Paris '44: The City of Light Redeemed

by Mortimer Moore, William

  20 July 1944

  AT 10AM, AT THE HÔTEL MAJESTIC, Colonel Eberhard Finckh took a telephone call from Berlin. “Übung!”—”Exercise!”—the signal that Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg was flying to Rastenburg in East Prussia, carrying a bomb in his briefcase, intending to assassinate Hitler. Meanwhile life at the Majestic continued as usual, although Walter von Bargatzky ordered a wall of sandbags to be erected in the courtyard of the École Militaire—for the firing squad.

  At 12.30pm, while General von Stulpnagel took lunch in the Hôtel Raphael’s famous blue dining room, Stauffenberg’s bomb exploded in Hitler’s map room, killing several officers but only lightly injuring Hitler.

  Around 2pm, Colonel Finckh received a second single-word message, “Abgelaufen!”—”Done!”

  At 3.45pm, after a telephone conversation with Stauffenberg, Luftwaffe reserve Colonel Casar von Hofacker erroneously informed Stulpnagel of the assassination’s success. Immediately Stulpnagel invited General von Boineburg-Lengsfeld up from the Hôtel Meurice. Within fifteen minutes Boineburg arrived accompanied by Colonel von Unger.

  “A coup has taken place in Berlin,” said Stulpnagel. “The chiefs of the SS and SD in Paris must be arrested immediately. If they resist, shoot them.”

  By 4.30pm Boineburg-Lengsfeld was back at the Meurice drafting orders to arrest Nazi officials across Paris. As far as Boineburg-Lengsfeld was concerned the dice was thrown; he received his orders in good faith and had to carry them out. Despite Boineburg’s difficulty in contacting Lieutenant Colonel Baron von Kraewel, commanding the 1st Security Regiment, the alert sounded at the Clignancourt Barracks and two of the 1st Security Regiment’s battalions swung into action, sealing off central Paris from the Étoile eastwards.110

  To Parisians these clean, fresh troops looked like reinforcements destined for Normandy. Their lorries rolled along Avenue Foch, halting outside numbers 72–88, the SS and SD offices. The 1st Security Regiment’s second battalion sealed off the front while the first took the ancillary streets behind to seal off rear entrances. By 8pm, Kraewel’s men were in place with sufficient transport to evacuate prisoners. The operation could have commenced at 8.30pm but Boineburg postponed it until 10pm when fewer Parisians could witness the occupying power’s internecine embarrassment. At 10.30pm, two SS sentries were curtly ordered: “Lay down your weapons or you will be shot out of hand.” Kraewel entered 72 Avenue Foch.

  “What do you want?” asked a service officer who had drawn his pistol.

  “I have orders to arrest all the SD,” said Kraewel. “Give me your pistol.”

  Kraewel then made the service officer man the switchboard and call each room, ordering everyone downstairs. Within forty-five minutes the city’s SD personnel were gathered in the foyer ready to be herded onto waiting lorries. Finding that SD chief, Standartenführer Dr. Helmut Knocken, was dining at a nearby restaurant, Kraewel sent his adjutant, Lieutenant David and an SD officer to find Knocken, who meekly surrendered his pistol. Concerned for the growing numbers of prisoners in his charge, Kraewel had the other ranks transfered to prisons while the officers waited. Kraewel’s statement says all this happened calmly, though some SS protested that Boineburg-Lengsfeld had got his facts wrong.111

  While Kraewel’s lorries deposited their prisoners at Fresnes and the Fort de l’Est, other arrests occurred on the Rue de Saussaies; Neifeind refused to come quietly. Two Luftwaffe generals who heard the radio while dining had told Neifeind that Hitler had survived the assassination attempt unharmed.

  Since, in the Wehrmacht, a general could only be arrested by another general, Boineberg sent his adjutant, General Walter Brehmer and an armed escort, to arrest SS chief Karl Oberg at 57 Boulevard Lannes.

  “I arrest you,” declared Brehmer.

  “Why?” asked Oberg.

  “Superior orders,” said Brehmer.

  Oberg seemed puzzled and reflective.

  “I am going to telephone Field Marshal Kluge at Saint-Germain,” said Oberg.

  “Not allowed,” said Brehmer. “Follow me.”

  Driving to the Hotel Continental, Oberg behaved with almost feminine docility, saying little to the Wehrmacht major escorting him. Watching from the street corner, Boineburg was pleased that everything was running smoothly; the SS were almost totally under arrest and the Wehrmacht was in control.112

  However, since Hitler was alive, Stauffenberg’s coup began unravelling from late afternoon. At 6pm Stulpnagel was telephoned by General Beck announcing the prearranged codeword, Valkyrie, supposedly confirming that Hitler was dead. This was followed at 6.15pm by a call from General Speidel summoning Stulpnagel to Field Marshal von Kluge’s HQ at Saint-Germain. Kluge knew about the conspiracy, but refused to commit himself until others completed the dirty work. When news of Hitler’s survival arrived, Kluge backpedalled fast. Despite growing evidence that Stauffenberg had failed, Stulpnagel and Hofacker desperately tried to persuade Kluge to join the conspiracy and open negotiations with the Allies. Kluge refused. When Stulpnagel told him the SS and SD were being arrested right across Paris, Kluge replied, “Release them immediately.”

  “Too late,” said Stulpnagel.

  Shaking his head, Kluge told Stulpnagel, “You’re relieved of your duties.”

  With those words Stulpnagel and Hofacker became condemned men. But Kluge’s chief of staff, General Gunther Blumentritt, whispered to Kluge, “You’ve got to help them,” thereby demonstrating that something of their former comradeship remained. Kluge escorted Stulpnagel down the château’s front steps to his car.

  “Find some civilian clothes and disappear,” said Kluge in a friendlier voice.

  Crestfallen, Stulpnagel and Hofacker returned to Paris. They had been absent for five hours.113

  Despite Kraewel’s cordon around Avenue Foch, some SS personnel managed to contact members of General Kurt Meyer’s Hitlerjugend Panzer Division who were on leave in Paris. Some Hitlerjugend personnel began threatening Kraewel’s men. Luftwaffe General Hanesse meanwhile tried to deflate the situation with judicious telephone calls. But the best informed senior German officer in Paris, now determined to suppress the conspiracy, was Admiral Theodor Krancke, the Kriegsmarine’s chief in the West whose office on the leafy Boulevard Suchet was close to Oberg’s. Krancke received an official teleprint message from his chief Admiral Donitz denouncing “an infamous attempt to assassinate the Führer” who “had been miraculously spared”. Donitz ordered the Kriegsmarine to close ranks “more tightly than ever around its Führer”. When Krancke telephoned the Kriegsmarine’s Potsdam command centre, Donitz said, “Only accept orders from me and the Führer. All other information and instructions must be regarded as suspect.”114

  Once the flow of orders from Stauffenberg’s clique inside Berlin’s Bendler block fell silent, Admiral Krancke recognised what had been happening. At Kluge’s HQ General Blumentritt agreed that no credence should be given to the Bendlerstrasse’s orders. But when Dontiz advised Krancke to place himself under the SS in Paris, Krancke faced an impasse; the SS had been arrested by Kraewel’s 1st Security Regiment. Krancke’s chief of staff, Admiral Hoffman, caught up with Kraewel by telephone, demanding to know who ordered the arrest of the SS and SD. Kraewel confirmed that his orders came from Generals von Stulpnagel and Boineburg-Lengsfeld. Next Kraewel took a call from the Hitlerjugend Division’s General Kurt Meyer, ordering him to withdraw and reassemble his men in the Bois de Boulogne.

  “I cannot accept your orders,” replied Kraewel. “I take my instructions from General von Boineburg-Lengsfeld and I will only obey him.”115

  Following his disastrous exchange with Field Marshal von Kluge, Stulpnagel went into denial. When Kraewel arrived at the Hôtel Raphael to confirm his instructions from General Meyer, Stulpnagel said nothing of what had happened at La Roche-Guyon. Further bad news arrived from the fragile Colonel von Linstow, one of the last to speak to Stauffenberg before his arrest in Berlin. It was all over. When Boineburg reported the successful arrest of SS and SD p
ersonnel, Stulpnagel managed a feeble smile. Boineburg asked what Kluge had said.

  “The Field Marshal has asked for time to think it over until 9 this morning,” lied Stulpnagel. On hearing this Kraewel decided to go to bed; it had been a long evening and there was nothing more he could do.116

  At 1am German time, Hitler spoke over German radio, excoriating the “small clique of ambitious officers” around Colonel von Stauffenberg. Stulpnagel stirred from the brief, catatonic spell into which intense sadness had thrust him. Would he allow Kraewel’s men to be drawn into street fighting with Krancke’s sailors after Krancke insisted that, if the SS and SD were not released, his men would act? For his part Kraewel, called on at his lodgings by his adjutant, was unfazed by Krancke’s sailors, dismissing them as office boys, but he told Lieutenant David, “We don’t want fighting between German soldiers in Paris.”

  Returning to the Raphael they saw Colonel von Linstow. “Be patient a little longer,” he said.

  “I am thinking the worst,” replied Kraewel. “We need a decision immediately.”

  Seeing Linstow seized with nerves, Kraewel returned to Avenue Foch with Lieutenant David.117 Stulpnagel, while doubtless recognising that his fate was sealed, slowly began the process of damage limitation and ordered Boineburg to release Oberg and everyone taken prisoner during the evening.118

  “Boineburg, are you completely mad?” Oberg asked angrily when Boineburg entered the Hotel Continental. “What’s this all about?”

  “Ask my boss, General von Stulpnagel,” Boineberg replied phlegmatically. “He has asked me to take you to him. My car is waiting.”119

  Watched by night-shift cleaners, Oberg followed von Boineburg-Lengsfeld across the Continental’s vast foyer. It was 2am. In Berlin the conspiracy’s ringleaders already lay dead. At the Avenue Foch’s SD HQ, Kraewel took a call from Colonel von Unger ordering him to release everyone his men had arrested four hours earlier. Addressing his prisoners, Kraewel told them their arrest was suspended and their sidearms would be returned before his men departed. The ORs were returned from Fresnes and the Fort de l’Est in the same lorries as before. Returning to the Raphael, Kraewel saw Karl Oberg being led out.

  “What have you been up to, Kraewel?” asked Oberg.

  “I was simply obeying orders,” answered the young colonel.

  “I have been on the telephone to the Führer,” said Oberg. “He asked me how many Wehrmacht Schweinehunde I had shot. I told him ‘none’. Consider yourself fortunate that I said this to him because, without that, I would have had you shot. But now it’s too late. The moment has past. You’ve been lucky, Kraewel.”

  Before Kraewel left the Raphael, Boineburg ordered him to reassemble his regiment in the Clignancourt Barracks’ courtyard at 8.30am. Seeing Otto Abetz and General Blumentritt arriving at the Raphael, Kraewel refrained from asking questions.120

  Having lunched with Stulpnagel a few days previously, Abetz knew of Stulpnagel’s deep misgivings about Nazi policy and inevitably suspected that he was involved. Perhaps Abetz also wanted to control the failed conspiracy’s fallout. Closeted with Stulpnagel, Linstow, Knocken and Oberg, Abetz made a show of accepting Stulpnagel’s story that he sincerely believed Himmler was seizing power in Berlin and acted accordingly. Oberg did not believe a word of it, but Abetz’s intervention helped cool tempers while he persuaded everyone that the evening’s events were merely an exercise, carried off with Germanic efficiency. They drank to “comradeship” with champagne.121 Few, however, were fooled; not the SD who noticed the vehemence with which Kraewel’s men treated them, and certainly not Oberg or Knochen. Apparently as a courtesy, but in fact to cover his back, Boineburg showed Blumentritt and Oberg the draft of a speech he intended to make to Kraewel’s men.

  Eschewing the need for sleep, Stulpnagel went to his private apartment and began destroying incriminating papers. By 8am he was sitting at his desk in the Majestic. On the way there he met his friend Dr. Hans Buwert, whom he previously hoped might open negotiations with Allied diplomats in Lisbon. “Fate was against us,” said Stulpnagel. “We all did what we did for the best. You get to a place of safety as soon as you can.” Shortly afterwards Stulpnagel was called to Berlin; he knew what that meant.122

  At 8.30am Colonel von Kraewel paraded his men on the courtyard of Clignacourt Barracks. General von Boineburg-Lengsfeld, one of the luckiest men in the 20 July story, addressed them.

  “Soldiers, what you did last night was an exercise in order to check whether you will carry out your orders whatever the situation. This test has shown that you have been well trained. I congratulate you.”123

  21 July 1944

  HEARING OF THE FAILED COUP, Pétain remarked to General Neubronn, “So there are stirrings among you.” Later that day the old marshal drafted a letter commiserating with Hitler, but thoughts of Oradour-sur-Glane prevented him from sending it. Instead he allowed his aide, General Blasselle, to register his disapproval to Cecil von Renthe-Fink.124

  While residents of the 16th Arrondissement noticed the comings and goings from Avenue Foch, it took someone in Pierre Taittinger’s position to discover that the German authorities ordered seventy-five coffins from various Paris undertakers after 20 July. Taittinger was concerned for his “Alsatian” informant, an SD officer who helped Taittinger save several résistants who were former members of his Jeunesses Patriotes. The “Alsatian” had warned Taittinger about the SD’s private execution chambers equipped with blocks and axes for decapitation. Now Taittinger feared that his friend had been secretly done away with.125

  De Gaulle virtually ignores 20 July in his memoirs, even though Free France and the 20 July conspiracy attracted similar personalities. The sudden death that day of his London ambassador Pierre Viénot preoccupied him far more. Leclerc and Stauffenberg had much in common, but they never met each other and now they never would. Christian Girard wrote,

  There is talk of trouble in Germany; of clashes between the SS and the regular army. One must not supplant realities with desires and it would not be the first time, without adequate intelligence, that a collapse seemed imminent in the enemy camp. If such an event did happen, we here would be appallingly disappointed to arrive too late. I struggle with this embarrassing possibility, knowing that our joy would not be without mixed feelings in such an eventuality. Alas this disappointment has been spared us.

  In any case, the development in Germany of an anti-Nazi movement presents other dangers. If they did change régime, either tomorrow or the day after, they would expect all the sympathy of our American allies. They would treat with them and the English just as the Weimar Republic did in 1918. Fate now decreed that this would not happen. Already, over the last four years, many British and Americans have drawn a distinction between Germany and the Nazi regime. This tendency would not be left unexploited and the Germans would know how to use it to fool the Allies once again and we would have let them.

  Common sense should tell the Germans not to fight among themselves. That is how it must be. The defeat of Germany on her own soil is necessary for the peace of Europe. It may be terrible to write, but this necessary result is worth the lives it will cost. Through sparing them in 1918, Foch has cost us more lives than he saved. Today it is not our interests that count but those of future generations.126

  IF 20 July HAD SUCCEEDED, Karl-Heinrich von Stulpnagel might have taken the uniformed intellectual Ernst Junger into the Raphael’s blue dining room and told him the war was all but over. Instead Stulpnagel told Countess von Podewils to send Junger his regrets. Carrying his briefcase and a vacuum flask of coffee, Stulpnagel left the Hôtel Majestic, the Avenue Kléber sentries presenting arms to him for the last time.127

  Junger had only heard Stauffenberg mentioned a few times by Hofacker. The plethora of titled officers involved merely confirmed Junger’s view that when things were at their worst the aristocracy gets involved. But many officers expected terrible reprisals. Knowing several Paris conspirators personally, Junger struggled to preven
t himself from hitting one officer who called the Attentat (assassinatin attempt) “incredible muck”. Now the problem for Junger’s friends was “to keep the python in the bag and let them get away”. Such men tend to face the music, or become too depressed to do anything, like Colonel von Linstow who wandered the Raphael’s corridors “like a soul in pain”. Extraordinarily, Junger’s diary entry closes by declaring that Field Marshal Rommel’s injury on 17 July, “threw away the only pillar on which such an enterprise could have rested”. Then, almost mirroring Christian Girard’s words, Junger wrote, “Even if the operation had succeeded, we would today have twelve boils to lance instead of one, with court martials in every village, every road, every house. We are moving towards a crisis which is both deep and necessary, and such machinery does not work in reverse.”128

  By late afternoon Stulpnagel’s car reached the First World War battlefields. Once across the Meuse, Stulpnagel, with the map on his knee, gave his driver surprising directions, not towards Metz and the German border, but to Verdun where he had served in 1916. With a view of once bloodily disputed features, Stulpnagel told Sergeant Schauf to stop, then he walked to the banks of the Meuse, drew his pistol and shot himself in the temple. Rendered unconscious by the injury he fell into the river where his driver found him. The bullet blinded Stulpnagel but he was still breathing. In hindsight it might have been kinder if Schauf had allowed Stulpnagel to drown. But Schauf assumed that Stulpnagel had been shot by the Resistance and drove him to a military hospital.129

  Of the other key players of 20 July in Paris—General von Boineburg-Lengsfeld, General Brehmer and Colonel Baron von Kraewel—all three escaped the Gestapo dragnet that followed. Brehmer went to the Eastern Front. Kraewel took his regiment to Normandy. Boineburg remained in Paris for several weeks before being posted to the Swiss border. Why did these officers survive while others, like poor Colonel von Linstow, did not?

  “If we were not pursued or even questioned by a board of inquiry,” Boineburg later wrote, “then it is to Oberg that we owe this. He had several motives for not attacking us; not least of which was the fact that the night of 20 July was hardly glorious for him. He behaved like a girl. What would his chief, Himmler, have said had he known of the docile manner in which the head of the SS in France submitted to his arrest? Also I believe that Oberg, partly through military comradeship, did not want to ‘know too much’. Stulpnagel was going to pay; he was the leader of the conspiracy in Paris; that was enough. Why enlarge a matter in which Hitler could have found him culpable? Finally, in late July 1944, the military situation had become so dreadful that Oberg probably hesitated to do anything decisive. It was better to maintain unity between German forces. Lastly, given that there was no one to say anything else left in Paris, Oberg was happy to accept what we told him; we were simply carrying out orders.”130