Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [97]
Bedaux went from Salzburg to Berlin to see Hjalmar Schacht, whom he had met in 1937 as minister of economic affairs and head of the Reichsbank. Hitler had since dismissed Schacht for criticizing Kristallnacht , the night of 10 November 1938, when thousands of Jewish synagogues, shops and houses were destroyed and Jews viciously attacked in Germany. Schacht declined Bedaux’s invitation to lunch and suggested instead that they meet for dinner in a well-known Berlin restaurant. At dinner, Bedaux told Schacht of his discussions with Ribbentrop on backing the Reichsmark with the Bex. Schacht gave Bedaux a sobering response: ‘Monsieur, are you an engineer, an economist or a fool? If von Ribbentrop could lay hands on the gold you Americans have in Fort Knox, Germany’s money would rest on that gold and not on your silly unit of human energy.’ As Schacht continued what became a tirade, Berlin’s chief of police entered the restaurant and arrested him. It turned out the regime had forbidden him to speak to foreigners and to appear in public. By the time Schacht was released from house arrest three days later, Bedaux was back in France. There, he read why Ribbentrop had left him without explanation. He had flown to Moscow to sign the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact, whose secret provisions called for dividing Poland between the Nazi and Soviet dictatorships.
On 1 September, as Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland, Bedaux told his engineers in Lyons, ‘This war will not be like the others, whole populations will be exterminated. And when it is over the same social problems will still be there, the very ones that these horrible criminals had exploited to push people to kill each other.’ His goal, he said, was to preserve something from the conflagration to rebuild the post-war world.
The first French official Bedaux converted to equivalism was Maréchal Philippe Pétain. When Bedaux saw him at Vichy in October 1940 about the Kenadsa mines, Pétain seemed unexpectedly responsive to Bedaux’s theory. Bedaux recalled, ‘He understood nothing whatever about equivalism, but he gave me a very good lecture on it. He takes your words and he amplifies very well without understanding. ’ Bedaux asked for authorization to experiment on the town of Roquefort in the Department of Les Landes. It was a town Bedaux visited before the war, when he advised its paper mill, the Société des Papeteries de Roquefort. Pétain agreed that Bedaux could proceed, but only with the inhabitants’ consent. Bedaux told him he already had it.
Roquefort lay inland from the Atlantic coast between Spain and Bordeaux, about ninety miles north of Bayonne. The Franco-German demarcation line between Occupied and Unoccupied France cut through the town. Bedaux said it had ‘a complete cycle in a small sphere’, where 2,200 inhabitants worked in forestry, agriculture, sheep herding and small industry. There were also artisans and a few artists. Bedaux and his engineers went to Roquefort in March 1941. The engineers lived in the village, and Bedaux rented a comfortable villa nearby in Lencouacq.
Bedaux undertook the project with his usual thoroughness, assigning efficiency experts to study all aspects of Roquefort’s production and consumption. They examined income distribution, trade, labour efficiency and housing. They replaced woodsmen’s shacks with modern dwellings. Bedaux himself worked at the paper mill, which was selling mainly to the German occupier. One day, when he and chief engineer Marcel Grolleau argued about the running of the plant, Bedaux shouted abuse at him. Grolleau quit. Bedaux returned to Candé at the weekend and called Grolleau to apologize. They resumed work at Roquefort, but Bedaux left the project’s minutiae to Grolleau and the other engineers.
Grolleau, an experienced Touraine forestier before he met Bedaux, chopped swathes through the pine forests to create firebreaks. The wood supplied the mill, and he replenished it with fast-growing leucanea pines. The Bedaux model accomplished some of its objectives. Roquefort achieved full