• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2510 0

appointed Carlos Niedermann, who was Swiss, to replace its American manager in Paris in February 1941. In 1942, its Parisian deposits, including those of German nationals, increased despite the war between Germany and the United States. Meanwhile, the American Club, American Express and the American private schools in Paris closed. ‘Institutions such as the American Hospital and the American Library,’ the New York Times reported from Vichy on 29 January, ‘operated by foundations and open to the French as well as Americans, have not been confiscated, although the Germans hesitated a long time before abandoning claims to the hospital, which is one of the most modern and best equipped in Europe.’ The American Chamber of Commerce stayed open to protect American businesses under the direction of acting secretary George Verité.

Mme Gillet of the French Red Cross contacted General de Chambrun at the American Hospital, and he donated medical supplies to Frontstalag 122. The hospital had no linen or blankets to spare, but it sent medical teams to the camp. Some internees were brought to Neuilly for treatment. Otto Gresser recalled, ‘These patients were not at all eager to get well very fast. As soon as they were cured, we had to promise the Germans that they had to return to the civilian camps until the war was over.’ Jackson and Gresser put some of the internees on a prolonged ‘unwell’ list in a ward for the elderly. This kept beds full and internees out of the detention camps. Many of the 340 men interned in January were released within a few weeks. Dr Morris Sanders was not released until the end of April, when he was allowed to resume work at the American Hospital.

Apart from auditing the American Hospital’s annual accounts, there was ‘no other interference by the German authorities’. This left Otto Gresser free to scavenge necessary but contraband supplies and allowed Sumner Jackson to hide the British, and later American, flyers whose planes had been downed in France. The escape network was becoming more sophisticated, as the Resistance developed skills in forging papers, keeping safe houses, crossing the Line of Demarcation and deceiving the Germans. Routes that took Allied soldiers to safety also served to deliver photographs of German military installations and other intelligence to London. The Germans penetrated some of the networks and arrested their members. By the spring of 1942, they had not captured any Allied soldiers, whether escaped prisoners or downed airmen, on routes that began in the American Hospital of Paris. When the men reached England, they told their commanders about a patriot named Sumner Waldron Jackson.

With fewer Americans in Paris and most French prisoners of war in Germany, Aldebert de Chambrun sought new ways to fill the hospital with non-German patients. A proposal came in January 1942 from Dr Alexis Carrel, a Nobel Prize-winning French physician who had conducted research in America in 1906 at the then-new Rockefeller Institute. Carrel was a friend and mentor of Charles Lindbergh, who had moved to Paris for a time after the kidnapping and murder of his baby son in New Jersey in 1932. The two men had designed a blood profusion pump that allowed human organs to survive outside the body, an early aid to organ transplants. Time magazine had pictured the two with their pump on its cover of 13 June 1938. Carrel’s medical talent was undisputed, but his views on race and eugenics mirrored the Nazis’. His L’Homme, cet inconnu (Man, This Unknown) in 1935 recommended that the criminally insane and other undesirables ‘should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanistic institutions supplied with gases’. Carrel had no objections to Nazi euthanasia of ‘defectives’, but attacking France was another matter. From the beginning of the war in 1939 to the fall of France, Dr Carrel took an active part in the struggle against Germany, directing the French army’s Commission for Oxygen Therapy. He warned Lindbergh, who fronted the largest anti-war movement in the United States, American First,