The most noticeable and most immediate changes for all Parisians were the daily displays of goose-stepping power as the Wehrmacht marched down the Champs-Elysées, the change of time as the clocks were brought forward by one hour so that Paris was on the same time as Germany, the night-time curfew from 10 p.m. until 5 a.m., and the exchange rate, which was fixed at the hugely favourable twenty francs to the Reichsmark, which meant that everything German soldiers could buy in Paris was at a bargain price, especially attractive because much of the produce was unobtainable back home. A few shops took advantage at first by dramatically raising prices. Lancel, for example, upped the price of a suede bag from 950 francs to 1,700 over ten days but were later penalized when the Préfecture de Police, charged with carrying out inspections, discovered the increase. Native Parisiennes were distraught at being priced out of the market by the new German buyers. Helmuth von Moltke, the aristocratic German lawyer drafted into the Abwehr intelligence service (though he was opposed to the Nazis), wrote home to his wife in Berlin telling her how he felt that the influx of Germans, both civilians and army representatives, in Paris made an ‘ugly impression … One sees high party functionaries with their wives, traversing the town in big cars on shopping expeditions.’ He was appalled, he told Freya, by stories of generals travelling to Paris and buying several fur coats. ‘The most disgusting are the people from Berlin who come to Paris for a day to stock up on everything imaginable.’ On the other hand he described the attitude of the native population as ‘reserved … but on the whole sickeningly friendly … Everybody confirms unanimously that the women … were positively queuing up to get a German soldier into bed, evidently from a feeling that he was the stronger and that it was more fun with the stronger man.’ Germans played on this attitude, with posters displaying a handsome German soldier gazing at a lost child above the slogan: ‘Populations abandonnées – Confiez-vous au soldat allemand!’ (You have been abandoned – put your trust in the German soldier).
As the well-brought-up, half-Jewish Simone Kaminker remarked when she first noticed German soldiers: ‘They were fantastic – tall, tanned, Wagnerian.’ Simone Kaminker, still a teenager in early 1940, not yet the world-famous Simone Signoret she would soon become, was living in Brittany some five hours away from her Paris home when war was first declared. One day four German soldiers from Hanover came to live in the house that she and her mother and younger brothers were renting. Their father, André, had escaped to join de Gaulle in London, but they lied about his whereabouts, insisting that they had no idea where he had gone, he had just disappeared in the upheaval. Her mother assigned the German soldiers tasks such as fetching the water and feeding the rabbits and then, as suddenly as they had arrived, they were gone. In September 1940, Mme Kaminker decided it was time to reclaim the family apartment in Neuilly, just outside the centre of Paris, seven rooms in a splendid, deserted building in a deserted city. Surprisingly, the little Kaminker boys found their toys were still where they had left them. The only other inhabitant of the building was the disagreeable concierge, who complained that the family had not paid their rent for months.
Mme Kaminker now set about organizing Protestant baptisms for the boys while Simone, the eldest child, who had just passed her baccalauréat in Brittany, was sent out to look for work. She felt alone in this smart part of Paris where Pétain was ‘a perfect symbol of reassurance for the good French bourgeois’ and where so many lives went on as before. ‘By which I don’t mean to say that they were bad. They were waiting.’ The well-to-do Jewish families who might have shared her anguish had left Paris and not returned, whereas the poor Jews of the 3rd and 4th arrondissements had remained. ‘But the 4th arrondissement is far from Neuilly-sur-Seine and I knew no one there.’ Although Simone harboured dreams of becoming an actress, she needed first to work as the family breadwinner. Remembering a classmate from Neuilly who had become a famous actress while still a schoolgirl, Corinne Luchaire, she went to a premiere to celebrate her success, and Corinne had lightly tossed off a suggestion that she should call her.
Corinne’s father was the journalist Jean Luchaire, an old friend of Otto Abetz, the Francophile former teacher who in November 1940, aged thirty-seven, became German Ambassador in Paris. Abetz had married Luchaire’s former secretary, Suzanne de Bruyker, so when Luchaire was asked to edit a new evening paper it was Abetz who ensured that he was paid an enormous salary of 100,000 francs a month, plus expenses, which enabled him to live in great luxury, lunch at La Tour d’Argent and keep expensive mistresses – none of which, according to his loyal daughter Corinne, he had done in the past. Now Luchaire needed an assistant. ‘Which is how, without professional qualifications, without knowing how to type and without Jean Luchaire’s asking me “where is your father?” … I was hired at 1,400 francs a month as the assistant to the personal secretary of the future director of the big collaborationist newspaper, which was to be called Les Nouveaux Temps.’