Bad Faith Read online

  UGIF: Union Générale des Israélites de France, General Union of French Jews

  Louis Darquier's Associations and Newspapers

  Association des Blessés et Victimes du 6 Février: Association of the Wounded and the Victims of 6 February

  Club National: National Club

  Club Sportif des Ternes: Les Ternes Sports Club

  Rassemblement Antijuif de France: Anti-Jewish Union of France

  l'Antijuif: the Anti-Jew, sequel to the Bulletin of his Club National

  La France enchaînée: France in Chains

  Union Française: French Union

  Cahiers Jaunes: the Yellow Notebooks

  Les Vieilles Souches: Ancient Roots

  UFDR: Union Française pour la Défense de la Race, French Union for the Defence of the Race

  Chaire d'Ethnologie: Chair in Ethnology, at the Sorbonne

  Chaire d'Histoire du Judaïsme: Chair in Jewish History, at the Sorbonne

  Commission Scientifique pour l'étude des Questions de Biologie Raciale: Scientific Commission for the Study of Racial Biology

  IAS: Institut d'Anthropo-Sociologie, Institute of Anthropo-Sociology

  IEQ J: Institut d'Étude des Questions Juives, Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions

  IEQ JER: Institut d'Étude des Questions Juives et Ethno-Raciales, Institute for the Study of Jewish and Ethno-Racial Questions

  Historical Note

  FRENCH REPUBLICS

  Before the Occupation:

  First Republic: 1792 to 1804, when Napoleon declared himself Emperor

  Second Republic: 1848 to 1852

  Third Republic: 4 September 1870 to 10 July 1940

  After the Occupation:

  Provisional Republican Government: 1944 to 1947

  Fourth Republic: 1947 to 1959

  Fifth Republic: 1959 to present

  The Third Republic, brought to an end by parliamentary vote on 10 July 1940, was a two-chamber parliament with a president and a prime minister, called the Président du Conseil des Ministres.

  The Chambre des Députés, today the Assemblée Nationale, equivalent to the British House of Commons, is the lower house of the French Parliament. Under the Third Republic it consisted of six hundred members elected by universal male suffrage every four years. Its official seat is the Palais Bourbon. The three hundred Sénateurs, the upper house of the French Parliament, were elected by mayors and councillors in départements throughout France. The Sénat sits in the Palais du Luxembourg.

  Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, installed as head of l'état Français with full governing powers, was authorised to produce a new constitution. This was never done; instead, for the first time since the Revolution of 1789, France had no representative national body in the Vichy state. Pétain ruled through his personal entourage and his Council of Ministers until April 1942, when much of his authority, though not his position, passed to Pierre Laval.

  French regions and departments have changed over the years. As of 2005, France is divided into twenty-six régions—twenty-two metropolitan and four overseas—and the régions are divided into a hundred départements.

  The state's representative in a région or département is called the préfet, his office the préfecture.

  GERMAN OFFICES IN FRANCE

  Heinrich Himmler was in charge of all police and security services for the Third Reich, including death camps. In 1943 he also became Minister of the Interior. The Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) was the secret state police, founded in 1933 by Goering, then controlled by Heinrich Himmler and his deputy Reinhard Heydrich. The Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RHSA), the Reich Central Security Office, controlled by the Nazi Party, was created in 1939 through a merger of the Sicherheitsdienst, the SD, the Gestapo and the Kriminalpolizei. Himmler placed Reinhard Heydrich in charge of the RHSA. After Heydrich's death in May 1942 Ernst Kaltenbrunner replaced him. The RHSA comprised the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the intelligence service of the SS; the Sicherheitspolizei (SS, SiPo), the security police, which had various subsections, one of which was the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo), the secret state police or political police.* Within the RHSA was Eichmann's Office Section IV B4, which ran the Judenreferat, the Jewish Section of the SD. Later, the Abwehr, the intelligence service of the army, also came under the RHSA.

  * In France—and elsewhere—most people used the word “Gestapo” for all these branches of the RHSA, except for the Judenreferat. I have used “SS” to include the Gestapo, but have often used the general word “Gestapo.”

  Family Trees: Darquiers and Joneses

  Prologue

  THERE ARE MANY THINGS to make one wretched on this earth. In my case my childhood was my purgatory, or rather, I saw myself as the Little Mermaid in Hans Andersen's fairy story, condemned to eternal suffering in return for becoming mortal. “Every step you take will cause you pain all but unbearable—it will seem to you as if you were walking on the sharp edges of swords—and your blood will flow,” says the witch. And so the Little Mermaid, “her heart filled with thoughts of death and annihilation, smiled and danced with the others, till past midnight.”

  In 1960, when I was twenty-one, my adventures took me from the place where I was born, Melbourne, Australia, by way of ships and boats and planes to Europe, and then, a year or so later, to the day at the Villa d'Este on Lake Como, in Italy, when I swallowed a large bottle of inadequate sleeping pills. The good man who was with me at the time took me back to London and found me a doctor. The person carefully chosen for me, because she was half-Australian—not that you would know it, for all her thirty-three years had been spent entirely in England—was called Dr. Anne Darquier, and she lived in London W1. For three days a week, for seven years, from eight o'clock in the morning I would spend an hour with her, and I started to live in the world, like other people.

  Anne Darquier was a doctor and a psychiatrist. She was born in 1930 in Old Windsor, just outside London. I knew her during the last decade of her life, and she told me stories about her Australian mother whom she never really knew, and her father, living in Europe—sometimes I thought in France, sometimes in Spain. Once she said matter-of-factly while speaking of them: “There are some things and some people you can never forgive.”

  One Monday, 7 September 1970, I rang the doorbell of Flat 38, 59 Weymouth Street. She had arranged the time, but there was no answer. Later that day, someone rang to tell me that Anne Darquier was dead. Ten days later I went to her funeral at Golders Green Crematorium, and there I found that she had another name: she was to be buried as Anne Darquier de Pellepoix. This was odd, but it would have remained only an oddity had I not, by chance, watched a documentary on television a year or so later: Marcel Ophuls' Le Chagrin et la pitié—The Sorrow and the Pity: The Story of a French Town in the Occupation. As I read the English subtitles I saw Anne's full surname again, attached to one of the officials of the Vichy government, trotting up to Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich Central Security Office, to shake his hand respectfully.

  Who was this man? Eventually, Anne's birth certificate told me. The Vichy official, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, was her father. Everything I had learned about Anne in the years I knew her—little, but enough— seemed to be shrouded in silence, buried beneath injustices to her which I sensed but could not comprehend. I had thought she was a child of the war, motherless and fatherless, like millions of others of her generation. In the decades that followed Anne's death, delving into archives and documents and bothering people in France, Spain, Germany, Australia, England, I became an expert on the lies and secrecy and the silence to which Anne felt condemned.

  Louis Darquier and Myrtle Jones, Anne's mother, were both arch-confabulators, and those who knew them, or met them, often wished that they had not, and for good reason were wary of my interest. So it would not be true to say that everything I have discovered is the only truth, or that I have not speculated; but when I have, my speculation stems from extensive research and considered analysis. I starte
d with Anne's story, which as the years went by became that of her parents, and of Europe at war.

  I searched for Louis Darquier in histories of France of the Second World War. And I found him—always given his entirely fictitious name of Darquier de Pellepoix. He had been Commissaire Général aux Questions Juives, Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, in Vichy France, and was known as the French Eichmann.1 When I began this quest Darquier was still alive, living in Madrid, happily ensconced in Franco's Spain, though I did not know this.

  Anne's story began on 19 April 1928 when Louis Darquier, the second child of a provincial doctor and his wife in Cahors, in southwest France, married Myrtle Marian Ambrosine Jones, second child of an Australian grazier and his wife from the township of Carrick, eleven miles outside Launceston, in the north of Tasmania.

  Louis Darquier was often described as a handsome fellow. By 1928 he had acquired the English uniform immortalised by P. G. Wodehouse: a monocle and cane, the former worn ostensibly for his farsightedness, and never left at home even when his clothes were in tatters. He was five foot ten, but seemed taller. He had a huge head, and in photographs he always looks solid and juts his jaw forward or stands erect, flourishing himself at the camera. His eyes were browny green, and his other distinguishing marks were those of a boy and man used to punch-ups: a scar above his left eyebrow and a slightly flattened nose.

  Louis resembled his father, and passed on to Anne the Darquier shape of face, his pale skin and straight hair. As is so often the case with married couples, Myrtle slightly resembled her husband, so that when you looked at Anne, the eyes and mouth of her mother, shared by Myrtle's three sisters and five brothers, stared out of her Darquier face. Myrtle Jones was not a beautiful woman. When Louis first met her the best he could say of her was that “she is not ugly.” But what he added revealed that he had met his soul mate. Myrtle Jones, as formidable a fantasist as Louis himself, was, he told his brother René, “that kind of agreeable woman who has a keen sense of reality.”

  On their marriage certificate, Louis Darquier gave his age as thirty years, as indeed he was. Myrtle gave hers as twenty-six, whereas she was in fact thirty-five, and described herself as a spinster, which indeed she was not. In Sydney in 1923 she had married for the first time under the name of Sandra Lindsay. It is a national Australian characteristic to abbreviate names. Had Louis Darquier himself lived in Australia for any length of time—as he so often, and so falsely, claimed to have done—he would certainly have been known as Lew. Myrtle carried this habit for life. In Australia she was Aunty Myrt, in public she was Sandra, but in private, throughout the multifarious reincarnations of her life in Europe, she called herself “San” except when someone was after her—creditors, passport officials, functionaries of that kind. On those occasions she had to use her given name, Myrtle Jones, Myrtle Marian Ambrosine Jones. In this book she is Myrtle.

  During the years I knew Anne, from 1963 until 1970, she often mentioned that she had been abandoned by her parents when she was a baby and had been brought up by a nanny in an English village, in considerable poverty. In 1963 Anne was in her thirties, eight years older than I. She had a gentle, round face, her skin was very white, very English, and her voice was very English too. But nothing else about her was. Her body in particular seemed to belong nowhere; she had a sense of imminent departure about her, even when she gave you her closest attention, which she always did. She stooped, and her straight brown hair stooped with her—she was always pushing it back with one hand. Her shoulders were rounded, bowed almost, and her very French legs went all over the place. She could not sit on a chair without tucking them up underneath her as though she was packing them away. Her face was not happy, but it was not sad either: it was wary and alert and concentrated. She laughed, and she could be angry. She told me secrets she should have kept to herself, but had she not, I could never have begun the search for the truth about her. She sent me on my way with many clues.

  I discovered that her story was not her own, but a keyhole into the dark years of civil war in France and of the victory of one faction during the Vichy years. Anne's story spread over continents, from France, the land of her father, to Australia, the land of her mother, to Germany and Spain, and to Britain—which gave her, as it gave so many at that time, what luck in life she had.

  As Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, Anne's father was the longest-serving official of the Vichy state appointed to deal with the elimination and despoliation of the Jews of France. Before the war, Louis Darquier had been a leading French anti-Semite, funded by the Nazi Party. From 1935 to 1944 he held public appointments and ran private organisations through which he campaigned for the expulsion or massacre of the Jews of France. Both the French police and the Nazis considered him as a top man in his field. He was a professional who used Jews as a way of making a living. More than that, he was a con man, one who was in his turn used by the Vichy state and the German occupiers as their puppet.

  For Vichy, as Commissioner for Jewish Affairs from May 1942 to February 1944, Louis Darquier controlled a staff of over a thousand and a police force which terrorised both Jew and Gentile. In July 1942 he was placed in charge of the notorious Vel' d'Hiv' round-up in Paris, which despatched nearly thirteen thousand Jews to death camps—almost a third of them were children. Though an idle man, he worked tirelessly to provide more Jews for deportation. He introduced the yellow star and took life-and-death decisions over the fate of the Jews of France. Most of those who died in Auschwitz were sent there during Louis Darquierelf—‘De Pellepoix’—God ks tenure. Almost all of the 11,400 children were sent there in his time. Most of them did not survive. Above all, he used the persecution of Jews to make money for himself and his cronies—through corruption, despoliation, looting and bribery. What energy remained to a man who loved high living was expended on propaganda efforts to achieve more of the same.

  After the end of the German occupation of France in 1944, in the épuration, the purge, which followed, a man was lynched by a mob in Limoges or Brive—reports differ—in the belief that he was “Darquier de Pellepoix.” But they got the wrong man.

  In a letter in 1975, a Madame Laurens, a native of Cahors who had known the Darquier family when Louis and his brothers were children, wrote: “What is interesting to us is the name he added himself—‘De Pellepoix’—God knows why, out of pride I suppose. As a young man he was, they say, troubled and unstable, a spendthrift, always at odds with his parents.”2

  But where did he come from? What made him what he was?

  I

  COBBLERS

  &

  CONVICTS

  1

  The Priest's Children

  CAHORS, IN SOUTHWEST FRANCE, the Darquiers' native town, is built on a loop in the River Lot, and boasts monuments and buildings, bridges and churches of great beauty, strong red wine, plump geese and famous sons, one of whom was the great hero of the Third Republic, Léon Gambetta, after whom the main boulevard and the ancient school of Cahors are named. It is an amiable, sturdy, provincial place, with the windy beauty of so many southern French towns, dominated by its perfect medieval Pont Valentré and its Romanesque fortress of a cathedral, the massive Cathédrale de St.-Étienne. Cahors was the capital of the ancient region of Quercy, whose many rivers cut through great valleys and hills, patched with limestone plateaux, grottos and cascades. In medieval times Cahors was a flourishing city of great bankers who funded the popes and kings, but up to the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century Quercy was also an explosive region of great violence, one explanation perhaps for the cautious politics of its citizens— Cadurciens—in the centuries that followed.

  Quercy reflected an important fissure in the French body politic, in the rivalry that existed between Cahors—fiercely Catholic during the Wars of Religion, when its leaders massacred the Protestants of the town—and its southern neighbour, the more prosperous town of Montauban, a Protestant stronghold. But under Napoleon Cahors became the administrative centre of the new departme
nt of the Lot, Montauban of the Tarn-et-Garonne. (The rivalry continued: when the Vichy state came to power in 1940, and wanted to work with the Nazis to control its Jewish population, the two Frenchmen who managed much of this process were Louis Darquier of Cahors, Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, and René Bousquet of Montauban, Secretary-General for the Police.)

  Cahors and environs in southwest France

  In the late nineteenth century the Lot was a poor agricultural department, covered with vineyards large and small, a place where “notables”— the elite bourgeoisie—reigned supreme, looking after a rural community who worked a hard land. The Lot was modestly revolutionary after 1789, restively Napoleonic under Napoleon, imperially Bonapartiste in the time of Louis Napoleon, warily republican after 1870. By 1890 the department had become solidly republican, and remained thus ever afterwards. Isolated from the political sophistications and turmoils of Paris, the Lot turned its face towards Toulouse, a hundred kilometres or so to the south.