The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (21 page)

The October 1940 statute was approved by all members of the French government, with some individual nuances. Neither before nor later did Pétain publicly attack the Jews as such, yet he alluded to an “anti-France” that in common ideological parlance also meant “the Jews”; moreover he strongly supported the new measures during the cabinet discussions.
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It seems that Laval, arguably the most influential member of the cabinet, although not a declared anti-Semite either, mainly thought of the benefits to be reaped in exchange from Germany; Adm. François Darlan, on the other hand, displayed open anti-Semitism in the French Catholic conservative tradition; as for Alibert, his hatred of Jews was closer to the Paris collaborationist brand than to the traditional Vichy mold.
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In a cable sent on October 18 to Gaston Henry-Haye, Vichy’s ambassador in Washington, the secretary general of Vichy’s Foreign Ministry presented the arguments that could be used to explain the new statute to the Americans. The responsibility was of course that of the Jews themselves. A Léon Blum or a Jean Zay (the minister of education in Blum’s government) was accused of having propagated antinational or amoral principles; moreover they helped “hundreds of thousands of their own” to enter the country, and the like. The new legislation, it was said, neither targeted the basic rights of individuals nor threatened their private property. “The new legislation merely aims at solving definitively and without passion a problem that had become critical and to allow the peaceful existence in France of elements whom the characteristics of their race turn into a danger when they are too intimately present in the political and administrative life of the country.”
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Vichy’s anti-Jewish legislation was generally well received by a majority of the population in the nonoccupied zone. As will become increasingly apparent in the coming chapters, French popular anti-Semitism grew as a result of the defeat and during the following years. On October 9, 1940, the Central Agency for the Control of Telephone Communications (Commission centrale de contrôle téléphonique)—a listening service, in other words—reported that “hostility against the Jews remains”; on November 2 it indicated that the statute had been widely approved and even that for some it did not go far enough.
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Although only fourteen
préfets
(district governors appointed by the state) out of forty-two reported on public reactions to the statute nine indicated positive responses and one reported mixed ones.
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In the midst of such a dire general situation, public opinion would of course tend to follow the measures taken by the savior and protector, the old
maréchal
. Moreover, a large segment of the population remained attentive to the spiritual guidance offered, now more than ever, by the Catholic Church.

In the 1930s, alongside the resurgence of a vocal Catholic anti-Semitism in France, prestigious thinkers such as Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, or the bestselling Catholic novelist François Mauriac, and an influential daily
La Croix
, opposed traditional Catholic anti-Jewish attitudes.
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Yet even among these liberal Catholic opponents of anti-Semitism, insidious anti-Jewish themes remained close to the surface during the prewar years. Thus, in 1937, when Mauriac joined
La Juste Parole
, a periodical devoted to the struggle against the growing anti-Jewish hatred, he saw fit to send an explanatory letter to the editor of the journal, Oscar de Ferenzy. “For a Catholic,” Mauriac stated, “anti-Semitism is not only an offense against charity. We are bound to Israel, we are tied to it, whether we wish it or not.” This said, Mauriac turned to the responsibility the Jews carried for the resentment surrounding them: Jewish “clannishness,” of course, was brought up, but there was more: “They cannot corner international finance without giving people the feeling of being dominated by them. They cannot swarm everywhere into a place where one of them has insinuated himself [the Blum ministry], without arousing hatred, because they themselves indulge in reprisals. Some German Jews acknowledged in my presence that there existed in Germany a Jewish problem which had to be resolved. I am afraid that in the end one will also exist in France.”
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As for Mounier, he wrote an article on the Jews and had it published on March 1, 1939, in
Le Voltigeur
; it was also meant to defend the Jews against the growing attacks from the Right. It did so to a point, but added that in some respects the Jews bore part of the responsibility for their predicament, along the lines taken by Mauriac; both shared the same hateful stereotypes.
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What counted in the end was the official position adopted by the church. During the summer of 1940 the Catholic hierarchy had been informed of the forthcoming statute. When the assembly of cardinals and archbishops met in Lyon, on August 31, 1940, the “Jewish question” was on the agenda. Émile Guerry, adjunct bishop of Cambrai, summed up the assembly’s official stand: “In political terms, the problem is caused by a community [the Jews] that has resisted all assimilation, dispersion and the national integration of its members taken individually. The State has the right and the duty to remain actively vigilant in order to make sure that the persistence of this unity [of the Jews] does not cause any harm to the common good of the nation, as one would do in regard to an ethnic minority or an international cartel. Here, we are not mentioning the foreign Jews, but if the State considers it necessary to take measures of vigilance, it is nonetheless its duty to respect the principles of justice in regard to those Jews who are citizens like others: they have the same rights as other citizens as long as they haven’t proven that they are unworthy of them. The statute that the State prepares has, in this case, to be inspired by the rules of justice and charity.”
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In other words the assembled leaders of the French Catholic Church gave their agreement to the statute that, a month later, would be announced by the government. Of course when the official announcement came, no Catholic prelate protested. Some bishops even openly supported the anti-Jewish measures.
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The most immediate reason for the French Church’s attitude stemmed from the unmitigated support granted by Pétain and the new État français to the reinsertion of Catholicism into French public life, particularly in education. Whereas the republic had established the separation of church and state and thus banned the use of state funds for the support of religious schools, Vichy canceled the separation and all its practical sequels: In many ways Catholicism had become the official religion of the new regime.
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There was more, however.

Since the French Revolution a segment of French Catholicism had remained obdurately hostile to the “ideas of 1789,” which they considered to be a Judeo-Masonic plot intent upon the destruction of Christianity. Such militant Catholicism found its modern political voice during the Dreyfus affair in the ultranationalist and anti-Semitic party then created by Charles Maurras: the Action Française. The Action Française had been excommunicated in the 1920s, but many Catholics remained strongly attached to it, and the ban was lifted by Pius XII on the eve of the war. It was the Action Française that inspired Vichy’s
Statut des Juifs,
and it was the same anti-Semitism that belonged to the ideological profile of an influential part of the French church in 1940.

Finally, some of the most fundamental tenets of Christian religious anti-Semitism resurfaced among French Catholics, in a less vituperative form than in Poland of course, but resurfaced nonetheless. Thus the newspaper
La Croix
, which during the 1920s and 1930s had abandoned its violent anti-Jewish diatribes of the turn of the century (mainly during the Dreyfus affair), could not resist the temptation offered by the new circumstances. “Are the Jews Cursed by God?” was the title of an article published on November 30, 1940. Having justified the new statute, the author, who wrote under the pseudonym C. Martel, reminded his readers that since the Jews themselves had called Jesus’ blood “upon their heads and those of their children,” a curse indeed existed. There was only one way of escaping it: conversion.
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The small French Reformed (Calvinist) Church was influenced by the general cultural-ideological stance shared by most of the country, although Pastor Marc Boegner, its leader, was to become an outspoken critic of Vichy’s anti-Jewish laws. Yet, in the summer of 1941, Boegner himself would emphasize on several occasions that his support was granted to
French
Jews only and that, in his opinion, the influx of Jewish immigrants had created a major problem.
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In the occupied zone, the Germans didn’t remain idle either. The first anti-Jewish initiatives did not stem from the “delegate of the Security Police and the SD,” Helmut Knochen, or from the military command, but from the embassy in Paris. On August 17, after a meeting with Hitler, Ambassador Otto Abetz demanded that Werner Best, the head of the civil administration branch at military headquarters, prepare an initial set of anti-Jewish measures. Best was surprised by Abetz’s initiative, but the following instructions were drafted nonetheless: “(a) with immediate enforcement, Jews who had fled southward should no longer be allowed back into the occupied zone; (b) preparations should begin for the removal of all Jews from the occupied zone; (c) the possibility of confiscating Jewish property should be examined.”
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On August 26 Abetz was informed by Ribbentrop that Hitler had agreed to these “immediate measures.”
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Everybody fell into line.

By mid-September 1940, the commander of the army, General Brauchitsch, gave the formal go-ahead, and on the twenty-seventh, the “First Jewish Decree,” defining as Jewish anybody with more than two grandparents of the Jewish religion or with two such grandparents and belonging to the Jewish faith or married to a Jewish spouse, was issued. The decree forbade Jews who had fled to the Vichy zone to return into the occupied zone; it instructed the French prefects to start a full registration of all Jews in the occupied zone (in order to prepare their removal), as well as to identify Jewish businesses and register Jewish assets (for later confiscation).
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On October 16 a “Second Jewish Decree” ordered the Jews to register their enterprises before October 31.
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From that day on, Jewish stores carried a yellow sign reading
Jüdisches Geschäft
/
Entreprise Juive
[Jewish business].
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The registration of all Jews in the occupied zone started on October 3, Rosh Hashanah. It proceeded in alphabetical order and was to be completed on October 19. In Paris the Jews registered at the police stations of their districts; outside Paris, at the
sous-préfectures
. The vast majority (over 90 percent) of Jews, whether French or foreign, obeyed the orders without much hesitation. Some even turned the registration into a statement. The terminally ill philosopher Henri Bergson, although exempted from the registration and for years far closer to Catholicism than to Judaism, dragged himself in slippers and dressing gown to the Passy police station in Paris to be inscribed as Jew; a Col. Pierre Brissac went in full military uniform.
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At the end of October 1940, 149,734 Jews had been listed. Late registration of an additional few thousand Jews continued sporadically during the following weeks and months: 86,664 were French, 65,707 were foreigners.
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Pierre Masse, a former minister and senator of the Hérault department wrote to Pétain on October 20: “I obey the laws of my country even if they are imposed by the invader.” In his letter he asked the
maréchal
whether he should take away the officer stripes that several generations of his ancestors had earned in serving their country since the Napoleonic Wars.
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The identification of “ordinary Jews” as such depended on their readiness to register. No such hurdle existed regarding Jewish writers, alive or dead. It had always been a specialty of anti-Semites to uncover the identity of writers, artists, intellectuals who at first glance were not identifiable as Jews; this was common practice in France as everywhere else. Thus a list of names was readily available when, in September 1940, the association of French publishers promised the German embassy in Paris that no Jewish authors, among other excluded groups, would be published or reprinted any longer: The publishers would, from then on, exercise strict self-censorship. Within days, a first list of banned books, the “liste Bernhard,” was made public, soon followed by a “liste Otto.” It was preceded by a short declaration from the association: “These are the books which by their lying and tendentious spirit have systematically poisoned French public opinion; particularly the publications of political refugees or of Jewish writers who, having betrayed the hospitality that France had granted to them, unscrupulously agitated in favor of a war from which they hoped to take advantage for their own egoistic aims.”
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Some French publishers came up with new initiatives. Whereas at Mercure de France, a French translation of the autobiographical part of
Mein Kampf
was being planned, Bernard Grasset, afraid that he would not be allowed to reopen his publishing house in Paris, informed the Germans, by way of intermediaries, that “as far back you go in both branches of my family, you will find neither a Jew or a Jewess.”
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Possibly more than any other Western European capital, Paris soon became a hotbed of intellectual and artistic collaboration. In the earliest period of German occupation, some initiatives appear as a mixture of abjection and comedy. Thus, the star of the French dance scene, Serge Lifar, much impressed by Goebbels during the latter’s visit to Paris in July 1940, started pressing the German embassy for another meeting with the Nazi propaganda chief. In historian Philippe Burrin’s words, “Lifar fancied his chances as the führer of European dance.” In the meantime, the Germans were worrying about Lifar’s Aryan ancestry. After the dancer was cleared of any Jewish stigma, he was invited to perform at the Embassy—not for Goebbels, alas—but at least in honor of Brauchitsch.
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