The pool of Holocaust perpetrators started out quite small, with only a few hundred Nazi defendants in the first trials. But the definition of perpetrator has been seriously widened since then. Today some might count Holocaust perpetrators in the tens of thousands, if not millions.Footnote 1 This is largely a consequence of the growing Holocaust scholarship that has shown that the top political and ideological leaders were not the only – or even necessarily the most – significant factors in the Holocaust. For Raul Hilberg, the father of Holocaust studies, the bureaucracy was sometimes ‘an actor even more important than Hitler’.Footnote 2 In the early 1960s, his writings alongside those of Hannah Arendt and Stanley Milgram painted a new and chilling portrait of Holocaust perpetrators: far from being bloodthirsty anti-Semites, those responsible for the extermination of European Jews were bureaucrats, white-collar professionals in administration or institutions, ordinary men and women following orders.Footnote 3 These works undoubtedly marked a clear turning point in the discussion of Holocaust perpetrators which, until then, had been largely explained by ideological anti-Semitism and barbarism.Footnote 4 Over half a century later, it is clearer than ever that ‘the pulse behind the final solution (was) not racial urges, but rather rational planning by bureaucrats, technocrats, statisticians’.Footnote 5
Yet a growing body of literature has made the line between perpetrator, victim and bystander more and more difficult to draw. Discussions of the inaction of American or Yishuv Jews, added to those of the Jewish councils (Judenräte) and the Jewish Police, seriously challenged the original definition of the Nazi anti-Semitic perpetrator.Footnote 6 Likewise, the role of local ‘bystanders’, or ‘neighbours’ as Jan T. Gross would put it, complicates our understanding of perpetrators.Footnote 7 Not only that, but the many horrific stories of zealous violence carried out against the Jews seriously dampened efforts to explain the Holocaust within a purely rational, rank-and-file system.Footnote 8 Such evidence suggests that one cannot but agree with Zygmunt Bauman, who has argued that modern networks of persecution alone cannot explain the Holocaust.Footnote 9
Despite this widening definition of perpetrators, the study of bureaucrats remains at the forefront of Holocaust literature. Hilberg's own work, Perpetrators, Victims and Bystanders (1992), reiterated the fact that the perpetrators included ‘not only the few who actually did the killing, but also the Europe-wide army of bureaucrats who stamped, defined, counted, processed, regulated, supplied, scheduled, and otherwise administered murder on such a scale . . . from those who guarded the trains to those who disposed of Jewish bank accounts’.Footnote 10 Besides Hilberg, Detlev Peukert, Götz Aly, Susanne Heim, Marc-Olivier Baruch, Wolfgang Seibel and Mary Fulbrook are but a few of a long line of outstanding scholars whose work has focused on bureaucrat perpetrators in the Holocaust.Footnote 11 Their studies confirm the importance of hierarchy, obedience and personal advancement in a variety of contexts – from French technocrats to local administrators, from financial to ‘racial’ experts – and have significantly advanced the field of Holocaust scholarship.
More recently, a specific literature on professionals and professionalism has emerged. More recently, a specific literature on professional bodies and individuals has challenged the idea that civilian participation in genocide can be explained by raw ambition or fear of punishment; a basic sense of professionalism was enough to carry out mass murder.Footnote 12 Competence, skill, and the earnest desire to do one's job well were enough to make men and women overlook basic moral principles. According to Michael Lippmann and Richard Weisberg, ‘lawyers’ immersion in legal technicalities too often insulate(d) them from considering the moral consequences of their conduct’.Footnote 13 Similarly, Peter Hayes commented that, by obeying the official corporate mandate, the heads of IG Farben ‘relieved themselves of the obligations to make moral or social judgements or to examine the overall consequences of their decisions . . . The professional spirit, with its glorification of partial, even tunnel vision, helped Farben's leaders to evade these (moral) difficulties.’Footnote 14 Even Feldman and Siebel's highly sophisticated study stated that ‘what Holocaust research reveals is not just the structural complexity of the persecution machinery but also the failure to observe the most elementary moral imperatives’.Footnote 15
Although this literature on bureaucrats and professionals is crucial in developing Holocaust historiography, it is not without its problems. First, as the definition of perpetrators grows wider, it also becomes more meaningless. If everyone is a perpetrator, than the responsibility of the more direct and important perpetrators is greatly diminished. Second, these recent works on professionalism tend to demonise white-collar workers. ‘In the conflict between Good and Evil during the Second World War’, wrote Elie Wiesel, ‘the infamous Nazi doctors played a crucial role . . . There was [also] the judicial profession. And in some ways, the church. Only the literary world retained its sense of honor.’Footnote 16 Such statements not only encourage a simplistic hierarchisation of professions in the Second World War, they also reinforce the tendency to ‘(heap) scorn on the new white-collar world of twentieth-century industrial society’.Footnote 17
By examining the case of the French railway workers – the cheminots – this article calls into question the usefulness of a widening definition of perpetrators of the Holocaust. It shows the limitations of this categorisation, not only because the involvement of railwaymen is not so straightforward, but also because it overlooks the complicated socio-professional contexts of the time. By historicising the professionalism of the cheminots and by examining the extent to which the war and the Holocaust reshaped their relationship with their profession, we can begin to unearth a complicated story of workers who were neither direct perpetrators nor ignorant bystanders. This article forms the backbone of one the arguments I developed in my doctoral thesis, and it highlights my academic interest in the role of railway sabotage during the war. However, it only tells a part of a long and multi-layered story. As such, it must be understood as part of a broader historiographical context of railway, Vichy and Holocaust studies.
Using French railway workers to examine the role of professionals and professionalism in the Holocaust is not so surprising, for the history of bureaucrat perpetrators has always been deeply entwined with that of the railways. In 1961 Hilberg was already showing that railways were central to the Holocaust.Footnote 18 He later refined his argument to point out that, although deportation trains represented a small percentage of the total railway traffic, the German National Railways (RB) were one of two indispensable agencies in the Final Solution (the other being the Bureau of Jewish Affairs led by Adolph Eichmann).Footnote 19 ‘The railroads’, wrote Hilberg, ‘were involved not on the fringe of the operation, but were indispensable at its very core.’ At the same time, he pointed a damning finger at the railway directors. According to him, the real perpetrators of the Holocaust ‘were traffic or timetable experts, not specialists in Jewish affairs.’Footnote 20
There have been many advances in railway history since the post-1989 Holocaust memory boom, but few of them have sought to dislodge this label of perpetrator that still hovers over the railway industry.Footnote 21 Alfred Mierzejewski has carried out the most extensive study of the RB's wartime transports, and although he confirmed that the impact of deportation trains was ‘numerically insignificant’ in the sea of wartime railway movements, he underlined that this did not mean railway directors were unaware of the unique nature or purpose of Jewish deportation convoys.Footnote 22 Far from being ignorant bystanders, they were ‘white-collar murderers par excellence’ who preferred to do their jobs well rather than dwell on how it affected the fates of others.Footnote 23 Later, Simone Gigliotti adopted a socio-cultural approach to the study of Second World War railways and embraced the ‘perpetrator’ label in her introduction before shifting the focus to victims.Footnote 24
At the centre of this portrayal of railways in the Holocaust is the image of the bureaucratic, technocratic, heartless white-collar professional. ‘The attitude that the wheels had to roll in spite of everything’ made it easy for railway directors and ministers ‘to ignore the suffering of individual people’.Footnote 25 There is much truth in this statement by Mierzejewski. Railway professionalism – and especially the desire to do one's job well – restricted the attitudes and behaviour of individuals during the Holocaust. But the relationship between professionalism and the individual worker was more complicated than that, and merits a full analysis. Likewise, Mierzejewski's exclusive focus on the upper echelons of the railway company seriously limits the spectrum of analysis to elite workers. As such, he not only upheld the stereotypical image of the immoral white-collar workers, but he also overlooked the complicated links between the industrial working classes and genocide.
The French National Railways (SNCF) provides a fascinating new prism to re-examine the role of indirect perpetrators. First, it allows us to step away from a German-centric approach to railways in the Second World War. Second, the sources available allow us to examine not only white-collar workers, but also blue-collar workers, and even a handful of Jewish railway directors. By engaging with a bottom-up history, we can shed new light on the principles of professionalism.
Moreover, the case of the SNCF has particular contemporary resonance. Since the early 1990s, the company has been regularly accused both in France and America of crimes against humanity for deporting Jews. This has encouraged scholars to investigate the company's history between 1939 and 1945, and the historian Christian Bachelier spent four years in the archives (1992–6) writing an unpublished report on the SNCF in wartime.Footnote 26 But while the Bachelier Report helped to challenge the resistance myths of the post-war period to some extent, it was also used by journalists, lawyers and second-generation Jews to attack the SNCF for crimes against humanity, or to denounce the cheminots as guilty perpetrators and/or cowards.Footnote 27 This reawakened questions that had surfaced as early as the 1980s, when scholars began to question the absence of railway resistance in the Jewish deportations: why did no one refuse to drive a train? Why did the convoys always run on time? Why were there no objections, no refusals, no sabotage, to prevent the deportations?Footnote 28 Several historians including Georges Ribeill and Annette Wieviorka have built on Bachelier's work to discourage such Manichaean views, but the public history of the railways in the Second World War remains distorted and hugely sensitive.Footnote 29
In order to discuss the complicated relationship between professionalism, workers and genocide, this article will focus around one simple question which has generated much debate and discussion in France: why did the railway workers, so active in sabotaging German transports, never sabotage the Jewish deportation trains? By historicising railway professionalism and showing its continuities and changes during the war years, it will challenge the label of ‘perpetrator’ which has been associated with the French railways and reveal the many complexities of life under occupation. Of course, the attitudes of the French railwaymen towards the Jews cannot be explained without taking into context the broader attitudes of the French people and their institutions.
The first part of this article will set out a chronological narrative. It will start by identifying the development of cheminot professionalism through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before going on to examine how this professionalism developed during the war years, and especially during the Jewish deportations which lasted from 1942 to 1944. Far from remaining isolated from the events of the war, cheminots were subject to the pressures of daily life and public opinion, to their historical professional traditions and values, and equally to the sight of men, women and children being deported. That the French resistance itself never prioritised the denunciation of Jewish persecution is one piece of this complicated puzzle. In a second part, this article will examine the attitudes of blue-collar, white-collar and even some Jewish cheminots. This will allow us to develop a stronger argument on the role of professionalism in daily life, and to assess to what extent it actually hindered possibilities of rescue and assistance to Jewish deportees.
Cheminot professionalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
‘Regardless of rank,’ Hilberg wrote, ‘railroad men who were concerned with Jewish transports only had to harness their conscience and common sense to obtain an overview of the situation before them (and yet) no one resigned, no one protested, and hardly anyone asked for a transfer.’Footnote 30 Hilberg's damning statement was followed by a comment from Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton in 1981: that although the cheminots became famous after the war for sabotaging German military transports, they never sabotaged the Jewish convoys.Footnote 31 But the answer to cheminots’ apparent passivity is not that they were unable to ‘harness their conscience’; rather, the professionalism of the cheminots was deeply entwined with a unique moral code of conduct. This section will follow the notion of railway professionalism through the ages, showing how cheminot attitudes were rooted in nineteenth-century notions of security, obedience and community. And of course, the all important esprit de famille. The arrival of war, occupation and persecution could not alter the fact that cheminots continued to live according to a specific code of conduct, and it is this code that prevented them from sabotaging deportation trains. So if railway workers were unlikely to disobey orders, it was because of a deep-seated commitment towards their profession, as well as a unique concern with security, rather than an absence of morality as such.
In the 1850s, when railways in France were still in their infancy, its workers were not much more than a heterogeneous group of unskilled men. However, as their skills gradually developed, so did their sense of community.Footnote 32 One of the key elements serving to unite these workers was, first and foremost, their exceptional professional tool: the train. This machine was central to the life of the nation, and until the advent of the car and the aeroplane post-1945, it was France's most precious commodity. It is not surprising, therefore, that over time railway workers came to be considered irreplaceable. In fact, during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1, railway workers were given the option of being exempt from military service.Footnote 33 Even today, in our era of high technology, the link between nationalism, patriotism and the railways remains unchanged for many cheminots: ‘The SNCF’, said Roger Charbonnier in 2008, ‘is a tool for everything. It forms a part of the nation.’Footnote 34
That being said, working on the railways was not just about national glory; in the late nineteenth century, the first workers for the railway companies were defined by a shared experience of bad wages and difficult working conditions. These harsh shared experiences saw the cheminots slowly unify to petition for material improvements. As such, it is possible to identify the simultaneous emergence of cheminot professional consciousness in the late nineteenth century with a rise in trade unionism. In many ways, their ‘irreplaceable’ nature should have given them political leverage, but political activism was not at all appreciated – let alone understood – by most directors of large railway companies.Footnote 35 The fight for better working conditions was difficult, and at the turn of the century the cheminots were not only using go-slows to protest, but going on strike.Footnote 36
Yet cheminots did not adhere to all methods of political protest. Far from being radical revolutionaries encouraging professional sabotage – sabotage became a form of political activism encouraged by French trade unions in 1895 – cheminots did not encourage the physical destruction of their professional tools.Footnote 37 Their reluctance to carry out professional sabotage can be explained by several factors. First, there was the fear of redundancy, a fear that will be explained later. Second, cheminots felt extremely attached to their professional machines – more so than other working-class communities. When Robert Lebrun chuckled in his interview and declared that ‘the guys who drove the steam locomotives loved their machines even more than their wives!’ he was only half joking.Footnote 38 Thus destroying their machines was not a desirable solution.
Finally, sabotage also presented great dangers for colleagues. The mid to late nineteenth century saw much hype on the subject of railway accidents, and whilst some of the fears associated with railway accidents may have been more imagined than real, railway security was a primary concern for all involved in the railways. This was especially true of railway personnel, for locomotive drivers and firemen were generally the first victims of derailments and other accidents.Footnote 39 Causing sabotages thus put the lives of their colleagues at risk – colleagues whom they considered to be family.
The nature of railway protest in early twentieth-century France was thus more about strikes than about sabotage – but even this form of defiance was questioned at times. The railway community was deeply traumatised by the severe redundancies that followed the 1910 and 1920 strikes, and fewer and fewer dared to risk their livelihood by engaging in active protest. Indeed, immediate redundancy was a terrible fate for cheminots who were often the sole breadwinners in their families. This does not mean that railway trade unionism died out, however. Rather, it began to take on new dimensions. During the inter-war years, most cheminots including the communist legend Pierre Semard preferred to use diplomatic negotiations rather than violent protest and active defiance, let alone revolution.Footnote 40 This was even the case under the Popular Front, an important period of working-class upheaval. Contrary to popular belief, when a huge percentage of French workers went on strike in 1936, the cheminots stayed at their posts to work, preferring instead to continue in negotiations with their employers.Footnote 41
When war struck Europe in 1939, the professional exceptionalism of the railway community continued to be evident. When Edouard Daladier, the French Prime Minister, accused the working classes of committing industrial sabotage in the Phoney War, he did not mean the cheminots. Railwaymen, along with miners, were instead applauded for their professional integrity. Then, in the Exodus of May–June 1940, as ten million people fled their homes in fear of the German invasion, the cheminots remained stationed at their posts.Footnote 42 It is for this reason, amongst others, that the SNCF received the Ordre de l’Armée in November 1940.Footnote 43 Of course, there were exceptions in this body of 400,000 workers;Footnote 44 but overall, the professional loyalty of the cheminots distinguished itself from other French citizens. As one couple of ex-cheminots recalled with pride in an interview, the trains (almost) always ran on time: ‘ –(the French railways), we’ve always had the reputation of being punctual,… isn't that right? –Yes, and of being safe, too. – And security too. We’ve always been in first place.’Footnote 45 It was a matter of duty to keep the trains running, and to keep them safe.
Of course, one must not idealise the railway community in its unity, its diplomacy and its professionalism. There were radicals and revolutionaries amongst the body of cheminots; there were brawls and back-stabbings amongst colleagues; the common good of the railways was not always promoted by everyone. However, an overarching view of the railways confirms that an esprit de famille, without being romanticised, did exist amongst the cheminots, more so than it did in other professional communities. This esprit de famille was a tool used by the upper echelons to forge a sense of loyalty to the SNCF directors.Footnote 46 The latter tried to dissuade railway workers from sabotage during the occupation by putting up posters of dead sabotage victims in railway sites.Footnote 47 This was bound to have a certain affect on the cheminots, who believed that ‘the French cheminot spirit, it was a family (spirit)’.Footnote 48 It even meant that they could overlook political and national affiliations: ‘a communist is a cheminot avant tout’, said one anti-communist cheminot.Footnote 49 Likewise, their sense of camaraderie overcame the obstacles of the occupation. After the French defeat in June 1940, several thousand German railwaymen arrived to supervise the cheminots.Footnote 50 And while cheminots referred to the German occupiers pejoratively as ‘les boches’, they used a more friendly term for the RB workers: ‘les bahnoffs’ (from the German for railway station). Testimonies and interviews further confirm this professional bond: ‘they were ch’minots, just like us’, said Robert Lebrun. ‘They were ch’minots themselves!’ echoed Brosset. Creusot considered them ‘sort of like colleagues’, while Bonnin stated that ‘a ch’minot is a ch’minot, whether he's French or German!’Footnote 51 Indeed, the esprit de famille was a tangible reality amongst the lower echelons.
The picture painted – one of conservatism in the railways, rather than revolution – contrasts sharply with the image of the cheminot saboteur propelled by the film director René Clément in the immediate post-war period. Clément's portrayal of cheminots under occupation in La Bataille du Rail (1945) helped launch a myth that all railway workers had actively resisted the German presence since summer 1940.Footnote 52 Like all myths it was rooted in truth; but sabotage did not take off until 1943–4, and even then it was limited to a minority of workers. This was not so much a result of a lack of courage or opposition, as it was the continuation of well-established political behaviour.
Breaking with tradition
The Germans invaded northern France in May 1940, and within a few weeks they had defeated the French army and signed an armistice. France was now divided: a northern zone occupied by the Germans, and a southern zone that housed the new French government in Vichy led by Maréchal Pétain.Footnote 53 The next four years of German occupation would prove to be the most intense and dramatic period of modern French history. That being said, the first few years of the occupation were arguably more about continuity than change. After the humiliating defeat of May–June 1940, most French people wanted to turn the page and return to their normal lives. Resistance, if it existed at all, was in its infancy.
Like the majority of the French population, cheminots went on with their lives in 1940–2. After a brief but intense war which triggered a massive exodus, and with prisoners of war causing a serious dent in their workforce, the cheminots were thrown back into work: ten million people needed to be repatriated; hundreds of tracks, buildings and materials needed to be rebuilt; and the nation needed to be fed as usual.Footnote 54 If there was any chance of France getting back onto its feet it was through a revival of its economy, and without the railways this was an impossible feat. What is more, the relationship with the Germans was not as tense as one may think. In the upper echelons, there was room for negotiation, whilst in the lower echelons, as it has been previously stated, German railway workers were not perceived as direct threats. A sense of camaraderie was even established to a certain extent. Finally, the cheminots’ attitudes towards Vichy were relatively stable. Pétain, the hero of Verdun, embodied many of the values that the cheminot community had upheld for years: Work, Family, Nation. The conservatism of the National Revolution thus matched pre-existing behaviours. The unification of the trade unions though the Charte du Travail would potentially have been one of the most direct actions to affect the cheminots, but even then certain railwaymen saw it as an opportunity to enter into negotiation with the government. In any case, the Charte was never successfully implemented, and in the later years of the occupation underground trade unions spread across the railway milieu.Footnote 55
But 1942 brought about many changes, for the French in general and the cheminots in particular. Pierre Laval's ‘relief’ (relève) – sending French workers to Germany in exchange for the return of prisoners of war – the round-ups of Jews, the spread of the Communist witch-hunt, the increasing number of arrests and deportations, the food shortages and the entrance of German troops into the Free Zone in November 1942 made people doubt the autonomy and integrity of Vichy. Moreover, cheminots faced a number of professional challenges after 1942, with a growing crisis in railway material and personnel. Soon, their attitude to the Germans, to Vichy and ultimately to sabotage would change. Until late 1943, sabotage had been limited to occasional incidents; now it was becoming a phenomenon that seriously threatened society and economics.Footnote 56 But why did it take off? And to what extent were railway workers involved in it?
The growing tensions in 1942 encouraged cheminots to make a radical break with tradition, and to take part in active resistance, including railway sabotage; but it was also linked to cheminots’ sense of professionalism. Allied bombings of the French railway network, despite being an essential military strategy in anticipation of the Allied landings, were often unsuccessful. They missed the mark, causing collateral damage, not least on cheminots’ homes that were often located near railway centres.Footnote 57 A growing sense of resentment thus emerged within the railway community, and this was only heightened by the inefficacy of the bombings. Indeed, they often resulted in the delay of French transports, while German ones went unscathed. To limit the damage and affect German transports specifically, more precise techniques were needed, such as sabotage. The trick about sabotage was doing it responsibly, and armed with professional expertise, something that cheminots knew how to do. They could damage material enough to cripple German transports, but not so much that it harmed civilians, or that it completely destroyed the material which France needed to rebuild itself after the Liberation.Footnote 58
By engaging in railway sabotage, cheminots were breaking with long-standing traditions of indirect and passive protest; but they were simultaneously protecting their community and professional material from excessive destruction. By 1943 the occupation was forcing them to change their methods and respond to an increasingly difficult situation. However, there was never a full break with the corporate spirit. The means to the end continued to be justified by notions of professionalism. As the ex-SNCF president Louis Armand commented in 1984, ‘destroying it ourselves was better than seeing it destroyed by aerial bombings’.Footnote 59
Railways and the Final Solution
The rise of railway sabotage in 1942–4 contrasts sharply with the absence of active protest against the Jewish deportations in that same period. Of course one must remember that the most intense wave of Jewish deportation – in the summer of 1942 – took place before this sudden increase in sabotage. But there are also other factors to be considered, not least the relatively low level of active, intentional involvement of the SNCF, as well as the secretive nature of the deportations. Moreover, if the cheminots did not sabotage the Jewish deportation trains due to professional standards of security, as well as personal concerns for their safety, their humanitarian instincts were no less diminished.
The deportations from France started on 26 March 1942 and finished in late August 1944. During this period, the ‘special trains’ of the Final Solution, the Sonderzüge, took over 76,000 Jews from the Occupied Zone, generally from Drancy, to concentration and extermination camps, generally Auschwitz. This involved seventy-nine railway convoys under German control.Footnote 60 No known documents suggest that the SNCF had any say in their deployment or organisation. The Direction made repeated pleas to stop requisitioning railway material for German use, but this was a very general complaint that did not concern the deportation convoys specifically.Footnote 61
The vast literature on peripheral, local and indirect perpetrators should not distract us from the fact that the Final Solution was a highly centralised system: the organisation of Jewish deportation trains from France was executed first and foremost in Berlin. It started in the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) headed by Heinrich Himmler, where the Bureau of Jewish Affairs (IV-B-4) was housed.Footnote 62 Adolph Eichmann, the ‘orchestrator’ of the Final Solution, led this bureau with great efficiency and energy, and it was from this seat that he conducted the movement of people across Europe to their deaths. Telegrams from Berlin discussed every single detail of the deportation trains: from the things that the Jews could (or could not) bring with them, to the straw and buckets supplied in each compartment, to the number of Jews to be allocated to each car.Footnote 63
But if Berlin called the shots, the Final Solution could not be carried out without the help of national governments and railway companies. The involvement of the French government in Jewish expropriation, persecution and deportation has been a burning topic for several decades, and if there are differences of opinion in regard to the degree of its involvement, there is no real doubt over Vichy's responsibility in these processes. Between July and October 1942 – after the Final Solution had started to be implemented in France but before the Germans crossed the demarcation line – Jews were transferred from the Free Zone to Drancy, Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande in the north with the help of the French government.Footnote 64 This mean that transports were under French supervision, at least up to the demarcation line. Once more, all orders, down to the last detail, emanated from the highest echelons in the government – except in this case, the government was French, not German. Pierre Laval, the Minister of Interior, insisted ‘on giving the lodgers (of the camps) an appropriate food supply, which will last them their entire transport’ – this was not out of the goodness of his heart, but rather in line with his politics of preventing ‘any kind of incident’.Footnote 65 Henri Cado, Director of the French Police in the Free Zone, asked that each freight car contain thirty passengers and two guards. Each car should have hay, ‘pitchers, drinking water, toilet buckets’,Footnote 66 as well as ‘a medical service for the convoy, made up of the doctors and nurses who are amongst the deportees’, something unheard of in the Sonderzüge.Footnote 67
As Mierzejewski argued, the Deutsch Reichsbahn was up to their necks in the organisation of the Jewish deportations, with full knowledge of what they were for.Footnote 68 The evidence certainly shows that the directors were aware of the nature of the convoys, and if the Minister of Transport Theodor Ganzenmüller sometimes opposed Franz Novak's demands for cattle cars with regard to Jewish deportation, it was less out of a moral obligation than out of a logistical concern for wartime needs on the eastern Front.Footnote 69 The involvement of the French railway company, however, is far more blurred. Documents show that, apart from naming the convoys, SNCF initiative in the transfer process was almost non-existent. At a meeting on 15 July 1942 – where the arrest and deportation of Jews from the Free Zone was planned – the SNCF's Head of the Délégation Technique suggested naming the Jewish transports ‘transports IATP’ (Israélites allemands, tchécoslovaques, polonais). This point was probably, once again, to veil the true nature of the trains, and to avoid arousing public suspicion.Footnote 70
Likewise, we gather from several sources that the role of blue-collar railway workers was relatively limited. First, the convoys were limited in time and space: the majority followed exactly the same route due to their highly secret nature. As such, only a handful of the 400,000 cheminots would ever come into direct contact with the trains. Second, the destination was often known as Novéant, a town on the German border. If the name Auschwitz was ever pronounced, it had absolutely no resonance at the time. The concentration camp universe as we know it today was inconceivable during the occupation, and it was a big leap of imagination to go from seeing people deported in bad conditions, to imagining the gas chambers in the east – one which most cheminots were not in a much better position to make.Footnote 71 ‘When they spoke of the concentration camps’, said one ex-cheminot's wife, ‘we imagined people were in prisoner-of-war camps.’Footnote 72
Raoul Merlin is one of two known eyewitnesses to the deportation transports, and his account gives the most detailed description of cheminots’ involvement at the Le Bourget-Drancy station, from which almost all the Jewish convoys left.Footnote 73 He largely confirms the lack of information that cheminots actually had about the deportations. Indeed, to avoid the spread of rumours which risked agitating the population, cheminots were made aware of the transports only a few days before their departure. What is more, cheminots had little if any direct contact with the deportees. On the day of departure, when the convoy was brought to the platform and all the doors were opened, no railwaymen were allowed within close proximity of the train. The German presence only increased after February 1943, when a series of escape attempts from deportation convoys triggered a massive intensification of surveillance measures.Footnote 74 Finally, it was against all regulations for German railwaymen to drive any train in French territory, no matter which zone they were in.Footnote 75 So French cheminots had to drive the train to Novéant, a railway town on the German border, before getting off and heading back towards Paris. Throughout their journey east, they were flanked by armed German SS.Footnote 76
This lack of knowledge and understanding of the Final Solution helps to explain why cheminots never sabotaged the deportation trains, but, in addition, I would argue it is their inherent reluctance to commit sabotage which prevented them from taking violent and direct action against the Jewish convoys. Of course, this reluctance was breached in part in 1943–4 when many German transports were sabotaged. However, there is no way of knowing how many cheminots took part in the increasing number of railway sabotages, especially since it was very easy for non-railway workers to sabotage tracks.Footnote 77 More to the point, sabotaging a train with innocent men, women and children inside was very different to sabotaging a goods train. First, the lives of those inside were in no way guaranteed, and the violence of railway sabotage should not be underestimated. Second, after the train was sabotaged, there was little chance of effectively hiding and saving the hundreds of people trapped inside.
If their professionalism might have deterred cheminots from taking action against the deportation convoys, it did not blind their humanism. Rather than completely breach their professional moral code, most cheminots working in the train stations near Drancy sought to help the deportees in other ways. Indeed, different moral codes – personal, professional, or both – co-existed. In the ateliers where convoys were assembled cheminots loosened the floorboards; those who could get near the deportees sometimes smuggled small tools to help the Jews in their potential escape; and engine drivers could sometimes slow down the trains at bends and wooded areas, sites where escape was far easier.Footnote 78 During the notorious escapes from convoys 9, 10 and 11 in February 1943, the Germans accused the cheminots of using precisely these techniques to help the deportees, and they implemented stricter supervision measures to prevent any kind of indirect assistance.Footnote 79 One cheminot from Valence managed to dress eleven of the deportees in SNCF uniforms and smuggle them out of the station unnoticed.Footnote 80 Another approached a Jewish deportee discreetly, telling him that he could supply him with an SNCF uniform and smuggle him out. The deportee turned down the offer: his father had already climbed aboard the train, and he could not leave him alone.Footnote 81 Survivors often confirm that cheminots provided moral support, by whispering words of hope or news of allied victory.Footnote 82 Also, deportees often slid small notes through the cracks of the cattle cars, notes destined for their families. Once the convoy was out of sight, when the armed Germans had left, cheminots crept around and picked up these bits of paper which they forwarded to the written addresses.Footnote 83 Raymonde Mann has carefully kept the little note she received from her mother, who died in deportation.Footnote 84
We can point to non-Jewish deportation trains to show the consistency in cheminots’ attitudes towards sabotage and deportation, for no one ever refused to schedule, prepare or drive deportation trains of non-Jews, even when they were being deported in the same conditions. The only two known incidents were for trains departing with forced labourers (Service du Travail Obligatoire, STO), but it was local people, not railwaymen, who intervened in transports left unguarded by Germans. One of these incidents took place in south-west France at Mazamet station, near Toulouse. On 11 March 1943, locals circled the tracks in order to prevent the train from going forward. Although the delay allowed several men to escape at the last minute, the train eventually set off towards Germany.Footnote 85 A study comparing Jewish and non-Jewish convoys would, I believe, shed great light on the continuity (or not) of attitudes and behaviour towards deportation.
Professional priorities in Occupied France
It has so far been shown that professionalism and immorality were not inherently linked when it came to the Holocaust. That being said, professional concerns, interests and attachments could still serve as blinkers, preventing individuals from grasping the bigger picture. This section will argue that if cheminots never sabotaged the Jewish deportations trains, it was also due to a lack of active interest in the Jewish deportations. Whilst many French men and women considered them to be horrific, deportations were only a small part of daily life in France. To most people, their immediate personal circumstances were far more important than the extermination of the European Jews at the time. Indeed, the Holocaust was not the central focus of the war, and it was other historical contexts – professional or political – which people were truly preoccupied by.
Cheminot attitudes towards the deportations are part of a wider conversation about how many French people had little or no concern over the ‘Jewish question’. This is not to say that they were completely indifferent: prefecture reports have revealed that when the deportations peaked in the summer of 1942 there was an upsurge of local protest. In fact, Serge Klarsfeld argues that the deportations were halted in October 1942 precisely because the French and German authorities wanted to avoid public dissidence.Footnote 86 He also argued that if two thirds of Jews were saved, it was largely thanks to the French population who helped hide them during the remaining months of occupation. Renée Poznanski nuanced this position, stating that Jewish rescue networks existed mostly within the Jewish community itself.
In her recent work on the ‘Jewish question’ and the French Resistance, Poznanski argues that most resistance groups completely overlooked the persecution of Jews. The reasons for this are more complicated than a straightforward lack of interest in the fate of the Jews. First, resisters spreading propaganda preferred to focus on the socio-economic problems that the average Frenchman could relate to. Second, the topic of Jews was a sensitive one, and triggering everyday anti-Semitism was a real concern. Not all groups, however, ignored the ‘Jewish question’. But even if the left-wing underground press mentioned the persecution and deportation of Jews, this did not necessarily mean that they understood the situation fully. Combat and L’Humanité, for instance, would discuss the Jewish deportations in the same breath as that of the communists, resisters and other ‘enemies’ of Vichy and the Third Reich, overlooking the uniqueness of the situation of the Jews.Footnote 87 In fact, despite denouncing the deportations in themselves, articles in Combat continued to mention the existence of Jewish ‘finance’.Footnote 88 Jean-Louis Crémieux Brilhac, a veteran of the Free French, has refuted Poznanski's allegations that they ignored the ‘Jewish question’.Footnote 89 Indeed, how can it be argued that someone like Raymond Aron, Jewish himself, did not object to the persecution of Jews? But Poznanski's argument is more subtle than that, and Aron's Jewish identity did not alter the fact the ‘Jewish question’ was never at the forefront of Resistance concerns. Understanding the reasons for this silence – personal, political, or in this case professional – is thus hugely important.
Like a lot of the French Resistance, the cheminot underground press largely ignored the subject of Jewish deportations. Rather, they discussed professional problems under the occupation, some of which resonated loudly with pre-war concerns: low wages, long hours, lack of basic materials such as coal or soap, and generally bad working conditions.Footnote 90 There were also the circumstantial problems with the forced labour service, the restriction of trade union activity or the oppression of cheminots which increased sharply after 1942.Footnote 91 Sometimes, the Jewish deportations were mentioned. In October 1942 the Tribune des Cheminots wrote that ‘after the mass arrests of Jews, ex-delegates and representatives of workers’ trade unions, who have remained valiant defenders of their comrades, have also been arrested’.Footnote 92 Yet despite this brief mention of the Jews, the principal purpose of this article was to denounce the deportation of fellow railwaymen. As Annette Wieviorka noted before Poznanski, communist resisters linked the Jewish deportations with their own political problems.Footnote 93 In regards to the cheminots, this was certainly the case.
The cheminot trade unions were not the only ones to prioritise political and professional concerns over the ‘Jewish question’: archives show that the upper echelons also tended to do this. On 31 March 1943, the General Director of the SNCF, Robert Le Besnerais, received a furious letter from one of his regional directors, Louis Cambournac. A ‘serious incident’ had occurred only a few days before at Le Bourget-Drancy station, regarding the preparation of a ‘train of Jews’.Footnote 94 On the morning of 25 March, a German surveillance officer had contacted the Bourget station to enquire about the deportation train scheduled to leave that very morning at 8h55. The local cheminots were taken by surprise: according to their timetable, the train had been scheduled for the following day, 26 March. The German officer was outraged by this mistake, and whilst the cheminots were rushing around to get the materials prepared for departure, he attacked the Bourget stationmaster with torrents of abuse. The train eventually left Le Bourget-Drancy at 10.45 on 25 March 1943 carrying 1,008 Jews. Three days later, it arrived at Sobibor.Footnote 95 Only five of those on board survived the camps.
At first glance, this letter raises two key issues: that the SNCF's upper echelons were fully aware of the nature of the deportation trains, and that they were still more concerned with doing their jobs than with the fate of Jews. Indeed, the reader is almost shocked to realise that the ‘serious incident’ which Cambournac was concerned with was not the deportation of over 1,000 Jews, but rather that the German officer had immediately blamed the French railwaymen for a scheduling error, and that he had subsequently bullied the Bourget station master. ‘I strongly protest against the conduct of the German officer’, wrote Cambournac in his letter. ‘Such procedures cannot ameliorate the relations between the occupation authorities and our agents who are already working under very difficult conditions.’Footnote 96
A closer reading of the letter, however, shows the complicated hierarchical relationships in the SNCF, as well as Franco-German tensions. Indeed, the day before informing Le Besnerais, Cambournac had already asked the German transport authorities ‘that the qualified authorities immediately begin an investigation into the behaviour of the officer in question’. ‘This is not the first time’, Cambournac warned, ‘that such incidents have occurred at Le Bourget, although they have not been as serious. For the service to keep on running, it is necessary that this stop once and for all.’Footnote 97
Whether or not Cambournac was horrified by Jewish deportations is in fact very unclear in this letter. In any case, official correspondence was not the place to make such comments; it was more likely to include professional concerns. He was interested in protecting the cheminots from German outbursts, and second, that the SNCF was increasingly concerned with the Germans taking control over their material and their employees. After 1942 a huge increase in German railway procurements was accompanied by a rise in the persecution of French railwaymen. By 1943, the SNCF management accused the Germans of brutal oppression which was pushing cheminots to sabotage their machines. The directors regularly warned the Hauptverkhersdirektion (HVD, Main Transportation Division) that such harsh measures would trigger popular resentment towards the authorities.Footnote 98 This concern for cheminots’ welfare was both an extension of late nineteenth and early twentieth corporate paternalism, and a real fear that massive protests and divisions amongst the cheminots would lead to the dissolution of the French railway service. Ultimately, it reflects a certain degree of protectionism over the railwaysFootnote 99: it was important for the Germans to understand that the French held the reins of the nation's largest asset.
In the face of Jewish deportation, cheminots were still able to prioritise their professional interests and concerns. This may seem hard to grasp, but this tendency was not so uncommon. Even Jewish cheminots held this kind of extreme professional allegiance. There were 138 Jews working in the SNCF in 1940, approximately 0.03% of employees, mostly directors from long-established French families.Footnote 100 Top engineers, like Henri Lang and Robert Lévi, were excluded from certain activities as early as October 1940. Lang was eventually arrested in December 1941 and deported to Auschwitz on the first convoy. He died a few weeks after his arrival. According to his daughter, Catherine de Béchillon – who lived in hiding in the southern zone and received the moral, intellectual and sometimes even material support of her father's close friends and colleagues, not least Fournier, the President of the Council of the SNCF – Lang never criticized the SNCF, but rather trusted the French system until the very end. His family received financial compensation from the SNCF for many years after the war.Footnote 101 In the meantime, Lévi was smuggled into the southern zone where he continued to carry out certain activities within the SNCF. He went to North Africa on business, and after the Germans invaded the Free Zone he stayed there until the end of the war. After the Liberation, Lévi returned immediately to France and had not lost an ounce of his professionalism. Far from condemning the SNCF for its involvement in Jewish deportations, he defended the French railways in face of ‘[the American] General Gray who, even before the allied landings, thought that he was the boss of the French railway’.Footnote 102 Then, during the period of purges, he testified in defence of Jean Berthelot, considered by many as one of the big collaborators in Vichy. In 1946, Lévi was made Director of the Services d’Installations Fixes.
Not all Jews maintained such strong allegiance to the SNCF. Jacques Eisenmann, for example, was left relatively isolated during this clandestine period, receiving no support from the SNCF. After the war, he did not go back to work for the French railways.Footnote 103 Still, the cases of Lang and Lévi remind us not to underestimate the power of professionalism, especially within the railways. From lowly cheminots to top-ranking engineers, they were tied into a unique community which existed through its professional values and identity.
Conclusion
Too often cheminots’ activities in regards to the Holocaust are categorised into two sections: on one hand, cheminots, especially those in directorial positions, were bureaucrats, technocrats and white-collar workers who became accessories to one of the greatest crimes of the century. On the other hand, working-class as well as highly ranked cheminots turned a blind eye to the deportations, failing to act in a heroic or moral way. Drawing from new archival sources as well as recent writings by Wieviorka, Ribeill and Bachelier, this article hoped to challenge these assumptions about cheminot behaviour in Vichy France. From a historical perspective, cheminots had always been reluctant to sabotage the railways. Even during the Phoney War and the early years of the occupation, their behaviour was more about continuity than change. But the winds turned in 1942, and as tensions increased, so their attitudes towards sabotage changed. By late 1943, railway sabotage had reached unprecedented heights. Still, sabotaging transports with travellers (whether forced or free) never became widespread. This can be explained by the lack of direct involvement of the SNCF and the cheminots in the deportations, as well as a lack of understanding of the situation. But more importantly, professional notions of security and safety prevented cheminots from ever carrying out such violent actions. That did not prevent them from acting with humanity and empathy, and there are many examples of cheminots being involved in assisting or rescuing Jews.
This article does not, however, wish to argue that cheminot professionalism had no effect on their attitudes towards Jews. In fact, evidence shows that political and professional concerns often took precedence over the ‘Jewish question’, whether they were unionised workers or railway directors. This fits in with broader French/Resistance attitudes towards Jews, and the history of the cheminots must be understood within this context. Moreover, the study of the cheminots’ inability to understand the full consequences of the Jewish deportations must also include the attitude of Jewish cheminots. For despite having felt the repercussions of racial exclusion, persecution and even deportation, Jewish SNCF workers continued to hold a real allegiance to the railway company. In that sense, we must take into consideration that, for these workers, breaking with this unique professional identity, community and tradition within the railways was far more complicated than we may assume.
There is, of course, one famous example of a cheminot who refused to drive a deportation train. On 31 October 1942, Léon Bronchart refused to drive a train of Jewish deportees in Montauban. Or rather, many have recently claimed that it was a train of Jewish deportees. Bronchart has even become a Righteous Amongst the Nations as a result of this. In fact, the train he refused to drive was one of prisoners.Footnote 104 It had nothing to do with the Holocaust.Footnote 105 There are more subtleties to the Bronchart story – for instance, he was considered to be a disobedient worker in the 1930s – but these will be discussed in another study.Footnote 106 What is important to understand is that active intervention in the Jewish deportations was not a realistic option for cheminots living in Vichy France.
Ultimately, the story of railwaymen in the Holocaust is more ambiguous than the labels of ‘perpetrator’ or indifferent ‘bystander’ suggests. The occupation was a double-edged sword for the cheminots: by keeping the trains running, they fed both the French nation and the German military apparatus; they bridged two zones and ripped communities apart; they brought POWs home and deported children. In general, there was no obvious side on which to stand. Primo Levi wrote of the grey zone in the concentration camp universe, but the world outside the camps, albeit different, is not easier to define. By keeping the trains running, cheminots were responding to a different set of rules that existed in a unique professional milieu, and in a time before the horrors of the concentration camps were known.
