Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [102]
On 21 November, Bedaux entertained the wife and daughter of Dr Franz Medicus to tea at the Adlon. Mrs Medicus, unlike her husband in Paris, was indiscreet enough to criticize the Nazis. She insisted to Bedaux that Germany must not be allowed to win the war. He left Berlin four days later. Back in France, he told Pierre Laval, ‘Many people in Germany who were in the know, now after the first retreat on the Russian front, not only didn’t think Germany would win the war but opposed it because victory meant perpetuation of Nazi rule.’ Laval disagreed, and Bedaux claimed to have answered, ‘You will be sorry.’
Although Bedaux insisted Abadan had not been on the agenda during his three weeks in the German capital, the US government opened a file on its expatriate citizen-entrepreneur. His activities came under the scrutiny of several American government agencies, including the Treasury, State Department and the Office of Naval Intelligence. Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover took a personal interest in Bedaux’s activities.
Florence Jay Gould arrived late for her weekly salon of German and French writers in her suite at the Hôtel Bristol, where many Americans were still living under the nominal protection of the US Embassy. When one of her guests asked what had delayed her, the society beauty declared, ‘The Paris stock market has just crashed. I think it’s a bad sign: America is going to enter the war.’ Outside her circle of German and collaborationist littérateurs, the prospect of American entering the war to defeat the Nazis was not at all unwelcome.
Charles Bedaux had regularly briefed both Counsellor Robert Murphy and First Secretary S. Pinckney Tuck at the American Embassy in Vichy. ‘Kippy’ Tuck’s telegram of 24 September 1941, in which he wrote that Bedaux ‘let it be known that he is cooperating on friendly terms with the Nazis’, was already part of an expanding file. Adding to the dossier was testimony from Charles and Fern’s friends Herman and Katherine Rogers, at whose request he had invited Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor to Candé in 1937. The Rogers were in Portugal in August 1941 to book passage home to the United States. A State Department official met them ‘by chance’ in Lisbon on 15 August, but he waited three months, until 24 November, to send a memorandum to his superiors. (It may not have been until then that he learned of Washington’s interest in Bedaux.) Katherine Rogers denounced Bedaux to the diplomat: ‘Mrs. Rogers stated that she had definite information that Mr. Bedaux was using his talents on behalf of the Germans in acquiring for the account of certain German individuals and for himself large properties in and about Paris, and that he traveled about without apparent restrictions and with all indications that he was persona grata to the German occupying forces.’ This was an unexpected turn in the friendship between the Bedaux and Rogers families. Herman Rogers had crossed British Columbia with Bedaux, Katherine had been a close friend of Fern’s and both couples had been witnesses at the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s wedding. Now, the Rogers were denouncing him to the American government as a Nazi collaborator.
The American official who sent this memorandum recalled meeting Bedaux in 1939 ‘in Rome, Italy, negotiating a contract with the Italian Government and [he] was introduced to attachés of our Embassy by the local representative of the Chase National Bank, Mr. Carlo Ruggieri, who entertained extensively for him’. The official offered ‘to elaborate this memorandum if it is found to be of interest’. Of Bedaux, he added, ‘He is a man of tremendous energy and apparent ability in his field of work.’
Bedaux was unaware of the interest he had aroused in Washington. From Candé on 6 December 1941, he wrote a two-page, single-spaced, typed letter to the American Consul General in Lisbon, Worthington E. Hagerman. Hagerman, while posted to France