When Paris Went Dark (38 page)

The Beast of Sevastopol.
(© Roger-Viollet / The Image Works)

The Siege of Sevastopol, in the USSR’s Crimea, had been murderous for both sides. Dietrich von Choltitz, scion of an old Prussian family, had led troops that had finally broken the siege in July of 1942. The city had been bombed and shelled mercilessly, and when Paris learned that Hitler had personally selected the “Beast of Sevastopol” as the new general in charge of the defense of Paris, a collective chill could be felt. As it turned out, von Choltitz had only a fortnight to keep the city open for the military, to contain the still disorganized French Resistance, to obstruct the Nazis who wanted the city razed, and—as if that
were not enough—to effect an armistice with the Allies, especially the de Gaulle government. In his memoirs, he describes his first and only meeting with Hitler, who had decided to appoint him to this prestigious position. The Führer, still recovering from the attempt on his life, was almost incoherent, his body shaking, his spittle spraying the nonplussed general’s face and uniform, as he demanded that Paris be saved from the Allies at any cost. Rather than feeling gratified that, after long and successful service to the war effort, he had been awarded a major position, von Choltitz soon knew that the job was only temporary, for the Reich was on its way to destruction. Nevertheless, this assignment was still in theory the culmination of any general officer’s career, a chance to show the world that only the Germans could protect the “capital of Europe.”

Unaware of how tenuous the German position in Paris was, he was surprised on his arrival on August 9 to find that a partial evacuation of the city had already been quietly prepared. Nonmilitary personnel, especially the women who served as assistants, would be the first to return to Germany; any man who was minimally qualified to carry arms would be dragooned into service. The experienced commander could see that only hollow defenses stood between his command and the Allied onslaught. Extensive Allied bombing had also stopped the import of foodstuffs to the city; the Germans had large warehouses filled with food, and von Choltitz did release some of it for the population to keep them from rioting. But Paris would be starving well before the Allies arrived if something was not done to clear the Seine and the roads so that more supplies could get through. Less concerned with an insurrection than with the massive Allied advance from Normandy—and with keeping Paris from being surrounded so that German troops, including his own, could not retreat—von Choltitz sought to buy as much time as he could. One of his first acts was to gather all uniformed men, vehicles, and artillery and march them down the Avenue de l’Opéra to impress on the Parisians that the Wehrmacht was still there, still ready to defend itself and Paris. He arranged for the first lines of troops to loop back and march again down the avenue so that Resistance spies and Parisians would think he had a larger force than in fact
he did. The Swedish consul at the time, Raoul Nordling, tells us that von Choltitz sat in a café on the Place de l’Opéra to watch the reactions of the Parisians to this last German parade in their city.
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Von Choltitz’s orders had been clear: “Paris must lose in a minimum of time its character as a port of call with its unhealthy symptoms. The city must not be a reservoir for refugees and cowards but an object of fear for those who are not loyal citizens, ready to help our troops who fight at the front.”
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But on his arrival, the Prussian general had recognized immediately that his demoralized, badly disciplined, undertrained, and underarmed cohort of troops, many of them aging reservists, was a straw force at best, even with the support of a massive antiaircraft armory. (The Germans had always overprotected Paris from air attack, though no major bombing was ever unleashed on the city.) Hitler’s rabid orders would be easier given than carried out. Desperate looting had by now become standard procedure among his command; almost immediately he had to send out officers to stop retreating Germans from commandeering French vehicles and using them to escape from the city with their stolen goods. The evacuation of the hundreds of women auxiliaries—the
souris grises
(gray mice)—was an early and encouraging sign to the Parisians that the Occupation was winding down.
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The French railway workers went on strike on August 10, the day following von Choltitz’s arrival, and the French police, finally, did the same on August 14. At this point, von Choltitz asked through intermediaries such as Nordling that there be a “live and let live” policy as his troops evacuated the city. In other words, if not fired on, the Germans would not retaliate. Simpler said than done. The order that von Choltitz could still demand of his own troops was not mirrored in a fundamentally disorganized Resistance. For a bit, von Choltitz’s truce held; one witness noticed that German trucks would pass others filled with
Resistance fighters, neither glancing at the other for fear that a firefight might explode into a major conflagration. Rather incredibly, and certainly suddenly, it seemed that the Occupation was ending quickly and more peacefully than had been hoped.

But significant numbers of young Parisians, with little or no leadership or coordination, were stealing arms, erecting barricades, making Molotov cocktails, and physically harassing a beleaguered, very frightened German military. The police had taken control of their own mammoth headquarters on the Île de la Cité, ejecting their collaborating brothers and Nazi bureaucrats; they began sending forays out regularly to test the will of the nervous Germans. Suddenly emboldened citizens began throwing objects down onto German patrols, whose anxious soldiers fired at apartments where French flags were dangling from balconies. Increasingly, Germans in uniform went out or patrolled only in groups. Here and there on isolated city streets dead and wounded civilians and Wehrmacht recruits began to appear. Radio communications among the German troops were spotty because of Resistance interference; von Choltitz and the German strongpoints around the city had to resort increasingly to insecure telephone lines. (Miraculously, the Parisian telephone system, soon to be known by generations of study-abroad students as the worst in Europe, continued to function up to and after the battle for the city.)

To his chagrin and disgust, the new commander was told that the SS troops and police under General Carl Oberg were already preparing to leave. When confronted by von Choltitz, Oberg only shrugged, implying that his superb troops were needed elsewhere to defend the Reich, not to hold an already lost city. In an understatement, von Choltitz wrote in his memoirs, “One must not think that playing with the destiny of Paris was an easy job for me. Circumstances had constrained me to a role that, in fact, I was unprepared for.”
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His nearby Wehrmacht colleagues had offered him reinforcements to defend the city, which he deftly refused, recognizing more clearly than they that it would be a useless loss of men and materiel needed for a more important mission: defending the borders of the Fatherland.

Adding of course to the burden of “defending” Paris was Hitler’s
demand that von Choltitz destroy much of the city rather than leave it as he had found it. (The Germans derisively referred to such policies as “Rubble Field orders.”) On August 22, general headquarters had sent him orders signed by Hitler: “Paris is to be transformed into a pile of rubble. The commanding general must defend the city to the last man, and should die, if necessary, under the ruins.”
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In his memoir, von Choltitz remembered a telephone conversation he had with General Hans Speidel, chief of staff to the general commanding the defense of France. He had just received the aforementioned order to destroy Paris:

The Reich’s occupation of Paris ended on August 25, 1944, as the last bedraggled German units pulled out or surrendered. Early that morning, before von Choltitz’s surrender, a Luftwaffe plane had dropped thousands of leaflets onto the increasingly confident city, still in the midst of forcefully “liberating” itself from Nazi control. The text of this leaflet reveals a first attempt for the Germans to craft the history of their Occupation of Paris, one that Charles de Gaulle would soon try to rewrite. The tone of this text is both exculpatory and pathetic:

I cite this document in its entirety, for it reveals an amazing narrative: the history of the Occupation through German eyes. Doubtlessly it was written to bring about some calm as the Germans were evacuating before the Allied advance. But it also speaks to some of the points raised earlier about how the Germans perceived Paris—repeating, for example, the claim that the Germans had, in their magnanimity, saved Paris from the ravages of the war. The text also sings the familiar song about current troubles coming from the “terrorists”—the Communists—and the power-hungry, thus playing up the real fear of a civil war that might follow a German retreat. As much as the French may have hated their Occupiers, it says, the Germans were better than chaos (especially Bolshevism) and the slow disintegration of Christian civilization. (We should take note that it makes no mention of the regime’s racial policies.)