Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [83]
A special unit of Vichy police, the Groupe de Protection, arrested Laval and took him to his modest chateau at Châteldon, 13 miles from Vichy. Fifty policemen held him, his wife and daughter under house arrest. At the Hôtel du Parc that evening, Fernand de Brinon tried to leave his room. But a policeman pointed a revolver at him and ordered him back inside. At Châteldon, police cut Laval’s telephone line.
Vichy’s 13 December coup d’état amused Charles de Gaulle in London. The Free French leader dismissed it as ‘a palace revolution that expelled the Grand Vizier’. Washington accepted the result quietly, but with satisfaction.
Pétain announced his decision to dispense with Laval’s services ‘for reasons of internal policy’ over French radio the next day. He sent Hitler a letter that arrived early on Saturday morning, 14 December, informing him of Laval’s dismissal and arrest. Pétain, while thanking Hitler for returning the Duke of Reichstadt’s ashes, declined his invitation to the interment. Hitler exploded, cancelled his trip to Paris and threatened to invade Vichy’s Free Zone immediately. ‘This is a heavy defeat for Ribbentrop and his Abetz,’ Ulrich von Hassell, a former German Ambassador to Italy and anti-Nazi conspirator in the Foreign Ministry, wrote in his diary. ‘Even if we now force them to take Laval back into the Cabinet the situation has shifted much to Germany’s disadvantage. Hitler has ordered preparations for occupying all of France.’ Hitler accepted Ribbentrop’s advice to send Otto Abetz to Vichy to see Pétain and free Laval, before resorting to an expensive invasion.
On Sunday, 15 December, Abetz presided at the delayed midnight service for the Duke of Reichstadt without either Hitler or Pétain in attendance. Unimpressed Parisians, freezing that winter, said they preferred coal to ashes. The ceremony was so tawdry that some of the German-supported Paris newspapers did not report it. Abetz sped early in the morning to Vichy and demanded Laval’s immediate release. At two o’clock, Laval was brought from Châteldon to Vichy to see Pétain, who apologized for his arrest but refused to reinstate him. A few hours later, Josée de Chambrun and her mother heard motorcycles at the head of a German Embassy convoy bringing Pierre Laval back to the Château de Châteldon. ‘I saw for the first time the Germans,’ Josée wrote in her diary, ‘their initiative perhaps [saving] the life of my father.’ To her, these Germans were ‘intelligent and pleasant’. Quoting ‘a great writer’, she switched to English: ‘The people from Auvergne never forget; children remember those who hurt their fathers and they don’t forget those who give them help or relief in days of stress.’ She added in French, ‘I’ll never forget, but what great sadness.’ Laval, free but out of office, went straight to Paris, ‘where he is safe’.
Josée sent a telegram from the post office in Vichy to her husband René in the United States: STAY AMERICA STOP NO REASON TO WORRY EXCEPT FOR THE COUNTRY STOP ALL LOVE. René de Chambrun’s morale was already low, because his second mission to the United States was failing. His cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, did not return his calls and refused to provide US government humanitarian aid to the Free Zone. Few American officials accepted René’s contention that his father-in-law was not pro-German. In New York, René wrote, ‘I spent the saddest Christmas of my life.’
Laval’s removal cost Charles Bedaux his most effective contact in the Vichy administration. Worse came the next day, 15 December, when Bedaux’s friend Count Joseph von Ledebur was recalled by the army from Paris to Germany. The allies he could call on were disappearing. He needed small favours, like German identity cards to travel to Vichy and North Africa, and larger ones, especially the return of his international company’s assets in German-occupied Amsterdam. His relations with Ambassador Abetz remained cordial, so he went the next day, 16 December, to the German Embassy. Discovering