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Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation 1940–44
Charles Glass
An elegantly written and highly informative account of a group of Americans living in Paris when the city fell to the Nazis in June 1940.When the German army occupied Paris in the early hours of 14 June 1940, a large American community awaited them. Although the US Ambassador had advised those without vital business to leave when war broke out in 1939, almost five thousand remained. Many had professional and family ties to Paris, and most had a peculiarly American love for the city that was rooted in the bravery of the thousands of Frenchmen who volunteered to help win American independence after 1776. As citizens of a neutral nation, they believed they had little to fear. They were wrong. For four hard years, from the summer of 1940 until US troops occupied Paris in August 1944, Americans were intimately caught up in the city's fate.Those who stayed behind were an eccentric, original and disparate group. Charles Bedaux, a Frenchborn, naturalized American millionaire, had played host to the Duke of Windsor's wedding in 1937 and went on throwing lavish parties for European royalty and high-ranking Nazi officials. Countess Clara Longworth de Chambrun, who accepted the legitimacy of the Vichy regime, dealt with anyone, including the Nazis, to keep her beloved American Library of Paris open. Sylvia Beach attempted to run her famous English-language bookshop, Shakespeare & Company, whilst providing help to her Jewish friends and her colleagues in the Resistance. Dr Sumner Jackson, wartime chief surgeon of the American Hospital in Paris, risked his life aiding Allied soldiers to escape to Britain and resisting the occupier from the first day.Charles Glass has written an exciting, fast-paced and elegant account of the moral contradictions faced by Americans in Paris during France's most dangerous years. His discovery of letters, diaries, war documents and police files reveals as never before how American expatriates were trapped in a web of intrigue, collaboration and courage. This is an unforgettable tale of treachery by some, cowardice by others and unparalleled bravery by a few.
Americans in Paris
LIFE AND DEATH UNDER NAZI OCCUPATION 1940–1944
CHARLES GLASS
Copyright (#u5d0bf4a3-8b79-5c45-b61d-909cade11a3d)
HarperPress An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London, SE1 9GF, UK www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
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First published in Great Britain by HarperPress in 2009
1
Copyright © Charles Glass 2009
Maps and Endpapers © www.joygosney.co.uk (http://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 (#uccba8efa-7014-54ac-9fcd-c6af358895ed)
TITLE PAGE (#ue317b697-e921-561c-9951-95f71576b379)
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_d55f5acd-d6be-5a21-8720-be48bcf13c73)
DEDICATION (#ue1d77359-30ae-5d03-9b21-631d8ae5395b)
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 (#u5d0bf4a3-8b79-5c45-b61d-909cade11a3d)
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, monpays 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.
