Paul Kix - The Saboteur

Pétain’s collaboration speech outraged Robert even as it silenced him. He thought it was “the war’s biggest catastrophe,” but his mother quieted him. With that threat about divergent opinions, “There could be consequences,” she said. She had lost her husband and wasn’t about to lose a son to a German prison. So Robert traveled back to Paris for school, careful but resolved to live a life in opposition to what he saw around him.

He was still a boy, only seventeen, not even of military age, but he understood better than most the darkening afternoon that foretold France’s particularly long night. Robert saw a country that was falling apart.

He saw it first in the newspapers. Many new dailies and weeklies emerged with a collaborationist viewpoint, sometimes even more extreme than what Pétain promoted. Some Paris editors considered Hitler a man who would unite all of Europe; others likened the Nazis to French Revolutionaries, using war to impose a new ideology on the continent. There were political differences among the collaborators; some were socialists, and others pacifists who saw fascism as a way to keep the peace. One paper began publishing nothing but denunciations of Communists, Freemasons, and Jews. Another editor, Robert Brasillach, of the Fascist Je Suis Partout (I Am Everywhere), praised “Germany’s spirit of eternal youth” while calling the French Republic “a syphilitic strumpet, smelling of cheap perfume and vaginal discharge.” But even august publications with long histories changed with the times: The Nouvelle Revue Française , or NRF (a literary magazine much like The New Yorker ), received a new editor in December 1940, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, an acclaimed novelist and World War I veteran who had become a Fascist. Otto Abetz, the German ambassador, could not believe his good fortune. “There are three great powers in France: Communism, the big banks and the NRF ,” he said. The magazine veered hard right.

At the same time, Robert also noticed the Germans begin to bombard the radio and newsreels with propaganda. Hitler was portrayed as the strong man, a more beneficent Napoléon even, with the people he ruled laughing over their improved lives. Robert found it disgusting, in no small part because he had witnessed this warped reality before, in Austria in 1938 at boarding school. He had even met Hitler there.

It was in the Bavarian Alps, hiking with a priest and some boys from the Marist boarding school he attended outside Salzburg. The priests had introduced their pupils to the German youth organizations Hitler favored and, at the time, Robert loved them, because they promoted hiking at the expense of algebra. He didn’t know much about the German chancellor then, aside from the fact that everyone talked about him, but he knew it was a big deal for the priest to take the boys to Berghof, Hitler’s Alpine retreat, perched high above the market town of Berchtesgaden. When they reached it they saw a gently sloping hill on which sat a massive compound: a main residence as large as a French chateau and, to the right, a smaller guest house. The estate was the first home Hitler called his own and where he spent “the finest hours of my life,” he once said. “It was there that all my great projects were conceived and ripened.”

The students stood lightly panting before it when a convoy of black cars wended down the long driveway and turned out onto the road. The path cut right in front of the boys, and one sedan stopped in front of them. Out stepped Adolf Hitler. The priest, stunned, began explaining that he and his group had just come to look—but Hitler was in a playful mood, not suspicious in the least, and began questioning the boys, many of whom were Austrian, about their backgrounds. When Hitler got to Robert, the priest said that this boy was French. Robert tried to make an impression, and began speaking to Hitler in the German he’d acquired living in Austria. But the phrases emerged with an unmistakable accent, and when Robert finished, Hitler just patted him on the cheek. “Franzose,” he responded. (“Frenchman.”) And then he moved on.

In a moment, the führer was back in the car and out of view. The encounter was as brief as it was shocking: The boys had seen, had even been touched by, the most famous man in Europe, the shaper of history himself. They looked at each other, and Robert couldn’t help but feel giddy.

The bliss wouldn’t last, however. Austria was quickly losing whatever independence it had, and when Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg said in a radio address in February that he could make no more concessions to the Nazis, a frenzied, yelling mob of twenty thousand Fascists invaded the city of Graz, ripped out the loudspeakers that had broadcast Schuschnigg’s address, then pulled down the Austrian flag and replaced it with a swastika banner. A month later Hitler invaded, and within days the Anschluss was complete.

Robert saw a demonstration in Salzburg a few days later, where everyone shouted, “Heil Hitler! Long live Hitler!” He felt the threat of violence begin to cloud the interactions of everyday life. The Nazis occupied the buildings next to the Marist school and one day Robert looked in a window and suddenly a man stormed from the building, insulting and threatening him, simply for peering inside. Robert began to second-guess a führer who would champion these bullies. By the end of the school year, he was happy to leave Austria for good.

Now, at the beginning of the Occupation, he saw a similar malice embedded within the French newsreels: Everyone smiling too hard and striving to look the same. With each passing day, the Frenchmen he encountered seemed to follow in the Austrians’ footsteps, embracing a fascism they were either too scared or ignorant of to oppose. One exhibition defaming Freemasonry attracted 900,000 Parisians, nearly half the city’s population. Another, called “European France,” with Hitler as the pan-national leader, drew 635,000. Meanwhile, the German Institute’s language courses flourished to the point that they had to turn away applicants. For 90 percent of France, La Rochefoucauld later mused, Pétain and Hitler’s alliance represented the second coming of Joan of Arc. The historical record would show that collaborators, those who subscribed to newspapers committed to the cause and joined special interest groups, were never actually a majority, but Robert could be forgiven for thinking this because all around him people declared themselves friends of Hitler. The founder of the cosmetics firm L’Oréal turned out to be a collaborator. So was the director of Paris’ Opéra-Comique, the curator of the Rodin Museum, even the rector of the Catholic University of Paris. By the end of 1940, in fact, the country’s assembly of cardinals and archbishops demanded in a letter that laity give a “complete and sincere loyalty … to the established order.” One Catholic priest finished Sunday Mass with a loud “Heil Hitler.”

It was all so disorienting. Robert felt like he no longer recognized La France . He was eighteen and impetuous and London and de Gaulle called to him—but couldn’t he do something here, now? He wanted to show the Germans that they could control his country, his faith, his house , but they could not control him.

One day he met in secret with his cousin, Guy, and they launched a plan to steal a train loaded with ammunition that stopped in Soissons. Maybe they would blow it up, maybe they would just abscond with it. The point was: The Germans would know they didn’t rule everything. Guy and Robert talked about how wonderful it would be, and ultimately Robert approached a man of their fathers’ generation, whom Robert blindly suspected of being in the fledgling Resistance, and asked for help.