In the days that followed, Blanche spiraled out of control. She seemed to be trying to get herself executed. She insulted German officers on the street; she was now brazen to the point of near insanity.
From an upstairs window of the Hôtel Ritz, she raved at those passing below. “Le Boche est fini!”—“The Germans are finished”—she yelled at sentries. The end of the war might be coming, but the liberation hadn’t happened yet. Her conduct could only prove fatal. Claude dragged her from the windows, screaming and weeping. He couldn’t stop her heavy drinking or her search for some kind of oblivion.
“I had a hate for Germans,” she told her nephew after the war, “yes, I was strong on that point—but as they were about to kill me I felt they deserved all the hatred I had for them. They hated my family, my mom and pop, my sisters and brothers, just for being Jewish, and I felt that was reason enough to hate them.” In August 1944, she had lost control of any ability to contain that emotion.
If the Germans came for her again—if there was a crackdown on the Hôtel Ritz that accounted for what the files in the foreign office already documented about their resistance networks and the spies and agents among them—it would be a terrible reckoning. It would mean an almost certain death for many of them.
Lily Kharmayeff did meet her death somewhere in Paris. Or at least she disappeared forever, and no one has ever managed to find any trace of her.
In the files on the Hôtel Ritz, stored in a government archive not far from the Alexanderplatz in Berlin’s Mitte district, there is no trace of the fate of one other person, either. Monsieur Süss also went missing.
He helped the German occupiers strip Paris of its riches. He conspired in the seizure of property and inevitably made money through his dark dealings. He cozied up to Nazi kingpins and killers. He was an informer.
But what the files in Berlin—at last declassified—seem to suggest is that Monsieur Süss covered in the spring of 1943 for Blanche Auzello. On that night of April 10, 1943, as Allied planes flew over the heart of central Paris, as lights from the kitchens of the Hôtel Ritz illuminated a small garden and, beyond, the walls of the Ministry of Justice, the Germans turned to Monsieur Süss, expecting his usual cooperation. He replied instead that he was not their air raid warden. It was none of his business. He refused to say whether he knew anything. The Germans were furious.
Messages flew from Berlin to Paris. It was indecent behavior. There would have to be consequences—of the highest order. What they were or when they came, it is impossible to say. Süss disappeared without a trace, one of the war’s millions of silent stories.
9
The German General and the Fate of Paris
General Leclerc’s arrival in Paris during the liberation, August 1944.
EVER SINCE OUR ENEMIES HAVE REFUSED TO LISTEN TO AND OBEY OUR FÜHRER, THE WHOLE WAR HAS GONE BADLY.
—General Dietrich von Choltitz, Paris, August 1944
The war in France had started with that first great human exodus from Paris in June 1940. Four years later, a second summer exodus bookended the last weeks of Nazi occupation in the capital. This time it was the Germans who were fleeing—the Germans and those who had passed the occupation in luxury with them.
By August 15, 1944, it was no longer business as usual even at the Hôtel Ritz.
At the height of the occupation, there had been swank dinner dances on Sunday evenings at the hotel, where Parisian socialites flirted with handsome Luftwaffe officers, while artists and entrepreneurs swilled champagne cocktails proffered by silent waiters. There had been long, boozy lunches under the flowering chestnut tree in the small courtyard garden, and low voices speaking in undertones of French and German.
Those days were over. Not only were the last remaining Germans abandoning Paris in advance of the Allies, but many of the more prudent members of the Parisian gratin were lying low. More than a few of them were quietly disappearing to country homes or shuttering their grand apartments in the city and hiding.
General Dietrich von Choltitz, however, was just arriving in Paris. Like all the highest-ranking German brass, he was put up at the Hôtel Ritz. He was the newest military governor of the occupied city, and he was replacing Baron Hans von Boineburg Lengsfeld. The baron was another of the Operation Valkyrie conspirators whom Carl von Stülpnagel’s frantic cover-up had saved from the gallows in those few precious hours when the capital of France was in the hands of the German resistance.
By August 15, General von Choltitz had been in the capital only a week, and he had his hands full trying to prevent Paris from igniting in a revolution. Law and order were unraveling quickly. Most of the other German personnel had abandoned the Hôtel Ritz, and the intelligence officers were burning files systematically in a “destructive measure.” The French communist resistance fighters intensified their guerrilla strikes against well-known collaborators, and agents of the FFI—or fifi in Parisian slang of the 1940s—were organizing coordinated resistance actions across the capital. The French police walked out on strike that day. By afternoon the subways stopped running. The Gestapo was rounding up suspected political dissidents and agitators, and the general wasn’t asking them to keep up any foolish pretense of due process any longer. Twenty-six hundred unruly Parisians were crammed onto a train destined for the concentration camp at Buchenwald that afternoon.
The next morning came more purges and executions. An informer betrayed thirty-five members of the FFI to the Gestapo. Von Choltitz ordered them eliminated with machine-gun fire and hand grenades in the park at the Bois de Boulogne.
It was a logistical nightmare. The German administrative corps had all but abandoned Paris, and the faltering Vichy government was imploding. But systematic terror was something the French still understood and respected. And Dietrich von Choltitz was there to deliver it.
He’d start by sending troops to burn the grain windmills in the northeastern suburb of Pantin so the Parisians would slowly starve. Then, according to plan, the troops would turn to planting bombs under bridges and landmarks across the city. When the fuses were lit, Paris would become an inferno. Adolf Hitler wanted the capital of France razed to the ground before the Germans retreated. Destroying one of the great cities of the world would be a powerful “moral weapon” against the enemy, the Führer declared. He ordered von Choltitz to leave the city “a field of ruins.”
To the dismay of even some of his fellow Germans, the general showed every sign of compliance. He had a reputation for ruthlessness. In Russia, he had carried out the extermination of large parts of the Jewish population. Ambassador Otto Abetz sent repeated telegrams to Berlin, complaining of the “brutality and rudeness of Choltitz” and decrying the escalation of the violence in the capital. It was a useless protest. The Führer was in a punishing mood, and he wanted Paris flattened.
Yet even with the Allies just beyond the city, theoretically capable of entering the capital at almost any moment, the planned destruction was unaccountably slow in starting. On August 17, 1944, the American troops reached the River Seine and the outskirts of Paris, to the north and the south.
For days, still nothing happened.
Lighting the fuses shouldn’t be taking this kind of time. Furious with the delays, Hitler was screaming to his staff in Berlin, “Brennt Paris?”—“Is Paris burning?”
Dietrich von Choltitz had long since come to the conclusion that the German leader was insane. He also knew that surrendering Paris was inevitable. He was a general, not a humanitarian, and he had blood on his hands in this war, without question. But he had already made a tactical decision. He didn’t want to destroy the capital of France. That was not how he wanted history to remember him.
By the third week of August, he figured that he could stall the burning of Paris, at best, for another forty-eight hours. If the Allies could liberate the city before then, he would let it happen.
After that, he would have to show Berlin action. The fuses would have to be ignited. It would be the end of the “C
ity of Light,” as the modern world knew it—the end of that particular version of Paris that had become one of the twentieth century’s most enduring legends.
The general—aided by representative resistance insurgents within Paris, to whom he could not with dignity or safety surrender—arranged for a diplomatic emissary to cross the front lines and deliver a message to the formal French forces-in-exile and to the American general Dwight D. Eisenhower. The message was a stark one. Enter the capital quickly, before I have to destroy it. Dietrich von Choltitz warned them that he had “not more than 24–48 hours left” before he would have to show Hitler that he was moving ahead with the explosions. The Allies had until noon on August 24, 1944, to make their liberation happen.
After that, if he didn’t show the Führer results, he had no doubt that someone else would be authorized to give the orders.
The general started moving the German heavy artillery and tanks out of the city. On the morning of August 23, in anticipation of an imminent Allied advance, Dietrich von Choltitz moved out of his suite at the Hôtel Ritz and took up military residence in German government offices at the requisitioned Hôtel Meurice, down on the rue de Rivoli.
It all should have been perfectly simple. The trouble was that the French and the other Allies—especially the Americans and the British, who were in charge of the military operations outside Paris—were now caught up in another round of bitter squabbling that threatened to squander the fleeting opportunity to save Paris.
It was just the latest flare-up in a tussle between the French and the Anglo-Americans that would ultimately, in one fashion or another, shape the contours of postwar European politics for more than another half century.
Poised on the edge of the city, the Allies had been holding back from entering the capital. There were a number of reasons, and like Dietrich von Choltitz they had been stalling. The most important reason was resolutely and unromantically logistical. Once Paris was free, the Allies would need to supply the city with vast quantities of food and fuel, supplies that were still needed desperately on the front lines of the battle. Taking Paris would distract from a swift push eastward, toward Berlin and victory. Now the German general’s offer and the French insistence on liberating the capital had forced the Allies’ hand. They would have to go ahead with a premature liberation.
The Allied operation to take Paris accordingly swung into motion. That was when the real trouble started.
As a matter of national pride, the French wanted to be the first forces to enter the city. There was a protracted brouhaha about the matter. The Allies promised to honor the French wishes, but the French were intractably suspicious, despite the fact that the leader of the national division, General Philippe Leclerc, had reached the outskirts of Paris on the morning of August 24. Going so far ahead of the operation had already been an act of serious military insubordination.
The locals in the suburbs had welcomed Leclerc’s troops as conquering heroes. The celebrations seemed a bit premature to some of the Allied commanders.
Suddenly, the French started dragging their feet and trying to slow down the entire operation. The clock was ticking. They had only until noon to take the capital.
Yet Leclerc would not budge. The French were not advancing. The Allies were losing patience with him—and above all with Charles de Gaulle, who was ultimately behind it. It was an escalation of tensions that had been simmering more or less openly since 1940.
“If von Choltitz was to deliver the city,” as the American general Omar Bradley said, then “we had a compact to fulfill.” That meant the troops pushing on through to Paris and not partying on the fringes. It seemed to Bradley that Leclerc’s men that day “stumbled reluctantly through a Gallic wall of townsfolk [and] slowed the French advance with wine and celebration.”
When his Allied commanders ordered him “to take more aggressive action and speed up his advance,” General Leclerc dismissed the directive out of hand—despite the fact that the order came from his military superiors.
Noon on August 24 passed without the liberation.
Outside of Paris, the Allied troops met with a surprisingly fierce resistance. The bridge at Sevrès, connecting the capital to routes southwest of the city, exploded.
Part of what General Leclerc couldn’t point out was that in fact he had been trying to delay liberation, even if it meant missing von Choltitz’s deadline and undermining a unified Allied operation. General de Gaulle had already made it clear to Leclerc that he didn’t want the French troops taking control of Paris until he could make political arrangements to oust the pro-communist resistance and install his own post-occupation government. At stake was his leadership of postwar Paris.
Thoroughly exasperated with de Gaulle by the summer of 1944, the Allies wouldn’t much have cared even if they had known the reason. There had already been a tussle over de Gaulle’s plans to lead postwar France solo. There was a reason Winston Churchill was going around in 1944 muttering aloud that he wished he’d been able to save Georges Mandel when the French government fled in the beginning. De Gaulle called the Allies gangsters and bullies. The Allies saw de Gaulle as power-hungry and ungrateful. With Allied casualties in the tens of thousands since the Normandy landings, from the Anglo-American perspective it was time to get this bloody war in Europe over.
Exclaiming that no one could afford to wait for the French “to dance their way to Paris,” General Omar Bradley took matters into hand directly. “To hell with prestige, tell the 4th [American infantry] to slam on in and take the liberation,” he ordered.
When General Leclerc heard that the Americans were geared up to advance on Paris at dawn the next morning, he sent a small detachment of French troops, under the command of Captain Raymond Dronne, and ordered their symbolic entrance into the capital instantly. The first French soldiers—an impossibly small division—passed the city gates and crossed the Pont d’Austerlitz over the Seine. Their destination was the medieval Hôtel de Ville, the ancient city hall in the fourth arrondissement.
There was no telling now if the armistice would hold or if in the morning the Allies could take the city.
Just off the rue de Rivoli, Dietrich von Choltitz sat that night waiting. There was no telling what, for him and his family in Germany, would be the consequences of his decision. The deadline had passed unmarked. He was desolate and worried. If the Allies did not arrive in the morning—if he could not honorably surrender—there would be death in Berlin on the piano wires for treason. In those last days he once remarked dryly to one of his staff at dinner, “Ever since our enemies have refused to listen to and obey our Führer, the whole war has gone badly.” At the crossroads, he had made the same decision not to listen.
Before him were the silent gardens of the Tuileries. Beyond those, the Seine ran all the way to those distant bridges to the south, where the Allies waited somewhere outside Paris. Borne along through the city, the water washed clean the banks of the steep seawalls. It slapped somewhere farther east against the heart of France, its Île de la Cité, where Notre Dame sat in the darkness as it had done for centuries, one of the legends of Paris.
Underneath the ancient cathedral, bombs waited. With them would begin the end of Paris.
Then, just before midnight and from a distance, Dietrich von Choltitz heard the sound of church bells. Soon they were ringing madly.
It could mean only one thing. The liberation at last had started.
10
The Press Corps and the Race to Paris
Robert Capa, Olin L. Tompkins, and Ernest Hemingway at Mont Bocard, France, July 30, 1944.
I HAD A FUNNY CHOKE IN MY THROAT AND I HAD TO CLEAN MY GLASSES BECAUSE THERE NOW, BELOW US, GRAY AND ALWAYS BEAUTIFUL, WAS SPREAD THE CITY I LOVE BEST IN ALL THE WORLD.
—Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway was still steamed at Martha Gellhorn for beating him to the punch in Normandy. But come August, “Papa” was a man with a new objective in mind. He was bound and determined to be the
first journalist back at the Hôtel Ritz after the occupation.
He was not alone. As Robert Capa put it, “The road to Paris was calling . . . and every international typewriter . . . and every accredited war correspondent [was] wrangling and conspiring to be the first to enter Paris and file history from the great city of former lights.”
Hemingway was pretty sure he could count on Capa and Gellhorn making their way to the Place Vendôme as soon as one or the other managed to get back to the capital. At the moment he was furious with both of them. He certainly wasn’t going to get beaten to the prize a second time.
Everyone knew that the Hôtel Ritz was where Papa stayed in Paris. And everyone could guess that Mary Welsh was going to be there with him as soon as she could arrange it. The entire press corps in London had watched with jaded, cynical amusement as their liaison took shape. Martha Gellhorn was probably the only person in their circle who didn’t have a clear idea of the situation.
Ernest Hemingway was just plain all-around competitive, but, in the last few weeks, beating Robert Capa back to the Hôtel Ritz had taken on a special significance for the celebrated literary master. It wasn’t just that “Capa”—that was all most people ever called him—had made it back to France before he had or that the photographer’s gritty images of the Allied advance through France had been making headlines for Life magazine ever since. It was personal.
For one thing, there was the whole sorry business with Martha Gellhorn. Martha and Bob had never made a secret of the fact that they shared a deep and intimate connection. Among her small circle of close friends, Bob Capa was “the best, the nearest in every way . . . my brother, my real brother,” as she put it frankly. With the Gellhorn-Hemingway marriage in tatters and Martha struggling with depression that spring, Ernest was perhaps feeling a bit defensive and even jealous. After all, Capa’s friendship with Hemingway “dated from the good old days”—back when they had reported on the war in Spain together in 1937. “I was a young freelance photographer” then, Capa remembered, and Hemingway “was a very famous writer.” “His nickname was ‘Papa’ anyway,” and “I soon adopted him as a father.” That made all of this a complicated little family romance, and the crumbling celebrity marriage was putting strains on everyone.
The Hotel on Place Vendome Page 12