Having failed with Abetz, Nordling then went to see Choltitz, who proved to be far more accommodating. Although Choltitz shared Abetz’s view of the FFI and the Resistance as terrorists, he seems to have recognized that many of the prisoners Nordling sought to free were in jail simply for their beliefs, not for any overt or violent act committed against Germans. Choltitz also undoubtedly saw the value in making a positive gesture toward the people of Paris. He therefore agreed to release three thousand prisoners on two conditions: that none of them were members of the FFI and that Nordling would assume responsibility for their behavior. Nordling agreed, likely saving their lives (for, despite Abetz’s claims about transportation difficulties, deportations to the death camps did continue). Perhaps more importantly, Nordling and Choltitz had begun to build a professional relationship that would soon have dramatic impacts on Paris.
Abetz left Paris soon after his meeting with Nordling, joining a growing eastward tide. Seeing the writing on the wall for the Vichy regime and understanding that the departure of the Germans would expose collaborationists to vicious reprisals by the FFI, the rats began to flee the sinking ship. Among the most notorious was Pierre Laval, the Vichy state’s prime minister. Hoping to save his own skin and the Vichy regime he had helped to lead, Laval came to Paris on August 17 on the pretense of holding a meeting of cabinet officials based in the city. In reality, he was trying to hatch a frantic scheme under which he could transfer power to a new French figurehead who would then negotiate with the Americans as a new Italian government had done the previous year. Laval saw himself in the role of Marshal Pietro Badoglio, the Italian soldier whose deal with the Allies had allowed him to keep power for nine months after the fall of Mussolini. The Vichy leader hoped both to keep de Gaulle out of power and to protect himself from retribution.
Laval, who had no political clout with the Allies, knew that he needed a nonfascist figurehead to lead the negotiating on his behalf. The man he chose to lead this desperate gambit was Edouard Herriot, a three-time prewar prime minister of France who had been serving as mayor of Lyon when the Germans invaded in 1940. After the invasion, the Vichy authorities put him under virtual house arrest, then formally imprisoned him. Laval ordered Herriot, whose distrust of de Gaulle was well known, to be released from his jail cell and brought to Paris. When the two men met on August 17, Laval explained his scheme. Herriot exploded at Laval in an understandable fit of anger. He was being asked to rescue the same regime that had kept him imprisoned for four years.
Pétain, like Laval, tried to save himself, working from Vichy to contact de Gaulle through intermediaries in the hopes of making an arrangement to transfer power through the legal mechanism of Vichy. De Gaulle, who never saw the Vichy regime as legitimate, rejected all notions of negotiation. Given his links to the powerful Allied armies, it was a position he could take with confidence.
All of these self-serving plans by Vichy leaders came quickly to naught, only serving to reinforce German fears that their erstwhile French allies were trying to sell them out or trick them. The Germans arrested Laval on the evening of August 17, shortly after his failed meeting with Herriot, and sent him to Germany, ostensibly for his own protection. Pétain, “invited” to leave France by his German masters, soon joined Laval in a golden cage at Sigmaringen castle in southern Germany, where they spent the rest of the war. Just for good measure, the Germans rearrested Herriot, who spent the remainder of the war in far less comfortable conditions than Laval and Pétain.23
The departures of Laval and Pétain dashed the hopes of collaborators seeking an easy political solution to the building crisis in Paris. Indeed, the Germans hustled their former puppets out of France in large part to keep them from opening any negotiations that might further complicate Germany’s already tenuous hold on France. It is doubtful that the Americans would have negotiated with Pétain, much less the widely detested Laval, but French Resistance officials and de Gaulle himself had reason to fear: They had seen the Americans work with Vichy officials in North Africa and in Normandy. Now, with Pétain and Laval out of the country and out of communication, the Vichy period could finally close. What, exactly, might replace it remained an open question, but it was clear that the key actors in this rapidly developing drama no longer owed any allegiance to Vichy.24
Pétain and Laval were not the only ones leaving France. German and senior Vichy officials all over Paris were burning their papers and getting out of the city as quickly as they could. Foremost among them were the officers of the Abwehr, the German Army’s intelligence service. With the front obviously about to move to the city’s east, it would have been pointless for them to remain in Paris. The flight of these officers and other high-level agents of the occupation created an environment that struck Charles Braibant as “June 1940 in reverse,” an image also used by Jacques Bardoux in his journal. Braibant, however, was careful to note that thousands of beleaguered and battle-fatigued German soldiers from Falaise were likely to pass through the city, and no one could guess what they might do. Bardoux similarly repeated a fearful rumor he had heard that among those troops headed to Paris were two SS divisions like the ones that had committed atrocities elsewhere in France. He also noted that the Allied failure to close the Falaise gap had kept the battle of Normandy from being a German Waterloo. Germany, he knew, still retained significant combat power.25
Even though the evacuations did not mean the Germans had been defeated outright, they did change the tenor of the occupation. Some of the city’s most visible collaborationist institutions and their leaders disappeared without warning. On August 17, Radio Paris, which for four years had faithfully served the German occupiers, announced in its regular news programming that the German Army had defeated the Allied landings in southern France. Then it simply stopped broadcasting and its directors left the city. The most important of the pro-German media outlets had closed its doors and quietly left, leaving the airwaves blissfully free of anti-Allied and anti-Semitic propaganda. Pro-German and pro-Vichy newspapers also stopped appearing as the printers refused to work with them. The Germans continued to evacuate noncombat personnel from the city. Powerless to prevent all collaborationists from leaving, FFI leaders spoke about the national purging that would come when the collaborationists lost the protection of the Germans and had to face the vengeance and fury of the French people, whom they had wronged.
The Gare de l’Est, the train station that handled eastbound rail traffic, was jammed with Germans, military and civilian alike, who were fleeing the city. “All over Paris,” noted the young Gilles Perrault, “the enemy were packing their bags, burning their files . . . [and] piling away their most treasured spoils.” Even on the infamous Rue des Saussaies the Germans were packing up and preparing to leave. Yves Cazaux watched Gestapo officers take everything, including the furniture, out of their offices and torture chambers. This time, however, when the trucks left, they did not come back.26
Abetz’s departure on August 17 may have been a welcome sign that the German presence in the city was ending, but with diplomats like him fleeing the city, the evacuations left the Germans with no official diplomatic representatives with whom to negotiate. The future of Paris would now be decided by force of arms, a thought that scared Nordling, even though he knew full well what Abetz was capable of. But in the midst of all the uncertainty, there was cause for hope. The disappearance of many members of the Milice, who followed their German masters out of town, was a joyous sign that Paris’s fortunes were starting to turn for the better. Without the Milice or the Paris police, the Germans could not hope to maintain anywhere near the level of control over the city that they had had during the four years of the occupation.
On August 18, a Friday, Parisians awoke to much hotter temperatures, a symbolic indication that more than the mercury was rising. The momentum in favor of an uprising with or without Allied help was clearly building. For the first time in four years, French tricolor flags were beginning to appear sporadically across the city, i
ncluding on a few public buildings. In some sections of the city—notably in the Latin Quarter, where university students were making their presence felt on the streets—tensions were rising high enough to produce violence. German soldiers had begun to fire on any large group of French youths they encountered, killing twenty-five people (most of them students) in the St. Michel area.27
The rhetoric, too, was heating up as Parisians began to view a future without the Germans or Vichy. They also saw a chance to liberate the city themselves, an issue of pride that mattered greatly to them. On August 18, one of the Paris-based political leaders of the Resistance wrote, “It is not possible for us to stand by as spectators of the great victory. We have emerged from too great a trial, too grievous a betrayal for our hearts, too, not to be committed to performing our task at the hour appointed by History.” In another pamphlet that appeared on the same day, the Resistance promised that “the [return of the] Republic will be proclaimed in the presence of the people of Paris,” not as a result of the Allies liberating the city on their behalf.28
Remarkably, however, the Resistance leaders still need not have worried about the Allies coming to the city, because the events inside Paris had thus far made little impression on the Allies. Allied officers had no direct means of learning about the situation in the city, and the eyes of the generals remained focused on the still tense situation around Falaise. Consequently, Eisenhower and his staff gave no serious thought to Paris, despite the fact that on August 18 lead elements of the U.S. Army were preparing to encircle German forces west of the Seine River at Mantes la Jolie. This location was less than thirty miles to the northwest of the capital. American planners had a report indicating that FFI members were moving freely through the city, but they were reluctant to change their plans based on such thin intelligence. The official U.S. Army history noted that the Allies judged the situation in Paris on August 18 to be serious but “far from formidable.” The main American axes of advance, therefore, remained toward the port cities of Le Havre and Rouen, not Paris; supply problems were still more important to the Allies than driving on the French capital.29
The Allies’ indifference to their situation notwithstanding, Parisians were growing feverish as they waited for the dam to break. Adding to the growing momentum in favor of action was the arrival of another Gaullist agent, Charles Luizet. The forty-year-old Luizet was a graduate of the French military academy at St. Cyr, where he had been Philippe Leclerc’s roommate and one of Charles de Gaulle’s students. In 1940 he had been serving in North Africa when he heard about the appeal of June 18 from his former professor. Luizet immediately offered his services to de Gaulle, who made him head of intelligence for Free France in North Africa, a position he secretly held while also serving in the Vichy administration. This made him a particularly valuable agent. After the Allied liberation of North Africa, he took a senior position in the Free French administration in Algiers, quickly becoming one of de Gaulle’s most important confidants.30
Luizet had learned the politics associated with war and resistance so well that de Gaulle wanted him back in France as quickly as possible. He nominated Luizet to become the prefect of Corsica in September 1943. The post was important and symbolic, as Corsica was the first part of metropolitan France to be liberated. Fiercely loyal to de Gaulle, Luizet worked quickly to ensure that the new administration in Corsica was filled with Gaullist supporters, although he also proved capable of working with the island’s nationalists and communists. In late July 1944, de Gaulle called Luizet to London to offer him a new assignment. He wanted Luizet to go to Paris and take control of the Paris police force, so that it would be in the hands of the provisional government even before the Allies arrived. Luizet’s mission was to ensure the loyalty of the police to de Gaulle and to make certain that at least one of the two Paris prefect positions was in Gaullist hands. To this end, de Gaulle provided him with a written directive naming Luizet the rightful prefect of the Paris police, a position that would both allow him to hold sway over the Paris police and deliver one of the two prefect seats to de Gaulle.
Luizet immediately accepted his new assignment, and he left England on August 2. Owing to the difficulties of getting him into France without anyone (including the Americans) knowing his mission, he took a circuitous route from Croydon to Corsica to Algiers to Italy. From there he was flown to the southern French town of Apt on August 11, where he met Resistance agents who were ready to smuggle him into Paris. It took six days to move through a chaotic French countryside. Luizet finally arrived in the city on August 17 only to find, to his great surprise, that the police force he was supposed to lead was on strike.
Luizet met with other Gaullist officials in the city, most notably Parodi and Chaban, and found them opposed to the strike and the idea of an insurrection. But Luizet made a different assessment. In his mind, the strike of the Paris police showed clearly that a general insurrection was imminent; if the Gaullists in the city did not move to gain control of it, then Rol and his FFI would. In effect, he argued that if an insurrection was inevitable, there was nothing for him, Parodi, and Chaban to do but to try to assume key roles in its leadership. Luizet also knew that if they moved quickly, and if the police accepted his leadership, then the Gaullists would be able to take control of the police force. This would give them an enormous advantage not just over the Germans but over the FFI as well. But they would need to move quickly, lest Rol beat them to the punch.31
There is little evidence to suggest that Rol was thinking in terms of a struggle for power inside Paris. Instead, he seems to have remained focused on the fight against the Germans and their Vichy collaborators. Under his guidance, the FFI distributed intricately prepared orders to their agents on August 17 calling for the seizure of eighty strategic places throughout the city, including prisons, the gas and electrical works, banks, and telephone exchanges. Each site was either strategic to solidifying FFI control of the city or aimed at freeing those still in German hands. Posters went up all over the city urging Parisians to rise up and help the FFI in the struggle to come. Rol’s General Order of August 18, announced to the general population in Paris, ordered additional attacks on German centers of communications in order to disrupt and confuse German defenses. It ended with the words “Chacun Son Boche” (“Everyone Kill His Hun”). An insurrection was about to begin in Paris, although where it might lead remained anyone’s guess.32
6
“THE MOST BEAUTIFUL DAYS OF OUR LIVES,” AUGUST 19–20
CHARLES BRAIBANT AWOKE ON THE MORNING OF AUGUST 19, a warm and sunny Saturday, to the sounds of cannon fire far away in the distance. Before losing electricity the night before he had managed to catch a few minutes of the news on BBC Radio, which had announced that the German Army in France was in disarray and retreating all across the front. The artillery he was hearing suggested that the Allied armies were close to Paris. He and his fellow Parisians were elated at the idea that the Germans might finally leave their city after four long and tortuous years of occupation. Braibant noted that in the streets that morning Parisians were debating where the best places in the city might be to watch the liberating U.S. Army when it entered the city.
Although in his journal he described August 19 as being “without a doubt our golden day,” Braibant was not quite as optimistic as most of his fellow Parisians. He had been able to divine from the BBC broadcasts that the Allied armies were advancing not toward Paris but around it to the north. He also used the pages of his journal to express some of his deepest fears about the immediate future, including the possibility that an Allied advance might provoke a slaughter of civilians, or that the Germans might hold Paris hostage in an effort to protect Berlin from the vengeful wrath of the Soviet Red Army. Like most careful observers of the situation, Braibant swung between optimism at what he hoped was the imminent arrival of an army of liberation, on the one hand, and, on the other, despair at what might happen if the Germans, instead of retreating, opted for a reaction of violence and
vengeance. There were still almost twenty thousand German soldiers in and around Paris armed with tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artillery, and they were supported by airplanes based at Le Bourget airfield north of the city. The Americans might be near, but the Germans seemed far from ready to surrender.1
Like Braibant, Dietrich von Choltitz and his staff still expected any serious challenges to German authority in Paris to come from the outside. The daily intelligence report that awaited Choltitz as he arrived at his desk that morning described the city itself as “perfectly calm.” Choltitz approved the morning report and sent it along to the army group’s headquarters as part of the day’s routine paperwork. Even at this late date, the German high command in Paris discounted the possibility of a serious uprising; some of Choltitz’s officers even left their headquarters that morning to help an elderly lady find her missing cat. Few of them thought that the Resistance was capable of a major uprising, and none of them read the police strike as the start of something more meaningful.2
Rol did not expect a day of revolutionary events either. Although he had written his impassioned “Chacun Son Boche” order the night before, and although his FFI agents were even then making final preparations to occupy eighty public buildings, he was still thinking that the popular uprising by the people of Paris might not begin for a few more days. That Saturday morning, Rol set off by bicycle, the only means of transportation available to most Parisians, to meet with the political leaders of the Resistance to discuss the exact timing of their plan as well as its primary targets, which included the remaining media outlets not yet under FFI control, the prisons at Drancy and Fresnes, and the mairies, the vitally important administrative centers that acted as district headquarters for Paris’s twenty arrondissements. Rol was intent on planning for the dramatic days that he knew were ahead for Paris, but even he would be surprised at what this day would bring. As he pedaled his bicycle along the quays of the city’s left (southern) bank, he began to sense that something had changed. The closer he got to the Préfecture de Police, the stronger the sensation became.
The Blood of Free Men Page 17