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| our being found out in
the case of the arrest of more than one of our clients. The middle
of the stamp consisted of Marianne, taken from a discarded official stamp.
The only difficulty in the operation was to frame Marianne precisely with
the concentric circles, so as to give the impression that the two belonged
together on the same rubber stamp. Soon enough we figured out how
much easier it was to stamp the name of the place first and then apply
the image of Marianne.
Our clients were a number of church organizations which attempted to help numerous "Jewish" refugees, many of whom were in fact Christian, for since Hitler required no less than four (4!) baptized grandparents in order to be of the pure "Aryan" race, the Hitlerian category of "Jew" included a great number of perfectly authentic Christians, baptized at birth, whose grandparents or parents had been Jewish or partly Jewish. There were other Jews who had converted in adulthood for reasons of personal faith or to increase the possibility of teaching at the universities in Germany, where it was always unthinkable for a non-converted Jew to hold a professorial chair. Still others among these refugees were totally Aryan, but had Jewish wives. They had emigrated together when Hitler had demanded the divorce and repudiation of the race-polluting member of the family. Many of these top German professionals had gone to the United States, where they had easily found employment in some of the most prestigious universities. One of the great New Testament scholars, my own Professor Piper, came to Princeton because he (with not a drop of Jewish blood) refused to divorce his wife, who did not have the required number of Aryan grandparents. Others, more attached to Europe and France, had come to Paris, where jobs were not so easy to come by as in America. Many of these had then fled to the Southern Zone in 1940, though, not being political refugees, they had avoided Loriol. Yet they were now required to register as foreigners and, presumably, Jews. Deportation to the East was, for them, a distinct possibility. But now, in the early months
of 1943, the Nazis were looking for Jews to deport to the "resettlement
areas" in Poland, in reality the extermination camps and the gas chambers
of Hitler's "final solution." This remained unknown to anyone in
France as Pétain rounded up Jews. Hitler had set quotas, and
Pétain's Vichy was delivering the required numbers. Since
Pétain did not want to touch, at the beginning at least, the French
Jews, the police rounded up mainly the racial refugees, regardless of their
faith, as long as they would fit into Hitler's definition of "Jew" and
were not French.
Since many of the Christian
refugees had taken up contact with the church |
