The German reaction to these developments was surprisingly tame and slow. Part of the reason may be that Choltitz had been away from the city on August 15, attending a conference at Seventh Army headquarters. At that conference, he and his commanding officer, Guenther von Kluge, agreed that the Germans could not hold the city for much longer. They were thinking in terms of external, not internal, threats. Choltitz did, however, present an intelligence estimate suggesting that the FFI would likely begin an uprising as soon as Allied forces arrived near the city. He argued that he had far too few resources to deal with simultaneous external and internal threats to Paris.
Choltitz’s immediate response to the police strike reflected these limitations. Knowing how thin his forces were, he opted for purely symbolic measures to counteract the strike, including the parading of German units through the city on their way to and from the front. He wanted to show the residents of Paris “the number of troops that were still available at this late hour,” even if most of them did not remain in the city for long. On the day the strikes began, Choltitz also issued an order for three thousand political prisoners to be assembled at the Pantin train station, located near the slaughterhouses of the La Villette neighborhood and known to Parisians as the animal platform. From there, the Germans dispatched the prisoners to the Buchenwald and Ravensbrück concentration camps in cattle wagons; half of the deportees died within a year. Choltitz hoped that this show of force, combined with new defensive measures for German strongpoints, would suffice to keep order in the city for a few more weeks, by which time the Germans would have either abandoned the city or seen some dramatic reversal of their fortunes.6
Choltitz also ordered that more repressive measures be taken inside Paris. Although he and Kluge had discounted the military utility of damaging the city’s infrastructure, there were still ways that the Germans could make life even more unpleasant than it already was for its residents. Parisians were by now living largely without bread and had just a few minutes of electricity per day. On the night of August 15, German authorities announced that they could not assure the city of even its current levels of food, water, gas, or electricity in the event of an uprising. “It is the innocents who will pay for the crimes of the guilty,” the announcement read. Choltitz also ordered the city’s curfew moved up one hour and established more roadblocks and identity checkpoints. But despite these threats and new restrictions on Parisians’ mobility, there is no evidence that he saw the strike by the Paris police as a serious crisis or the start of an actual uprising. Choltitz’s description of the Paris police at an August 15 staff meeting as “weak” may indicate that he saw the police as unreliable and ineffective but not necessarily a threat to German interests.7
More importantly to Choltitz, on the same day that the Paris police strike began, the police strikes in St. Denis and Asnières ended peacefully. Vichy authorities had worked behind the scenes to keep the police in these industrial suburbs on the streets, pressuring the police to return to work while also convincing the Germans that a police presence on the streets of St. Denis and Asnières served everyone’s interests. They then issued a statement saying that the strikes had been the result of a miscommunication in orders between the police and the German Army. Although the statement fooled no one, it allowed all sides to save face. The Germans undoubtedly hoped to find a similar solution to the much more important strike of the Paris police. They were correct to think that the police might go back to work, for even as they began to strike many members of the Paris police had reservations about exposing themselves and the people of Paris to the Milice and the Gestapo. Even Rol feared that the police might end their strike if the Germans offered to negotiate.8
But a solution for Paris along the lines of the one in St. Denis and Asnières was not possible. Paris was not the suburbs, and the police strike inside the city had much deeper symbolism and more significant political ramifications than the strikes outside the city. Once begun, moreover, the Paris police strike had too much momentum for it to end by negotiation. Raoul Nordling, the Swedish consul, noted that “the situation inside Paris was entirely transformed in the space of a few hours” by the strike. A strike meant that final battle lines were being drawn. Like so many Parisians, Nordling wondered if the strike presaged even more momentous events or if it would provoke a savage German reaction. “We knew that somewhere in the shadows great events were transpiring that could perhaps unleash rivers of blood,” he wrote. The possibility that one or both sides might see in the police strike a cause for a final showdown of arms scared Parisians even as they understood that the strike might help to speed up their liberation.9
Without a working police force, Paris was a nervous and anxious place. Even those groups that had traditionally had tense relations with the police saw their sudden absence from the streets as a sign that anarchy, revolution, or disorder might not be far behind. Furthermore, the police had given little indication as to whether they saw their strike as the start of an insurrection, as Rol hoped, or merely as a temporary statement of opposition to plans to disarm them, as the Germans hoped. Gilles Perrault, a teenager not well disposed toward the police, was among those who were confused by the turn of events. In his eyes, he wrote later, the police were “precisely those who had been for so long the docile henchmen of the enemy, the Jew hunters, and Resistance trackers.” He wondered what was truly motivating them: “Opportunism? [A] last minute volte-face?” He would not have to wait much longer to find out.10
Neither would the collaborationists have long to wait. They understood clearly that the lack of an effective police force put them at even greater risk in the event of an uprising inside the city. Jean Galtier-Boissière noted in his journal on August 15 that the collaborationists were “starting to get scared” as the FFI became more visible and more assertive. If the FFI’s tricolored brassards with the Cross of Lorraine inspired some Parisians, they terrified others, who saw in them an armed mob waiting to exact their revenge. If the Paris police could not maintain order, the collaborationists would need to find a new protector.
The absence of a police presence gave the Resistance new opportunities. It also changed the dynamic on the streets, as the Germans lost a critical source of information and muscle. In the words of Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont, “fear changed sides.” Without a pliant or complicit police force on their side, Kriegel-Valrimont reflected, the Germans were stuck in a “trap that they could not escape.” Neither could they move around safely, choosing instead to hunker down at their thirty-six strongpoints across the city. The initiative was rapidly passing from the Germans to the FFI, seemingly without Choltitz and his staff taking notice of it.11
The changes were evident almost immediately. The city’s printers, working full-time for the Resistance since the start of the strike, began to mass-produce leaflets written by Rol and his FFI agents. They urged Parisians to take advantage of the absence of police on the streets by demonstrating and striking. In this way, Rol hoped, the police strike might lead to a more general uprising. The leaflets appeared in cafés, in offices, and on the walls of buildings. For most Parisians it was their first exposure to the name Rol. “People stop themselves and read these seditious writings in the streets,” Galtier-Boissière noted with some surprise. For the first time in four years, no police officer or German was there to watch them as they did so. Conversations in cafés also grew more daring and more open. Resistance cells all across the city now held their meetings in public places instead of in cramped apartments with the shutters tightly drawn and voices held to a low whisper.12
The FFI’s most pressing problem remained a lack of weapons. Although numbers are nearly impossible to assess with certainty, it appears that the FFI had around 165 light machine guns and submachine guns, 550 rifles, 825 pistols, and 200 grenades. The rifles and pistols, gathered from a wide variety of sources, fired a dizzying number of calibers, presenting a supply problem that would have challenged any regular army. Many of these weapons, moreover, w
ere in poor condition, and no one had enough ammunition. Without weapons, the FFI had little hope of fighting against German soldiers, who were well protected in their strongpoints and supported by armored cars and tanks. The Allies, moreover, continued to show little interest in the fate of Paris. There were still no arms drops into the city, and the actions of the Allied armies from the August 15 to 18 continued to suggest that they would bypass the city to the north and south. An announcement on BBC Radio that the liberation of Paris was near struck most residents as scant compensation for the continued lack of material help.13
The police strike therefore represented more than a symbolic change to the delicate balance of power within Paris. As the Germans well knew, the police had access to vital intelligence. They were the only group in Paris that could effectively control the city in the absence of either the Germans or the Allies. They also had access to weapons, including rifles, pistols, and ammunition. Each commissariat contained small arms caches, but the main armory sat inside the imposing prefecture on the Île de la Cité. The strike kept those weapons out of the hands of the Germans, who likely didn’t need them in any case, but few police officers were willing to transfer weapons to the FFI yet, despite pleas from Rol and others. The German decision not to try to force the issue with the Paris police may have been motivated by a belief that it was far better to have the police on strike, but still politically neutral, than to risk pushing them over to the side of the Resistance.14
By the morning of August 16, virtually the entire Paris police force was on strike, preparing to defend their commissariats in civilian clothes. Their behavior remained hard for the Germans to read. Although they refused to go to work, they were also careful not to show an outwardly anti-German attitude, as long as the Germans did not try to use force against them. There remained little indication that the strike was going to be the start of a general insurrection. Parisians who recorded their impressions of the police remained rather cynical, seeing in the police behavior an attempt to clear their names and save their skins before the departure of the Germans left them exposed to retribution and punishment from the people whom they had so recently oppressed.15
The police strike inspired strikes in other public sectors, however, indicating that at least some Parisians saw more lofty motivations for the police. On August 16, workers for the telephone and telegraph company, the Métro, and the French railway company all went on strike as well. These strikes had less direct impact on Parisians than they did on the Germans, as the Métro, owing to power shortages, had largely ceased operating anyway. Few French people had been able to ride on trains anymore in any case because the Germans had almost completely taken over the Paris railway network. These strikes were therefore mostly political in nature, aimed as they were at paralyzing the German military presence in Paris. The strike wave soon spread, eventually resulting in as many as 60 percent of Paris’s workers refusing to go to work.16
The strikes of August 15 and 16 gave new impetus and momentum to those in the FFI, who urged their fellow résistants to be bolder. Although Resistance members had taken to meeting and displaying their sympathies in public, they had yet to mount a direct challenge to the Germans. Rol and the FFI leadership met on the night of August 16 with Chaban and Parodi to announce plans for seizure of public buildings and the beginning of a general insurrection on August 18 or 19. But Chaban urged the FFI to wait, warning Rol that the Allies might not arrive in Paris for several weeks. He wanted the FFI to postpone its uprising until he could make one more effort to convince de Gaulle to lean on the Americans to change their minds and drive on Paris. Otherwise, Paris could become a battleground like Warsaw if the Germans decided to fight. The contentious meeting ended without a final decision but with Rol stating clearly that he was willing to risk a major uprising with or without help from the Allies.17
The German response to the strike and the new mood in the city remained curiously muted, showing a clear lack of initiative from Choltitz and his headquarters. Once again, a shakeup at the highest levels of the German Army in France played a critical role in the city’s fate. On August 17, Walter Model, a devoted Nazi and one of Germany’s best defensive generals, replaced Kluge as head of German forces in France. A favorite of Hitler’s, Model had stabilized the situation on the eastern front following the Russian breakthrough in June. He arrived in France just as the situation in the Falaise pocket was approaching its bloody dénouement. At first he hoped to turn the defeat at Falaise into a victory, but he quickly realized that he had no choice but to use his connections to Hitler to convince the German high command that an evacuation of German forces out of the pocket was the only logical course of action.18
Like his Allied counterparts, Model gave little thought to Paris, which struck him as far less important than the ongoing calamity at Falaise. He accordingly devoted most of his attention to trying to rescue as many men as he could before the Allies sealed the gap. Paris received only a small part of his attention. Model argued that he needed 200,000 men and several tank divisions to have any hope of holding Paris against a determined attack, resources that he knew were not available. His demands might have been his way to communicate to Hitler how unrealistic it was for the German high command to hold on to the hope of keeping Paris. He also told Choltitz that although he still envisioned demolishing large parts of Paris rather than leave the city intact for the British and Americans, he wanted him to suspend all demolition work until he had evaluated the situation. The order came as a relief to Choltitz, who knew that he did not have the resources on hand for the kind of widespread demolitions that Model envisioned and Hitler demanded. It also freed him from the awkward possibility of having to destroy the city while he still thought such a measure to be unnecessary. Choltitz could now respond to critics of his lack of action in Paris that he was only following orders. Given Model’s preoccupation with Falaise, any further orders might be a long time in coming, permitting Choltitz wide latitude inside the city.19
But if the Germans were moving slowly, others were moving quickly. Foremost among them was the most widely respected diplomat in the city, the Swedish consul Raoul Nordling. Sixty-three years old, but looking worn and tired because of heart problems, Nordling had spent virtually his entire life in Paris and thought of the city as home. He had been born there, and his father had run a successful paper company in the city. Returning to Sweden only for short visits and to complete his mandatory military service, Nordling spoke better French than Swedish and had married a Parisian woman. By 1905 he had been living full-time in Paris, helping to run his father’s company and serving as Swedish vice-consul. Twelve years later, in the midst of another war between Germany and France, he was promoted to consul, completing a meteoric rise in the diplomatic arena.
Like most other diplomats from neutral countries, Nordling had spent the early years of the occupation trying to secure contracts for his country’s firms, including his family’s own impressive industrial holdings. By summer 1944, however, he had reached the conclusion that Germany would soon lose the war and that the German deportation of French political prisoners would result in the future leadership of France dying needlessly in concentration camps. On August 6, he had gone to the prison at Fresnes to try to help a friend who was about to be deported. The sight of so many young Frenchmen imprisoned and perhaps about to be murdered merely for their political beliefs convinced Nordling that he, and perhaps he alone, could save thousands of people from a pointless death.20
Nordling at first sought the intervention of Otto Abetz, the German chief diplomat in France. Like Nordling, Abetz had long-standing ties to France, including an aristocratic French wife. Abetz’s close association to France dated back to the 1920s, when he had helped to form a Franco-German social group dedicated to repairing links between the two nations after World War I. He had initially cut his teeth in left-leaning politics in France and Germany, but like many other ambitious Germans in the early 1930s, he saw the benefits of moving into Nazi
circles. He also made important contacts with some of France’s leading fascists, many of whom later became collaborators. He had been expelled from France shortly after the Munich Conference (where he had served as a German adviser on France) on the charge of bribing French newspapers to write positive stories about Germany, but he had returned after the German conquest in 1940. His first assignment was to catalog and seize artistic treasures in Paris coveted by the German Foreign Office, but he soon moved on to more sinister roles. He was, for example, instrumental in the implementation of anti-Semitic policies in the occupied zone.
Tall, well-dressed, and affable on the surface, Abetz was, like many other Nazis, able to cover the brutality of his views with a veneer of gentility that fooled those who were willing to buy into his lies. He and his wife, whom the French executed in 1946 (after Abetz himself had returned to Germany), helped to direct the rather lenient occupation policies of the first years of the war. By 1944, however, Abetz had become enraged at the FFI and the Resistance; he believed that France should have been grateful to him, and to the collaborationists with whom he worked, for sparing France the fate of the conquered countries of the east. He saw all Resistance members as terrorists and at one point recommended burning down the École Normale (which trained teachers and had produced a number of résistants) because he saw it as a “school of assassins.” By August, his genteel veneer had largely faded, revealing only the baleful soul of a man willing to kill thousands for a lost cause.21
Nordling had hoped that, by appealing to Abetz’s love for France, he could convince him to authorize the release of some of the prisoners at Fresnes and elsewhere, but he found little in Abetz’s demeanor to encourage him. Abetz told Nordling that because of the German Army’s transportation difficulties, he could not move the prisoners out of Paris. Nordling then asked Abetz to release the prisoners from their squalid jails, but Abetz chillingly turned him down. “There is nothing left to do but kill them all,” he said. Abetz did finally propose to Nordling that he might be willing to exchange French prisoners for German POWs in Allied hands at a ratio of one to five, but Nordling had no authority to make such a deal and no way to implement it even if he could get an agreement from all parties. Under the circumstances, Abetz must have known that no diplomat could have arranged such a deal.22
The Blood of Free Men Page 16