Von Choltitz explained that, while he was entitled to make decisions, many officers who had signed existing orders or whose authorisation Nordling needed were already leaving Paris, including his services officer, Major Huhm. “Hurry,” said Choltitz, “Huhm is leaving Paris at noon today.” Huhm’s office was at the Hôtel Majestic on Avenue Kléber.4
Nordling found the Champs Élysées and the Étoile deserted, but barriers were being erected around the Avenue Kléber as well. Outside the Majestic, as lorries came and went, smoke wafted from paper incinerators stoked by soot-smeared clerks. Major Huhm received Nordling immediately.
“General von Choltitz has just told me that he is disposed to allocate to myself the security of the political prisoners,” Nordling told Huhm. “In so far as this matter concerns your office, I hope that you will not be difficult.”5
Since Nordling carried no papers, Huhm had a junior officer telephone the Meurice for confirmation of what Nordling told him. Once Huhm received this confirmation, negotiations with Nordling began. Sadly, Huhm was quite a Nazi and, strictly speaking, more under General Kitzinger’s orders than von Choltitz’s; a pretext for being difficult.
“We ought to establish a convention,” said Major Huhm. “If we liberate French prisoners then surely we ought to get back twenty-five German prisoners of war for every French civilian we’re holding.”
“I don’t have any German prisoners,” said Nordling. “And I have no reason to capture any.”
But Huhm was intransigent, saying he saw no reason to make any agreement that did not benefit Germany. Although utterly powerless to make concessions, Nordling offered Huhm five Germans for each French detainee. Huhm went to find von Choltitz at the Hôtel Meurice while Nordling conferred with the advocate Maitre Mettetal and résistants linked to Algiers. Nordling also contacted his Swiss opposite number, René Naville, believing Naville’s support would be more effective than involving the Swedish Foreign Ministry in Stockholm.
With undertakings he hoped would satisfy Huhm—even if the release of five Germans for each detainee was impossible to implement—Nordling returned to Huhm’s office. The next obstacle the malign Huhm threw at Nordling was that the rubber stamps necessary for the order to become official were packed for the journey eastwards. Luckily a clerk remembered which packing case contained the stamps and pulled them out. According to Maitre Mettetal’s “convention”, all political detainees “whether in Paris or its environs” and “all trains of evacuation without exception were to be placed under the authority of the Consul-General of Sweden, Monsieur Raoul Nordling, and left under the supervision of the French Red Cross.” It also stipulated that the German authorities relinquished control of these prisoners to the Swedish Consul-General and the French Red Cross. The final document comprised two pages of legalistic French. Surprisingly Major Huhm congratulated himself on this agreement, adding in his own hand, “The military command has no objection to the above accord.” Following Huhm’s signature, the document was stamped.6
Now Nordling needed SS agreement to ensure the prisoners were handed over. After visiting von Choltitz again, Nordling and Bender arrived at Oberg’s HQ on Boulevard Lannes. Bender entered Oberg’s office bearing the convention now signed by General von Choltitz and Major Huhm. Oberg wrote on the convention, “There are no political detainees in Paris, or in the environs, since the order to evacuate them was given on 15 August.”
Nordling was unsure what to make of this; he saw prisoners peering from the windows of Fresnes that morning. And what about other prisons: Cherche-Midi, Santé, Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, Saint Denis, La Pitié, Val-de-Grace, and the camps at Compiegne, Drancy and Romainville? Nordling and Bender went swiftly to the Cherche-Midi jail, the mid-nineteenth-century military establishment which replaced the old Abbaye Prison at the junction of the Rue du Cherche-Midi and the Boulevard Raspail. Nordling found the gates shut and locked. When Count de Rohan-Chabot arrived they looked over the wall. The prison was abandoned. “Oberg was right,” wrote Nordling. “Was Huhm’s convention simply a comedy?”
At Fresnes, however, little had changed since their morning visit. Immediately after seeing the convention, Fresnes’ German governor telephoned the Hôtel Meurice to obtain confirmation from General von Choltitz. Choltitz said that it only refered to the sick. But among underfed and demoralised prisoners, Nordling realised that von Choltitz’s phrase could be interpreted very widely. The governor co-operated. Rohan-Chabot, who was imprisoned there earlier in the Occupation, savoured the moment. “The roles have changed,” he murmured to Nordling. “Now it’s us taking charge of things.” Hearing the remark, the German governor took it in good humour and went to find the prisoner list. Meanwhile a barrister appeared demanding the release of seven clients who had been acquitted.
“It’s no longer me in charge here,” said the governor. “Fresnes is now under the orders of Consul General Nordling.”
The barrister recognised Nordling from a previous occasion.
“What’s this comedy?” the barrister asked. “Have you suddenly become a prison governor?”
Once Nordling explained the situation and authorised the release of the seven acquittals and others besides, the barrister was delighted. Next Nordling ordered the Red Cross flag to be raised over the prison. The women and sick were released first. Ambulances were called to take the sickest to hospitals. The male detainees would have to wait for their release until the following day.7
The five hundred dishevelled female prisoners suddenly released had no money for food or to book themselves into modest hotels for the night, forcing Nordling to offer four hundred thousand francs from consulate funds, though he knew the French Red Cross would reimburse him. One woman was too frightened to leave her cell. She was one of twenty-five condemned to death and was convinced she would be taken to the execution yard. When female warders tried to pull her out, she fought them off, only agreeing to leave when an interpreter explained Nordling’s convention.8
Next on Nordling’s list was a trainload of prisoners about to leave the Gare de l’Est. Nordling and Fiévet arrived around 5.30pm and showed the convention to SD and Gestapo officials. Far from finding a repeat of the co-operation experienced at Fresnes, Nordling was told that if he or his companions approached the train they would be shot. Nordling consoled himself with the possibility that the Resistance might stop the train east of Paris, and moved on to the Prison des Tourelles. There the warders were French and co-operated immediately.
The Fort de Romainville at Les Lilas held around sixty women, some quite young, who had the status of hostages. Among them were Madame Krug, a member of the champagne family, and Madame Peyerimhoff. Romainville was guarded by SS Captain Achenbach and a company of Georgians, who understood little German and no French. When Nordling arrived at Romainville’s buff brick gatehouse, he found the Georgian guards drunk. When he finally got one of them to fetch Achenbach, Nordling was told they would only obey orders from the SS HQ at Compiègne. For the time being Nordling had to accept defeat. However, he did manage to persuade Achenbach to allow two French Red Cross nurses to enter the fort and care for the sickest prisoners. Noticing the appreciative glances these nurses received from the Georgians, Nordling extracted an undertaking from Achenbach that the nurses would not be “violated”.9
By early evening Nordling reached Drancy, the wretched transit camp created from unfinished blocks of flats, from which Jews were transported to concentration camps. It was not known as “the antechamber of death” for nothing. Bender drove his car through the gate first. While Nordling and Fiévet waited they noticed a black German staff car leaving the camp carrying the sadistic SS Captain Alois Brunner, a major German player in the Holocaust. Having deported ninety thousand Austrian and Greek Jews to their deaths, Brunner arrived in France where he was directly involved in deporting twenty-five thousand Jews. As one of Himmler’s élite, Brunner was recalled and would soon assist in liquidating Slovakia’s last Jews. As Brunner passed through th
e gates, Nordling gained entry. On the face of it, for a warm summer evening, conditions were not too bad. Young Jews were wearing shorts and summer dresses, albeit scruffy. Some inmates sat on grass lawns. But the guards’ control was obviously loosening. Although Brunner sent fifty-one Jews to Buchenwald that morning, the rest were released to Nordling. In one fell swoop “the Gentleman of Paris” liberated 1,482 Jews; but it was impracticable for them to leave Drancy without identity cards, money and food, which were organised for the following day.10
After Drancy, Nordling’s convoy returned briefly to Paris before driving out to Compiègne where the transit camp of Royallieu held twenty-four hundred Jews. Doubtless intending to grease the wheels of Nordling’s efforts, the Marquis de Mun had telegraphed the French Red Cross’s representatives at Compiègne that the inmates of Royallieu would soon be released. Messieurs Grammont and de Laguiche, in their turn, approached the Commandant, SS Haupsturmführer Heinrich Illers, who smugly claimed to know nothing of the convention signed by Major Huhm, and that the last prisoners would soon leave for Germany. Then one of the two Red Cross representatives foolishly suggested that force might be used if Illers did not comply; and if that failed the Resistance could simply stop the train. Furious, Illers telephoned Oberg who scoffed back down the telephone. About that moment, Bender arrived and, being an intelligence officer, began to parley with Illers. Illers accused Bender of treason and threatened to have him summarily executed. Bender angrily replied that he had orders from General von Choltitz, and that it would be Illers himself facing Wehrmacht discipline. Illers’ riposte was that both the Gestapo and the Feldgendarmerie had orders to arrest Bender. “You won’t get far,” sneered Illers.11
At this point Nordling arrived, accompanied by Erich von Posch-Pastor and the Mayor of Compiègne, delighted to be liberating Royallieu. But Bender said negotiation was pointless, that they should dim their headlights and follow him away from the camp. “I think you’ll have to go your own way,” Posch-Pastor said quietly to Nordling. “One has to think about security.”
Without using headlights, Bender tried to navigate back to Paris by moonlight just as an air-raid began on the banlieues’ remaining industry. Suddenly they found themselves on the edge of a Luftwaffe airfield, where they halted until the raid ended. Continuing on their way, Count de Rohan-Chabot, who was driving Nordling, fell asleep at the wheel, causing a small collision with a Wehrmacht lorry. Back in Paris, both Bender and Posch-Pastor decided to remain inside Wehrmacht controlled buildings while Oberg remained in the city.12
“LA GRANDE FUITE DES FRITZS” applied to collabos as well, notably Darnand’s Miliciens. By 1944 Joseph Darnand knew he had made the wrong choice, though he attempted to persuade himself and others that he had acted on principle. He had lost great friends to the Resistance. Nor was he too stupid to recognise that the Resistance was now larger and better equipped than the Milice ever was. Informing Pétain that the Milice had suffered eighteen hundred killed and wounded, with another eight hundred missing, did not prevent Pétain being disgusted with him. On 10 August Darnand advised all Miliciens in the Ile de France to prepare to leave for Nancy, where they would regroup under the Waffen SS. Laval released eighty million francs for expenses, which was supplemented by another sixty million from the Germans (following recommendations from Abetz) which reached Milice coffers by 17 August. Minus their dependants, they assembled at the Lycée Saint-Louis. From there, on buses seized from the police by Jean Bassompierre, they left for Nancy.13
A fellow traveller now going eastwards was young right-wing journalist Christian de la Mazière, the future lover of Juliette Greco and Dalida, who was interviewed for Marcel Ophuls’ documentary film The Sorrow and the Pity. Brought up on Action Française, throughout his youth La Mazière regarded the Left as a threat to the “Old France” values he held dear. After la Chute he was retained by Vichy’s hundred thousand man French Army until 1942 before becoming a collabo writer on Pierre Clementi’s right-wing magazine, Le Pays Libre. When D-Day became imminent, Roger Pingeault, another journalist on Clementi’s journal advised La Mazière to switch to de Gaulle.
“Wake up, old fellow,” Pingeault told him. “Hitler is finished. It’s time to give up.”
“Have you forgotten the men from all over Europe who are fighting on the Eastern Front?” La Mazière replied.
“Rest assured they’ll be quickly forgotten when the war is over,” said Pingeault.
And the fact that his girlfriend’s outwardly collabo mother was also hiding Allied airmen made little difference. Alain Ballot, a résistant working on escape lines, told La Mazière, “You’ve been acting stupidly long enough, now you’ve got to listen to me.” But, sharing Rhett Butler’s taste for lost causes, La Mazière reported to the Kriegsmarine building in France’s former Navy Ministry on the Place de la Concorde where Miliciens and Francs-Gardes were assembling. After an interview with Max Knipping, La Mazière received SS induction papers from an office at the Hôtel Majestic. Unlike ordinary Miliciens, La Mazière did not travel to Nancy in Bassompierre’s buses but in his own smart little car.14
Many collabos and Miliciens departing eastwards honestly believed that Germany’s setbacks were only temporary and that they could soon return. The previous week the PPF’s Jacques Doriot and Victor Barthelémy had planned a new cabinet over dinner. And on 16 August, dining with Jean Lecan on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, everyone believed the golden years of collaboration would continue, until Radio Paris’ collabo anchorman Jean-Herold Pacquis arrived to inform them that all significant collabos were advised to leave France. At once Barthelémy went to the PPF offices on the Rue des Pyramides and went through the PPF accounts; the millions of francs they had gathered from collabo businessmen. In lorries seized from Les Halles by pretending to be résistants, the PPF left Paris, leaving roads lined with astonished faces.15
Other collabos were prevented from joining the exodus to Germany by inertia and denial. Collabo journalist Robert Brasillach wrote, “They say the Germans will leave today and that the Americans will come. I ate at Solange’s bistro, everyone was talking about it. It’s idiotic because the Americans still have the Germans right in front of them and the Germans too will have to go somewhere. When I look at Paris I try to take its pulse, not from people’s faces, but from the avenues and intersections. What kinds of faces are the houses making tonight? The ones at the corner of the Gobelins don’t look like they are expecting anything important to happen.”16
If Brasillach was living in a fool’s paradise, Vichy Jew-baiter Louis Darquier de Pellepoix’s conduct that summer was even more extraordinary. An énergumène (oddball) who could only have achieved power under a crackpot régime like Vichy, Darquier de Pellepoix and his slavishly loyal Australian wife Myrtle became rich on the proceeds of expropriated Jewish property and selling Aryanisation certificates. This enabled them to live swankily in the Rue du Fauborg-Saint-Honoré’s Hôtel Bristol, where he remained undisturbed throughout August while smaller collabos were arrested and degraded.17
ON THAT SAME DAY, FIELD MARSHAL MODEL took over from von Kluge. With Normandy gone and Allied landings on the Riviera, OKW ordered a general evacuation of France. Model’s task was to uphold dicipline and ensure the retreat did not become a rout. Shortly after arriving at Saint-Germain en Laye, Model had a Wehrmacht medical officer shot for drunkenness. At the Hôtel Meurice, Lieutenant Dankwart von Arnim was reprimanded for not wearing a helmet. When Model arrived in von Choltitz’s office, announcing that he was replacing von Kluge, von Choltitz, who was unaware of Kluge’s suicide, asked if Kluge knew he was being replaced. Model nodded gravely, leaving von Choltitz under the impression that Kluge would be joining others at Plotzensee.18
Without indicating his distaste for Hitler’s orders, von Choltitz explained the situation in Paris and the measures so far taken. He also showed Model a CPL affiche calling Parisians to arms. “But,” wrote von Choltitz, “I made no mention to the field marshal of the orders I had received
to blow up the bridges. He [Model] had come straight from the Eastern Front; hence he was in a totally different mindset to that which reigned in Paris. Besides, this general, frequently wounded, was so exhausted by the dreadful thirty-six-hour journey that it did not seem the appropriate moment to discuss such complex issues with him. After a frugal dinner in the mess, he departed for his HQ. I did not see him again.”19 An officer like Model would hardly have regarded destroying bridges as too complex, however tired he was.
THE 2e DB HELD ITS TRIANGULAR POSITIONS south of Argentan for four days. But General Gaffey still wanted Leclerc’s division to join in an attack northwards. A visit from Jacques de Guillebon resulted in Gaffey agreeing that the 2e DB should not weaken its present positions. If absolutely necessary Leclerc decided only to commit GT Langlade, giving Langlade strict instructions only to take up positions supporting the 90th Infantry Division but not to attack without Leclerc’s orders. Leclerc also decided to send his senior US liaison officer, Major Robert Loumiansky, to the 90th Infantry’s HQ to explain his viewpoint that it was a bad operation; “Badly prepared, misconceived and badly organised,” said Leclerc, smiling at Loumiansky.20
Along with deciding which attacks should proceed, the matter of who would command V Corps remained atop Patton’s agenda that morning. He needed to fly to Eagletac to see Bradley, but the previous night’s bad weather had become quite a storm. It would be noon before Patton could take off. Before leaving, Patton prewarned Hap Gay that if he wanted Gerow to replace Gaffey he would simply radio “Change horses”.21 Bradley had not slept well, concerned that he was over-relying on Ultra, while allowing Patton to advance to the Seine meant there might be insufficient forces at Argentan to close the gap. Leclerc, whom Bradley regarded as undisciplined, said as much to Gaffey.22 A combination of bad weather and command indecision gave Model a breathing space.
Paris '44: The City of Light Redeemed Page 24