Vichy France (64 page)

Even if Laval had managed to stave off direct forced labor until 1944 by means of the
relève
, it would have been a questionable bargain. In concrete terms, it was not really the three-for-one exchange which propaganda claimed. Laval and Sauckel agreed on 15 June that France would supply 400,000 workers, including 150,000 with special skills. The
relève
applied only to skilled workers; i.e., a maximum of 50,000 prisoners would be freed in return for eight times that many volunteer workers. Moreover, the exchange returned mostly farm boys to France at the expense of men with such vital industrial skills as lathe-turning, a short-term gain perhaps for French food production but a bad bet for the French future in Europe. The Germans, in turn, merely lowered the expense of keeping French war prisoners. The net result was that Vichy wound up doing Sauckel’s job about as well as Sauckel could have done it himself. Most damning of all, the
relève
didn’t buy any French exemption from forced labor in the long run anyway.

None of these Vichy efforts prevented Sauckel’s general labor draft decree from being promulgated in occupied France on 20 August 1942 anyway, along with the rest of occupied Western Europe (a violation of Article III of the armistice, which attributed administration of both zones to the French.) Furthermore, in the effort to forestall the extension of the August 20 decree to the rest of France, Laval chose to exercise the shadow of remaining French sovereignty by issuing a French law “in the
same sense” on 4 September 1942. This act established machinery in the unoccupied zone for drafting individual French skilled workmen, prevented French workmen from changing jobs freely, and made it more difficult to escape German recruitment. Thus the basic statutes for forced labor were already on the books when the rest of France was occupied in November 1942. When Sauckel came up with a new quota of 500,000 more workers from all France in January 1943, the Service du Travail Obligatoire was set up in February to draft whole age groups. Thereafter, all Frenchmen were subject to forced labor.
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How much time had been won? The Sauckel decrees had gone into operation in Holland on 6 April 1942, and the largest Dutch annual contingent went that year. In Belgium an
arrêté
of 6 October 1942 established obligatory work in Germany for Belgian men and women, although it was not until September 1943 that individual conscription was replaced by the kind of call-up by year-classes that had been instituted in France in the preceding February. Thus France had a forced labor draft a bit after Holland and a bit before Belgium. Since Frenchmen were being more or less coerced to go to Germany under the
relève
anyway, the few months gained over Holland in unoccupied France before the STO of February 1943 does not seem a very good bargain.

A little calculation establishes that in the long run, French people suffered proportionally about as much as Belgium, and a little more than Holland, from forced labor. Total French labor figures in Germany, including prisoners of war who were set to work, amount to about 3.3 percent of the total population, as compared with about 3.4 percent of Belgian and 3.0 percent of Dutch total populations. Vichy France failed to win real respite from forced labor for the French in either zone.
⁶³

Two forces finally did save a number of Frenchmen from the STO. In fact, of the million men Sauckel asked for in January 1944, only 38,000 French workers actually went to Germany in the remaining months before the Liberation. Vichy can take credit for neither of these effective barriers. One was Albert
Speer, who struggled for influence against Sauckel in 1943–44. Speer, whose approach was technocratic rather than punitive, believed that it was more efficient for workers to produce for Germany in their own countries than to be brought to Germany where they had to be fed, supplied, and protected from Allied bombardment. Since plants were earmarked as “Speerbetriebe” or “S-betriebe” all over Western Europe, no special favors were being shown in France. No doubt a number of young French workers owed their lives to Albert Speer, however.

The other real barrier to the STO was the
maquis.
It became very difficult to compel young French skilled workers to go to Germany after the beginning of 1944 and virtually impossible after the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944. Vichy can take no credit for either of these shields, of course. They would have developed and worked as well, all other things being equal, under a gauleiter.
⁶⁴

There remains the somber business of the Jewish Final Solution. It is true, as Xavier Vallat claimed, that a larger proportion of the Jewish populations of totally occupied Holland, Belgium, Norway, and Italy (totally occupied after 1943) perished than that of France, even taking refugees and citizens together.
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The real question, however, is not whether fewer Jews were deported from France than from the totally occupied countries, but whether more Jews were deported from France because of Vichy
preparations and assistance than would have been the case if the Germans had had to do it all alone. Vichy bears a heavy burden of responsibility, seen in these terms.

It is true that the unoccupied zone of France provided a refuge of sorts for tens of thousands of Jewish refugees from Germany and Eastern Europe for the first two years. Republican France having taken over from England the role of Europe’s refugee haven in the late nineteenth century, German Jews and then, after September 1939, Polish Jews, followed a well-worn path to the west. The fact that the armistice and the division of France into two zones kept many of these refugees one jump ahead of the German armies was not the result of any Vichy sentimentality about the refugees. In fact, Vichy objected vigorously when the Germans delivered more expatriate Jews into the unoccupied zone in the fall of 1940. After protest, Vichy acquiesced in Article 19 of the armistice, which empowered Germany to demand the extradition of German citizens who had sought refuge in France. Under this provision, such prominent figures as Herschel Grynspan (who had assassinated a German diplomat in Paris in 1938) and the socialist economist and Weimar minister Rudolf Hilferding were delivered back into German hands—an ominous first warning about the precariousness of asylum in Vichy France. Moreover, Vichy did everything possible to encourage the further emigration of Jewish refugees. At a time when French Jews were being uprooted from the economy, there was no possibility of foreigners settling. Vichy also revoked some recent citizenships, enlarging the number of Jews in France without the protection of citizenship. Finally, Vichy gathered destitute Jewish refugees into work camps. Although Pétain spared them the yellow star, thousands were waiting behind barbed wire when the Germans came into the unoccupied zone in November 1942. Only those with money had managed to use southern France as a springboard for safer havens. For the rest, the French tradition of refuge made the unoccupied zone a trap.

The possibilities of sheltering Jews in southern France were far greater, say, than in the ghetto of Amsterdam. Furthermore, by the time the Germans actually arrived in southern France, in
November 1942, there had been ample time for emergency arrangements. The final irony is that Italian-occupied Alpine France provided the cover in 1943 that Vichy refused. Many French citizens did the same, but the Vichy authorities deserve none of their credit. Vichy bears the guilt for not having used its opportunity for the kind of escape operation that the totally occupied Danes managed to carry out by moving almost the entire Jewish population by small boat to Sweden in September 1943.

This survey suggests that the shield theory hardly bears close examination. The armistice and the unoccupied zone seemed at first a cheap way out, but they could have bought some material ease for the French population only if the war had soon ended. As the war dragged on, German authorities asked no less of France than of the totally occupied countries. In the long run, Hitler’s victims suffered in proportion to his need for their goods or his ethnic feelings about them, not in proportion to their eagerness to please. Vichy managed to win only paltry concessions: a few months of the
relève
instead of a labor draft, exemption from the yellow star for Jews in the unoccupied zone, slightly lower occupation costs between May 1941 and November 1942, more weapons in exchange for keeping the Allies out of the empire. Judged by its fruits, Vichy negotiation was barren.

In the last analysis, fruitful negotiation depends upon some comparable capacity of each party to threaten the other with damage if acceptable compromises are not made and to withhold that damage if acceptable compromises are made. Vichy’s one serious threat—to take fleet and empire over to the Allied side—lacked credibility. Vichy leaders could not exercise it without suffering more than the Germans. To be sure, the Germans did not want the effort and expense of a total occupation of France. Vichy leaders could delude themselves for the first months that France had found a cheap way out of the war. Even after the sufferings increased, however, they could not flee abroad without sacrificing the National Revolution, their commitment to internal order, and, after the Gaullists took over the empire from the Giraudists, their personal liberty and even life.

Early in the occupation, the Vichy leaders did not want to threaten to renounce the armistice; later on, they couldn’t. In all of Laval’s dealings with German officials, I have found only one threat even to resign. On 27 August 1942 Laval threatened to quit office if Sauckel’s forced labor decree, applied to the Occupied Zone on 20 August, were extended to the unoccupied zone. Laval agreed, however, to issue a French law “in the same sense” for the unoccupied zone on 4 September, suggesting that he was much more interested in retaining the outward show of Vichy sovereignty than in blocking the policy of forced labor itself by exercising his ultimate weapon of breaking the armistice. No other threats to resign by Laval, and none by Darlan, turn up in the voluminous German records of their many conversations. Instead, the characteristic Vichy technique was to warn the Germans against creating a hostile public opinion, beyond Vichy capacity to control, by excessive severity. In other words, as long as the armistice and Vichy sovereignty was something they wanted more than the Germans, Vichy leaders were limited to the same sort of threat that lower civil servants could make in totally occupied countries. “Don’t push our population too hard,” they said in effect, “or it will become unmanageable.”
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Pétain made no more forceful threats than the others. There remains the curious plan for Pétain to present himself at the Demarcation Line as a hostage in September 1941 when the Germans began their reprisal executions, but we know about it only because Pucheu, perhaps to add negotiating pressure, told Abetz about it. The gesture was of course never carried out. The fact that Pétain did not renounce the armistice in November 1942, upon the total occupation of France—and there is no contemporary evidence that it was ever considered—proved to the Germans that he would never resign. They did not have to take very seriously his brief “strike” as head of state during his
last effort to get rid of Laval in November–December 1943, and indeed Pétain soon gave in. Pétain ceased exercising the powers of head of state in earnest only when the Germans took him by force off French soil, to the castle of Sigmaringen in August 1944. No one at Vichy ever seriously made the threat that Thiers claimed he issued to Bismarck as they began negotiations at Versailles in February 1871:

You mean to ruin France in her finances, ruin her on her frontiers. Well, take her. Administer the country. Levy the taxes. We shall retire and you shall be left to govern her.
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In the last analysis, the sovereignty of Vichy was a negotiating liability rather than a negotiating asset. The Vichy leaders had asked for an armistice in the summer of 1940 to prevent revolution and to remake France along different lines. The continued existence of the Vichy regime had to be defended, as the price of fulfilling those aims. It was something for which Vichy leaders made concessions, rather than something for which Germany made concessions. A gauleiter would have made many Frenchmen suffer; in the end he might have gotten less.

Profits and Losses

T
HE
V
ICHY REGIME DID NOT SAVE THE
F
RENCH PEOPLE
from suffering, perhaps even more suffering than that endured by totally occupied countries in Western Europe. That suffering was not endured evenly, moreover, on all shoulders alike. Not even the most conscientious war economy of penury can spread the burdens and equalize sacrifices with a perfectly even hand. The Vichy war economy was colored by ideological favoritism and distorted by the pressures of interest groups. It would be misleading to speak of beneficiaries of the regime, for the occupation was a bitter experience for all Frenchmen. Nevertheless, some
Frenchmen found themselves in a less exposed position under Vichy than others, better able to shelter from the blows of a tormenting epoch. A few even enjoyed, for a time, the fruits of power or the economic favors of war production. In that sense, we can ask upon whom the regime smiled more and less, who benefited more and less from the Vichy regime.

Some of the particular victims would have suffered regardless of the existence of an armistice or a quasi-sovereign French regime: the farmers of the northeastern “Sperrzone” whose lands were colonized with Germans by the Ostland corporation; prisoners of war; the victims of bombings, first by the Axis and then by the Allies; refugees under direct German occupation north of the Demarcation Line. To their number were added the particular victims of the Vichy regime itself: Jews, luminaries of the former regime, Communists, workmen recruited to work in Germany. All of these conspicuous victims have their memorial. Other groups were victimized more subtly by Vichy economic policies and interest groups.