Americans In Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupaton

Charles Glass, “Americans In Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupaton, 1940-44” Penguin Press, 2010, 418 pps plus 72 pages of notes
This is my 4th book this summer concerning Paris. I only recommend this book to those similarly obsessed with Paris and its’ history.

Author Charles Glass uses letters, diaries, war documents, and police files to create his portrayal of this sad period in Paris.

Before September 1, 1939 and Hitler’s invasion of Poland, there were more than 30,000 Americans in Paris. By the beginning of 1942 this population had dwindled to about 2,000; this book is primarily about the experiences of those 2,000.

Sylvia Beach, the Shakespeare bookshop owner and great friend of Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce, receives a large portion of the books attention. Additionally, Glass focuses on the American Hospital and the American Library and their contribution to the morale, safety and health of Americans remaining in Paris. The hospital became an important conduit for returning downed pilots to safety. The Hospital and the Library were presided over by General Count Aldebert de Chambrun and his American wife, Clara, a cousin of President Franklin D Roosevelt. Their son René de Chambrun was married to Josée, the daughter of Vichy’s prime minister, Pierre Laval. This ultimately compromising connection was, however, an advantage during the Occupation. It helped the conservative Chambruns to keep the Germans at arm’s length and preserve intact both the hospital and the library, even after Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States in December 1941. After 1942 most American citizens were interned but some remained free. An extraordinary example of those that remained free was Charles Bedaux and the description of his attempt to construct a pipeline across the Sahara to transport peanut oil from West Africa to the Mediterranean. He even managed to obtain supplies from the Germans, who he was allegedly working for, including 15,000 tons of badly needed steel. After the Allied landings in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942, he proposed the same project to the Americans. Bedaux saw nothing wrong in his actions, and he committed suicide in despair when later charged by the Americans with treason for having worked with the Germans.

The outstanding heroes of the story are Dr Sumner Jackson, the director of the American Hospital, his wife Touquette and their 15-year-old son Phillip. Jackson and his wife hid shot-down Allied fliers in the hospital and passed them on to French Resistance escape lines to the Pyrenees. Working for an intelligence network as well, Jackson even allowed Phillip to slip into the restricted area of Saint-Nazaire to photograph the U-Boat pens. All three are ultimately arrested by the Nazis. The Father apparently drowns on 3 May 1945 when an RAF squadron assuming the ship containing POW’s was transporting German troops, attacked them. Of the 7,000 prisoners aboard the SS Thielbeck, only 200 survived. Phillip, the son, is one of the survivors. The Mother had been sent to Ravensbruck and survives but is a broken woman.



My Notes:

Pg. 13: When the Germans approached Paris in 1940, the American Ambassador Bullitt, despite White House and State Department entreaties, refused to leave. “No American ambassador in Paris has ever run away from anything”, Bullitt cable President FDR, “and that I think is the best tradition we have in the American diplomatic service.” That tradition dated to Gouveneur Morris’s decision to stay during the French Revolution, Elihu B. Washburne continued it throughout the German occupation of 1870. In 1914, when Germany’s offensive put Paris within range of the Kaiser’s artillery, every ambassador except the American, Myron T. Herrick, fled. Bullitt would not be the first to cut and run.

Pg. 228: Major-General Karl Oberg had two missions in France: to send Jews from France to die in Poland and to destroy the French Resistance. He ordered what became known as la rafle du Vel d’Hiv, the round-up of the Velodrome d’Hiver, on 16 July 1942. The Germans dragged 13,000 Jews without French citizenship from their homes in Paris to the bicycle stadium. Among those held there without proper sanitation or sufficient food and water were 4,000 children. They were all sent to death camps in Poland. (See my review of the book “Sarah’s Key” for details of this imprisonment, a book as sad as "Sophie's Choice"). Note: The Vélodrome d'Hiver was an indoor cycle track at the corner of the boulevard de Grenelle and the rue Nélaton in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, not far from the Eiffel Tower. It no longer exists.

Pg. 386: Hitler ordered that Paris be subject to the widest destruction possible before the Allies entered the city in 1944. Von Choltitz ordered explosives to be planted under every bridge, electricity station and water-pumping plant as well as the most famous monuments. Marked for destruction were the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Hospital des Invalides with Napoleon’s tomb and the Palais du Luxembourg, among others.

Pg. 415: In 1964, an
American bookseller in Paris rechristened his bookshop on the Left Bank of the Seine facing Notre Dame ‘Shakespeare and Company’ – in memory of Sylvia Beach the owner of the original bookshop of that name. The original bookshop had been located not far away at 12 rue de l’Odeon where it had been founded in 1921. (We visited this bookstore this past May).