Although the FFI was rapidly depleting its resources, its ranks were growing every day, especially in working-class neighborhoods. Rumors that the Germans were planning to deport as many as 200,000 young men from Paris to factories in Germany sent thousands of Parisians into the FFI, creating chaos in the streets and headaches for Rol, who had no weapons to give them. Rounding up as many weapons as they could, the FFI in northeastern Paris focused on the major German strongpoint of the Prince Eugène barracks on the Place de la République. The largest single concentration of German soldiers in Paris, it housed 1,200 men. FFI members surrounded the exits from the building and trapped the Germans inside. They lacked the power to take the building, but their actions kept the Germans based there from coming to the aid of their comrades, especially at nearby strategic sites such as the Gare de l’Est and the Place de la Nation.8
All across the city the FFI members were becoming bolder and more daring. The new atmosphere on the city’s streets was evident for all to see. On the Avenue Henri-Martin in the normally calm Passy neighborhood near the Bois de Boulogne, Charles Braibant watched in astonishment as a young woman bicycled toward a prone German rifleman, seemingly oblivious to his presence. His fear that she might ride into his line of fire and become an innocent victim soon turned to stunned amazement when he saw her take out a pistol, calmly shoot the sniper dead, then speed off, while another man raced from the safety of a doorway to seize the dead soldier’s weapons. He also saw eight German soldiers captured and then summarily executed in the streets for trying to throw grenades into a crowd. Incidents like these spread fear through a German garrison unaccustomed to dealing with an openly hostile population. The FFI captured increasing numbers of German soldiers who were trying to escape from the city in civilian clothes. Hundreds of such men sought refuge from the vengeful crowds in the sprawling Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes on the city’s edges. An FFI intelligence report given to Rol during this phase of the struggle noted that German morale was collapsing to the point that the FFI expected to be able to launch successful attacks on even well-defended strongpoints.9
The increasing German unwillingness to fight any longer for Paris stretched all the way to Choltitz, who saw no way out unless the Allies arrived in force. A battle in Paris, he had concluded, “would be a useless fight in a war already lost.” In his eyes, surrendering to the Allies was a far better fate for him and his men than dying needlessly in the rubble of the city or surrendering to the dangerous mob he believed the FFI to be. German headquarters continued to pressure him to use explosives, like the ones the FFI captured in the ring-road tunnel, to begin demolitions of forty-five bridges and numerous key buildings. Choltitz never issued orders to carry out those demolitions, knowing full well that they had no military value and would simply waste what few resources he had left.10
In his memoirs Choltitz gave the impression that he considered orders to demolish Paris to be a violation of his honor. Most books that followed the war took him at his word, accepting his reluctance to harm Paris as an early step on the road to Franco-German reconciliation and making Choltitz a hero for saving the city. As a result, most writers have depicted him as a man who could have destroyed the city if he had wanted to, but instead chose not to carry out the orders of his insane führer. It is clear, however, that even if he had wanted to damage Paris, there is little he could have done. Choltitz responded slowly to the growing uprising in the city and seems never to have fully understood it. By the time he did begin to react, the FFI fighters were in control of much of Paris, thus preventing the Germans from carrying out any kind of widespread plan for demolition. Choltitz himself said as much in a 1954 interview with an East Berlin newspaper. When asked by an interviewer if humanitarian reasons had prevented him from carrying out orders to destroy Paris, Choltitz said no. The newspaper then suggested that the explanation for his decision to ignore the orders were “uniquely because he did not possess the necessary technical means” for destruction, a point Choltitz did not dispute. As a veteran of Stalingrad, Choltitz had personal connections to dozens of German generals who had died needlessly in that city following the irrational orders of German headquarters to stand in place rather than retreat. Choltitz had no intention of sharing the fate of those officers, or of ordering his men to die a pointless death to satisfy the pride of Hitler and his increasingly out-of-touch coterie.11
German headquarters continued to underestimate the FFI and badly misunderstand the larger strategic picture. Kurt Hesse, the German commander responsible for the Seine and Oise region, noted that even at this late date German strategists still assumed that the Americans “had pushed forward with strong armored units past Paris” with an eye toward “outflank[ing] the city eastwards in a wide circle.” In other words, the Germans had not detected the change in Allied thinking or the shifting of two divisions (the Deuxième Division Blindée and the U.S. Fourth Infantry Division) toward Paris. Hesse also knew that the German garrison in the city was in no position to defend itself. It was filled not with frontline soldiers but with “badly trained and frequently ill people who were only fit for office work. They still tried their best but proved to be completely unusable.” Ernest Hemingway recalled meeting German prisoners of war on the road to Paris who told him that they were office workers for the Paris garrison who had been given their first weapons only that morning. Given such a situation, Hesse saw no utility in the orders coming from German headquarters to stand and fight for Paris. Nor did he believe that orders to destroy the city could have been carried out in any case. In his opinion, the best course of action for Choltitz was the organization of a breakout and withdrawal from the city, but lacking orders to that effect, Choltitz had made no such preparations. Hesse saw that the general had already lost control of the city. Choltitz, he believed, “could not cope with the physical and mental demands of these days.”12
Choltitz, furthermore, never fully understood the internecine nature of French politics, a handicap that further prevented him from coping with events inside the city. Politically, Paris was deeply fractured even when under foreign occupation, with the FFI and the communists on one side and the Gaullists on the other, but as a soldier who saw only military problems, Choltitz lacked the ability to see these fissures. Nor could any amount of Gestapo and SS torture have given him the insights he really needed on French politics. As a result, the German commander could not read the situation accurately; he did not know who spoke for whom inside Paris or whom to accept as a negotiating partner. He had become exasperated with Parisian politics, later confessing to an American interrogator that the complexity of the situation in Paris “surpassed all his expectations.” He was glad, he said, to be rid of the responsibility of trying to figure out the inner workings of French politics. Choltitz, the interrogator determined, “was damn glad to get rid of the job of policing both Paris and the Frenchmen, both of which he apparently detests.”13
Thus, although it may have been true that Choltitz was reluctant to compromise his honor by destroying parts of Paris, he was driven mostly by the need to make the best out of the bad situation he had inherited just a few weeks earlier. He could have ordered the Germans to fight much harder than he did, but he knew that his men, mostly reservists and second-line soldiers, lacked the ability to manage a situation spiraling dangerously out of control. He also thought that they might refuse orders to fight to the end. The large numbers of surrenders and desertions were a clear indication that many German soldiers were already giving up on their missions. The Paris garrison, he knew, had neither the will nor the means to fight against an angry and vengeful population that was growing more militant by the hour. He also saw little point in accepting an offer from the Luftwaffe to begin air strikes on the city; such attacks would inevitably kill his own men or force him to evacuate the city to ensure their safety. An evacuation would make regaining control of the city much more difficult and would therefore defeat the purpose of continuing the German occupation.14
Choltitz therefore took the most logical course of action open to him, even if it was the unusual one of trying to contact his enemies to arrange a surrender. In doing so, he was also upholding his soldier’s honor in seeking to ensure the safety of the soldiers serving under him, just as German officers in 1918 had done for young soldiers like him. Believing that the end was near for Germany, not just in Paris but across Europe, he saw his last duty as the protection of his soldiers from what he knew would be useless sacrifices. His true motives were less humanitarian than practical and were motivated in no small part by his deep fear of the Paris mob and by his realistic assessment of the situation that he and the men under his command faced.15
The mass confusion of events during these dramatic days further complicated the responses of people inside and outside of Paris. Midday on the 23rd, the BBC mistakenly announced that Paris had been liberated. An overeager BBC reporter, anxious to get his name on a major scoop, read a message saying that the Cité (meaning the island on which Notre Dame and the Préfecture de Police sit) was in FFI hands. Misinterpreting “Cité” for “City,” he jumped too quickly to the wrong conclusion. Jubilation broke out in London. Mass confusion spread through Allied headquarters. Even General Pierre-Marie Koenig, the nominal commander of the FFI, began to celebrate. Church bells across Britain rang in joyous celebration, and both King George VI and Winston Churchill sent messages congratulating a bewildered Charles de Gaulle, who was at least gratified that George VI’s message referred to him as “Your Excellency,” which de Gaulle took to be a confirmation of Britain’s recognition of his place at the head of the French government in exile. The celebrations stretched as far as New York City, where thousands of New Yorkers showered Rockefeller Plaza with confetti in celebration. “It was good to learn,” said one Parisienne dryly of the “liberation” of her city, “because we knew nothing about it.”16 Parisians often had little information about the outside events that were shaping their future. Despite the premature announcement about the liberation, the BBC was usually a reliable source of information, although the limits on electricity meant that most Parisians did not have regular access to radio broadcasts.
Parisians, of course, still had to deal with their daily necessities, especially the quest for food. Jacques Bardoux, a former senator who was then trying to organize clandestine meetings of the members of the French Senate who were not in German prisons, walked past lines of sad, hungry Parisians waiting outside bakeries in the rain. “They are silent,” he observed. “This is certainly not yet an atmosphere of liberation and victory.” But despite their ongoing hardships, the mood was starting to change in the city. Bardoux knew, as did the hungry people in the bread line, that the Resistance was taking power from the Germans and that the Allies were finally coming. As one woman said to journalist Edith Thomas, “we may be hungry, but we are smiling.”17
As the sun struggled to break through the rain and clouds during the early morning of August 24, the lead elements of the Deuxième Division Blindée were just twenty miles from Paris, moving through German opposition between Rambouillet and Versailles. French forces continued throughout the day to press on toward the city as quickly as they could. From the prefecture, Charles Luizet had managed to send a wireless message to Leclerc, once his roommate at the French military academy at St. Cyr, telling the French general that “the Resistance is at the limit of its resources and calls out for your help.” Unable to offer any meaningful help, Leclerc opted for a symbolic gesture. At 5:00 p.m. on August 24, a small propeller airplane flown by a very reluctant pilot swooped down over the prefecture and dropped a leaflet signed by the French general that read, “Hold On. We are Coming.” Although some policemen would undoubtedly have preferred that the plane had dropped arms or medical supplies, it was nevertheless a positive sign, providing a tremendous morale boost for the men in and around the prefecture. A short time later, the Paris police received an order to put on their dress uniforms in anticipation of giving arriving French and American soldiers a formal welcome. The order led to a series of triumphant cries and spontaneous hugs in the streets between the police and the residents of Paris. 18
Despite the Allies’ reassurances, the situation was still fraught with problems. De Gaulle and many others worried that if French forces did not secure the city quickly, the bloodshed could rapidly get out of control. De Gaulle was much less concerned about a German counterattack than the possibility of a civil war. After telling Leclerc how lucky he was to have the honor of commanding the division that would liberate Paris, de Gaulle had issued a solemn warning. “Go quickly,” he told Leclerc. “We cannot have another Commune.” To de Gaulle, the young Parisians on the barricades were not heroes but symbols of anarchy and a challenge to his own authority. Obsessed with the restoration of order and the legitimacy of the French republic, de Gaulle feared, not without reason, that the spirit of the uprising might well turn against him and his efforts to reconstitute the French state as quickly as possible. De Gaulle thus saw the need to move quickly and bring order to the city in the form of armed representatives of his own provisional government.19
De Gaulle was far from the only one who saw that Paris was in danger of suffering another Paris Commune, the two-month civil war that followed the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. As many as fifty thousand people may have been killed during the violence of the notorious “Bloody Week” in late May 1871 alone. The Commune, and the mutual recriminations that followed, poisoned French politics for decades afterward. Many of the bitter political struggles in France as late as 1944 had their direct origins in the harsh reprisals of the Right against the Left that followed in the wake of the Commune. While the constructions of barricades may have seemed like a symbol of liberty to the teenagers of St. Michel, they struck fear into the hearts of many of the city’s older, more conservative residents, who saw in them the return of a dangerous specter from a distant and horrifying past.
The rhetoric of the Left in these heady days was certainly powerful, and whether or not the Left intended for it to be revolutionary, the Gaullists and even the Americans often read it as such. Free French general Alain de Boissieu, soon to be de Gaulle’s son-in-law, recalled that de Gaulle and those working directly for him were sure that “the Communist party and its allies had already decided to take power and form, if at all possible, a Paris Commune, followed by a Revolutionary government that would control the capital before [de Gaulle’s] arrival . . . with all the consequences one might imagine for the future.” Observing events from her upscale apartment near the Palais du Luxembourg, Clara Longworth de Chambrun, an American who had married into a collaborationist French family, thought that the Resistance “craved revolution.” She assumed that the communists would attempt a power grab as soon as the Germans left. She and most other members of the middle class shared de Gaulle’s fear that the end of the war might be followed by a civil war such as the one that had rocked Germany in 1918 or, worse yet, by a communist-led coup. For her and many other conservatives, the FFI and the Resistance were not heroes, but an ill-formed mob that posed a threat to the return of democracy and capitalism. Frequent references to revolution and the “glorious weeks of the Commune” in the resistance newspapers only served to fuel those fears.20
The writings of Albert Camus, one of the most eloquent Resistance writers, provided a sense of the spirit that was animating the Left on August 24. Camus hoped to rebuild a better France out of the ashes of the past four years, but neither he, nor Rol, nor any other leading Resistance figure sought an armed conflict with the Gaullists. They did, however, demand a settling of scores with the collaborationists (which included many members of Clara Longworth’s family) and a return for France to its historical roles. In his article for Combat on the fourth day of the uprising, entitled “The Blood of Liberty,” he wrote:The barricades of liberty are once again built. We know too much to refuse the difficult destiny that we must fully accept. Paris fights today so that France can speak tomorrow. The people
are in arms tonight because they want justice for tomorrow. . . . The Paris that fights tonight wants to command tomorrow, not for power but for justice. These are not words of regret but words of hope, a terrible hope of men isolated inside their own destiny. . . This enormous Paris, hot and black, with its two storms, one in the sky and one in the streets, will become more than ever the lu- minous City of Light that is the envy of the world.21
Camus’s writings, and those of many other Resistance figures, were filled with Marxist and socialist rhetoric, but it spoke mainly of punishing those of all classes who had worked with the Germans and Vichy. The spirit of vengeance, more than revolution, dominated these days. In the same issue of Combat, Camus had also written, “No one can hope that men who have fought for years in silence and for four days now in a din of thunder and rifle fire will agree to the return of the forces of resignation and injustice in any form whatsoever.” For Camus and many other members of the Resistance, there would have to be a reckoning as soon as Paris was once again free. Whether that reckoning would turn into a revolution remained an open question.22
Outside the city, French soldiers were making their final preparations for the advance on Paris. Holbrook Bradley, an American war correspondent who had been in London for three weeks, returned to the front and observed that “it was a different war,” in large part because of the overriding enthusiasm of French and American soldiers concerning the impending liberation of Paris. Emlen Etting, an American war artist, observed some of the soldiers of the Deuxième Division Blindée at Rambouillet, where, he wrote in a letter to his wife, the air was “electric with excitement and impatience.” The Frenchmen wore American uniforms, but their red berets identified them as French and gave them “a jaunty touch.” While he was with them, a report came in that lead elements of the French advance had seen the spire of the Eiffel Tower through a telescope. “A great elation came over us, and the name Paris in our talk made our hearts beat faster. Very soon now the heart of France would beat again.”23
The Blood of Free Men Page 25