“Permission to enter Siam”: How the Consul of Thailand in Marseille Saved the Lives of Refugees during World War II

Abstract

Robert Vimont-Vicary was consul of Siam/Thailand in Marseille from 1919 to 1941. He issued hundreds of visas and travel documents to Jews and other refugees piling into the city from 1940 to 1941, which allowed them to emigrate to safety in Portugal and beyond. Vimont-Vicary worked closely with the individuals and networks that organized diplomatic rescue operations in Marseille, like Frank Bohn, Varian Fry, Donald Lowrie, and others. Already under surveillance by Vichy’s secret service since 1940, Vimont-Vicary’s exequatur was revoked in 1941 by the French state and the Thai consulate was shut down. Robert Vimont-Vicary died an untimely death in 1942 and fell into obscurity for over eighty years. Based on previously unused primary sources, this article explores Vimont-Vicary’s actions and motives, traces individual refugees who received Siamese visas, and establishes a connection between Siam/Thailand and the Holocaust for the first time.

Introduction

Manfred Mann was fourteen when he sat across from the tall, bespectacled Frenchman in the early afternoon of September 14, 1940. Born in Leipzig, Germany into a Jewish family, Manfred and his family fled Germany first for Brussels, then southward through France, always fleeing the German advances. When he walked into the Siamese consulate on 16 Rue Breteuil in Marseille, dressed in his Boy Scout uniform, Manfred was alone. His parents were some four hundred kilometers away in Naucelle, where his father was interned at a refugee camp.¹ Outside the camp, he and his mother stayed in order to be close to his father.

Manfred had already learned that the only way to leave France was from Marseille overland to Portugal, which first required a visa from the final destination country, then Portuguese and Spanish transit visas, and finally, a French exit visa. As far as the consul of Siam was concerned, Manfred’s family planned to travel to Siam. The consul issued visas and stay permits for Siam to Manfred and his parents without any problems, accepted the visa fee, and sent him on his way, but not before reminding him to get involved in the burgeoning Boy Scout movement in Siam once he got there (see Figure 1).

Remarkably, teenage Manfred Mann obtained all four required visas and the Mann family arrived in Lisbon on November 6, 1940. Officially on their way to Siam, they spent fifteen months in the Portuguese capital, unsuccessfully trying to obtain American visas, until they embarked for the British colony of Jamaica in January 1942. They never set foot in Siam, but owed their survival, at least in part, to Robert Vimont-Vicary, the consul general of Siam in Marseille, who issued their visas on that September afternoon in 1940 and who did the same for hundreds of refugees before he died little more than a year after meeting Manfred Mann.

The story of Robert Vimont-Vicary from 1940 to 1941 spans the German invasion of France, the armistice, the division of the country, and the creation of the Vichy government. Refugees, desperate to leave for neutral or safe lands, flooded unoccupied France and the port city of Marseille. During most of this period, it was possible, at times even encouraged, to emigrate legally, provided one had the necessary papers. Foreign consulates in Marseille played crucial roles in providing the necessary travel documents. Though for the majority of refugees, the most sought-after visa was that of the United States, soon any visa of any country would do, as long as they reached safety beyond the French border.

This article aims to add Robert Vimont-Vicary, who has been unknown for the past eight decades, to the group of diplomats and humanitarians who helped Jewish as well as non-Jewish refugees escape Vichy France by providing them with passports, visas, contacts, or funds. In addition, this article introduces Siam/Thailand as a destination country for Jewish emigrants during the Holocaust and explores individual refugee case studies of Jews and non-Jews, who used Siamese visas to flee France.²

Marseille, as a city of refuge during the Vichy era, has received significant scholarly attention.³ A substantive body of scholarship focuses on the diplomatic rescue efforts of a small, but significant group of humanitarian activists and diplomats who helped refugees flee France.⁴ Adding Robert Vimont-Vicary to this group is a challenge, as archival sources on the man and his actions are few and scattered, and he left no writings of his own. Unlike his consular peers, there is no intelligence services (surveillance du territoire) file on Vimont-Vicary in either the Marseille office or the central administration under the Ministry of Interior. Memoirs by rescuers who worked with Vimont-Vicary (like Varian Fry or Donald Lowrie) and survivors who obtained Siamese/Thai visas augment the few existing archival sources on the consul general. The grandchildren and a surviving nephew of Vimont-Vicary have been another valuable source of information and they have been very supportive of this project and gracious with their time.

While Siamese visas played a remarkable role in saving lives in Europe, no Thai person played a significant role in the events in Marseille and the honorary consul acted with a great deal of autonomy. This article, thus, draws a line connecting the Holocaust and Thailand, which runs specifically through wartime Marseille and the actions of non-Thai individuals.

Throughout this article, I use the names “Siam” and “Thailand” interchangeably. In 1939, the military government in Siam decreed that internationally, the country should be known as Thailand, but this name change took time to take root in the West, which is why sources from 1940–1941 sometimes refer to Siam, and, at other times, Thailand. For example, Vimont-Vicary referred to himself as consul general of Siam until well into 1941, while the war over Indochina in 1940–1941 is generally known as the Franco-Thai War.

Life and family background of Robert Vimont-Vicary

Robert Vimont-Vicary was born in Marseille as the second son of wealthy shipowner Adolphe Vimont and his wife, Marie Vicary, on February 13, 1885. In an arrangement that was certified by decrees of the president of the French Republic, both sons were given the family name Vimont-Vicary at the insistence of Robert’s maternal grandfather Louis Vicary, a decorated counter-admiral in the French navy who had eight surviving daughters, but no son, and was intent on seeing his family name live on (see Figure 2).⁵

Robert’s father also came from a navy family and had sailed to French Indochina and Japan in the 1870s as a navy officer. It is possible that he visited Bangkok during this period, although we do not have specific records of his voyages. Adolphe left the navy and became a shipowner in Marseille in 1899. With his firm Adolphe Vimont & Cie., he engaged in trade with Southeast Asia and the United States and was one of the founders of the French East Asia Company in 1902 and the French Cabotage Company for the China Seas in 1909. A well-known figure in trade and shipping circles, he would have been an obvious candidate for the consular posting for Siam and received his exequatur—the official accreditation of a consul issued by the host government—in 1903. Adolphe Vimont served as Siamese consul until he died in 1916, after which the post remained vacant until 1919 due to the war.

We have no information on Robert Vimont-Vicary’s youth and education, but we know that he married Claire Artaud in 1911, their first son Jacques was born the same year, and their second son Jean was born in 1914. The marriage was not a happy one, however, and the couple divorced in 1927. In 1930, Robert married Mireille Péronne, who was more than twenty years his junior, and they went on to have four children born between 1931 and 1939, so we may imagine that in 1940, during the events of this article, their home would have been a place bustling with small children (see Figure 3).⁶

During World War I, Robert, who was fluent in English, served in the French army as a military translator with British troops. After his father died in 1916 and the war ended, Robert inherited the family shipping business in Marseille—though he was the younger son—and set upon expanding it. His elder brother Roger inherited a stately amount of cash and built a business of his own in the food industry in Normandy.⁷ Whether due to a challenging business climate, lack of business acumen, or a combination of both, Robert’s shipping business declined during the 1920s, forcing him to successively sell all vessels. By 1934, Robert was no longer a shipowner and continued his import-export business, partnering among others with his brother-in-law Daniel Péronne. In 1937, he contributed to the founding of the Marseilles section of the French chamber of foreign trade, and acted as the chamber’s vice president. Perhaps due to his lackluster business success, Robert moved the family from a seaside residence at 177 Promenade de la Corniche to a rented apartment in 99 Boulevard Périer, another upscale neighborhood in the late 1930s.

Ships, cars, and golf—these were the major themes in the life of Marseille businessman Robert Vimont-Vicary. A bon vivant with a large physique, his life included visits to Monte Carlo, overseas travel to New York, and a country house. Robert drove an American Buick through the streets of Marseille and was a board member of the city’s automobile club; his descendants remember him as a lover of luxury, extroverted, and charming. But his personality seems to have been more complex than this picture suggests, especially because of his profound religiosity: Robert was a devout Catholic, even superstitious, and deeply devoted to the Virgin Mary, and installed statues of the Madonna on the facade of his country house and at his apartment in Marseille.

Together with his father’s business and his love of ships and cars, Robert also “inherited” the Siamese consulship in 1919. The Siamese foreign ministry in Bangkok was happy to keep its consulships within families, so Robert was the natural choice to succeed his father.⁸ His membership in the city’s consular corps conferred a high social status that was on display through his interactions with visiting royalty, and through his attendance at the state funeral of Marshal Foch in 1929 in Paris as a member of the Siamese delegation. That same year, in recognition of a decade of service for Siam, Vimont-Vicary’s position was elevated from consul to consul general. As a French citizen and honorary consul, however, he did not enjoy diplomatic immunity, and this made him subject to police persecution, as will be detailed below.⁹

Siamese diplomacy, the Marseille consulate, and Jewish immigration

Siam had maintained a consulate in Marseille since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 revolutionized shipping between Europe and Asia and Marseille experienced a boom as a port and trading hub. Siam’s consuls primarily acted as commercial agents.¹⁰ During the time of Adolphe Vimont and Robert Vimont-Vicary, Siam had a large trade deficit with Europe, exporting few agricultural products and importing railway materials, automobiles, machinery and electrical appliances, and pharmaceutical, chemical, and consumer goods. Another reason Siam found it useful to maintain a consulate in Marseille was to receive and send off members of the royal Chakri Dynasty. Marseille was usually the first European port of call for ships arriving from Asia, and Vimont-Vicary often met Siamese royals at the port. Siamese princes and princesses and members of noble families would travel to Europe for their university education, military training, or for holidays. The consuls were at hand, often together with representatives of the city, to greet them, arrange accommodation, meals, and onward journeys (see Figure 4).¹¹

On several occasions, Robert Vimont-Vicary met the Siamese monarch himself. King Prajadhipok arrived in Marseille from Bangkok in February 1934, where the prefect of Bouches-du-Rhône, with Vimont-Vicary in attendance, received him with military honors. On this occasion, the consul received a gold watch from the king and was made a commander of the Most Noble Order of the Crown of Siam. King Ananda Mahidol, who succeeded his uncle Prajadhipok after the latter’s abdication in 1935, embarked for Bangkok from Marseille in October 1938. On this occasion, he awarded both Vimont-Vicary and the consulate’s chancellor, Otto Marinetti, the Order of the White Elephant. The consul also welcomed the young king and his mother again on their return from Siam in February 1939 (see Figure 5).¹²

When German troops advanced on Paris in June 1940, the Thai legation was part of the diplomatic exodus and relocated first to Vichy and then Lisbon.¹³ Some months later, Thailand made front page news in France when it took advantage of Vichy’s weakness and attacked French Indochina. Incursions into Indochinese territory began in late 1940, before Thailand launched a full-scale occupation of Cambodian and Laotian border provinces in January 1941, but the conflict ended quickly when Japan brokered a ceasefire that same month, to which the French colonial administration had no choice but to agree.¹⁴

Since the 1920s, Siam was home to a small community of Jews who had fled persecution in Soviet Russia.¹⁵ Before this time, we know of only a few Jewish individuals like Abraham Navarro, interpreter to the East India Company in seventeenth-century Ayutthaya or, in modern times, Maurice Rosenberg from Romania and the German linguist Oskar Frankfurter. Most Jewish refugees who went to Asia preferred Shanghai, which had loose immigration rules and where a large Jewish expatriate community made it easier to settle. Still, a small number of Jews from Europe emigrated to Siam in the late 1930s. While Siam did not have a culture of antisemitism, it was also not inviting Jews to immigrate; rather, a Siamese visa was simply one of the few available options to leave Europe at all.¹⁶

Estimates put the size of the Jewish community in Bangkok during World War II between 120 and 400 persons, outnumbering the depleted non-Jewish German community there, after most of the men had returned to Germany for military service. In response to this development, Berlin stationed an SS officer in Bangkok in the autumn of 1941, to monitor “the Jewish question, which was becoming increasingly problematic.”¹⁷

Egon Salomon’s Jewish family, for example, left Germany in 1937, after searching for countries that would accept them:

Now, where do we go to? No country was open to them, except, at that particular time, Siam. In order to get out of Germany to save their lives, they decided to go to Siam. When they got into Siam, the country at the time said, “Okay, you can come into the country, stay here for 60 days,” or 90 days, I don’t remember whatever it was. But at that particular time, you are no longer acceptable, and you have to leave. And they had to make the decision, and they made the decision at that particular time the only country that was available to them was China. And they decided, then, after they stayed in Bangkok for a month—a month and a half, to leave for Shanghai, China. And they stayed in Shanghai, China for the rest of the war until 1945.¹⁸

The 1938 immigration act, enacted to limit Chinese immigration into the kingdom, allowed Jews to immigrate to Siam, provided they could pay the immigration fee and prove that they had sufficient funds to support themselves. And the news spread to Europe quickly: after the pogroms of November 1938, Harry Rosenfeldt in Berlin recalled overhearing people in the Jewish community saying that it was possible to get Siamese visas to emigrate there.¹⁹ Leopold Rotholz, a dentist from Hamburg, Germany, and his wife, Alice, were prominent pacifists and anti-Nazi activists who had been interned in a concentration camp in 1935. Although later released, they had no option but to leave the country. They found a way out when Martin Pickenpack, the Siamese consul in Hamburg, told them they could emigrate to Bangkok and Leopold could practice as a dentist there. They left for Bangkok in March 1939 and stayed there until 1951, whereafter Alice Ekert-Rotholz became a successful author of exotic travel and adventure novels in Germany, inspired by her time in Thailand.²⁰

Contrasting the Rotholzes’ experiences, Charlotte Layton’s account will also have been typical for many German and Austrian Jews: after the November pogroms of 1938, she and her husband, Heinz, managed to obtain Siamese visas and steamer tickets for Bangkok. She recalled an encounter on the train to Hamburg, where they were to board the ship: a fellow passenger with a swastika emblem on his lapel asked them whether they had relatives in Siam, to which they responded no; whether they spoke Siamese, to which they again responded no; and whether they had a lot of money to make a living there? When they again responded with no, the man said he would rather take his life than travel to Siam under such conditions, to which Heinz replied that they could always do that once they were there. Charlotte and Heinz boarded the MS Jutlandia bound for Bangkok, but when they stopped overnight in Penang in British Malaya, they met a Jewish jeweler shop-owner who invited them to stay. They decided to stay, and they never made it to Bangkok.²¹

Suffice it to say that Siam was generally not high on the list of desirable emigration destinations for European Jews, but this had no bearing on the immense popularity of Siamese visas in 1940 Marseille.

Marseille, 1940–1941

After the German invasion of France in June 1940 and the division of the country into an occupied zone governed by Germany and a free zone governed by a French government in Vichy, Marseille was the largest city and the only major port in the free zone still open to the world. Foreigners and French citizens fled to Marseille in droves, hoping to find a passage out of Europe. Nearly two hundred thousand refugees piled into the city, around one third of the city’s peacetime population.²² Many of these refugees were Jews, others opposition politicians, communists, intellectuals, and artists. In the overcrowded city, relief organizations tried to get people to safety abroad and relied on consuls to issue life-saving visas.

Germany interfered little in the Vichy government’s internal affairs, but Vichy voluntarily passed antisemitic laws and took measures against Jews, communists, other minorities, and immigrants from October 1940 onward. Of the estimated three hundred and fifty thousand Jews living in France in 1940, some one hundred and thirty thousand of whom were refugees from Germany and other parts of Europe, around eighty thousand are believed to have died, most of them deported and killed by the Nazis and French collaborators from 1942 onward.

After June 1940, the Vichy government interned some one thousand male Jews, mostly from Germany and Austria at Camp des Milles near Aix-en-Provence, thirty kilometers north of Marseille, under appalling conditions, while female refugees and children stayed at four hotels in the city under government supervision. Vichy’s strategy to rid itself of unwanted foreigners was to encourage them to emigrate, and Les Milles became a transit camp where inmates awaited visas or ship passage to leave France. Among the many camps that dotted Vichy France, Les Milles was chosen specifically because of its proximity to the foreign consulates in Marseille.²³

Other refugees managed to avoid internment, but also spent their days in long queues at consulates, aid organizations, and shipping offices looking for ways to leave the city, waiting in run-down hotel rooms, harborside cafés, or in the open, always on the lookout for the police or secret service agents. In addition to internment by Vichy police, the threat of being delivered to the Germans hung over many of the refugees, as Vichy had agreed in the armistice treaty to “surrender on demand” any German or Austrian national, for whom the Nazis were looking.

The large majority of refugees stuck in Marseille tried to emigrate to the United States or, as an interim solution, to any other country in Central or South America. As the escape route across the Atlantic became increasingly difficult, refugees chose to cross the Mediterranean for North Africa. Shanghai was another destination until fewer and fewer ships served the routes to Asia toward the end of 1940. Individual ships still undertook the journey some time into 1941, but it became increasingly dangerous and soon it was no longer possible to travel to Asia, including Siam.²⁴ The remaining escape routes were overland to Spain, and one special route devised by Vichy officials that opened suddenly from October 1940 to May 1941, between Marseille and the French colony of Martinique in the Caribbean. Through the latter route, an estimated five thousand refugees made it out of France.²⁵

German writer Anna Seghers was a refugee in Marseille in 1941 and later gave one of the most evocative accounts of life and desperation in the overcrowded city in her novel Transit. She describes a scene at a café by the old port:

I had a coffee standing up with the suitcase clamped between my legs. All around me I heard people talking. It was as if the counter where I was drinking stood between two pillars of the Tower of Babel. Nevertheless, there were occasional words I could understand, and they kept hitting my ears in a certain rhythm as if to impress themselves on my memory: Cuba visa and Martinique, Oran and Portugal, Siam and Casablanca, transit visa and three-mile zone.²⁶

Siam, Seghers tells us, was in the air in Marseille. It was one of the exotic overseas destinations to which one might be able to flee to safety. The man who held the power to issue these sought-after Siamese visas was consul general Robert Vimont-Vicary.

As fewer and fewer ships left from Marseille, Lisbon became the escape route for departures from the European continent. Estimates of refugees who reached Lisbon from 1940 to 1941 range from forty thousand to two hundred thousand. The Portuguese and Spanish consulates in Marseille issued thousands of transit visas, allowing refugees with a visa for a final destination to travel to Lisbon. These final-destination visas could be real, as in the case of those fortunate enough to hold American visas, or they could be pro forma only, like those for Siam or China, but still sufficient to make it to Lisbon. The US consulate in Marseille issued visas to carefully selected refugees; the Mexican, Panamanian, and Cuban consulates in Marseille also issued visas to refugees, as did the Belgian consulate for the colony of Congo, while the consuls of Poland and two states that had already ceased to exist—Czechoslovakia and Lithuania—sold passports to many stateless refugees. Marseille was a city in a frenzy over passports and visas.²⁷

Scholars have researched and identified many men and women who participated in diplomatic rescue efforts during this period. In Marseille, Varian Fry and others from the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) stood at the center of these rescue efforts, and Hiram Bingham, the American vice-consul, was a key collaborator. Two American religious groups, the Quakers and the Unitarians, set up makeshift organizations to help refugees;²⁸ the Jewish relief organization HICEM maintained an office in Marseille and provided aid and emigration support to refugees inside Les Milles and in the city, and the so-called Nîmes Committee of more than twenty relief organizations supported men, women, and children in the camps and outside.²⁹ Mexico’s consul Gilberto Bosques enabled thousands of refugees, mainly republican Spaniards, but also Jewish refugees like Anna Seghers, to flee France for Mexico.³⁰ The Chinese consul, Chen Zhongjun, issued visas to Jewish refugees, which did not, in fact, allow holders to enter China, but were good enough to obtain Portuguese and Spanish transit visas.³¹ In the midst of these dramatic events was fifty-five-year-old businessman Robert Vimont-Vicary, who had been consul of Siam for more than two decades.

The actions of Robert Vimont-Vicary

The Siamese consulate in Marseille was located at 16 Rue Breteuil, one of the old streets of the city that stretches uphill from the old port. The street not only housed the Siamese consulate, but also, only some five hundred meters away, the city’s oldest synagogue. Moreover, 60 Rue Grignan, where Varian Fry’s ERC was located until January 1941, was only steps away from the consulate. Retracing the locations today, it is easy to imagine the narrow street corner between the consulate and Fry’s office crowded with refugees searching for ways to leave the country (see Figure 6).

Vimont-Vicary worked with the various relief organizations active in Marseille. During the initial months after the German invasion, he provided visas to Frank Bohn, who represented a coalition of American labor groups and tried to get several hundred anti-Nazi labor activists out of the country. Bohn befriended Vimont-Vicary and got him to supply Siamese visas until he was recalled to the United States. Varian Fry worked alongside Bohn during his first weeks in Marseille and then took over Bohn’s lists of refugees and his local networks, including Vimont-Vicary, from October 1940 onward (see Figure 7).³²

Vimont-Vicary’s cooperation with Varian Fry and the ERC was equally significant. By his own accounts, Fry made extensive use of Siamese visas for the refugees on his list:

The Spanish Consulates in Marseille, Toulouse and Perpignan were all giving transit visas on presentation of passports with valid Portuguese transit visas. And the Portuguese Consulates were giving transit visas on almost anything which seemed to mean that the holder could go on from Portugal. Refugees who hadn’t yet received United States visas were taking Chinese or Siamese visas and getting Portuguese transit visas on them, with the intention of waiting for their United States visas in Lisbon rather than in France…. The Siamese visas were real enough, only there was absolutely no way of going from Portugal to Siam without getting numerous unobtainable transit visas. Yet, at the time, the Portuguese Consuls gave the holders of these Siamese visas Portuguese transit visas exactly as though there were ships from Lisbon to Bangkok. Once they had the Portuguese and Spanish transit visas, most of the refugees were able to go to Lisbon with little or no difficulty.³³

A third network connection that cooperated with Vimont-Vicary was that of Donald Lowrie. Lowrie was a relief worker for the World Service of the YMCA and headed the so-called Nîmes Committee. He wrote in his memoirs in 1963:

There were legal and not-so-legal ways of procuring visas. Certain consulates might be “persuaded” to bypass the regulations. In rare cases a personal appeal to the authority concerned would procure the necessary rubber-stamped note in an endangered man’s passport. One such personal connection with the consul of a certain Southeast Asian country was most useful. And the records must show the names of scores of immigrants to that far-off land, who never got farther than the Free French forces in North Africa or Britain.³⁴

Lowrie was undoubtedly referring to Vimont-Vicary as the consul who helped “scores of immigrants,” given that Siam was not only the sole Southeast Asian country with a consulate in Marseille, but the only independent Southeast Asian country.

Besides issuing visas to individuals at the consulate and working with the international relief agencies and networks, Vimont-Vicary was also involved in other schemes to get refugees out of France. Anna Seghers describes a scene in which an acquaintance rushes to an appointment with a staff member of the Siamese consulate and explains to Seghers that the consul was friendly with a forwarding agent who could organize visas for Portugal without the requirement of holding an American visa, certainly due to the Siamese visa.³⁵

Manfred Mann, whom we met above, and his family are prototypical of refugees who applied for Siamese visas to leave France without the intention of actually emigrating to Siam. The Klein family from Berlin was another example. In Autumn 1940, Louis Klein from Berlin was hiding in a hotel room in Marseille, while his wife and daughter met Varian Fry at a café, who recommended they apply first for a Siamese visa, then for Portuguese and Spanish visas. They did so for all three of them, and, guided by members of Fry’s network, walked across the border from the small town of Cerbère into Spain and to freedom.³⁶

Herbert Weichmann was a German Jew, a socialist intellectual, and a journalist. He and his wife, Elsbeth, an economist and fellow socialist, had emigrated to Paris already in 1933 and, in 1940, fled from the German advance to Marseille. The Weichmanns were on a German “wanted” list, but luckily also on the list of Varian Fry and the ERC, so they were in line to receive US visas. These were delayed, however, so Siamese visas from Vimont-Vicary enabled the couple to flee France in August 1940 to Spain and Portugal. The Weichmanns eventually emigrated to the United States, but returned to Germany in 1948 and played prominent roles in Hamburg politics and the postwar Social Democratic Party, including Herbert’s stint as mayor of Hamburg.³⁷

Walter Herz, a professor of Jewish theology, emigrated from Germany to Luxembourg in 1939 with his wife, Irma, and his one-year-old son, Dan, then onward to France. They obtained visas from Vimont-Vicary, but could not find a ship that would take them to Siam en route to Indochina, so they remained stuck in France. Probably around July 1942, Irma entrusted her son to a family in Marseille, before she was interned with her husband, who was serving as Rabbi at Les Milles. Walter and Irma Herz were among the two thousand Jews deported from Les Milles in August or September 1942, first to Drancy and then to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.³⁸

Besides Jewish refugees—non-Jewish intellectuals, socialists, and persons otherwise opposed to the Nazi regime fled France with Siamese visas. Like the Weichmanns, German journalist and author Maximilian Scheer settled in Paris in 1933, where he was active in the antifascist resistance against the Nazis. Certain to be on a German wanted list, Scheer fled Paris from the German advance and found himself in Vimont-Vicary’s office in Marseille in Summer 1940. Scheer’s account of this time in Marseille aptly describes both the absurdity and the desperation:

For ten weeks we, like many others, have been living like we were in a nerve-racking lottery game. Things could go wrong any day. Every day there was less hope for a telegram from the State Department of the United States approving a visa. One day the Spanish border was open, the next it was closed. Yesterday the Spanish consulate refused transit visas, today they are available. Only the consul of Siam was a smiling sage. He asked nonchalantly in almost accent-free French, and his august smile was barely visible: “If you really want to go to Bangkok, I’ll give you a few brochures.” Also smiling only with my eyes: “Please do, give me brochures.” He actually gave them to me, and he issued the visa into the single passport for three people without any hesitation—and, with a smile, calculated three times the price for writing a three instead of a one. The Siamese visa was not in high demand because it was the most expensive of the fantasy visas available on the market. The cheapest was Chiang Kai-shek’s. I don’t think his Chinese consulate sold as many visas in the preceding years of his dictatorship as it did in a week in the summer of 1940. We prefer the White Elephant of Siam; it is a bit more unusual and—how paradoxical these times are!—therefore more inconspicuous than a visa for Shanghai.³⁹

In his memory some thirty-five years later, Scheer may have conflated an ethnic Chinese consul (hence his remark about his accent) with Vimont-Vicary, and his remark about the visa fee also seems curious. But after this encounter with Vimont-Vicary, Scheer and his family managed, armed with the Siamese visas, to flee France to Spain and Portugal, where they eventually received an American visa and spent the war years in exile in New York. After the war, Scheer settled in East Germany, where he became an award-winning writer.

Scheer’s experience highlights that Vimont-Vicary’s visa-issuing practice was flexible in several ways. For example, if not all family members of an applicant possessed valid travel documents, he would simply issue a visa for all family members into one person’s passport. As the visa was handwritten, Vimont-Vicary could adapt it to individual needs, and he would have been able to set the price for visas and other travel documents himself. It was common practice that consuls operated independently from, in this case, the legation in Paris and the ministry in Bangkok, and no instructions were given or limits were set by Bangkok as to the number or types of visas Vimont-Vicary could issue, in essence allowing the consul to act autonomously.⁴⁰

Robert Vimont-Vicary’s nemesis was Marcel Dubois, special investigator of the secret service in Marseille (commissaire spécial de la surveillance du territoire à Marseille).⁴¹ Dubois was in charge of the surveillance of the various consulates in the city where large numbers of refugees congregated daily, on the lookout for illegal activities and wanted individuals, and he and his men had been observing Vimont-Vicary and the Siamese consulate at least since November 1940.⁴²

The secret service raided the Siamese consulate in the first days of December. Dubois tipped off Varian Fry, and we may speculate that the American, who was using Siamese visas widely, will have warned Vimont-Vicary, as the consulate continued to operate after the raid.⁴³ The raid highlights that, as a Frenchman and honorary consul, Vimont-Vicary was considerably more exposed to police actions than those consuls in Marseille who were foreign diplomats and were able to operate with greater impunity than Vimont-Vicary or fellow honorary consuls.

It was not illegal for the Siamese consul to issue Siamese visas, of course. But the number of visas must have been significant. By the end of 1940, Vimont-Vicary had established a reputation well beyond Marseille as a man who could provide potentially life-saving papers. His help was sought from as far away as Amsterdam in the German-controlled Netherlands. German architect Oscar von Halle had fled to Amsterdam with his family already in 1933, only to find himself once more living under the shadow of the Nazis in mid-1940. He wrote to the Siamese consul in Marseille and received Vimont-Vicary’s reply in January 1941, in which he assured von Halle that he and his family could be issued visas for Siam and that he could practice as an architect in Bangkok. “But,” Vimont-Vicary wrote, “it is indispensable that you present yourself at our consulate.” It was practically impossible for von Halle to travel from Amsterdam to Marseille during wartime Europe, so the plan never came to fruition. Oscar von Halle was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944 (see Figure 8).⁴⁴

Issuing a large number of Siamese visas was not what led to the eventual downfall of Vimont-Vicary, however; rather, in violation of its authority, the Siamese consulate issued travel documents for persons without passports (laissez-passer tenant lieu de passeport), with which the holders then attempted to apply for Portuguese and Spanish visas. It is unclear how many refugees were successful with such a laissez-passer, but one such document has survived. Issued on September 28, 1940, for Austrian Jews Georges Blau and his wife Edith, the document states its validity for a journey to Siam in lieu of a passport for a period of two years. The Siamese laissez-passer eventually proved not to be the ticket to freedom that they had hoped, but instead, the Blaus embarked for Martinique in March 1941 and eventually settled in the United States (see Figure 9).⁴⁵

By March 1941, Dubois and his team at the Marseille office of the secret service had a clear picture of Vimont-Vicary’s actions, had collected no fewer than ninety-eight cases they considered illegal, and informed the secret service headquarters at Vichy. The charges included the indiscriminate issuing of a large number of Siamese visas, issuing of fake laissez-passer documents to refugees without valid passports, and even the counterfeiting of other countries’ visas. As a result, the ministry of interior suggested to the foreign ministry on April 8, 1941, that it revoke Vimont-Vicary’s exequatur, the technical term for the legal document that officially recognized him as an agent of another country. In layman’s terms, the ministry of interior was suggesting that the consul be shut down.⁴⁶

Also implicated was Jules Jean, chancellor at the Siamese consulate, who was in one case in February 1941 accused by the secret police of having forged Spanish and Portuguese transit visas and a Brazilian entry visa. When he and some accomplices were questioned about this affair, they placed all blame squarely on Vimont-Vicary.⁴⁷

By late April 1941, so many suspicious dealings were going on around the Siamese consulate that the police headquarters in Vichy ordered all prefects of the départements to refrain from sending inmates of internment camps with Siamese visas to Les Milles for transit altogether, and the police remained adamant that the consulate had to be shut down.⁴⁸ The foreign ministry took its time with the political considerations of such a decision, but on May 15, 1941, it officially revoked the exequatur of Robert Vimont-Vicary by publication in the official journal of France. Further, the foreign ministry requested that the prefect of Bouches-du-Rhône ensure that the consulate was shut down and any activities by consul general Vimont-Vicary and chancellor Jean were put to an end.⁴⁹

The revocation of Vimont-Vicary’s exequatur was the only such act we are aware of in the context of events in Marseille from 1940 to the German takeover of Vichy France in 1942. In diplomatic practice, it marks the most significant step a host country can take against a consul. This singles out Robert Vimont-Vicary and underscores the gravity of his actions in the eyes of authorities in Marseille and Vichy.⁵⁰ Vimont-Vicary reacted promptly in a letter to Foreign Minister François Darlan on May 19, 1941, rejecting all accusations and demanding to be reinstated and have his honor restored. Pointing to his service for France during the Great War, Vimont-Vicary invoked God as witness of his honorable intentions. But this intervention had no effect, even though he added, because Darlan was an admiral, that he was the “son of First Lieutenant A. Vimont” and “grandson of Admiral Vicary,” for good measure.⁵¹

While one may expect the story of Siam’s consul in Marseille to have ended here, in fact, it entered into its most surprising chapter. Although his exequatur had been revoked, Vimont-Vicary did not stop issuing visas, and he did not even close the consulate. It appears that the instructions from Vichy did not reach the police in Marseille or were not acted upon. Vimont-Vicary may have benefited from conditions in the overrun city, where food shortages and crime were widespread and police services were stretched thin. He may have also taken inspiration from his Czechoslovak consular colleague Vladimír Vochoč, who had continued to operate his consulate and by selling Czech passports for over a year after his country had seized to exist. But Vimont-Vicary will also have been aware that such a strategy was not without serious risk, given that Vochoč was arrested and interned around the same time that Vimont-Vicary’s exequatur was revoked.⁵²

On June 11, 1941, as if nothing had happened, the consul general of Siam in Marseille wrote to the French Minister of Foreign Affairs on letterhead and with official stamp, requesting that a group of Dutch and French nationals, to whom he had issued Siamese visas on April 25, be issued French exit visas, so they could travel to Siam via Indochina. Perhaps in light of events, Vimont-Vicary felt compelled to add that “they really intend to travel to Thailand” and that he had issued specific recommendation letters to Thai ministries, as they wanted to engage in the Thai rice trade.⁵³ This must have caused consternation among officials in Vichy. Some days later, the Foreign Minister urged the Ministry of the Interior to finally do what it had been asked and shut down the Siamese consulate in Marseille. The secret service headquarters responded only on August 1, and hastened to assure that it had indeed instructed the colleagues in Marseille to act immediately. The Thai legation in Lisbon was looped in later that month, and Minister Phra Bahidda Nukara asked Vimont-Vicary to send the official seals and documents while expressing his “great regret that our collaboration has been so brusquely terminated.”⁵⁴

Also in June 1941, his exequatur revoked, Robert Vimont-Vicary appears to have launched an attempt to reverse his fortunes, perhaps hoping he could be reinstated, by involving none other than the King of Siam himself. At least, this seems the most reasonable explanation of why he applied for an exit visa to travel to Lausanne to meet the king, who was residing there. Brazenly, Vimont-Vicary filed his request for a French exit visa as consul general of Siam. And while his visa request was approved in July, we have no evidence of whether the visit actually took place or not. Even if we assume that Vimont-Vicary did visit King Ananda Mahidol in summer 1941 in Lausanne, it is doubtful that the king would have intervened with Vichy authorities to reinstate him as consul general.⁵⁵

All this time, the consulate continued to issue visas. A note written by Max Bredig, a Jewish refugee who managed to flee to America, mentions a Siamese visa in July 1941, some two months after the consulate should have closed down.⁵⁶ In September, the foreign ministry in Vichy received yet another letter from the Siamese consul, which it described as “absolutely unacceptable,” but all the diplomats could do was to insist, yet again, that authorities in Marseille finally act.⁵⁷

And the efforts by Vimont-Vicary and Chancellor Jean to rehabilitate themselves continued. Jules Jean was, in fact, not unknown at the foreign ministry in Vichy. He and Vimont-Vicary had, it appears, provided confidential information in the context of the Franco-Thai war to the director for Asian affairs, Count Stanislas Ostroróg. ⁵⁸ Jean used this prior contact to intervene with Ostroróg in late October 1941 and request a meeting to refute the accusations against him and Vimont-Vicary. It is unlikely that this meeting took place, because, at the same time, with the Siamese consulate still issuing visas and possibly also laissez-passer documents, and Vimont-Vicary still corresponding as consul general, the French foreign ministry had enough and demanded the police immediately close down the consulate once and for all.⁵⁹

One reason that the Secret Service’s Marseille branch office dragged its heels during this period could have been the behavior of Marcel Dubois. According to Simon Kitson, Dubois was drinking heavily and then lost his position as special commissioner in October because he was having an affair with a woman known to be a German secret agent.⁶⁰ But eventually, on November 5, 1941, nearly half a year after the consul’s exequatur had been revoked, the head of the Marseille criminal police, Auguste Clary, and his men entered the Siamese consulate in rue Breteuil, interrogated Robert Vimont-Vicary, and confiscated all seals and official records, effectively shutting down the consulate. The seized documents comprised registers of births, marriages, adoptions, divorces, and revocations, while any visa or passport registers were glaringly absent.⁶¹

According to Vimont-Vicary’s son Pierre, the dramatic events took a serious toll on his father’s physical and mental health. The pressure to provide for his family of five would have been anxiety-inducing enough, but then quite publicly losing his social status as consul general and the threat of arrest by the secret police looming proved too much for Vimont-Vicary. His health had been deteriorating for some time already, he suffered from hypertension and was receiving various treatments. Pierre recalled seeing leeches and suction cups being applied to his father. On May 28, 1942, Robert Vimont-Vicary died of a heart attack.⁶²

His widow, Mireille, shared his anxiety over the events surrounding Siamese visas. She believed that her husband’s death preempted his, and possibly her, imminent arrest by Vichy authorities.⁶³ Indeed, suggesting her fear may not have been unfounded, Mireille was visited by French intelligence officials after the end of the war, who inquired whether she had indeed been harassed or detained by German or Vichy authorities.⁶⁴

How many lives did Vimont-Vicary save, and why?

After reconstructing the events involving Siamese visas, two questions beg answers: How many visas did Robert Vimont-Vicary issue to refugees, and why did he do this? Because no records from the consulate remain and Vimont-Vicary did not leave behind any writings, we are forced to extrapolate from existing fragments of information. We estimate that the number of Siamese visas and laissez-passer documents was certainly in the hundreds, possibly even more, which suggests that the number of individuals saved by these documents was also in the hundreds. Three factors support these assumptions.

The first factor to consider is time. We know that Robert Vimont-Vicary was issuing a substantial number of visas at least from the German invasion of France in mid-1940 until November 1941, when the police confiscated his seals and shut down the consulate for good. The consulate was thus operational for some sixteen months during the mad scramble for visas in Marseille, when various firsthand accounts tell us it was necessary to sometimes queue for several days and nights at consulates to receive the desired stamp.⁶⁵ Even a very conservative estimate of around two to three visas per weekday, or three dozen a month, would already give us a total of over five hundred. Moreover, many refugees were couples and families, and we have seen that Vimont-Vicary issued visas, as well as laissez-passer documents for all family members at a time, which further supports the assumption of a significant number of such documents during this sixteen-month period.

The second factor is that Vichy applied its full administrative and law enforcement power to shut down the consulate, a process involving the senior leadership of the Secret Service, the Ministry of Interior, and the Foreign Ministry, resulting in the extraordinary act of revoking Vimont-Vicary’s exequatur. This level of effort would conceivably only have been made if the impact of Vimont-Vicary’s actions was great, suggesting a significant number of visa and laissez-passer recipients. Had the Siamese consulate in Marseille been a sideshow, authorities would not have acted so aggressively.

The third factor derives from Vimont-Vicary’s connections to the major aid organizations and networks active in Marseille. The frequent mention of Siamese visas by Varian Fry and others suggests they were issued in significant numbers. Donald Lowrie, as we have seen above, spoke of “scores” of refugees who emigrated with Siamese visas. And several memoirs of refugees who managed to escape speak of Siamese visas from Marseille, suggesting that there was a larger number of visa recipients who did not record their experiences or who did not live to have the chance to do so.

Vimont-Vicary’s motives for doing what he did must also remain speculation. The fragments of information suggest a complex set of motivations rather than a single, overriding one. First, Vimont-Vicary may well have held anti-German and possibly anti-Vichy sentiments rooted in his closest family relations. His youngest son from his first marriage, Jean, played an active role in the French resistance against the Germans, worked on the staff of General de Gaulle, and was killed during a resistance operation in 1944, two years after his father’s death. In 1940, Jean was twenty-six years old, and it is conceivable that father and son shared a conviction that it was patriotic to resist and support those who were in danger of German and Vichy persecution.⁶⁶

A second possible motivation is rooted in Vimont-Vicary’s devout Catholicism, as described by his descendants. We may speculate that a Christian morality could have led him to act compassionately toward his fellow men in need. This assumption appears more likely in the context of the desperation, food shortages, and general chaos that persisted in autumn 1940 in Marseille and that increased the following year. The same faith-based humanism could also have motivated Vimont-Vicary’s cooperation with religious and secular aid organizations, networks, and individuals who were helping individuals and families escape, thereby putting himself at risk.

Finally, financial motives most likely played a role in Robert Vimont-Vicary’s actions. The need to care for his family with four young children during difficult times was obvious. It was common for consuls to charge a fee for visas, and the income stream would have been very welcome to Vimont-Vicary in times of food shortages. As we have seen, the Secret Service accused Vimont-Vicary and Chancellor Jean of acting for financial gain, and a source described Siamese visas as expensive compared to those of other consulates. But accounts of Siamese visa fees are inconsistent, and a collection of German exile literature provides a contrary assessment:

Among the many consuls of countries that were unreachable in practice, who nevertheless issues visas liberally and without any risk, those of the Republic of China, the Belgian colony Congo, and the Kingdom of Siam were the cheapest.⁶⁷

What we can say with certainty is that the sale of visas and passports in Marseille in this period was widespread. The fee for a Chinese visa, for example, was one hundred francs.⁶⁸ Vladimír Vochoč, the consul of Czechoslovakia, testified to Commissioner Dubois in September 1940 that he had issued around two hundred and fifty passports, for which he had collected fees of around eighty thousand francs, while denying any imprudence on his part.⁶⁹ Henry Mallet, the Lithuanian consul, was arrested in late 1940 for selling a large number of passports to Varian Fry’s network and others.⁷⁰ While Vimont-Vicary will have generated income from visas, it appears not to have relieved his financial difficulties, for his widow’s situation after his death in April 1942 was dire (see Figure 10).

Legacy

Consul general Vimont-Vicary’s was the only exequatur revoked by the Vichy government in the context of the dramatic diplomatic rescue efforts of the early 1940s. Seven years after these turbulent events led to the consulate’s closure, a new consul of Thailand in Marseille was appointed. Robert Vimont-Vicary quickly faded into obscurity, where he has remained for the past eighty years. Today, researchers widely recognize the roles of non-Jewish diplomats, consuls, and activists in aiding Jews during the Holocaust. Robert Vimont-Vicary stands among this group of humanitarians who acted extraordinarily during the intense months from 1940 to 1941 in Marseille. His personality and motivation remain enigmatic, but I suggest that he was instrumental in saving the lives of at least several hundred Jewish and other refugees. His exequatur revoked, his position as consul general lost, the Thai consulate eventually shut down in late 1941—while these events may not have caused Robert Vimont-Vicary’s untimely death in 1942, they were most likely contributing factors.

Thailand and the Holocaust are, thus, connected, and the connection runs through the Siamese consulate on 16 Rue Breteuil in Marseille, where Manfred Mann and many other desperate refugees sat opposite a Frenchman who aided them in the name of the Kingdom of Siam.

Stefan Hell is a historian and a visiting research fellow at Chulalongkorn University’s Department of History in Bangkok, Thailand. He holds an MA in History and Philosophy from Tübingen University, Germany, and a doctorate in History from Leiden University, Netherlands. He is the author of three books: The Manchurian Conflict: Japan, China, and the League of Nations, 1931–1933 (in German), Siam and the League of Nations: Modernisation, Sovereignty and Multilateral Diplomacy, 1920–1940 (in English), and Siam and World War I: An International History (in English and Thai). He has also co-edited books, authored articles, and contributes to the Bangkok Post newspaper. His current research focuses on the confluence of architecture, religion, and politics in modern Vietnamese history.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Tej Bunnag, Marc Frey, Nicolas Vimont-Vicary, Raffaella Vimont-Vicary de Gennaro, Fiorella de Gennaro, Michael Bress, Jacques Péronne, Jean-Marc Berlière, Simon Kitson, Stéphanie Marinetti, Ruth Gerson, Stephen Mallinger, Mechthild Leutner, and Jeremy Sanford von Halle for their support. I am grateful to the Department of History at Chulalongkorn University and to the staff at the Departmental Archives Bouches-du-Rhône, Marseille Municipal Archives, National Archives of France, Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs of France, National Archives of Thailand, The Azrieli Foundation, Arolsen Archives, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Footnotes