To mark the glorious moment, the station broadcasts the mystic chords of “The Marseillaise,” the rousing anthem that had been banished in Paris ever since the Germans arrived here. Spontaneously, thousands of residents turn their radios up full blast and fling open their windows to make the still-darkened streets explode with the joyful sound of freedom.
Then Schaeffer returns to the microphone to command every Paris parish to start ringing its bells. Within minutes, every block is reverberating with the clanging noise, from the south tower of Notre-Dame to Sacré-Coeur high up on the hill.
IT WAS PARTICULARLY APPROPRIATE that this was all happening on the radio, because this was the medium that had done the most to stoke the fires of Resistance since the Occupation began. It was also the radio that transformed Charles de Gaulle from an unknown officer into the larger-than-life figure who was now being embraced as the nation’s savior — practically a Joan of Arc for his time.
His celebrity was almost entirely the product of the regular broadcasts the British had allowed him to make on the BBC. Between 1940 and 1944, he delivered sixty-eight speeches. Gradually, his broadcasts became as beloved among his countrymen as Churchill’s in Britain and Edward R. Murrow’s and Roosevelt’s in the United States. The Vichy government estimated that three hundred thousand French people were listening to de Gaulle at the beginning of 1941 — and three million just one year later.
As Ian Ousby observes, de Gaulle used the radio to accomplish “precisely what Pétain had hoped but miserably failed to do as leader of Vichy: he had become France. Actually, the claim to be France in some indefinable but potent way had been implicit in de Gaulle’s wartime utterances right from the moment of his arrival in Britain.”
The six-foot-five general is mobbed by grateful Frenchmen in every town and city he travels through after the Normandy invasion. Yet no one is more aware of the deep canyons of division in France, where some have fought the Germans, some have collaborated — and the vast majority have simply kept their heads down and tried desperately to get enough to eat.
De Gaulle knows exactly how he will smooth these divisions. He understands that France has been infected by a terrible disease, and denial is a necessary part of the cure, an indispensable part of the healing. On the eve of his return to Paris, this is how he envisions his task: He will “mold all minds into a single national impulse, but also cause the figure and the authority of the state to appear at once.”
DINING WITH HIS FELLOW OFFICERS at his headquarters at the opulent Hôtel Meurice hotel, facing the Tuileries, General Choltitz hears the clanging bells, and he knows exactly what they mean. “Gentlemen,” he tells his guests, “I can tell you something that’s escaped you here in your nice life in Paris. Germany’s lost this war, and we have lost it with her.” Later that evening, Choltitz’s aide, Count Dankwart von Arnim, writes in his diary, “I have just heard the bells of my own funeral.”
Shortly after midnight, Captain Werner Ebernach pays a visit to Choltitz. This is the German officer who has placed several hundred oxygen bottles, at a pressure of 180 atmospheres, to magnify the effect of the dynamite planted in the cellars of Les Invalides, two tons of explosives behind the pillars of the Chamber of Deputies, five tons of explosives under the Ministry of the Marine on the Place de la Concorde, mines on the southeast leg of the Eiffel Tower, and dynamite under more than forty Paris bridges spanning the Seine.
Ebernach has also heard the bells, and he understands what they mean just as well as the general does. Declaring his mission accomplished, Ebernach asks Choltitz if he has any further orders. The general does not. Then the captain asks for permission to withdraw, to avoid being captured by the advancing Allies. He explains that he will leave behind enough men to detonate all the bridges and monuments he has readied for destruction.
But Choltitz has another idea: “Take all your men and leave us,” he tells the colonel. Three hours later, all of the demolition experts of the 813th Pionierkompanie (combat engineers) have left the city, taking with them the principal menace to its most magnificent structures. From now on, the increasingly urgent query from Hitler and his minions — “Is Paris burning?” — will be greeted by nothing but silence.
Choltitz explained later that he had no fear of death, but he had begun to have nightmares in which he saw his own corpse suspended over the ruins of the City of Light.
FRENCH AND AMERICAN TROOPS roar into the city under a perfect summer sky on Friday, August 25, the Feast of St. Louis, which honors an unusually benevolent French king of the Middle Ages who had made his officials swear to give justice to all.
Choltitz is eager to surrender, but his sense of military honor compels him to put up a token defense. There is a brief but brutal battle outside his headquarters at the Hôtel Meurice and some heavy fighting near the Ecole Militaire and Les Invalides. German snipers increase Allied casualties, especially near the Tuileries.
French officers conduct the German general to the Préfecture, where General Leclerc has just started a celebratory lunch. Henri Rol-Tanguy, the Communist commander of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, barges in to demand that his name appear next to Leclerc’s on the document of surrender. Then the generals proceed to the Gare Montparnasse for the formal signing.a
German prisoners being marched down the rue de Rivoli on August 25, 1944.(photo credit 1.14)
At seven o’clock that evening, de Gaulle finally enters the capital. From the Hôtel de Ville, he delivers a radio address to the nation. In a speech that lasts less than five minutes, he sets the tone for all of his future efforts to bind up the wounds of his tortured nation.
Why should we hide the emotion which seizes us all, men and women, who are here, at home, in Paris that stood up to liberate itself and that succeeded in doing this with its own hands?
No! We will not hide this deep and sacred emotion. These are minutes which go beyond each of our poor lives. Paris! Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated! Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the French armies, with the support and the help of all France, of the France that fights, of the only France, of the real France, of the eternal France!
With those words, de Gaulle immortalizes all those who had fought the Germans as the only “real” Frenchmen of “eternal France.”
Well! Since the enemy which held Paris has capitulated into our hands, France returned to Paris. She has returned bleeding but resolute. She has returned, enlightened by this immense lesson, but more certain than ever of her responsibilities and her rights …
It would not even be enough, after what has happened, if with the help of our dear and admirable allies we chased him out of our country. We want to go to his country as we should, as conquerors.
This is why the French advance guard has entered Paris with guns blazing. This is why the great French army from Italy has landed in the south and is advancing rapidly up the Rhône valley. This is why our brave and dear Forces of the Interior are going to arm themselves with modern weapons. It is for this revenge, this vengeance and justice, that we will keep fighting until the last day, until the day of total and complete victory.
This duty of war, all the men who are here and all those who hear us in France know that it demands national unity. We, who have lived the greatest hours of our History, we have nothing else to wish than to show ourselves, up to the end, worthy of France.
Long live France!
Immediately after his speech, he reinforces his message of the one “real France” when he is asked to “proclaim the Republic before the people who have gathered here.” De Gaulle refuses to do so: “The Republic has never ceased. Free France, Fighting France, the French Committee of National Liberation have successively incorporated it. Vichy always was and still remains null and void. I myself am the President of the government of the Republic. Why should I proclaim it now?” (Two days earlier, he had said, “France is a country which continues, not a country which begins.”)
The next day, de Gaulle defies American commanders who want to use General Leclerc’s troops to guard the northeast approaches to the city. The French general concedes that militarily, the Americans are correct, but he insists, “We must have this parade,” and he needs Leclerc’s troops to provide security for the huge festivity. “Today we were to revive, by the spectacle of its joy and the evidence of its liberty, the self-awareness of a people who yesterday were crushed by defeat and scattered in servitude.”
At three o’clock in the afternoon, de Gaulle lays a huge wreath on the tomb of the unknown solider under the Arc de Triomphe and relights the eternal flame, the first Frenchman to do so without German minders watching since the Occupation had begun four years earlier. De Gaulle thinks Parisians are watching him “as though I were the materialization of a dream.”
Shots ring out as de Gaulle leaves the Champs-Élysées to turn into the place de la Concorde, and thousands dive to the sidewalks, although de Gaulle thinks most of the fire is pointed up into the air. The same thing happens again when he arrives in front of Notre-Dame, and it even continues inside the cathedral. But no one has ever been more certain that he is a man of destiny than he is. He wrote about himself on this day, “Since each of all of those here had chosen Charles de Gaulle in his heart as the refuge against his agony and the symbol of his hopes, we must permit the man to be seen … so that the national unity should shine forth at this sight.”
And so de Gaulle walks straight down the nave of the cathedral, never flinching at the sounds of gunfire.b
CHRISTIANE is among the millions of Parisians who descend upon the Champs-Élysées to celebrate their liberator. But she never really experiences “the euphoria of the liberation.”
“Everyone seemed happy and relieved,” she remembered. “There were many who greeted de Gaulle with acclaim, after they had supported Pétain. I viewed all of this from a certain distance. It was true that the war was almost over, but my parents and my brothers had been deported, my sister had stayed with the Maquis in the countryside, and I was completely alone in Paris.”
At midnight on August 26, hours after de Gaulle’s triumphant march through the city, the Nazis return one more time to terrorize the French capital. Ignoring the surrender, which had been signed by General Choltitz, German planes bomb Paris, destroying five hundred houses, setting fire to the wine market, and killing or wounding a thousand citizens.
* The Führer is not exaggerating. The day after this meeting with Choltitz, at least nine people are executed for their role in the assassination plot, including one field marshal, four generals, two captains, and Berthold von Stauffenberg, the brother of the ringleader. Four months later, Choltitz told his fellow generals, “This ‘Putsch’ of 20 July will be regarded as an event of historic significance. Those 1,500 men, hanged by these criminals, will all get a memorial dedicated to them, for they were the only patriotic, resolute and ‘ready to act’ men that we had.” (Neitzel, Tapping Hitler’s Generals) In fact, the widows of most of the anti-Hitler conspirators were initially denied pensions by the West German government, on the grounds that their husbands had been traitors. (www.dw.de/germany-remembers-operation-valkyrie-the-plot-to-kill-hitler/a-1271174)
† In fact, Patton’s 3rd Army does run out of gasoline, one hundred miles from the Rhine, on August 30 — five days after Paris is liberated. (Collins and Lapierre, Is Paris Burning? p. 219)
‡ Although this is the last such prisoner train from Paris to reach Germany, there are several later ones from other parts of France. (http://dora-ellrich.fr/les-hommes-du-convoi-du-15-aout-1944/)
§ De Gaulle doesn’t know the exact numbers, but French casualties are mounting in Paris: 125 killed and 479 wounded on August 19, and another 106 killed and 357 wounded the following day.
ǁ Paris Police Headquarters.
a Choltitz was taken prisoner by the British, who sent him, along with many other captured German officers, to the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre at Trent Park, near Enfield in Middlesex, where all of their conversations were secretly bugged. In October 1944, Choltitz declared, “We are also to blame. We have cooperated and have almost taken the Nazis seriously … We’ve let those stupid cattle talk and chatter to us … I feel thoroughly ashamed. Maybe we are far more to blame than those uneducated cattle who in any case never hear anything else at all. It wouldn’t be so bad if we Generals, or the generation before us, for that matter, hadn’t taken part. The trouble is that we participated without a murmur.” The general also said, “The worst job I ever carried out — which however I carried out with great consistency — was the liquidation of the Jews. I carried out this order down to the very last detail.” Choltitz was probably referring to actions he took in Crimea. (Neitzel, Tapping Hitler’s Generals) From Britain, Choltitz was sent to Camp Clinton, Mississippi. He was released by the Allies in 1947. In 1950, he published a memoir, Brennt Paris? (Is Paris Burning?). He wrote that he had refused to blow up Paris because he thought Hitler was crazy and the destruction of the French capital would make any future friendship between France and Germany impossible. His memoir was a principal source for Is Paris Burning? by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. He received a German general’s pension of $675 a month. He died in Baden-Baden in 1966 at the age of seventy-one.
b None of the snipers was ever caught alive, or identified. De Gaulle believed they were agents provocateurs, who had fired “a few bullets into the air” to “create the impression that certain threats were still lurking in the shadows” and “that the resistance organizations must remain armed and vigilant.” (de Gaulle, Complete War Memoirs, p. 658)
Eighteen
We must not forget that we owe a great debt to the blunders — the extraordinary blunders — of the Germans.
— Winston Churchill, addressing Parliament, September 1944
TWO DAYS AFTER the Liberation, Christiane goes to a police station to request a gendarme to accompany her to her parents’ apartment. When she walks through the front door, she discovers a hovel: the Germans have looted everything, from her mother’s jewelry to her father’s rare books.*
When she is alone in the ravaged apartment, a neighbor appears, the father of a young girl who is Christiane’s age. He says he is there to comfort her, but when she lets him in, he tries to rape her. “I was shocked and quite undone. After everything else I had been through, this was really too much.”
To escape her brutal neighbor, her loneliness, and her parents’ decimated home, Christiane leaves Paris at the end of August by car to rejoin the Maquis and Jacqueline in the Morvan: “She was all I had left.” At the end of September, the region is liberated. On October 21, Jean Longhi (Grandjean) presents Christiane with the Croix de Guerre. The self-effacing Résistante is annoyed by this recognition of her bravery: “I considered all of my clandestine activity to be a matter of course, and now a decoration! After so many dramas and so many deaths, it seemed like a ridiculous gesture.”
Christiane and Jacqueline return to Paris and their parents’ apartment. Their lives are brightened by their new tenant, Lieutenant Henry Kaiser, the charismatic Brooklynite who is a labor lawyer and the labor adviser to the occupying American Army.
Then Christiane suffers one more serious scare. Jacqueline becomes ill, and the doctor telephones Christiane and asks to see her alone. He tells her Jacqueline has only a few months to live. After all the other catastrophes she has already endured, Christiane feels completely overwhelmed — until she takes the X-rays to her friend Dr. Cler for a second opinion.
After examining them, Cler explains that they actually show only a few benign traces of an old case of pleurisy. He promises Christiane her sister will recover before long — and she does.
THE SISTERS’ GREATEST PREOCCUPATION is the fate of their parents and their brothers, about whom they have heard nothing since André’s letter from Flossenbürg the previous summer. At first they don’t even know that their father has been sent to Buchenwald, their mother to Ravensbrück, a women’s concentration camp about ninety miles north of Berlin, and Robert to Ellrich, a subcamp of Dora-Mittelbau, about twelve miles away.
By November, they have learned their father’s whereabouts. A family friend, Pierre Lefaucheux, miraculously returns from Buchenwald, and Christiane immediately goes to see him. When she arrives at his house, he is at the dinner table with friends. She hears laughter from the dining room while she waits for them to finish. When dinner ends, he finally tells Christiane that despite the dire conditions at Buchenwald, her father is fine. But the friend is obviously uncomfortable, and she wonders if he is telling the truth or just doesn’t want to alarm her.
The daughters know nothing about their mother’s fate. But her husband, Jacques, actually hears from Hélène shortly after he arrives at Buchenwald. She is permitted to write one letter a month, and he receives her first one toward the end of September. Jacques’s college classmate Etienne Audibert, who was with him in the camp, recorded what happened next.
Although letter writing from one camp to another continued to be authorized, after that [Jacques] never received another letter [from his wife]. He could not fail to understand what that meant. This was the greatest blow that could have struck him, and it crushed his indomitable energy. Once his moral resolve had been broken, there was nothing left for him but death; that is the law of the camp. He succumbed on February 18, 1945.
Jacques’s deduction had been correct: Hélène had died at Ravensbrück on October 25, 1944, just two months after she had been waterboarded by the Nazis.
The Cost of Courage Page 16