Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [4]
French Premier Paul Reynaud, preparing to flee to Tours with his government, declared Paris an open city and asked Bullitt to persuade the Wehrmacht not to destroy it. Bullitt, a one-time playboy and writer who co-authored with Sigmund Freud a psychological study of President Woodrow Wilson, spent the last nights of May 1940 in his wine cellar to avoid the Luftwaffe bombs. One nearly killed him. Bullitt was as close to France’s senior politicians, especially Prime Minister Reynaud, as he was to his old friend Roosevelt. Bullitt was the only ambassador still in Paris when the Germans arrived on 14 June 1940.
At first, Americans shared the French panic that the Germans would treat Paris as they had Warsaw–raping, killing and destroying as they entered. But the Nazis’ racist ideology accorded a higher place to the French than it did to the Poles. They did not target Americans, who were allowed to stay and work unhindered. The two most important American organizations, the American Hospital of Paris and the American Library of Paris, were open to Americans and French alike. A few courageous American consuls disobeyed State Department orders by issuing passports and visas to Jewish refugees and establishing safe routes to help them reach North and South America.
The African-Americans who stayed were not as lucky as their white countrymen. After Adolf Hitler’s only visit to Paris, on 24 June 1940, the Germans banned concerts by black American musicians. Proclamations published in the Officiel du Spectacle set out to eliminate what the Nazis called ‘degenerate Jewish-Negro jazz.’ A month later, the Germans ordered a census of all foreign nationals in Paris. Black Americans were ordered to report to the police, and the American consulate did not protect them. The famous American jazz trumpeter Arthur Briggs was sent in late June 1940 to a concentration camp at St. Denis, where he formed a classical orchestra with other black musicians from America, Britain and the West Indies. The Germans detained many other African-American performers, including Roberta Dodd Crawford from Chicago. She was a prominent singer, known as Princess Tovalou since her marriage in 1923 to Prince Tovalou of Benin. Another trumpeter, Harry Cooper, was sent to an internment camp. The African-American classical composer and musician Maceo Jefferson escaped Paris–only to be captured outside the city and interned at Frontslag 122. Henry Crowder, whose thirteen year affair with British shipping heiress Nancy Cunard shocked white America more than it did Paris society, was giving a concert in Belgium when the Nazis invaded. He escaped on the last train to Paris, but the Luftwaffe bombed it. Continuing to his beloved Paris on foot, he was taken by the Germans. Thus, the vibrant African-American community that thrived in the 1920s and 1930s was for the most part absent from Paris during the occupation.
Unlike other African-Americans, Josephine Baker was not interned, thanks to her fame in Paris and abroad. An entertainer who had captivated Paris in the 1920s with her topless Danse Sauvage, she was a much-married and much-loved social fixture. Her decision not to abandon France was moral: the Nazis represented an extreme version of the racial hatred she had escaped in the United States. She stayed at her chateau in the country at first and joined the new French Resistance. Her commander was Jacques Abtey, the police officer for whom