PARIS – An exhibition dedicated to diplomats during World War II opens Tuesday at the Mémorial de la Shoah museum in Paris. It highlights the action of diplomats when confronted with the persecution of the Jews and spans the early 1930s and the ascent of Hitler to the postwar years.
The curators of the Holocaust museum take an unusual approach. The exhibition examines what diplomats from the Allies (before and after occupation) and the Nazi Axis powers realized was happening and what were their reactions.
It seeks to understand: How much did the diplomats know? What were their sources? Who took action to help the Jews? How, why and in what context? To what extent did they reach out of their comfort zone? And on the other hand, who failed to understand? Who did not act and why?
Four renowned French historians – Jean-Marc Dreyfus, André Kaspi, Claire Mouradian and Catherine Nicault – assembled the exhibition together, drawing on their own studies and on research conducted at archives of the French Quai d’Orsay (French Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and other foreign ministries.
The exhibition focuses on the role played by diplomats during the war, first as reliable sources of information for their governments about the persecution of Jews, and then the role some of them played either in saving Jews or in exterminating them, Nicault told The Jerusalem Post.
“To better understand their actions, we must place the heroes within their own context, within the context of their professional environment,” she said. “This is true both for the heroes and for the others. That is why we have one part of the exhibition titled, ‘Indifference, Collaboration or Saving?’ We are not talking only about the heroes who helped save Jews, but also about German diplomats who were responsible for what happened, ‘Nazified’ diplomats. Then there were those who turned their backs, who did not want to see.”
In 1940, no French ambassador openly dissociated himself from the Vichy regime, and only a few lower-ranking diplomats in Latin America did so, Nicault said. The Vichy government forced 83 diplomats to retire that year, allegedly to rejuvenate the staff, and this happened mostly at Paris headquarters, she said.
Letting diplomats go at French missions in Southern Europe and Eastern Europe was apparently more complicated, Nicault said. The Vichy administration feared it would be difficult to replace them during the war and preferred preserving a facade of sovereignty, rather than leaving missions empty, she said.
“Thus, archives show that several French diplomats abroad were in fact Gen. [Charles] de Gaulle loyalists,” Nicault said. “All this was true until 1942, when the Germans took over the ‘free zone,’ and the French government clearly became a fiction. It is difficult to make an exact account, but I think that in the last few months of the Vichy regime, the French Foreign Ministry lost about half of its diplomats, with only part of them replaced.”
Only few Jews were integrated in the French Foreign Ministry of that era, Kaspi said. Out of seven French Jewish diplomats who served at the beginning of the war, six were immediately fired by the Vichy regime.