In the national memory, World War II is the gift that keeps on giving. There are ample reasons why it is remembered as the Good War. America was unambiguously in the role of good guy. Hitler, the epitome of depravity, was the consummate villain. The story was about as black-and-white as history ever gets. In the end, the good guys won and the bad guys were punished. America not only rescued Nazi-occupied Europe but went on to sponsor a postwar system that was both democratic and broadly prosperous.
As the Iran war proves to be an epic fiasco with villainy on all sides, we take comfort in the memories of those simple, heroic, victorious days. And because the Good War had so many dramatic nooks and crannies awaiting rediscovery, it also keeps being a gift for the popular culture. WWII movies are endless, from Casablanca to Schindler’s List to Saving Private Ryan to Nuremberg.
The recent remake of Nuremberg, about the 1945-1946 war crime trials, starring Russell Crowe and Rami Malek, emphasizes the angst of the U.S. chief prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who was hoping that his success would lead President Truman to elevate him to chief justice. The movie embellishes the actual trial to play up the head-to-head confrontation between Jackson and the most important Nazi on trial, Hitler deputy Hermann Göring.
In the end, all of the defendants are found guilty and sentenced to death. Göring manages to get a cyanide capsule smuggled in and cheats the gallows. Jackson learns to his chagrin that his rival on the high court, Fred Vinson, has been appointed chief. Still, justice is done. History is reliable that way. You can count on it to always come out the same.
In the 2026 film Pressure, a true account of the three-day run-up to the Normandy Invasion, we have the improbable and historically accurate battle of two meteorologists. An American expert, Irving Krick, advises Gen. Eisenhower that June 5, the original planned D-Day, will be sunny with calm seas. But James Stagg, a Scot with an intuitive sense of how rapidly the weather can change in Northern Europe, forecasts gale-force winds and high seas that will capsize the invasion.
Even though we all know that D-Day was moved to June 6 and was an epic success, we are on the edge of our seats waiting to see Ike’s call. At the last possible moment, Ike sides with the Scot, and pauses the invasion. Stagg’s storm arrives on schedule. The two meteorologists then agree that there will be just enough of a window of decent weather on June 6. The rest, as they say, is history.
Of all the stories of Nazi impunity that I have encountered, one of the most disturbing concerns Florence Gould, an American.
Yet another new movie, a Netflix original that unearths a little-known true history, is called The Swedish Connection. In World War II, Sweden was neutral. But since the Swedes were surrounded by nations occupied by the Nazis and early in the war Germany seemed destined to be Europe’s new hegemon, Sweden was very indulgent of Hitler. The Swedes sold German war materiel, allowed free movement of German troops, and agreed to Germany’s demand not to grant visas to Jewish refugees.
The Swedish Connection is the true account of how one mid-level official, Gösta Engzell, chief of the legal department of the foreign ministry, gradually bent the rules and then openly broke them, eventually ordering visas granted to all Jewish refugees. That led to the rescue of some 7,000 Danish Jews who came to Sweden in a secret nighttime flotilla, and the saving of as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews thanks to the far better-known Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg.
In the end, Sweden, with about one-twentieth of the population, saved almost as many Jews as the United States, even though Sweden was ringed by Hitler’s Wehrmacht while the U.S. was protected by two oceans. And that begins to suggest the darker side of the Good War.
A viciously antisemitic State Department official, Breckinridge Long, blocked the granting of more than token numbers of visas to Jews. Larger contradictions in the narrative of America as the good guys included the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the firebombing of Dresden. None of these cities were military targets. Together, these assaults cost more than a million innocent civilians their lives. Supposedly, they shortened the war, but at what cost?
The narrative of the bad guys being punished also needs substantial qualification. In the Nuremberg trials, 199 defendants were tried, 161 were convicted, and 37 were sentenced to death. But tens of thousands of slightly lesser war criminals never faced trial. And as the Cold War became America’s central preoccupation, thousands of high-ranking Nazis were quickly exonerated to become part of the U.S. military machine. The most infamous of these was Hitler’s chief rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun.
OF ALL THE STORIES OF NAZI IMPUNITY that I have encountered, one of the most disturbing concerns Florence Gould, an American. I first encountered the Gould saga several summers ago, when my wife and I were waiting for a concert to begin. We were at Ozawa Hall, on the grounds of Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The hall is named for the BSO’s longtime beloved conductor, Seiji Ozawa.
I noticed that Ozawa Hall had a second name prominently displayed on the wall: The Florence Gould Auditorium. That was odd, since there is nothing else in Ozawa Hall except Ozawa Hall. Why did it need a second name? I then turned to the program, which contained a brief biography of Florence Gould. The words that stopped me cold were “She ran a famous salon in Paris during World War II.”
Paris during World War II, of course, was occupied by the Nazis. What sort of American would run a salon in occupied Paris during World War II? And why was her name on Ozawa Hall?
Doing some research, I learned more about Florence Gould. The story has a moral lesson that contradicts the usual Good War ending: Sometimes the bad guys get away with it.
Florence Gould was a beautiful, seductive, and cynically corrupt American expatriate in France in the 1920s and 1930s, who had become very rich through a strategic marriage. In Paris during the war, she was a Nazi collaborationist, slept with high-ranking German officials, and got even richer helping Hermann Göring buy and sell looted Jewish art.
After the war, J. Edgar Hoover personally tried to build a case against Gould for war crimes, but she had powerful friends and was never charged. More remarkably, she used her fortune to create the postwar Florence Gould Foundation, which gave gifts to arts organizations all over Europe and North America, redeeming her name. That’s why Ozawa Hall is also called the Florence Gould Auditorium. Her foundation was a major benefactor to Tanglewood.
Gould’s story has resonances with the present moment, when deeply corrupt and cynical people get away with it and, as Yeats put it, “the best lack all conviction.” The museum and symphony directors who took Gould’s money and named buildings after her lacked all conviction. So did her friends who protected her after the war.
As other movies about the war have shown, most notably Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, ordinary people often made terrible moral compromises in order to survive. Gould was no ordinary survivor, but a corrupt and amoral woman of privilege. It’s creepy to observe her slide from ordinary opportunism into something more sinister.
THE BACKSTORY: AFTER WORLD WAR I, Florence, hungry for a marriage to a rich man, succeeds in seducing Frank Gould, the younger son of the robber baron Jay Gould, now deceased. The Gould siblings are at each other’s throats, fighting over the family fortune, taking each other to court, marrying and divorcing. Florence and Frank marry in 1923. He is almost 20 years her senior. Florence, at 27, is recovering from an earlier failed marriage and looking to regain her financial footing with a person of wealth. It turns out that she is actually French, sort of.
Her father was Maximin Lacaze, who emigrated with his wife from France to California. He published a French-language newspaper in San Francisco, where Florence was born in 1895. After the earthquake and fire of 1906, she goes with her mother, Berthe, to Paris to live with relatives. Her father dies, and she never sees him again. In 1916, Florence decides to stay in France and make herself over, the first makeover of many.
The union of Florence and Frank is a marriage of convenience as well as a business partnership. Each allows the other plenty of lovers; they amuse each other by comparing notes of their sexual escapades. Florence’s flings include Charlie Chaplin and the French matinee idol Henri Garat. She and Frank soon own hotels and casinos in Nice as well as factories. They are art collectors. She is close to several gallery owners, many of whom are Jews. This will be useful later when Jewish art dealers are driven from France and their collections seized. She is not antisemitic, just opportunist.
In the 1930s, the Goulds make powerful German friends, including Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and his aide Otto Abetz, who was in charge of German propaganda in France. They and their crowd loathed the leftist Popular Front government of Léon Blum, who is a Jew. The Goulds are lavishly rich, owning three homes. Frank, already living separately from Florence, but still a close business partner, is in one of the family homes on the Riviera, managing the casinos. As early as 1935, French intelligence was monitoring the Goulds for being too cozy with the Germans and threatened to take away their casino licenses.
After France abruptly falls to the Nazis in June 1940, the Goulds decide to stay. After all, Germany is not at war with the United States yet, and they get along well with the Nazis. Florence expands her dealings in looted art. She has affairs with several Nazi officers and with the American ambassador, William Bullitt, who will be very useful to her later.
After the U.S. enters the war in December 1941, Americans are now the enemy. Before Florence can use her contacts to prevent it, the German high command seizes the Goulds’ duplex apartment at 2 Boulevard Suchet. It becomes the Paris headquarters building of the German Navy. Yet by 1942, Florence has used her contacts, fortune, guile, and above all her sexuality to get back into the good graces of the Nazi occupiers. She is now holding her famous Thursday salons at the Hotel Bristol. Her friend Otto Abetz is the new German ambassador to occupied France. She regularly attends auctions where she bids for “ownerless” art looted from Jews.
Florence Gould’s FBI case, after languishing for more than a decade, is closed once and for all in 1959.
Florence is now in her late forties. She likes younger men. She has brief affairs with several prominent Nazis, all in their thirties, including Helmut Knochen, head of the Paris Gestapo; Gerhard Heller, the Nazis’ Paris chief of censorship; and her favorite, Carl Vogel, who is in charge of occupation-approved black-market operations for the Nazis. Thanks to these contacts, Florence is able to get unlimited special passes to cross back and forth between the occupied north and the Vichy-governed south, for herself and her husband, who is mainly living in Juan-les-Pins on the Riviera. Vogel finds her an elegant and fully furnished apartment at 129 Avenue Malakoff, vacated by a deported Jew.
Florence becomes an official Nazi-sanctioned black marketeer. She is able to profit and to serve only the best food at a time when ordinary Parisians are near starvation as the war increasingly turns against the Germans. Some people attend her salons just for the food, which is slipped into pockets and oversized purses. She is also a leading procurer for Nazis who want French girlfriends for relationships or casual sex.
As a favor to her Nazi friends, Florence becomes a principal investor in the newly created Banque Charles, which was established in 1944 as a joint French-German enterprise in order to launder flight capital from Germans who needed to get their money out of the Reich as they anticipated Hitler’s defeat and Allied occupation.
In Florence’s busy love life, three men stand out. The first is her husband, Frank Gould. Though they are no longer living together, she is very loyal to him. When she is tipped off that his life may be in danger in the chaos of 1944, she cooks up a scheme to pay the Resistance 400,000 francs to stage a fake kidnapping of Frank. This caper later becomes very useful to her, when she claims to her interrogators that while ostensibly helping the Nazis she was also aiding the Resistance.
The second is U.S. Ambassador William Bullitt, a man of great wealth and power. They are two of a kind, charming and ruthless, drawn to each other. After France fell to the Nazis in June 1940, Bullitt was the only Allied ambassador to remain in Paris.
The third and most important is Carl Vogel. There is deep and mutual affection between the two. After he turns himself in, Florence uses every contact she can to get him freed from his confinement at Drancy, the French prison that once housed French Jews as a way station to Auschwitz. They remain lovers for several more years.
WHEN PARIS IS LIBERATED IN AUGUST 1944, Florence and Carl Vogel briefly go underground. There are recriminations against collaborators who did a lot less for the Germans than Florence did. Women who slept with Nazis—collabos horizontales—have their heads shaved, and worse. There are summary executions of Frenchmen who profited from the black market or denounced their neighbors. By October, normal courts are functioning and summary justice ends. Florence invents an elaborate story that she and Vogel were actually slipping information to the OSS as early as 1943 and secretly helping the Resistance. It is all a preposterous invention.
Florence cautiously emerges from hiding. Vogel, after moving from one safe house to another, surrenders to the allies in September. Under questioning, he implicates others, including Florence. In October, she is called in by French prosecutors for the first of several interrogations. The French established that Florence has been an agent of German military intelligence and had been granted special privileges, such as travel passes, access to black-market luxuries, lax supervision, and even a permit to carry a gun. They track down her role as investor and board member of the Banque Charles, serving an institution whose sole purpose was to launder and transfer Nazi and collaborationist money.
But Florence declares under oath that she and Vogel had been secretly helping the OSS. She also arranges for testimonial letters from several powerful friends who are important to the new provisional government. In the meantime, she has resumed her Thursday salons, now with Americans as special guests rather than Nazis.
Astonishingly, she manages to persuade the American occupation leaders that Vogel could be useful to them. He is released from prison in December 1944 and hired by the U.S. Army. Vogel uses the head of the OSS, Bill Donovan, who had no idea who Vogel was, as a reference. But a former law partner of Donovan vouches for Vogel.
J. Edgar Hoover has opened a parallel investigation of Florence. Eventually, the French decide that there were too many crosscurrents and political complications in her role; and since she is an American, Florence is Hoover’s problem. She is now called in for repeated interrogations by FBI agents. In November 1945, Hoover sends Florence’s treason file to the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice for prosecution. The assistant attorney general rejects prosecution for insufficient evidence.
Florence gets into legal trouble one more time before all cases are dropped. In September 1948, the French prosecutors forward Florence’s extensive dossier on the Banque Charles case to the Ministry of Justice. Once again, charges are dropped. By now, the mood has changed. France and postwar Germany are allies; J. Edgar Hoover has moved on to investigating communists. America is rehabilitating Nazi rocket scientists, not prosecuting cold cases against collaborationists. Frank Gould dies in 1956. Florence Gould’s FBI case, after languishing for more than a decade, is closed once and for all in 1959, the same year that Carl Vogel becomes an American citizen.
In 1957, Florence establishes the Florence Gould Foundation, with tens of millions of dollars from Frank’s estate. The foundation’s worth eventually exceeds $100 million. She bestows gifts on major cultural organizations in Europe and North America, including the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as the American Library in Paris, Paris Opera, Lincoln Center, Morgan Library, and dozens of others including the Tanglewood Music Festival. She is awarded the French Legion of Honor and is elected to the Academy of Beaux-Arts.
Hers is one more little-known World War II story, one that utterly contradicts the received wisdom of the Good War. It foreshadows the kind of impunity that is now endemic.
