Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [104]
Bedaux wrote the letter on Saturday, 6 December 1941. On Sunday the 7th, he and Fern set out on the road to Roquefort. She was going to stay with him at his rented villa in Lencouacq to see his utopian experiment in ‘equivalism’ at work. They stopped for the night in Bordeaux, which, like Candé, was in the Occupied Zone. They went to Les Landes, where Bedaux mailed the letter to Hagerman. On Sunday morning, when Bedaux mailed the letter, the Empire of Japan bombed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. What President Roosevelt would shortly call the ‘day that will live in infamy’ was about to transform Americans in Paris from protected neutrals into enemies of the Third Reich. Even if Bedaux had obeyed Hagerman’s request to return home to the United States, it was now–as for the rest of the Americans in occupied France–too late.
TWENTY-ONE
Enemy Aliens
GERMANY DECLARED WAR ON THE UNITED STATES on 11 December 1941, four days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The Germans ordered all American citizens in the Occupied Zone to register with the nearest German Kommandatur by 6 p.m. on 17 December. As the deadline passed, the Nazis arrested 340 American men under the age of 60. Among them were the American Cathedral’s organist, Lawrence K. Whipp, and Dr Morris Sanders of the American Hospital. Dr Sumner Jackson, although liable to internment at age 56, ‘was permitted to remain at liberty’. Ninety-five of the internees were Jewish, whose American citizenship was respected by the Germans. The men were installed at Besançon in crude wooden shacks without heat or plumbing. Like the British internees in 1940, they were soon moved to better quarters at Frontstalag 122 near Compiègne. Compiègne, where Germany and France had signed the Armistices of 1918 and 1940, lay in a forest 50 miles north of Paris. Frontstalag 122, also called the Royallieu Camp, had been the barracks of a Moroccan Spahi regiment. It had heat, running water and kitchens. The Germans divided the camp into sections for enemy aliens, political prisoners, Africans, gypsies, Freemasons and European Jews.
The first American to be released was Gething C. Miller, a friend of René de Chambrun and the lawyer who had represented the defendants in the Teapot Dome oil scandal of the 1920s. ‘He came to tell me all the requirements of his compatriots who needed practically everything, ’ René recalled. ‘Josée visited the managers of two or three Paris Department Stores and was able to buy a great amount of supplies which had been concealed from the French public and the Germans and these we had delivered to the camp in Compiègne through the Red Cross.’
The Germans held the Americans while they determined how Washington treated Axis citizens in the United States. Charles Bedaux was not interned, but the Germans put him and Fern under house arrest at the Château de Candé. They cancelled his ‘equivalism’ experiment at Roquefort, and they seized his company files and other assets in France and the Netherlands. His friends in the German administration, Dr Franz Medicus and Ambassador Otto Abetz, were powerless to protect him. One week after the Nazis interned the 340 Americans, they deported the last American journalists in Paris, Edward Haffell of the New York Herald Tribune, Louis Harl of the International News Service and Philip Whitcomb of the Associated Press, to southern Germany. There, the reporters were interned with other American correspondents to await repatriation to the United States. The Germans did not disturb the rest of the Americans in Paris.
A distinguished, 70-year-old English gentleman walked into Shakespeare and Company on 17 December, ten days after Pearl Harbor and the final day for Americans to register at the Kommandatur. Sylvia Beach had known him since 1920 and had sold his books and magazines. The sudden appearance of Edward Gordon Craig, who had been an actor and director before he became a writer, could not have been more welcome. Sylvia had