisia, seeing them as another aspect of French anti-Italian actions there.
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When deportations from the coastal zone increased in early 1943, the Italian occupation authorities obstructed them east of the Rhône, warning
the French government that while it could do what it wanted with French Jews, foreign Jews in the Italian-occupied zone were exclusively a matter for the Italian authorities. In March the Italian authorities stepped in to prevent the French prefects of Valence, Chambéry, and Annecy from arresting foreign Jews there. In June 1943 Italian police prefect Lospinosa blocked the French arrest of 7,000 foreign Jews at Mégève. That a fascist Italian police prefect should have to point out to Antignac, Darquier de Pellepoix’s hatchet man in the Commissariat-General of Jewish Affairs, that Italy “respected the elementary principles of humanity” is some measure of judgment upon Vichy anti-Semitism.
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With Italy out of the war in July 1943, the last barrier to mass deportations was down.
I saw a train pass. In front, a car containing French police and German soldiers. Then came cattle cars, sealed. The thin arms of children clasped the grating. A hand waved outside like a leaf in a storm. When the train slowed down, voices cried “Mama!” And nothing answered except the squeaking of the springs.… The truth: stars worn on breasts, children torn from their mothers, men shot every day, the methodical degradation of an entire people. The truth is censored. We must cry it from the rooftops.
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In the end, some 60,000–65,000 Jews were deported from France, mostly foreigners who had relied upon traditional French hospitality. Perhaps 6,000 French citizens also took that gruesome journey. Some 2,800 of the deportees got back.
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Vichy’s share of responsibility for the bestial deportations of 1942–44 was probably greater than the German documents themselves would suggest. Because French cultural anti-Semitism, with its acceptance of assimilated Jews, was built upon bases entirely foreign to Nazi racial anti-Semitism, it seemed to Abetz—and indeed to French racial anti-Semites like Darquier and Antignac—that the Vichy people were lukewarm, obstructionist, or even
“philo-semitic.” German authorities were angry because Vallat had indeed tried to block the German use of “Aryanization” as an undercover device to gain control of important parts of the French economy, or because they suspected that “Vichy Jewish legislation parallels ours only in order to soften the German decrees.”
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But Vichy’s cultural and economic anti-Semitism was no less real for being scorned by Nazis. Such a regime, even if the German troops had soon withdrawn, would have made life difficult for Jews in France. Darlan and Vallat had tried to regain the initiative not out of concern for Jews but out of fear that the Germans would dump more foreign Jews into unoccupied France or would take over Jewish property in the Occupied Zone.
Furthermore, the French laws of 1940 and 1941 made the Final Solution much easier. By the summer of 1942, some 20,000 Jews had already been interned in French concentration camps in the unoccupied zone under the law of 4 October 1940.
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The census of all Jewish persons and property ordered under the law of 2 June 1941 made escape harder. The creation of the Union Générale des Israélites Français on 29 November 1941, the obligatory welfare and representation organization of all French Jews, helped set them apart even more clearly. Expulsion from jobs and “Aryanization” of businesses reduced more to destitution. Finally, the official government attitude and the gutter press lent an air of respectability to Vichy anti-Semitism from which Nazi anti-Semitism profited.
It is true that the Vichy government had not planned to turn discrimination into genocide. Vichy clearly blocked some German measures. Pétain forbade the extension to the unoccupied zone of the yellow star worn by all Jews in the Occupied Zone after 28 May 1942; it was not applied there even after the total occupation of November 1942. At lunch with SS Colonel Oberg on 2 September 1942, Laval warned that Jews couldn’t be handed over “as in a supermarket, as many as you want for the
same price.” That day, as always, he tried to get Oberg to limit further deportations to Jewish refugees from countries now controlled by the Nazis: Germany, Austria, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.
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In July–August 1943 Laval stubbornly refused to issue a proposed law depriving all French Jews who had become citizens since 1933 of their citizenship so that they could be deported, in spite of German efforts to “force” its promulgation. Laval’s tortuous explanations and postponements are annotated by German officials with remarks such as “the fox” and “where insolence becomes a method.”
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Outside the immediate Vichy circle, the French Catholic hierarchy made public its opposition to the deportations in the summer of 1942. And shelter and help to Jews by thousands of French citizens are among the most honorable acts of the Resistance.