Bad Faith by Carmen Callil

Author:Carmen Callil [Callil, Carmen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-48188-7
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2006-02-21T05:00:00+00:00

Darquier kept his legal team at the CGQ J at work preparing new anti-Jewish decrees for presentation to Laval. Three categories obsessed him. First were those Jews who took refuge in the zone under Italian occupation—Italy refused to implement Nazi or French anti-Semitic laws. Mussolini did not have to accept Hitler's anti-Semitic laws, and did not until after his fall in 1943. When he was restored to power by the Nazis, the laws were enforced by the German police—Brunner's men did the work. Only 12 percent of Italian Jews were deported, seven thousand out of fifty thousand living there, but it was the Italian police who protected Jews rather than Mussolini. There are many instances of furious rows between French and Italian police on the subject. Darquier's fury, of course, was more excessive.

Next came war veterans and French Jews who used Vichy's dispensations under Vallat's laws; but third, and most important, were half-Jews, both known ones and hidden ones. Only a new law and the scientific investigation of bloodlines could deal with this problem. Darquier requested the creation of a “half-Jewish” status. He noticed that “many half-Jews were working in the national radio broadcasting service,” and considered banning mixed marriages, but knew this would never get through, the conversion of the Jews being a fixed and traditional Catholic aspiration.33 He presented dozens of bills. Laval rejected all of them.

Louis tried another tack. Each time he was rejected he would go straight to whichever German power base he was using at the time— usually it was the Gestapo or the Judenreferat—and file a complaint. After his turmoil in the summer of 1942, first in Vichy then in Paris over the deportations, he chose the embassy. He turned for help to Zeitschel, its specialist on Jewish questions, who conferred with Dannecker; both agreed to force Vichy to give Louis support and money.34

Because of Bousquet, Louis knew what he had to do to reposition himself more favourably and get the money he wanted. Bousquet had told Oberg and Knochen that Louis Darquier was given no money by Vichy because he had produced no proposals. So, in the immediate aftermath of his failures of 1942, he came up with shoals of them. He turned his attention to propaganda. He would cajole the civil population, suffering in ignorance and deluded by Jewish propaganda. In “enlightening them about the Jewish problem” he would save them, save France, and save himself.35

Louis' great passion was for the media, and even his numerous critics agreed that “if he was little occupied at the Commissariat, Darquier, in another way, and at a more general level, was vastly active.”36 What he liked best were associations and unions, floridly named little newspapers, lectures to the like-minded in halls and restaurants—preferably restaurants—surrounded by followers and henchmen who looked up to him, defended him with their fists, listened to him talking for a long time and drank with him into the night.

He decided that his new thrust would concentrate almost exclusively on FRENCH RACE and FRENCH BLOOD.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.