Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [82]
The hospital attracted medical staff with no obvious medical expertise. One of these was Mademoiselle D. ‘A very beautiful girl,’ Guillon thought, ‘she nonetheless did not win our sympathy because we were wounded and she certainly knew absolutely nothing about the nursing profession.’ Three weeks later, Guillon read in the German-sponsored Paris press a communiqué from the Feldkommandatur of Grossparis that a young American woman, who turned out to be Mademoiselle D., had been expelled for abusing her privileges on ‘neutral territory’. Guillon took this to mean she was ‘conducting anti-German activities’. Mademoiselle D. was probably Elizabeth Deegan, a clerk in the American Embassy who was arrested by the Germans on 1 December. Because the US Consulate was representing British interests in France, Elizabeth Deegan had visited British prisoners at the German prison in the rue du Cherche Midi and at the American Hospital. The Nazis held and questioned her at Cherche Midi. Before the Germans finally allowed her to be deported under pressure from the State Department, the Paris press alleged that her crime was ‘conniving at the escape of British officers’.
FIFTEEN
Germany’s Confidential American Agent
IN PARIS, CHARLES BEDAUX became more closely involved with Otto Abetz and Pierre Laval over what Time magazine would call ‘the affair of the dead eaglet’. On 12 December, Abetz delivered Laval an invitation for Maréchal Pétain. Adolf Hitler was asking Pétain to join him in a ceremony to inter the ashes of Napoleon’s son, the Duke of Reichstadt, in his father’s crypt in the Hôpital des Invalides. Simultaneously, the Germans issued an official announcement of the Führer’s gift to France. L’Aiglon, or ‘the little eagle’, as the French affectionately called the younger Bonaparte, had been buried in Vienna’s Capuchin church at his death in 1832. Hitler himself would accompany the remains on the train to Paris in two days, the hundredth anniversary of the return of Napoleon’s body from St Helena. The Germans intended their public relations extravaganza to demonstrate the benefits of collaboration. The return of the little eagle’s remains drew Charles Bedaux into a political web whose strands led from Berlin to Vichy and Paris for control of France.
Laval warned Abetz that Pétain’s age and the December weather might prevent his attendance, but he called Vichy anyway to urge the Maréchal to accept. An official there declined on Pétain’s behalf, so Laval drove early the next morning to Vichy with his daughter Josée to invite him in person. Josée Laval de Chambrun, who had just left her husband, Comte René de Chambrun, in the United States, noted ominously in her diary that the day was Friday the thirteenth. Laval claimed that Pétain met him that afternoon and agreed to attend the interment service in Paris. At five o’clock, Laval presided at a short meeting of the cabinet in the Hôtel du Parc. Afterwards, someone informed him that the cabinet would meet again at eight o’clock. ‘I had scarcely entered the Council Room when the Marshal came in … He said, “I wish each minister to hand in his resignation.”’ When they obeyed, Pétain accepted the resignations of only Laval and one other minister. Laval argued with Pétain. Pétain accused Laval of not pressing the Germans to allow him to move the government from Vichy to the Paris suburb of Versailles, traditional seat of French kings. (The Pétain government was responsible for police, roads and the rest of the civil infrastructure in both the Occupied and Free Zones. It also commanded the colonies, which at the time comprised 10 per cent of the world’s landmass. Vichy had begun as a temporary capital that P