A Paler Shade of Red: Memoirs of a Radical. W. E. Gutman
release from a French Gestapo prison -- and despite his selfless service in the Résistance -- with suspicion and resentment.
93, RUE LAURISTON
The will to exterminate the Jews through mass deportations to the East was absent -- or as yet unarticulated -- in the first days of the occupation of France. Jews were still defined as members of a religious sect, not a race. But by August 1940 the Germans called for the “expulsion” of all Jews and the expropriation of their assets. Two months later, Jewish heads of corporations were fired and replaced by “Aryan surrogates.” Ninety percent of the proceeds from Jewish businesses were seized.
The French were anxious to placate the conqueror. They formed social, commercial and romantic connections. They opened exclusive restaurants and elegant bordellos. They created pro-Nazi, anti-Jewish militias and recruited bullies who were only too willing to do the Germans’ dirty work. The government’s zeal to please the Germans and the enthusiasm with which average citizens espoused Hitler’s mission in exchange for tutelage and protection, made for a remarkable degree of compliance and accommodation. It also created big breaks for the quick-witted, the shrewd and the dissolute.
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Political change gladdens those who think they have something to gain until they realize that they’ve lost everything.
Henri Chamberlain “Lafont” was 45 and suffering from advanced syphilis when he first came to see my father. Considered “handsome” by some (he looked more like a punch-drunk boxer), Lafont was a charismatic con man and part-time pimp. He’d been referred by a mutual acquaintance, Aristide Babin -- “Titi” to his friends -- a gendarme assigned to police headquarters, where Lafont’s sister held a food concession. My father, an intern at the time, earned extra cash and gained practical experience by giving cops checkups and doing basic urine and blood work.
Orphaned at 11, abandoned by his mother shortly after his father’s death, Lafont spends his childhood in misery. He supports himself through shoplifting and other petty crimes. Caught, he is sent to reform school where he refines his skills. He later joins the army and serves without incident. Returned to civilian life, he steals, goes back to prison, is sentenced to hard labor at the penal colony in Cayenne, from which he escapes. Convicted on multiple counts of theft and racketeering, declared persona non grata, he opens a prosperous business under an alias and, overnight, becomes a patron of the Paris police. Exposed, he is arrested in 1940 and soon released as Paris falls. He goes to work for the Germans first as an informer, then as a “foreman.” He opens an office on Rue Lauriston and organizes a cartel made up of mobsters and pimps his friends in the police helped spring out of jail. In 1941 he teams up with inspector Pierre Bonny, a trusted confidant of the Gestapo and once hailed as the “best policeman in France.” The Bonny-Lafont clique, whose crimes are recorded on a plaque at 93 Rue Lauriston, surrounds itself with a strange assortment of perverts, lunatics and whores. Their specialty: black marketeering and the traffic of gold and jewels stolen from Jews.
Working closely with the Gestapo, Lafont and Bonny convert their headquarters on Rue Lauriston and Place des Etats Unis into torture chambers. Their acolytes commit murder and hunt for members of the Résistance. Jacques Delarue (Histoire de la Gestapo, Fayard, 1962) wrote:
”These criminals used torture and exploited the immunity that their Gestapo badges and pistol permits conferred to commit innumerable crimes.”
Pascal Ory (Les collaborateurs, Le Seuil, 1976) wrote that at the summit of his career --
“ Monsieur Henri rode in a Bentley, surrounded himself with orchids and countesses and, in his final days, was haunted by blatant megalomaniac fantasies.”
Playing on people’s baser instincts, earning their confidence by showering them with gifts and favors, the two accomplices gained the support of people in high places. Many cozy up to Bonny and Lafont to obtain the release of imprisoned friends and relations. The thugs occasionally set aside their murderous activities to help someone from whom they can later extract favors or support.
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Lafont’s condition was serious. Massive doses of sulfa, popular at that time, and homeopathic treatments of dubious integrity or efficacy had done nothing to prevent a primary skin lesion, now healed, from storming the bloodstream and hastening the advance of a secondary and potentially fatal infection. A rented microscope had confirmed the presence of the slender and deadly spirochetes in Lafont’s blood and my father knew it was only a matter of time before they invaded the brain and caused catastrophic damage. It took a great leap of faith on my father’s part -- and several million units of penicillin into Lafont’s rear-end once a week for several weeks -- to cure Lafont. Penicillin had only been discovered in 1928, barely seven years before my father graduated from medical school, and mercury and arsenic were still the treatment of choice. From all accounts, Flemming’s wonder drug had not been widely used in Europe at the time and my father felt that he had taken great risks with a remedy still deemed exotic.
“I’ll never forget what you did for me,” Lafont told my father on his last visit. “He was bawling like a child,” my father recalled. “We embraced for a moment or so. I then begged him to be more careful and resist shoving his dick in just any old thing without some form of protection. Lafont laughed heartily, gave me a bear hug and said, ‘I’ll always be there for you if you need me, Doc.’ I was touched but quickly dismissed his exuberance as that of man who had just been granted a reprieve. Neither one of us could have imagined, as we parted, how it would all end for him. I had saved him from one executioner and, in so doing, delivered him to another.”
My father saw Lafont on two separate occasions after that. Lafont invited him to his apartment to celebrate Babin’s birthday. “The place was crawling with gorgeous whores, neatly attired hoodlums and all the cops money could buy,” my father recalled. “We didn’t meet again until five years later. His wife and his brother came to my office a couple of times with some minor health problems. It was through Babin that I would learn of his new vocation.”
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Men who are for sale but find no buyers are the first to accuse of treason those who have buyers but do not sell themselves.
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With Paris crushed and the Germans firmly in control, opportunities abound for mercenaries, collaborators and soldiers of fortune. Doubling as black market and money-laundering networks, “auxiliary Gestapo” cells recruit hoodlums, crooked cops and spies. Convicted murderers are smuggled out of prisons to act as “enforcers.” Drawn by the prospect of easy money, a number of Jews, among them former scrap dealers and future multi-millionaires Josef Joanovici and Michel Szkolnikoff (the latter was assassinated in Spain after the liberation), joined Otto Brandel, an agent of Admiral Franz Wilhelm Canaris, head of German Intelligence, in schemes that generated over 40 billion Francs. Canaris was later executed for plotting against Hitler.
The marriage between commerce and espionage was so profitable that dozens of “bureaus” popped up in some of the city’s finest districts. In a statement published after the war, Belgian spy Georges Delfanne, also known as Masuy, confessed at his trial that,
“the idea of getting rich by exploiting the situation did not come to mind right away. I was drawn in gradually as enticing offers came my way.”
Soon, all sorts of merchants, bankers and middlemen came knocking at his door, filling his waiting room from early morning until late in the afternoon. The manager of the Claridge Hotel offered Masuy a deal involving the distribution of ten tons of stolen green coffee beans.
General Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel ordered Masuy to crush budding clandestine units of French freedom fighters. Over two thousand people were interrogated in his office on stylish avenue Henri-Martin. Interrogation was accompanied by a form of torture invented by a Russian physician and known as the ordeal of the bathtub.
“Used by the Russians [the bathtub] is a crude and barbaric device. In my care,