FRANCE: Terror

Last week, to the great, grim tragedy of France was added the Nazi Terror. With superb irony, its setting was Paris’ shoddy, working-class XIe Arrondissement (eleventh ward), once the cradle, now the abattoir of French Republicanism. France was stirring against the Germans and the Germans had no intention of letting the stir progress to an upheaval.

Chief Terrorist was beak-nosed General Heinrich von Stulpnagel, German commander of Occupied France, ably and professionally supported by veteran French and Nazi police. Early-bird Parisians were puzzled by public notices announcing tem porary closing of the quartier’s important subway stations. The entire Xle Arron dissement was surrounded by German troops. They began arresting people whole sale. The victims were supposed to be Jews, but this was not the Jewish district of Paris. In a house-to-house, room-by-room roundup, soldiers seized every “Jew” aged 17 to 50, bundled 6,000 off to nearby concentration camps, there to join 5,000 others corralled May 15 in Stulpnagel’s opening Paris performance.

Same day three anti-German agitators were put to death: one Szmul Tysselman, a Jewish emigre; one Henri Gautherot, a zealous French nationalist; one Jose Roig, a recruiter for De Gaulle.

Death also came to a Nazi colonel, stabbed in the Paris subway. Hereafter, by order of enraged Lieut. General Ernst von Schaumburg, commander of the German Paris garrison, similar violence will be paid for by the lives of Frenchmen arrested by or for the occupying authorities “in a number corresponding to the gravity of the act.” Already the Nazis have 150,000 French locked up to choose from. And within 24 hours General von Schaumburg had been challenged to make his choice.

In a blacked-out street in suburban Puteaux a steel cable, taut from curb to curb, overturned a car full of Nazi soldiers, injuring several. While Parisians waited tensely for Schaumburg to make good his threat, in Vichy Marshal Petain’s Minister of the Interior Pierre Pucheu lashed out furiously at the underground Communist Party in both zones of France. Warned he: “[We] will not permit a political group that was most bellicose before the war, but defeatist throughout the war, now to wrap itself in the Tricolor and provoke incidents between the people and occupation troops on the pretext of patriotism.”

To all residents of the Paris basin an official manifesto was issued, threatening death for sheltering R.A.F. flyers, two crews of whom mysteriously vanished last week when shot down on the city’s outskirts.

Perhaps to divert attention from General von Stulpnagel’s Putsch-&-Jewry show, the Paris weekly L’Appel “exposed” plans for a fantastic “worldwide revolt,” predicted Ford and Du Pont millions would back appeasement-loving, ex-Premier Pierre Etienne Flandin and several French industrialists and bankers in rigging an early peace. This was to be done by establishing a league of major nations in Europe and Africa to be called Paneurafrica, five leagues of minor nations.