Reconciling history

Though the Nazis continue to have a disquieting allure on our imagination, the French have never quite recovered from the profound humiliation of the German occupation; it has taken the country decades to open the Pandora’s box of the Vichy years. As an American student in Paris during the postwar period, I remember watching Italian films like “Open City,” thinking how odd that I saw no French films about the Resistance, nor were there any depicting French soldiers during their short “phony war” against the Germans. Before “Hiroshima Mon Amour” in 1959 (which had no male heroes and was about the meaning of war to civilians), there was only silence.

Twenty years ago, Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton, in their “Vichy France and the Jews,” set the standard for works on this period, using the records of the Vichy and German governments to build a convincing case for the complicity of the Vichy government in facilitating the Final Solution. Paxton and Marrus chose not to include interviews with either victims or perpetrators, sticking entirely to a meticulous documentation of the process leading to the deportation of the Jews.

In “Verdict on Vichy: Power and Prejudice in the Vichy France Regime,” one of two recent histories on the German occupation of France, Michael Curtis, a professor of political science at Rutgers University, builds on Marrus and Paxton’s work. Curtis sifts through a multitude of primary sources and gives us a book that is as accurate a summary of almost every aspect of the Vichy years as it is possible to imagine.

Robert Gildea’s “Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France During the German Occupation” is diametrically opposed to Curtis in concerns and methodology. Gildea, a professor at Oxford, argues that historians have been too intent on portraying France as victim, too pro-Resistance; according to Gildea, the current debate is so “Judeo-centric” that the German occupation and Vichy have been reduced to a detail of the Holocaust.

Gildea blends an informal oral history of people’s memories with data from local archives, concentrating on provincial France, the Loire region -- Chinon, Angers, Nantes and Tours -- where there wasn’t a heavy Jewish or foreign population. When Gildea focuses on what interests him, he has an impressive ability to ferret out the foibles of cohabitation in this sleepy, tradition-bound part of the country.

But the book is uneven. France wasn’t England, where you can do a sort of Mrs. Miniver on the local population shouldering through hard times; there are huge problems with relying on people’s personal recollections 50 years after the fact. Just for starters, France was a thicket of Petainists, resistance movements, Gaullists, the Vichy government and crooks. There were snaky financial maneuverings and the myriad shifting positions of the French Communist Party.

Add to this the presence of the Third Reich in the occupied and unoccupied zones, the deportation of the Jews and gypsies, the plethora of resistance groups, the brutal dreaded French Milice (the thugs who worked with the SS), the German-backed collaboration press plus the complicated issue of what constituted collaboration. The crucial political and moral issues concerning those years can’t be simply rinsed away by minutiae, as Gildea sometimes does.

In his introduction, Gildea disarms the reader with a show of frankness, writing about the rage his talk on this material caused at the Academy of Tours. The academy secretary remarked to him: “While each of the examples rings true, your audience, myself included, failed to find in it the precise reflection of our collective memory of the German Occupation [which was] characterized by cold, hunger, the absence of freedom, and, above all, fear.”

Perhaps some of the cause for this rage is Gildea’s tendency to be overly solicitous of the Germans. Gildea blames a pair of infamous Nazi massacres on the French Resistance: “126 babies, mutilated, cut to pieces or burned .... [T]he body of a two-month-old baby was found, its head smashed, lying on that of its mother, who had her throat cut and her guts torn out.” But Gildea says “[t]he atrocity was unpardonable, but it was the deed of an army in a panic, caught in a race against time by the advancing Allies, harried by maquisards -- an army whose units, out of contact with their superiors, themselves behaved like terrorist bands.”

By contrast, Curtis, whose forte is meticulous research, provides the accepted account of one of them, the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre: how the SS Panzer Division of the Reich and a Milice leader, in retaliation for the Resistance’s effort to impede their march to Normandy, picked at random Oradour; soldiers locked more than 600 men, women and children in a church, then burned it.

To understand why the French continue to hold certain convictions (and some of the anti-British, anti-American prejudices of the French date back to that time), one has to evaluate the Nazi propaganda machine, which was so extraordinarily skillful in establishing legitimacy for the Reich while characterizing its enemies -- Allies, Jews, the Resistance, Gaullists and Communists -- as terrorists, providing it with a legal justification for the deportation of Jews and random killing of hostages.

Gildea repeatedly excuses the Nazis and their actions. I have no idea why Gildea asserts the Germans were “seduced by the [French] artistic treasures.... [T]here is evidence that the Germans could be better conservators than the French,” or why he indulges in an unfortunate bit of tweaking by using the word “holocaust” with a small “h” as an apologia for brutal German actions in France. “[There was] the fears of the holocaust being inflicted [through bombings] on the cities of the Reich.” Of course there were all sorts of decencies, and even sweetness, between individual German soldiers and the civilian population; this is hardly a new idea. But it doesn’t change the fact that the Nazi machinery and ideology that rolled into France was no bucolic adventure.

Curtis includes reasons for the collapse of the Third Republic, a history of anti-Semitism in France, a rather nuanced reappraisal of Petain and Laval (in which Laval comes out somewhat better, and Petain worse). To his credit, Curtis raises a tremendously painful issue -- the problem of UGIF, the official Jewish agency created by Vichy. It wasn’t exactly a Judenrat, or Jewish Council. It was run by assimilated upper-class French Jews, who genuinely believed Petain would protect them. The UGIF did provide food and shelter for immigrant Jewish orphans. But the Jewish Resistance groups, mainly immigrant, early on, warned Jews not to report to UGIF, and, at times, rescued from UGIF homes Jewish children, who, as a handy source, were particularly at risk of being used to meet deportation quotas.

One of the most horrible atrocities concerned a UGIF home in Neuilly. Despite the warnings of the Jewish resistance that the children were in imminent danger, in mid-July of ‘44, with the Allies so near Paris, UGIF refused to turn the children over to Jewish resistance safe houses. On July 31, 1944, the Germans deported 200 immigrant Jewish children from the UGIF homes on the last convoy to Auschwitz.

Curtis is skittish in dealing with the complexity of the Jewish-Communist relationship and gets off the hook by saying the Communists weren’t interested in Jewish identity. Well, survival, not identity, was the issue then, and one can’t so easily sever the intimate connection between Jews and Communists during the 1930s to conform to the present perspective. The Australian historian Jacques Adler points out in “The Jews of Paris and the Final Solution”: “All organizations, save the Communists, acted on the assumption that Jewish survival could only be the concern of the Jews themselves.”

According to Adler, the French Communist Party in 1942 warned the Jewish Communist Party that mass internments were imminent. At great risk to themselves, members of the Jewish Communist Party immediately printed thousands of leaflets warning Jews to hide, not to report to the police. Young Jewish males particularly heeded this warning; those most vulnerable were the elderly, women and children.

Curtis, despite his excellent research, at times loses a feeling for the period. He commends the Italians for their unwillingness to turn over Jews, as compared to France, noting, “The Italian Army didn’t turn over one Jew.” True -- but what French army does Curtis have in mind? Italy, which didn’t have a history of anti-Semitism, lost 23% of a small Jewish population; France lost 25% of a much larger population (France begged the United States to accept part of its burgeoning new immigrant arrivals, which the Roosevelt administration refused to do). France lost about 80,000 Jews; 60% were immigrant and 10% French citizens. About 115,000 members of the French army were killed or missing after the “phony war”; 1.8 million were prisoners of war in Germany. Six hundred thousand Frenchmen and -women were sent to Germany in the obligatory labor program; 30,000 members of the Resistance were shot; 112,000 were deported to Germany, of which 35,000 returned, many permanently devastated.

Curtis also deals with the troubling role of French intellectuals during the occupation. I will add that Marcel Proust, so identified with evoking the power of memory, was also amazingly politically prescient about the future; his warnings about the rise of a nationalistic anti-Semitic radical right were on the mark.

Among his former admirers, Paul Morand became a collaborator, and Nouvelle Francaise critic Ramon Fernandez turned into a scabrous anti-Semite, depicting the character of Swann as infected with the virus of Dreyfusism, the sickness of the Jewish race. Though Fernandez committed suicide before being tried as a collaborator, his anti-Semitic critique of “Remembrance of Things Past,” slanted to suit Nazi propaganda, has never been disowned by the French. Proust’s closest friends, Rene Blum (brother of Leon), who had helped Proust get published, and critic Benjamin Cremieux (after first being horribly tortured in France), each died in extermination camps. After World War I, Proust shocked his contemporaries by refusing to sign a manifesto calling for a world federation of intellectuals under French leadership; he maintained that France was not the guardian of the civilized world.