Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [78]
In October 1940, German Ambassador Otto Abetz provided Bedaux with an Ausweis, or pass, to cross the demarcation line between France’s Occupied Zone and the Free Zone. Bedaux’s mission was to consult Maréchal Henri-Philippe Pétain about reviving his scheme to increase coal production at Algeria’s Kenadsa coal mines– no longer for Spanish mills to produce steel for France to fight Germany, but to fuel trains in North Africa. The old Maréchal received Bedaux at his Hôtel du Parc headquarters in Vichy. They discussed various Bedaux projects, and Pétain granted his request to study the Kenadsa mines’ operation and evaluate the quality of the coal. Bedaux left Vichy to inspect mineshafts in the northern Sahara.
On 21 October, Clara and Aldebert de Chambrun had lunch in Paris with Pierre Laval. Laval, already Pétain’s vice-premier, had just been named foreign minister as well. Their children, René de Chambrun and Josée Laval, were in Boston seeking American aid for children and refugees in the Free Zone. Laval told Clara and Aldebert that Abetz had just invited him to meet a senior German official: ‘He must be speaking of [Foreign Minister Joachim] von Ribbentrop, I believe. He is somewhere in the offing, and, it seems, has more influence with Hitler than anyone else.’ The next day, Abetz told Laval he was taking him to meet, as he had suspected, Ribbentrop. A German car drove the two men out of Paris, past Rambouillet, to the Loire Valley. It was then that Abetz admitted to Laval that he would see, in addition to Ribbentrop, Hitler himself. Laval blurted out, ‘Sans blague?’ ‘No joke?’ They went to a nondescript village, Montoire-sur-Loire, chosen for its proximity to a tunnel in which the Führer’s private train, the Amerika, could hide in the event of RAF bombing. Hitler and Ribbentrop, who received Laval in the train’s dining car, invited him to return in two days with Maréchal Pétain for the first post-defeat summit between the German and French leaders.
In the meantime, Hitler had a rendezvous with the Spanish dictator, General Francisco Franco, at Hendaye in French Basque country beside the Spanish frontier. Franco, who had taken power with German military assistance in the Spanish Civil War only the year before, resisted Hitler’s demand that he repay the debt by joining the war against Britain. The Spaniard’s prevarication scuttled German plans to send troops through Spain to conquer the British Mediterranean fortress at Gibraltar. Hitler responded by denying Franco, who had occupied Tangier on the day the Germans entered Paris, permission to occupy other parts of French Morocco. Franco left Hitler in a bad mood to receive Pétain and Pierre Laval on 24 October back in Montoire.
On the Amerika, Hitler asked Pétain, stung by the British attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir in July, to declare war on Britain. Pétain said he was not yet in a position to go that far in cooperating with Germany, but he asked for a peace treaty so that ‘the two million French prisoners of war may return to their families as soon as possible’. Like Franco, Pétain would not commit his country to war against Britain. But he would not resume the fight against Germany either. His goal was to keep France’s fleet and colonies out of both Allied and Axis control, while cooperating with the Germans to obtain a gentler occupation. After the meeting, Pétain broadcast a speech that introduced the notion of ‘collaboration’: ‘This collaboration