How Hitler’s Paris envoy used French writers to back the Nazis

Born in 1903, Abetz grew up near the French border. He was a young art teacher when, in the late 1920s, and contrary to the prevailing hostility on both Rhine banks, he resolved to work for Franco-German rapprochement. He went to Paris over Easter 1930 and found like-minded young French idealists. They formed a group that began to propagate their message of reconciliation, as a first step to a united Europe.

Because Abetz had solicited subsidies from Berlin, he became known in the capital. After Hitler forced youth groups into the Nazi straitjacket, the new regime offered Abetz a job in the central Nazi youth organisation. He moved to Berlin with his family. Not long after, he was recruited as adviser on France by Joachim von Ribbentrop, busy running a parallel and party-linked ‘foreign office’.

For the rest of the decade, Abetz was in and out of Paris, organising visits, banquets and congresses. He built up a pro-Berlin network to counter French anti-fascists. Abetz groomed influential French publicists, understandably eager to avoid another bloody Franco-German conflict. Willing to use their pens to oppose bolshevism and justify Hitler’s aggressive behaviour, they were not viscerally antisemitic, in the way writers such as Robert Brasillach and Louis-Ferdinand Céline were.

Abetz’s chief acolytes in Paris had Jewish family ties. The prolific Jules Romains, put up by the German government at the Hotel Adlon when he gave a talk in Berlin in 1934, had a Jewish wife. So had the writer Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, an admirer of England and a friend of Aldous Huxley. Fernand de Brinon, the first French journalist to interview Hitler, never divorced his Jewish wife, Lisette. Another journalist, Jean Luchaire, had an actively anti-Nazi Jewish stepmother, Antonina Vallentin, born Silberstein. The political thinker, Bertrand de Jouvenel, whose flattering interview with Hitler in 1936 would come up in the Nuremberg trials, had a Jewish mother.

With France alarmed, not just by Hitler’s call in Mein Kampf for the destruction of France but by the increasingly brutal nature of the new regime, Abetz skilfully steered his gullible friends from reconciliation to advocating appeasement. He convinced them that he was a moderating influence in Berlin, and assured his Berlin superiors that he was calming the twitchy French. But by 1939, and the crisis over Danzig, the French government curbed Abetz’s propaganda activities and declared him persona non grata. A French press campaign claimed Abetz was running a fifth column, intended to weaken the country’s will to resist invasion.

Back in Berlin during the phoney war, Abetz continued his efforts to demoralise the French. His team issued texts playing up antisemitic remarks in Hitler’s speeches, arguing that fighting the Germans would benefit only international Jewry and Anglo-Saxon capitalism. They aroused mistrust of Britain by claiming London would fight — to the last Frenchman.

On the day German troops entered Paris, Ribbentrop, now foreign minister, ordered Abetz to go to Paris and ensure his ministry’s visibility there. Reaching Paris twenty hours after German troops had entered the capital, Abetz installed himself in the former German embassy.

Apart from the plundering of Jewish-owned works of art, the Abetz embassy helped to identify and register Jews, confiscate their wealth and organise their deportation. Asked to rescue a Jewish friend from his youth, Abetz replied, “I do not deny my friendship, but I cannot risk my credit pour les petites choses.”

Abetz saw his chief role, however, as keeping French public opinion on Berlin’s side. By now Romains had broken with Abetz, while Jouvenel had crossed into Switzerland. The envoy proceeded to plant the other close followers in key jobs. Although he had failed to persuade Brinon to divorce his Jewish wife — Lisette became an ‘honorary Aryan’, freed from displaying the yellow star — Abetz forced the Vichy authorities to accept Brinon as their envoy to the occupiers in Paris. Abetz made Luchaire both editor of a new collaborationist daily, Les Nouveaux Temps, and press czar, controlling publications in Vichy territory. With his eye on the intellectual elite in Paris, Abetz compelled the renowned publisher Gaston Gallimard to put Drieu La Rochelle in charge of the firm’s prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française, the only major literary journal to appear in occupied France.

Meanwhile, Abetz and his wife Suzanne joined the exuberant social whirl, determined to show that life was normal, despite the débâcle. He would be seen at luxurious restaurants, attend events such as a commemoration of Richard Wagner, or help mount the notorious exhibition, Le Juif et la France; it attracted more than 200,000 visitors.

But the shifting fortunes of war — the German defeat at Stalingrad, mounting food and other shortages, ruthless reprisals for acts of sabotage, and forcing thousands of workers to move to German factories — dissipated collaborators’ confidence in a German victory.

As the Allies approached the capital in 1944, Abetz prepared an exodus to a small Bavarian town on the Danube. He transferred to Sigmaringen not only his embassy but also Brinon and Luchaire and the virtually dormant Vichy government. He installed Pétain on the top floor of the 380-room castle, from which he had thrown out the senior branch of the Hohenzollern family. Thousands of French collaborators who now found themselves on the losing side also fled to the region, fearing the wrath of the liberators. The French had their own theatre, shops, newspaper, radio station, schools and doctors — one of whom was Céline.

As American and French forces approached the Schloss, there was a chaotic sauve qui peut. Pétain reached Switzerland but was handed back and sentenced to life imprisonment. The French tried and executed Luchaire and Brinon. Drieu, in Paris, committed suicide.

Abetz hid in the nearby Black Forest until a tailor’s label inside his jacket betrayed him. A French military court in 1949 sentenced him to twenty years’ hard labour but he was reprieved in 1954. Four years later Abetz and his wife were killed in a car crash near Cologne.

A literary curiosity: In a single paragraph near the beginning of La place de l’étoile, his satirical novel set in occupied France, French Nobel prize-winner Patrick Modiano mentions Céline, Drieu la Rochelle, Luchaire, Brinon and Otto Abetz. All were not only prominent figures in wartime France,and all published books.

Martin Mauthner is a regular contributor to the monthly Journal of the Association of Jewish Refugees. He has published books on French writers who ‘flirted’ with fascism, and on German writers in French exile after 1933