Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [110]
After two months of house arrest, which in the opulent Château de Candé’s 1,200 hectares would not have been intolerable, Charles and Fern Bedaux were told they could travel again. They immediately requested permission to return to the United States. France must have seemed less attractive than before, now that their country was at war with Germany and their influence with German and Vichy officials had proved inadequate to prevent their detention. The Germans denied the request, given Charles’s knowledge of their military and industrial production. Moreover, Nazi officials suspected Fern’s adherence to the Christian Science Church, which they rightly accused of involvement with British military intelligence. A condition of their release was that one of them must remain in France at all times, effectively as hostage for the return of the other. Bedaux immediately took advantage of his liberty to lobby for restoration of the property and files that the Germans had seized from him as an enemy alien after Pearl Harbor. At just the right moment, an ally emerged within the German administration.
In February 1942, Rittmeister Joseph von Ledebur, Bedaux’s friend and former employee, returned to Paris. It seemed that Bedaux’s appeals had succeeded in saving Ledebur from further combat in the Soviet Union. The timing of his deployment to France, as well as his appointment as a custodian of enemy property, could not have worked more to Bedaux’s advantage. Colluding with Bedaux’s other close friend in the German administration, Dr Franz Medicus, Ledebur arranged for German officers to accompany Bedaux to Holland to reclaim the International Bedaux Company’s files on more than two hundred of the most important industrial concerns in German-occupied Europe. Charles returned to Paris with all his dossiers and with his Amsterdam office manager, Alexandra Ter Hart. The former Miss Lebowski feared denunciation in Holland as a Jew. Bedaux gave her a false Aryan identity to work for him in Paris, where no one knew her or her family history.
As an American citizen, Bedaux was no longer permitted to run a company in any of the lands of the Third Reich. His brother Gaston, with his French citizenship, could. He wrote later that Charles was not permitted to sign contracts with belligerent powers: ‘I was therefore authorized by the Minister of Public Works to administer my brother’s company.’ Charles made Gaston promise to return the company to him at the end of the war and, if anything happened to Charles, to provide for Fern.
Gaston was not surprised that Charles’s first concern was his wife’s welfare. He recalled a conversation with his brother, when ‘Charles told me one day, at the beginning of the war, that if he were separated by events from Fern or if his wife disappeared he would have no reason to live.’ With no company responsibilities, Charles was free to pursue a scheme that had been germinating in his imagination for more than a year. ‘In 1941,’ Gaston wrote, ‘he adopted the idea of the pipeline.’ The ‘pipeline’ was to be a bridge between the French territories in black Africa and those in the Arab north. Its functions were to carry water from the fertile areas of Algeria into the desert and to funnel food oil in the opposite direction from the Niger Valley over the inhospitable Sahara to the Mediterranean. Dual-use efficiency appealed to his engineer’s instincts. The Trans-Sahara Railway, on which he had already been working, would run beside the pipeline. The railway and pipeline companies, both to be owned by the French state, would share the costs. Bedaux would assume an interest in the peanut oil refineries he planned to construct on the River Niger. The refineries would have a ready market