Gun Control in Nazi Occupied-France Read online

  To be sure, the Hague Convention included an ambiguous preamble declaring that “in cases not included in the Regulations adopted by them, the inhabitants and the belligerents remain under the protection and the rule of the principles of the law of nations, as they result from the usages established among civilized peoples, from the laws of humanity, and the dictates of the public conscience.”92 This clause had been introduced by Fyodor Fyodorovich Martens, the Russian delegate at the Hague Peace Conference of 1899, as a compromise between the Great Powers such as Russia and Germany, who deemed civilians who take up arms to be treated as francs-tireurs subject to execution, and the small states like Belgium and Switzerland, who saw them to be patriots doing their duty and entitled to be treated as prisoners of war.93

  Despite the humanistic phrases in the Martens Clause, historically occupying powers have disarmed civilians and severely punished those who fail to obey diktats of all kinds. That is the very nature of what it means to be an occupied country. The dilemma faced by the Germans would be how to repress the French population to keep them subjugated without doing so to such extremes that would spark resistance.

  1. “Czech to Shape Tie with Berlin Today,” New York Times, October 13, 1938, 6.

  2. Karel Novak, Vzoroo ve vecech honebniho prava, zbrojniho patentu a rybolovu Kempas (Prague, 1934), 151–52; Czechoslovakian Firearms Act §§ 17–40. See Federal Firearms Legislation, Senate Judiciary Committee (1968), 482.

  3. The Times (London), March 15, 1939, 14a.

  4. The Times (London), March 16, 1939, 16b. See also Neue Zürcher Zeitung, March 15, 1939, 1.

  5. Milan Kubele (Uherský Brod, Czech Republic), in discussion with author, March 16, 1994.

  6. “Berhaftungen in Prag,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, March 17, 1939.

  7. “Nazis Bar Violence on the Czech Jews,” New York Times, March 19, 1939, 39.

  8. New York Times, August 11, 1939, 6.

  9. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, September 21, 1939, 1.

  10. Der Bund (Bern), September 29, 1939, 3.

  11. Simha (Kazik) Rotem, Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter and the Past Within Me (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 10.

  12. New York Times, November 4, 1939, 5.

  13. Henri Michel, The Shadow War: European Resistance 1939–1945, trans. Richard Barry (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 55, 183; Thomas J. Laub, After the Fall: German Policy in Occupied France, 1940–1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 112.

  14. Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv (BA/MA), RH 19II272, Geheime Kommandosache, Heeresgruppenkommando B, Erst besondere Anordnungen für die Verwaltung und Befriedung der besetzen Gebiete, 14. November 1939.

  15. BA/MA, RH 19II217, Anlage zu Heeresgruppe A O.Qu., Besondere Anordnungen für die Verwaltung und Wirtschaft der besetzten Gebiete, 20. Dezember 1939.

  16. BA/MA, RH 19II272, Heeresgruppenkommando B, Befehl für das Verhalten des deutschen Soldaten im besetzten Gebiet, 15. Januar 1940; BA/MA, RH19II272, Geheime Kommandosarche, Heeresgruppenkommando B, Besondere Anordnungen Nr. 2 für die Verwaltung und Befriedung der besetzten Gebiete, 15. Januar 1940.

  17. BA/MA, RH 19II272, Oberkommando des Heeres, Generalstab des Heeres, Besondere Anordnungen für die Militärverwaltung, 3. April 3 1940.

  18. BA/MA, RH 19I/217, Heeresgruppe A Oberquartiermeister, Zusätze der Heeresgrupe A zu den Bestimmungen des OKH für die Militärverwaltung, 9. April 1940.

  19. “Warnung der deutschen Militärbehörden,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, April 21, 1940; “Die deutsche Occupation in Norwegen,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, April 24, 1940.

  20. François Kersaudy, Norway 1940 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 80, 100–101.

  21. Kersaudy, Norway 1940, 159–224.

  22. Verordnung über den Waffenbesitz im besetzten Gebiet, vom 10.5.1940, Verordnungsblatt (des Militärbefehlshabers) in Frankreich (VOBIF), MA 75 168, S. 4; Ordonnance du 10 mai 1940 sur la détention d’armes en territoire occupé, Verordnungsblatt für die besetzten französischen Gebiete, n° 1, 4 juillet 1940, 4; “Tout détenteur d’armes non déclarées sera puni de la peine de mort,” Le Matin, June 27, 1940, 1. See Hans Umbreit, Der Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich 1940–1944 (Boppard am Rhein: Harald Boldt Verlag, 1968), 119–20.

  23. The text stated in French:

  1° Toutes les armes à feu et munitions, grenades à main, explosifs et autres matériel de guerre sont à remettre.

  La remise doit s’effectuer dans l’espace de 24 heures auprès du prochain commandement de place ou de camp, à moins qu’il n’y ait d’autres prescriptions d’ordre local. Les maires (préposés aux communes) sont tenus pleinement responsables de la mise en exécution exacte. Les Chefs de troupes sont autorisés à accorder des dispenses.

  2° Toute personne possédant des armes à feu, munitions, grenades à main, explosifs ou autres matériel de guerre, à l’encontre de la présente ordonnance, sera puni de mort ou de travaux forcés, en cas plus légers de prison.

  3° Toute personne commettant des actes de violence, quels qu’ils soient, contre l’Armée Allemande ou l’un de ses membres sera punie de mort.

  Le Commandant supérieur de l’Armée.

  24. Die deutsche Wochenschau, no. 506, 15 May 1940, UfA, Ton-Woche. Reproduced by International Historic Films, vol. 2, disk 1 (available at ihffilm.com/22902.html).

  25. Verordnung über Waffenbesitz im besetzen Gebiet.

  26. Jack van der Geest, Was God on Vacation? A WWII Autobiography (Highlands Ranch, CO: Van der Geest Publishing, 1999), 10. “Dutch Shoot at Nazi,” New York Times, November 22, 1940, 6, reported: “Because a potshot was taken at a German sentry Tuesday night, the Chief of Police today ordered all inhabitants of this famous university town [Leyden] to turn over all firearms by 10 p.m. Anyone found in possession of arms after that hour will be shot on sight, said the official decree….”

  27. “Das Leben in den besetzten Gebieten kehrt wieder,” Völkische Beobachter, June 23, 1940.

  28. Venner, Armes de la Résistance, 144.

  29. Venner, Armes de la Résistance, 144.

  30. “La restitution des armes de chasse déposées aux autorités allemandes,” Le Saint-Hubert, organe officiel du Saint-Hubert-Club de France, n° 4, 40e année, juillet-août 1941, 37.

  31. Philippe Lecler, “Les auxiliares français de la police allemande: L’exemple du département des Ardennes,” in Patrice Arnaud and Fabien Théofilakis, eds., Gestapo et Polices Allemandes: France, Europe de l’Ouest 1939–1945 (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2017), 76.

  32. Venner, Armes de la Résistance, 146.

  33. Yves Lenogré of Périgueux, France, letter to author, January 15, 2000.

  34. While the decree-law was imposed in 1935, the actual banned arms were specified in 1936. J.O., January 16, 1936, cited in Barbier, Le délit, 100.

  35. The Chassepot, official name Fusil modèle 1866, was a bolt-action, breech-loading rifle used in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71.

  36. The Modèle 1892 revolver, which chambered the weak 8 × 27 mm cartridge, was issued to French officers in World War I.

  37. The M91 Mannlicher-Carcano Modello 38 (the rechambered 7.35 mm version) was made by MAB (Manufacture d’Armes de Bayonne).

  38. The Modèle 1935A was the French military sidearm at this time, which was actually in 7.65 mm.

  39. This was a resistance network associated with General de Gaulle. See “Réseau Cohors-Asturies,” sgmcaen.free.fr/resistance/reseau-cohors-asturies.htm; “Cohors-Asturies,” https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohors-Asturies.

  40. Général Pierre Michel, Paris, response to author’s questionnaire, October 18, 1999.

  41. Louis Maurice Charmeau, président de l’Union Départementale des Combattants Volontaires de la Résistance, Bordeaux, France, letter to author, June 10, 2003.

  42. André Marchiset (born January 25, 1925), Raddon, Haute-Saône, France, response to author’s questionnaire, no date.

  43. Bernard Lecornu, Un Préfet sous l’Occupation allemande: Cha
teaubriant, Saint-Nazaire, Tulle (Paris: France-Empire, 1984), 19–20.

  44. Lecornu, Préfet sous l’Occupation allemande, 30–31.

  45. Ordonnance concernant la détention d’armes et de radio-émetteurs dans les territoires occupés, on display at the Musée de l’Ordre de la Libération, Paris. Photograph of poster in author’s possession.

  46. Venner, Armes de la Résistance, 148.

  47. Michel, Shadow War, 82.

  48. Colonel Henry Dutailly, “Les armes des maquis Haut-Marnais,” Revue de la Société des Amis du Musée de l’Armée, n° 109, juin 1995, 20.

  49. Jacques Demange, vice-président de l’association d’anciens combatants du village, Mont-sur-Meurthe, France, letter to author, June 3, 2003.

  50. Stephen A. Schuker, “Seeking a Scapegoat: Intelligence and Grand Strategy in France, 1919–1940,” chap. 3 in Jonathan Haslam and Karina Urbach eds., Secret Intelligence in the European States System, 1918–1989 (Stanford, CA: University Press Scholarship Online, 2014).

  51. Ninetta Jucker, Curfew in Paris: A Record of the German Occupation (London: The Hogarth Press, 1960), 53.

  52. Reynaud, Thick of the Fight, 380.

  53. Reynaud, Thick of the Fight, 382.

  54. David Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich: A History of the German Occupation, 1940–1944 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981), 3.

  55. Shirer, Collapse of the Third Republic, 849.

  56. Shirer, Collapse of the Third Republic, 848; Reynaud, Thick of the Fight, 486.

  57. Reynaud, Thick of the Fight, 558.

  58. “A France Doit Mettre Bas Les Armes déclare le maréchal Pétain,” Le Matin, June 18, 1940, 1.

  59. Jean Guéhenno, Diary of the Dark Years, 1940–1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris, trans. David Ball (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1.

  60. Shirer, Collapse of the Third Republic, 854–56, 876.

  61. Michel, Shadow War, 197.

  62. Laub, After the Fall, 41, 43.

  63. Werner Best, “Die deutsche Militärverwaltung in Frankreich,” Reich, Volksordnung, Lebensraum (1941) 1:29, 55–57.

  64. Best, “Die deutsche Militärverwaltung,” 54. See generally Ulrich Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903-1989 (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1996), Chapter 4; Ahlrich Meyer, Die deutsche Besatzung in Frankreich 1940–1944: Widerstandsbekämpfung und Judenverfolgung (Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000), Chapter 1.

  65. Martin Loiperdinger, “Das Blutnest vom Boxheimer Hof,” in Eike Hennig, ed., Hessen unterm Hakenkreuz (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1983), 435.

  66. Betr.: Erteilung von Waffenscheinen an Juden, preußische geheime Staatspolizei, B.Nr. I G - 352/35 (16. Dezember 1935). DCP 0072, Bundesarchiv Lichterfelde, R 58/276. See Halbrook, Gun Control in the Third Reich, 111–13.

  67. Best, “Die deutsche Militärverwaltung,” 64–65.

  68. Harold Flender, Rescue in Denmark (Princeton University Press, 1963; repr., Washington, DC: Holocaust Library, n.d.), 40–41; Werner Best, Dänemark in Hitlers Hand: Der Bericht des Reichsbevollmächtigten Werner Best, ed. Siegfried Matlok (Husum, Germany: Husum Druck GmbH, 1988), 52–53.

  69. Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich, 16.

  70. Michel, Shadow War, 68.

  71. Guéhenno, Diary of the Dark Years, 1.

  72. Shirer, Collapse of the Third Republic, 873.

  73. Shirer, Collapse of the Third Republic, 864, 878.

  74. Articles II and III, “Armistice Agreement Between the German High Command of the Armed Forces and French Plenipotentiaries, Compiègne, France, June 22, 1940,” avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/frgearm.asp. Source: U.S. Department of State, Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918–1945, Series D (Washington, DC : U.S. Government Printing Office, 1956), 9:671-76. See also “Les Textes Officiels Des Contrats D’Armistice Franco-Allemand Et Italo-Français,” Le Matin, June 27, 1940, 1.

  75. Armistice Agreement, Article III.

  76. Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 89–96.

  77. Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, 416–45.

  78. Armistice Agreement, Article IV.

  79. Armistice Agreement, Article VI.

  80. Armistice Agreement, Article X.

  81. See Peter Lieb, Konventioneller Krieg oder NS-Weltanschauungskrieg? Kriegführung und Partisanenbekämpfung in Frankreich 1943/44 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2007), 236–39.

  82. “Tout détenteur d’armes non déclarées sera puni de la peine de mort,” Le Matin, June 27, 1940, 1.

  83. “German Army Decrees Death for Those Retaining Arms and Radio Senders,” New York Times, July 1, 1940, 3.

  84. Agnès Humbert, Résistance: A Woman’s Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France, trans. Barbara Mellor (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 8.

  85. Guéhenno, Diary of the Dark Years, 2.

  86. “Topics of the Times: Their Common Fate,” New York Times, July 2, 1940, 4.

  87. “Topics of the Times,” New York Times, 4.

  88. Charles I. Bevans, comp., Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America 1776–1949 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968), 1:643.

  89. Beavens, Treaties and Other International Agreements, 644.

  90. Beavens, Treaties and Other International Agreements, Article 46, 651.

  91. Beavens, Treaties and Other International Agreements, Article 53, 652–53.

  92. Beavens, Treaties and Other International Agreements, Preamble to Convention, 633.

  93. Jeffrey Kahn, “‘Protection and Empire’: The Martens Clause, State Sovereignty, and Individual Rights,” Virginia Journal of International Law 56:1, 23–25 (2016).

  4

  Occupation and Collaboration

  THE MOST PROMINENT French collaborator with the Nazis would be none other than former Prime Minister Pierre Laval, who had decreed firearm registration in 1935, and who joined the government as minister of state and deputy prime minister in late June 1940.1 Laval spearheaded the destruction of parliamentary democracy and the Republic, introducing a dictatorship with Pétain at its head and Laval as the real power and successor behind him. This dictatorship was supported both by the Socialists and by the rightist parties.2 Laval told French senators that the constitution must be “modeled upon the totalitarian states,” including the introduction of concentration camps.3 Laval wielded power until December when he would be fired, but he made a comeback later.

  Jean Guéhenno quipped in his diary, “Pétain and Laval do not speak for us. Their word does not commit us to anything and cannot dishonor us.”4

  On July 14, Winston Churchill spoke these words: “This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition; it is a war of peoples and of causes. There are vast numbers, not only in this Island but in every land, who will render faithful service in this war, but whose names will never be known, whose deeds will never be recorded. This is a War of the Unknown Warriors….”5 A “shadow army” of resistance groups rose all over occupied Europe, and it would contribute to the final victory.6 Countless unknown French citizens in the coming years would pick up arms and form the Resistance.

  Forms of Resistance

  Resistance did not, and could not, begin with armed actions, but took many individual forms. In July, Marcel Demnet began acting as a human smuggler in Vierzon-Forges (Cher), the only city in France to be bisected by the demarcation line between occupied France and Vichy France. A young man employed at the town hall at the time, he responded to my questionnaire in 2002. In Demnet’s experience, before the war those who possessed firearms were mostly hunters, and the acquisition of a hunting gun was not regulated. Only members of shooting clubs could acquire revolvers and pistols after authorization by the prefect. There was a shooting club in Vierzon.7

  Regarding the German decrees to surrender firearms, Demnet noted, “It
doesn’t seem to me that in general the French in the occupied zone overwhelmingly obeyed these orders. The French are rebellious by nature and do the opposite of what one asks them to do. With the coming of the Germans, it was well within their temperament to engage in passive disobedience.”

  What arms were kept by civilians and the Resistance? Demnet’s response: “Hunting guns and military rifles recovered after the debacle by farsighted French!” He added, “When the decrees appeared, some surrendered them to the occupation authorities but the others, certainly the most numerous, took care to grease them thoroughly, to slip them into protective cases, and to bury them or to hide them in places where they were more or less sure that the Germans would not be going to look for them—maybe with the hope that one day it would serve a good cause!”

  For the next two years, Demnet worked for the Resistance to help as many as nine hundred people move clandestinely across the border. A favorite ruse for smugglers was to stage fake funeral convoys between the church (in the occupied zone) and the cemetery (in the free zone) over the Cher bridge.8 Then he was arrested by the Gestapo. He eventually would be released but went underground when he was about to be drafted as a forced laborer for the Germans, only to reappear to fight for the liberation of Vierzon in 1944.

  This pattern repeated itself countless times. The Paronnaud family, farmers from Annezay in southwestern France, handed in their hunting weapons but tried to hide their new rifle. The mayor, already collaborating, threatened to denounce them to the occupation authorities. Their teenage sons, Yves and Robert, joined with others to form the nucleus of a resistance group. Before long their activities consisted of recovering hunting weapons, cutting Wehrmacht cables, hiding wanted people, collecting information on German troops, and writing anti-Nazi graffiti. They fought for the Resistance through the end of the war.9