The snipers created turmoil and chaos on the streets. Shaw recalled being repeatedly warned by the FFI to “watch the windows” as the snipers moved from building to building. “We watched the windows,” he recalled, “with the old, uncomfortable feeling, which you had in any town where there were still snipers, that buildings are made with a ridiculously extravagant number of windows.” If there was anything positive to note, Shaw observed that the snipers were on the whole not good shots. Their poor aim and amateur style led most Parisians to dismiss the notion advanced after the war that the shooters were German soldiers. Luizet, by contrast, was convinced that the shooters were Germans trying to cover the retreat of German forces out of the city. If that was indeed the case, their inaccuracy may have been a function of the generally low quality of German troops left in Paris at that late date.15
The fastest and least bloody route to ending the violence in Paris involved forcing Choltitz to order the surrender of German troops. With a surrender, the necessity to reduce each remaining German strongpoint by force would disappear. To avoid a prolonged pitched battle in the streets, de Gaulle wanted Billotte and Langlade to lead their armored columns to the center of the city and force Choltitz to surrender. By 9:00 a.m., Billotte and his men were across the Seine, pausing briefly at the Hôtel de Ville before turning west toward the Louvre and Choltitz’s headquarters on the Rue de Rivoli. Using the telephone network at the Préfecture de Police and the policemen’s direct line to the Swedish consulate, Billotte got a message to the general, whom he called “Sholtitz,” through the ailing Nordling, demanding that the Germans surrender their remaining garrisons or risk their extermination. He had decided to name himself a general in the hope of impressing on Choltitz the size of the force headed to Paris. It didn’t work. A deflated Choltitz, although unable to offer much in the way of military resistance to the French units surrounding his positions, responded that his soldier’s honor prevented him from surrendering without a fight. “I don’t accept ultimatums,” was his laconic reply.16
Choltitz, who had been willing to contemplate surrender, hoped the French would attack him in force so that he could at least claim that he had yielded to superior forces. But Choltitz had other reasons to delay his surrender. His advisers warned him that masses of French and U.S. troops, supported by tanks, were on their way and suggested that he surrender immediately. Choltitz still refused. Whether out of a sense of honor or, more likely, his fear of being taken by the FFI mob, he wanted regular troops to attack him so that he could surrender to men in uniform. He and his soldiers would therefore be more likely to be treated according to the laws of war.
Billotte was even then unwittingly obliging him, directing street-by-street fighting along the Rue de Rivoli and the Quai du Louvre toward the Hôtel Meurice. The fighting had been intense enough to blow out the windows of the Meurice as Choltitz ate lunch. It was to be his last meal as commander of the city. Sometime after that lunch, he gave orders for his staff officers to put on their best uniforms and prepare to surrender, but only to regular uniformed French or U.S. soldiers.17
By 2:00 p.m., men under the command of Lieutenant Henri Karcher had fought their way to the outside of the Hôtel Meurice. While his soldiers covered him with machine-gun fire, Karcher and one other officer ran to the front door and tossed phosphorus grenades into the lobby, using a portrait of Hitler that hung behind the concierge’s desk as an aiming point. In the confusion caused by the smoke and noise, six German officers surrendered. Karcher demanded that one of them tell him where Choltitz was. He then raced up the steps toward the office of the German military commander of the Paris district.
An odd story later spread that Karcher burst in and demanded to know if Choltitz spoke German. Choltitz was then supposed to have replied, “Yes, and probably better than you do.” How the story began or why it persisted for so long is a mystery. Karcher had no need to know if Choltitz spoke German, a language the Frenchman himself did not speak. Instead, Karcher, logically enough, asked Choltitz if he understood French so that they might converse over surrender terms or if they needed to find a translator. Choltitz replied that he had a staff officer who understood French well enough for the purposes at hand. Through that interpreter he told Karcher that he would surrender himself and the entire Paris garrison if he and his men would be treated as regular soldiers and protected by the rules of warfare. Karcher promised to protect him but told Choltitz that he had orders to escort him to the prefecture, where Leclerc was waiting.18
Karcher escorted Choltitz out of the Hôtel Meurice and into a wild mob. Word had spread that Choltitz had surrendered, and Parisians gathered to yell curses at him, spit in his direction, and, in some cases, try to tear him away from his French escort. One woman broke through the soldiers around Choltitz and smashed his cigar into his face. Karcher and his men did the best they could to protect Choltitz and his officers, but they might have failed against the angry crowd if a Red Cross nurse had not run to them and helped them into a waiting car. The crowd did, however, manage to grab Choltitz’s suitcase, whose contents they ripped to pieces in their fits of anger. Choltitz later submitted a formal claim to the French government for compensation, which the government understandably denied.19
At 4:00 p.m., Choltitz arrived at the prefecture, where Leclerc was awaiting him in the billiard room. Rol and his deputy, Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont, had rushed to the prefecture as soon as they heard about the surrender, fearing that Leclerc was going to shut them—and the FFI—out of the proceedings. Rol and Kriegel-Valrimont arrived to find Choltitz meeting with Leclerc, Chaban (representing de Gaulle) and Major General Raymond Barton, the commander of the U.S. Fourth Infantry Division. Leclerc asked the two résistants to leave, arguing that the ceasefire was a military arrangement between uniformed soldiers only. Leclerc’s staff officers were even then reading a German translation of the terms of the brief ceasefire agreement to Choltitz, who must have been quite curious about the heated exchanges in French between a general and a charismatic civilian who obviously had no intention of yielding; Choltitz had no idea that the civilian was in fact the man who had been directing the uprising against his forces. Barton, too, was curious, but he knew a delicate situation when he saw one. He left the room in order to avoid even the appearance that the U.S. government was supporting one side of this French political conflict.
Rol was incensed, not only because the terms, written in the name of the provisional government, were drawn up without his input, but because the document itself had no place for him to sign in his capacity as the leader of the FFI. In his eyes, his men had made this victory possible, and no ceasefire could be agreed without his consent. Rol further insisted that he did not take his orders from Leclerc and that therefore if he did not sign, his men would not be bound to agree to its terms. Leclerc was furious at the challenge to his authority, but he was more interested in ending the battle with the Germans in Paris than in starting one with the FFI. Charles Luizet, the Gaullist prefect of the Paris police, convinced Leclerc to allow Rol to sign the surrender document rather than risk further bloodshed in the city. The political problems could be solved later; first the shooting had to stop. Leclerc agreed and Rol signed. Then, in a gesture of reconciliation, Leclerc gave Kriegel-Valrimont the honor of driving Choltitz to the Montparnasse train station, where the agreement would be finalized in the presence of de Gaulle himself, who was expected within the hour. Kriegel-Valrimont later remembered that drive as “the greatest moment of my life.”20
Leclerc ordered teams of French and German officers to drive through the city jointly announcing the ceasefire. One of those teams featured Philippe de Gaulle, Charles’s son and an officer in the Deuxième Division Blindée. In some places, the teams succeeded in getting the Germans to come out peacefully in exchange for promises that French troops would protect the prisoners from the crowds that were gathering around them. In most cases surrendering Germans avoided being attacked by the crowd, although Jacques Bardoux esti
mated that forty Germans were killed by crowds on their way to captivity. Much more commonly, they were spit upon, and in some cases hit with stones or other objects, as they marched through the streets with their hands in the air. Irwin Shaw watched as the German officers tried to maintain some dignity “in the middle of a city full of voluble, newly liberated citizens, mostly women, who have hated you for four years and who spend half their time kissing your conquerors and the other half devising means of breaking through the ranks and taking a swipe at the highest officer in your column.” All German prisoners were serenaded with endless choruses of La Marseillaise. But despite the unbridled enmity, Shaw and other observers rightly noted that Parisians were saving their real hatred not for the Germans but for the collaborators among them.21
Not all German strongpoints surrendered peacefully. By the time teams of officers had arrived on the Place de la République, the FFI had taken control of all of the outer defenses of the Prince Eugène barracks and were preparing an attack on the building itself. The Germans and French had to work together to find an agreement whereby the Germans inside would voluntarily surrender rather than fight to the finish. At the Palais Bourbon across the Seine from the bloody fighting on the Place de la Concorde, the Germans refused to accept the announcement of the ceasefire, believing it to be an FFI trick. They insisted that they would surrender only to Americans. Some American officers from the Fourth Infantry Division were quickly located in eastern Paris, which led to the surrender of 530 Germans following combat so intense that the Palais, the home to the lower house of the French Parliament, was on fire.
In some cases, French and German teams intervened in the fighting just in time. Near the Place de la République on the Rue du Temple, Raymond Dronne found the Germans heavily defending their last telephone and telegraph station. After losing a number of his men in the act of taking the building, he discovered that the Germans had mined it for demolition. Dronne had arrived just in time to force the engineers to defuse their explosives at gunpoint. His actions may well have saved the building and the surrounding area from a major explosion. The surrender of the 176 Germans in the luxurious Hôtel Crillon on the Place de la Concorde went much more smoothly, as they neatly stacked their arms in the cloakroom and calmly walked outside with their hands raised.22
The final German strongpoint to yield was the Palais du Luxembourg, which was guarded by SS troops. Its garrison had seven hundred men and ten tanks at their disposal, plus the building itself, which was as imposing as any fortress. Leclerc had been adamant in upholding Eisenhower’s order that no artillery should be used inside the city itself, but he was ready to make an exception to capture this last island of German resistance. Boissieu, the senior officer on the scene, gave orders to fire on the building’s cupola if French troops had evidence that the Germans were using it for observation. Finally, at 7:35 p.m., even the fanatical SS troops inside saw that any resistance would be futile and surrendered. The last major German stronghold in Paris was gone, even as sniping continued. But an estimated 2,500 Germans who had put on civilian clothes tried to melt away, most of them in the vast Bois de Boulogne on the city’s western edge. Almost all of them were apprehended in the next few days.23
With the German strongpoints falling or already taken, there only remained the formalities of the German surrender. By 4:30 p.m., Leclerc, Choltitz, and Rol were among a group in a small, packed office of the Gare Montparnasse, just a short walk from Rol’s headquarters underneath the Denfert-Rochereau Métro station. Choltitz thought at one point that he, like Raoul Nordling a few days earlier, was having a heart attack and asked a French soldier for a glass of water so he could take his medicine. “My dear general,” the soldier asked, “you aren’t trying to poison yourself, are you?” A dejected Choltitz, the strain of the past few days clearly visible on his face, signed a new set of surrender papers, then headed off to two and a half years of captivity in England and in Mississippi. His war was over, as was the presence of the German Army in Paris.24
If the morning of August 25 belonged to Leclerc and his soldiers, the afternoon belonged to de Gaulle. For the next twenty-four hours he played his cards so skillfully and adroitly that he cemented both his political power in France and his independence from the Americans. With an air of drama surrounding him, de Gaulle had come to Paris without informing the Americans and, symbolically, in a French vehicle. He came in through the Porte d’Italie (as Dronne had done the night before) to such an ecstatic celebration and welcome that he almost couldn’t move through the adoring crowds. Eventually his driver found a route to the Avenue du Maine and into the Montparnasse section of the city, which de Gaulle knew intimately from his time studying at a Jesuit school there. In more ways than one, he was coming home.25
De Gaulle moved with the air and confidence of a head of state, dominating the events that followed. At Montparnasse he angrily berated Leclerc for letting Rol, a civilian, sign the ceasefire documents. “Why do you think I named you interim military governor of Paris?” he thundered at Leclerc, “if not for you to accept von Choltitz’s surrender?” But at the same time, he was gracious to Rol personally, shaking his hand and thanking him for his service to France. With these gestures de Gaulle sent the message that the proper political authority in France rested with him and not with the FFI. He also sent symbolic messages back to his alliance partners, demonstrating to the British and Americans that, now that France had been liberated, their political presence in the country was not needed. Every act he performed was laden with symbolism and carefully crafted to send the clear signal that the French government had returned and was back in control of Paris. The final surrender documents that Choltitz signed made no mention of the Americans or the Allied command structure, as Gerow and Bradley had wanted. Instead, Choltitz formally surrendered to the French government. Present to witness the signing was Gallois, who had managed to get to Paris with Leclerc’s staff; his presence at this historic moment was a just reward for the role he had played in convincing the Americans to send the Deuxième Division Blindée to Paris.26
Everywhere de Gaulle went, he attracted massive, joyous crowds. Journalist Roger Stéphane, who had himself twice escaped from Nazi prisons, compared the general to a king, saying that de Gaulle “was like a sovereign returning home who was clearly marking that return for all to see.” From Montparnasse, de Gaulle went directly to his old office in the War Ministry on the Rue St. Dominique. In doing so he was sending the message that there was still a war to be fought. He was also sending the message that he was still only the head of a provisional French government and, as such, he had no right to use the presidential residence, the Élysée Palace. Despite the urgings of some of his staff officers, de Gaulle refused to sleep or hold meetings there, saying that he was not the elected representative of the French people.27
De Gaulle found, much to his surprise, that the office he had left in 1940 had not changed at all. The Germans had not occupied the War Ministry, so the furniture and files were exactly as they had been four years earlier. The same butlers were there to bring him his food, and even the names on the telephones were the same. “Nothing was lacking, apart from the state,” de Gaulle later wrote. “It was my task to set about it again.” De Gaulle made the Rue St. Dominique his Paris headquarters for the duration of the war and the place from which he would begin to reassemble the French state. To outsiders, and even to many of those closest to him, he moved with an air of complete confidence and seemed to be in total control of events around him, but de Gaulle was also adeptly concealing the strain that he felt in confronting such an enormous task. His aides thought he was always more comfortable inside the army than in the world of politics, and he seems to have confirmed as much in a letter to his wife around this time. To her, he complained of the continued shooting in the streets (“This will not last long,” he pledged) and signed it “Your Poor Charles,” an indication of the weight of the responsibility he felt he could share only with her.28
�
��Poor Charles” did not take much time to feel sorry for himself. He had already begun to assure the stability of any future French government, and the task absorbed most of his attention in the first few days after the liberation. He urged Gaullist officials in Algiers and London to get to Paris within a week so that they could begin to reform a French government in the national capital. That process was likely to be difficult and contentious. The first decision was whether to reestablish the prewar Third Republic or begin writing a new constitution for a Fourth Republic. De Gaulle had definite ideas on that subject. He also arranged for the transfer of eight thousand small arms from the Americans to the Paris police force to replace their losses from the days of the uprising and to make sure that they would be in a position to exercise effective control over the city.29
As the transfer of arms indicated, de Gaulle had carefully thought through his next moves. Rol and the French communists wanted de Gaulle to go from the Rue St. Dominique to the Hôtel de Ville, both to proclaim the return of the French Republic and to thank the mostly left-leaning groups that had gathered at the historic site. De Gaulle, however, had other ideas. He went instead to the Préfecture de Police, remarking that he had no intention of being officially received by low-level city functionaries at the Hôtel de Ville. He would, instead, receive them when the proper time came. By going to the prefecture, and recognizing the role the police had played in the uprising, de Gaulle cemented his hold on the police force and ensured its loyalty to him in the heady days that followed.
Only after his meeting with the police did de Gaulle finally, and reluctantly, agree to go to the Hôtel de Ville. It was the right decision, as de Gaulle himself soon realized. As he recalled it, “along the way, the combatants, tears in their eyes, presented arms. Under a thunderous applause, I was escorted to the second floor. I was surrounded by numerous companions. Many had on their arms the insignia of the FFI. All wore the Cross of Lorraine.” The symbols of the uprising and the symbols of his own Free France movement had merged. French officials at the Hôtel de Ville urged him to declare the return of the French Republic, but de Gaulle refused, saying that because the Vichy government had been illegitimate, the French Republic had never ceased to exist. De Gaulle then stepped up to the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville, the place from which previous French republics had been announced. He leaned out toward a crowd so adoring that even the leftist Franc Tireur called it “an homage from the people” to the man “whom they had followed with such unwavering loyalty. In de Gaulle the soul and spirit of France are at once united.” De Gaulle basked in the adulation of the crowd, leaning so far forward that Georges Bidault, the Resistance’s political representative, reached out and grabbed his belt for fear that he might fall.30
The Blood of Free Men Page 28