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this as a possible way around Catholic and American opposition to its collaboration with the Nazis in deporting Jews to Poland. Joseph de Catry had a Jewish ally, Kadmi Cohen, whom the Germans had released under suspicious circumstances in late 1941 from internment at the Compiègne camp. Cohen, a Revisionist or right-wing Zionist, made an appeal to the Germans similar to that made by mainstream Zionist leaders, like Chaim Weizmann, to the British: that Germany sponsor a Jewish State in Palestine, Transjordan and the Sinai peninsula that would defend German interests. De Catry’s ‘Masada’ programme required the Germans to expel the British from the Middle East, something Rommel’s Afrikakorps had failed to do at El Alamein in November 1942. André Lavagne thought the plan ‘could lift the very black cloud that hangs over [France] because of an excessively violent antisemitic policy’. When the Catholic hierarchy disowned de Catry, Pétain’s advisers lost faith in the scheme. So did the Germans, who eventually killed Kadmi Cohen at Auschwitz.

Suspicion of René de Chambrun grew in Allied circles. In July 1943, Britain’s Ministry of Economic Warfare, in a secret memo to the British Embassy in Buenos Aires, accused de Chambrun of ‘organizing a series of holding companies in order to conceal transactions carried out on behalf of the Germans, the object of which is to place looted property in security. Pierre Laval, himself, is the brains behind the scheme.’ No evidence emerged to prove the charge, but a careful watch was nonetheless kept on de Chambrun and his friend, fellow Franco-American lawyer François Monahan. Someone began supplying the American press with allegations about René de Chambrun designed to embarrass his family in Ohio, as well as his cousins, the Roosevelts.

Charles Bedaux was the subject of investigation and negotiation, not only in Washington, but in France. Although his arrest made headlines in the German-supported Paris press for only a day, both Vichy and the German occupiers had a residual interest in the millionaire. His name came up when François Monahan went to Lourdes in December 1942 to see the American diplomats interned at the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs. United Press correspondent Ralph Heinzen, who was interned with his wife at another hotel in Lourdes, believed that Monahan was representing Pierre Laval in an effort to reopen a Vichy–Washington channel after the break in relations. Monahan thought that Bedaux might act as an intermediary between Laval, who naively hoped to negotiate peace between Germany and the Allies, and Robert Murphy in Algiers.

André Enfière, a secret member of Charles de Gaulle’s Committee of National Resistance, chanced upon a German interest in Bedaux while he was in Paris seeking the release from Vichy custody of the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Edouard Herriot. Herriot’s defiant speech at Vichy in July 1940 had been praised by American Ambassador William Bullitt as ‘the single example of courage and dignity during the dreary afternoon’. Herriot had subsequently been arrested for condemning Maréchal Pétain’s award of the Legion of Honour in August 1942 to the pro-Nazi Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism. Pétain, who had little regard for parliament or its members, confined Herriot in various locations, including Vittel and Nancy, far from his home in Breteil. Herriot was an old man, whose health suffered from the moves. Enfière’s concern for his well-being was combined with his respect for a man who represented the Third Republic. In his and de Gaulle’s view, the Republic’s abolition in July 1940 was illegitimate because it had been coerced by Nazi bayonets. To ameliorate Herriot’s condition and have him available to reconvene parliament when the Germans left, Enfière, to his distaste, negotiated with Vichy politicians Georges Bonnet and Pierre Laval.

It became clear that the Germans had the final word regarding Herriot, so Enfière appealed to Charles Bedaux’s friend in the Hôtel Majestic, Dr Franz Medicus. Medicus, whom Enfière believed was anti-Nazi,