Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France by Richard H. Weisberg

Author:Richard H. Weisberg [Weisberg, Richard H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Law
ISBN: 9781134376698
Google: SeGOAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-10-18T01:19:42+00:00

Did the average Frenchman better understand the Jew as a racial entity than as a participant in an organized religious group? In a legal area that ambiguously combined the language of race and religion, such popular views might indeed have affected both administrative and judicial policy. CGQJ’s first leader, Xavier Vallat, seemed as a theoretical matter to have preferred a religious conception of Jewish status, as we saw in his exchanges with Barthélemy from early 194285; yet, as time went on, both he and his successor, Darquier, inevitably became involved in what seemed to many an official racism,86 backed by native French conceptions. Ironically, their zealous (nay, compulsive) overinclusiveness coerced the language of race from the lips of legal players trying hard to protect these smaller groups; doubly ironic, such language evoked Nazi decisions that had long since left these groups alone. The resultant discourse again demonstrates the ability of analysts and participants alike to use low levels of generalization to engage in seemingly complex discussion, in this case situating through their drily logical rhetoric tiny groups while only exacerbating the effect of religious legislation upon Jews.

So, in representing another sect that eventually gained exempted status—the Jugutis—the lawyer Julien Kraehling found himself using tactical language for his client that surely might have surprised him a year or so earlier from the pen of any colleague in France, much less his own:

To Doctor Atchildi, Leader of the Jugutis community [Président de la Communauté DJOUGOUTE], Paris, 22 August, 1941. Sir: In accordance with your instructions, I spoke this morning to the delegate of the German High Command attached to the CGQJ [Dr. Amon].87 I elaborated for him the special condition of your group’s members and asked him as a minimum, before he made a definitive decision, to order provisionally that any iniquity or sale of property be avoided. After examining the various relevant questions, the representative of the High Command told me that he was going to refer the matter to the Racial Bureau in Berlin and would expect an opinion with which he could comply.88

Four days later, Kraehling confidently informed his client that Amon would instruct CGQJ to stop bothering the Jugutis, expressing his “certainty that CGQJ will immediately inform its relevant departments.”89

Kraehling’s association with the occupying authorities in order to assist a client was hardly unique, as we shall see in a later chapter of this study. Nor is it necessarily blameworthy, even though the tactics more or less required recourse specifically to Nazi racial theories. But, as it turns out, Kraehling’s counsel was retained for life-and-death issues as well as property matters, and it was here that he learned how chancy racial advocacy was, and how independent Vichy was from the German “opinion” on the Jugutis.

Collaterally with his representation of the full community, Kraehling had as a client a certain Abramoff, a man whose liberty and life, as well as his grocery store, were being threatened because Vichy believed that Jugutis were Jews for their statutory purposes.90 In August

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