Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, 1940-1944 (24 page)

Meanwhile, the Embassy made much of a message from Joseph Goebbels expressing his hope and expectations for a positive contribution by France to an “ultimate victory.”
⁴¹
But what were the prospects at a moment when enemy forces were moving to encircle Paris? An attempted answer to that question was contained in a later Abwehr report reviewing the events of that August. At the month's beginning, following the optimistic statements by Goebbels and also Heinrich Himmler, morale among the Occupation authorities was “still rather good.” But rapid Allied advances brought “strong discouragement.” Germans in Paris were impatiently awaiting the deployment of new weapons “on which all hopes are pinned.” Then, revealingly, the memorandum added a sentence that said it all: “Everyone hopes for a miracle through the new weapons, since only through them can the war be concluded with success for us.”
⁴²
Unfortunately for them, there was only one miracle weapon that could now have saved the Third Reich, and Germany did not possess it. Undeterred, the Propaganda Section duly repeated the official gospel by claiming, barely one week before the Allies stormed Paris, that “signs are already visible of an impending change of the war in favor of Germany.”
⁴³

Cooler heads prevailed. On 9 August 1944, the MBF staff began preparations for the long anticipated
Sonderfall
of evacuating the capital. Three days later, the Abwehr commenced “destructive measures” by shredding and burning its secret files.
⁴⁴
On the following morning, 13 August, instructions were issued to the entire MBF staff for a pullout from the Hotel Majestic to St. Dié and Fraize. The Hotel Ritz was emptied of personnel on the next day. Simultaneously, an incident occurred at the Place de la République where German female staff workers were being evacuated from the Hotel Moderne. Crowds gathered to witness the event, and as the women mounted into trucks, they were showered with catcalls and whistles. By then, after confiscating twenty Paris busses, several trucks, and automobiles, the entire military administration had departed.
⁴⁵

On 15 August 1944, Adolf Hitler gave orders to destroy Paris factories, bridges, and public buildings, which had been mined for the purpose. The current military commander in France, General Karl Kitzinger, had arrived from Ukraine in late July to replace Stülpnagel, a week after the abortive coup attempt that ended the latter's tenure as MBF. Unfamiliar with circumstances in Paris or with the elaborate bureaucracy he was supposed to direct, Kitzinger was completely ineffectual in the post to which he had been hastily assigned. His flight from Paris was scarcely noticed. Instead, another figure appeared in the person of General Dietrich von Choltitz, who had been awarded the grandiose title Commanding General and Military Commander of Greater Paris (Kommandierender General und Wehrmachtsbefehlshaber von Gross-Paris). He was, in short, not the successor of the cousins Stülpnagel but of Ernst Schaumburg. Choltitz promptly announced that since Paris had become part of the war zone, his assignment would be to defend the capital city and to maintain law and order there. As is long and well-known, however, Choltitz hesitated to execute Hitler's wishes for the city's destruction, although the matter was pending and the outcome still uncertain. In the meantime, the municipal police of Paris went on strike, and outbursts of violence erupted on the streets. Because German intentions were unclear, barricades were erected overnight, arms were distributed, and calls for insurrection brought many Parisians into the streets. As a result, the ensuing ferocious melee understandably but perhaps needlessly cost the lives of those excited French patriots whose names are now commemorated on dozens of small plaques throughout the capital. Doubtless they wanted to do something to save the honor of France, or their own, but the liberation of the city was already assured. Paris was not burning. On 25 August 1944, Choltitz was admonished that his garrison must surrender or face “total extermination.” He met that afternoon with French General Leclerc and other Allied officers at the Gare Montparnasse and issued orders that hostilities should cease.
⁴⁶
The Occupation of Paris was terminated.

E
PILOGUE

The Long Handshake

T
he Germans were great record-keepers. During the four years and two months of the Occupation of Paris, they managed to produce tens of thousands of documents that recorded in minute detail every conceivable aspect of their military administration. Even though a substantial portion of those papers was either scattered or deliberately destroyed as the Occupation came to a close, huge quantities of them remain—vastly more than a single scholar could digest in a lifetime. From that surfeit of evidence it is necessary to select, and on that selection the historical record must be based. Of all the documents written near the Occupation's end or shortly thereafter, one stands out. Although this memorandum was undated and unsigned, it was clearly composed by an officer within the military administration at the Hotel Majestic, one who witnessed the final days and then sat down to describe the Occupation's evolution and dénouement.
¹

According to this extraordinarily perceptive account, the Allied invasion came as no surprise. Planning for the eventuality of an evacuation of Paris had proceeded for months before the June 1944 landing, and few in the Majestic harbored any illusions that such an outcome could be averted. By the beginning of August, with the news that the Allied surge from Normandy could no longer be contained, that assumption became a certainty. Yet the capital seemed quieter than ever. Because of the shortage of electricity, city lights burned only for one hour at dawn and another before midnight. Theaters, cinemas, bars, and restaurants were closed. Meanwhile, German military staff members in the Majestic worked on, and they continued every day to receive visits from the same French officials who had come to their offices during the past months and years. If not friends, they had come to know one another and had developed a close personal relationship. All of them, French and German, knew that the end was approaching, but no one dared to express that reality in words. As a rule, there was no jesting or hinting, no clever remark or strained parting salutation. Instead, the only indication of a farewell was an unusually lengthy silent clasp of hands.
²

To understand the significance of that gesture, one must keep a firm grasp of chronological sequence. The German Occupation had evolved over time, and with it so had the meaning of collaboration. No doubt, that term has become a dirty word in the lexicon of French history, but only gradually did it acquire the thoroughly pejorative connotations that we now associate with it.

During the first phase of the Occupation, before the German invasion of Russia, nothing seemed more natural than, in a literal sense, “working together.” That was immediately apparent, for instance, when German soldiers joined French farmers in the harvest of early autumn 1940. Everyone had an interest in the gathering, distribution, and sale of foodstuffs that, as a result, initially remained in abundant supply. In central Paris, commerce thus resumed quickly after the fall of France, and the cooperation of French and German functionaries to promote it was taken for granted. Meanwhile, in Paris the Germans were to be seen everywhere: in the metro, on the streets, in restaurants and shops, at the theater, and also in bars and brothels. Each personal encounter implicated the French ever deeper in approval or acceptance of the unavoidable circumstances of Occupation. Collaboration assumed a multiplicity of forms, and complicity became a commonplace of daily life. The persistence of a black market provided a perfect example. Attempts to suppress it proved to be of little avail, since French and Germans alike benefited from it. The geographic division of France, the existence of a Vichy regime, and the nimbus of glorification that surrounded Marshal Pétain also gave collaboration an aura of respectability. Even the Communist Party, at first restrained by the Nazi-Soviet Pact, adopted a stance that verged on acquiescence. Raucous political activity was all but eliminated from the public sphere, and with rare exceptions the Church hierarchy meekly complied with admonitions to maintain a low profile. Before June 1941, in short, collaboration seemed an eminently sensible arrangement between victors and vanquished.

Germany's assault on the Soviet Union changed that ambiance by setting off a wave of terrorism and repression in the Occupied Zone. Assassinations and attacks on German military personnel brought on prompt retributions by Occupation authorities, who hoped thereby to master the situation and restore order. They largely failed to do so, however, and a hostage crisis became the big stinking albatross of the Occupation. These developments not only caused a change in the military command in Paris, they cleared the way for the arrival of the two most unsavory characters in the entire German cadre of administration, Carl Oberg and Fritz Sauckel. By seizing control respectively of the police and the economy, this pair of officers contributed significantly to altering the atmosphere in 1942 and consequently to redefining collaboration. Previously held in abeyance, an unapologetic brutality now reached the surface. In effect, the Occupation thereby underwent a process of Nazification, for which the police razzias and roundups of Jews—notably that of the Vel d’Hiv—were the signature events. This context explains the pivotal figure of René Bousquet, whose pact with the devil, by supposedly trading alacrity for autonomy, gave collaboration a new and more sinister meaning. There could be no scientific measurement of the response of the French population, but analyses by German propaganda officials were unanimous on two points: that the majority of Parisians had adopted a more tentative attitude toward their nation's cooperation in a Nazi-dominated Europe, and that public opinion depended entirely on the military progress of the war.

The verdict was rendered at the outset of the third phase of the Occupation by the Allied invasion of North Africa and the crushing defeat of the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad. Now entirely occupied, France had already slipped far down the slope of collaboration. When Pierre Laval, speaking for Vichy, announced that he wished for a German victory, he was doing no more than drawing the ultimate logical conclusion from his regime's prior actions and policies. It was altogether appropriate, therefore, that Laval increasingly leaned on Joseph Darnard and his Milice, a vigilante force representing a desperate attempt to maintain law and order. But after early 1943, it was clear that Germany was losing the struggle for hegemony in Europe. It was also obvious that the collaborationists had long since crossed a line, and there was no turning back. Their options were limited to victory or defeat. Laval desired the first, to which he and his followers were irrevocably attached, but he would soon have to accept the other. The same was true of German authorities in Paris. Some of them still talked a good game, but the encroaching military reality now dictated that preparations be made to abandon their post. Many tasks of the Occupation were thus left unfinished, due in part to the half-hearted cooperation of French functionaries during the last phase of its existence and to the increasingly open hostility of the French population, but also to the unresolved internal conflicts of the German regime and the ever more acute shortage of its administrative manpower. Amply documented in this study, these factors proved in the end to have far-reaching ramifications for the Occupation's lagging attempts to exploit the French economy, repress the mounting waves of public violence, and complete the planned expulsion of all Jews from France.

A perceptible sense of inevitability enveloped the capital city after the Allied invasion of Normandy. The period from that time until the final days in August 1944 could constitute for the Occupation only a postscript that was bound to culminate in the liberation of Paris. That event, we must recall, had by no means appeared predestined in the summer of 1940. It did not seem so until the summer of 1944. In the interval, Parisians had endured the trying, humiliating, and essentially absurd experience of a German Occupation. It ended, without a word, with a long handshake at the Hotel Majestic.

It is always unwise to put too much weight on a metaphor. Yet, without any wish to add a faux happy ending to what was surely one of the cruelest and saddest chapters in European history, it is permissible to observe here that the remarkable reconciliation of France and Germany since the Second World War cannot properly be detached from the trauma mutually shared at close quarters by the two nations for more than four years. This wrenching experience should not simply be counted as an unfortunate interlude to be placed within parentheses, as if the Fourth Republic followed directly from the Third. Rather, disturbing as that might seem, the Occupation must be seen as an integral prelude to the years thereafter. In a certain sense, the long handshake endures to this day. Could this be because the Occupation had a salutary effect of demystifying both sides and dispelling tired myths about being hereditary enemies? Otherwise, there may be no adequate explanation for the emergence of a united post-war Europe.

If so, of course, that would constitute only half of the story. The rest, frequently and ably recounted elsewhere, concerns the complex interaction of the clandestine French Resistance and the exiled Free French, who together participated in the liberation of Paris and the nation—not to mention the largely unrecorded and often costly acts of individual citizens who resented collaboration and in their fashion opposed it at every opportunity. One finds relatively few references to these matters in this text, for which there are several explanations. First is the fact that the two branches of German military administration most directly involved with repressing insurgent activity in Paris, the Abwehr and the Gestapo, were also the most scrupulous in destroying self-incriminating records before departing from the capital in August 1944. The resulting paucity of such hard evidence therefore necessarily precludes a close examination of German attempts to thwart potential insurrectionary organizations in Paris. Secondly, the Germans soon learned that the delicate assignment of singling out genuine French “terrorists” from the civilian population (as they tried to do during the hostage crisis) was often better left to the French police—in particular, the Brigades Spéciales, whose repeated dragnets were highly effective in rounding up Parisians suspected of direct responsibility for acts of violence. Traditional police methods, in other words, were sometimes more efficacious than the more clumsy and brutal tactics of the Occupation's own forces. The Germans, in truth, were often ignorant of the nature of the Resistance, and what they did not know, they usually did not record. Furthermore, as noted, until the very last days of the Occupation, Paris was remarkably quiet, occasional bomb attacks and assassinations notwithstanding. The heavily patrolled boulevards and streets of the inner city provided scant protection for incipient movements of armed resistance. From the beginning, Paris was literally swarming with German military personnel, Gestapo agents, and police officials of all sorts. If the French capital can in some regard be said to have become the headquarters of the Resistance by 1944, it was unquestionably also the pith of repression. It was therefore grimly appropriate that the capture and severe torture of Jean Moulin occurred not in Paris but in Lyon. Those distressing events, as well as the entire history of Resistance fighters in the
maquis
, transpired well beyond the purview of this volume, and as a consequence they have found little place here.

To strike a final and fair balance is accordingly difficult. It would doubtless be too much of a stretch, and perhaps even a bit perverse, to ascribe the character of today's Europe solely to its antecedents in Franco-German collaboration during the war years. Yet the opposite pole, uncomfortably seated in a sweeping definition of the French Resistance, also has its share of ambiguities. The latter properly features such distinguished names as Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, and especially Charles de Gaulle. No one can forget the image of that other long clasp of hands, as de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer stood side by side in the cathedral of Reims. We must recall, however, that it was a defeated, divided, and morally weakened Germany to which de Gaulle became reconciled. He made his peace with Bonn, not with Berlin. It appears, in fact, that he is more likely to be remembered not as a deeply committed European but as the last great champion of conservative French nationalism, whose efforts to refurbish the grandeur of France were embodied by the
force de frappe
and the atomic bomb, the two vetoes of British entry into the Common Market in 1963 and 1967, France's ostentatious withdrawal from NATO, and the curt eviction of NATO's headquarters from Paris.

Whatever the ultimate reckoning of history, if such there should ever be, it is certain that the restoration of a peaceful Franco-German relationship—the double helix of post-war Europe—will stand as a supreme achievement of the late twentieth century. Under vastly different circumstances from those of the wartime Occupation in Paris, collaboration has prevailed after all. It is a great story, still waiting to be written.