AVENUE FOCH, running southwest from the Arc de Triomphe, is one of Paris’s most expensive streets. It is also one of Paris’s widest, and it is often loud and congested. There are, however, long parks on either side of it, which lend privacy along two additional one-way streets that run parallel to the avenue and provide secluded access to the expensive houses that line them. Had such people marked their doors, names such as Onassis and Rothschild would have once graced the street. In 1944, a far more thuggish and disreputable set of characters occupied the avenue’s houses: Dr. Helmut Knochen, the head of the SD, had his headquarters at No. 84, and SD officers occupied Nos. 82 and 86.

Avenue Foch terminates at its southwest end as it begins at the opposite end, in a roundabout, albeit a considerably less grand one. One of the streets extending from the roundabout, at basically a ninety-degree angle from the avenue Foch, is the boulevard Lannes. Carl Oberg, Knochen’s boss and head of the SS and security police in France, had his offices at No. 57, while SD recruits were billeted in newly constructed buildings on the same street. Together, the two thoroughfares formed a rough L that made up the core of the Nazis’ terror organization in Paris: the SD, the Gestapo, and the Sipo were all within a few minutes of each other. On the night of July 20, 1944, the German army in Paris descended upon them from all sides.

At 21:30 that evening, trucks transporting the men of Kraewel’s First Regiment, 325th Security Division drove quietly up avenue Foch. The convoy stopped near the end of the street, and the men climbed out and took cover behind the parks’ thick bushes and the large, leafy trees running along the street. SS guards were posted in front of several of the doors, but the soldiers, mostly foreign recruits from Ukraine, southern Russia, or the Danube region, had fallen asleep in the warm summer evening.1

As Kraewel’s men took their positions along the avenue Foch, shock troops under Generalmajor Walther Brehmer moved slowly through the thick bushes of the Bois de Boulogne, the large park that abuts the western side of the roundabout connecting avenue Foch and boulevard Lannes. Boineburg himself was among them.2 From where they stood, they could see the Gestapo billets. The lights were on, the buildings quiet, a few sentries pacing to and fro in front of them.3 Their occupants expected nothing.

At 22:30, Brehmer gave the order. A whistle pierced the night. Cars and trucks moved into position along the street. Another whistle. Hundreds of troops hit the street at once and rushed the buildings. The surprise was total.4 The sentries, confused and disorientated, laid down their weapons.5 Only a single machine gun went off, the product of an SD sentry’s clumsy effort to salute an army officer, but it hit no one.6

The operation continued with absolute precision. Weapons drawn, the officers and their shock troops burst into the Gestapo billets. They dashed up the stairs, kicked open doors, and screamed, “Hands up!”7 With orders from Stülpnagel to open fire on any who resisted, the troops searched the men for weapons, ordered them into the courtyard, and loaded them into waiting trucks.8 One set of vehicles made for the prison at Fresnes, south of Paris, which had been cleared for the new guests; the other rolled on toward the old fortifications of the Fort de l’Est in Saint-Denis, north of the capital.9

As the men under his command stormed the billets, Brehmer moved toward No. 57. He had undertaken to arrest Oberg personally.10 The SS leader was at his desk, in shirtsleeves and on the telephone, when Brehmer entered the room. Brehmer pointed a gun at him. The SS leader jumped up and asked Brehmer what this “nonsense” (Unfug) was supposed to mean.11 The SS in Berlin, Brehmer replied, had launched a putsch and Oberg was therefore under arrest. Oberg, claiming the whole thing had to be a misunderstanding, handed over his weapon and gave himself up.12

This operation occurred simultaneously with another. As Boineburg and Brehmer’s troops moved into position along boulevard Lannes, Kraewel commanded units that were hiding among the trees along avenue Foch. He organized the arrests differently. Rather than immediately storming the three grand houses holding the SD officers, Kraewel first occupied the rooms of the officer on duty.13 On Kraewel’s order, the SD commander summoned his men into the office, where Kraewel disarmed them. As he arrested the SD officer corps, Kraewel’s troops poured into the building, arrested all other SD men and locked the three buildings down.14

The entire SS and SD in Paris—some twelve hundred men—had been arrested without a shot being fired in anger. All that was left was the senior SD officer, Dr. Knochen. A junior officer said that Knochen was at a Paris nightclub and offered to retrieve him.15 Kraewel put him under arrest as soon as he returned, and Knochen joined the other senior SS officers in the Hotel Continental in the rue Castiglione.16 As the clock approached midnight, members of the army’s First Security Regiment piled sandbags in the courtyard of the École Militaire, its headquarters. They were to act as butts for the executions-by-shooting that would follow summary courts martial.17 Bargatzky, himself a lawyer by training, had advised Hofacker to shoot Oberg, Knochen, SS-Sturmbannführer Hagen, and Dr. Maulaz (the SD staff member foisted onto the military governor’s staff) and to avoid any distracting legal proceedings.18

In the span of a few hours, Stülpnagel, Hofacker, and Boineburg had surrounded and neutralized the Nazi military and political machinery in Paris. The most famous city in the world, and by far the most important in France, was in the hands of the German resistance.

When Boineburg and his adjutant, Arnim, returned to Stülpnagel’s rooms on the fourth floor of the Hotel Raphael, the general had already left.19 Speidel had called at 19:00, summoning Stülpnagel, who left for La Roche-Guyon, headquarters of Army Group B, with Hofacker.20 Linstow, Stülpnagel’s chief of staff, had stayed behind and taken charge, and he set up a makeshift office in one room with a billiard table. Officers streamed into the adjoining room. The atmosphere was festive, and the alcohol flowed. The men, mostly older officers, spoke of the end of the war, returning home, and the end of Nazism. In Linstow’s adjacent room, the mood was entirely different. He had known for hours that Hitler had most likely survived. Yet he decided, following the urging of his fellow officers in Paris, to launch the coup in Paris anyway.21 Stauffenberg had believed that to take Berlin was to take Europe; Linstow hoped to revise that logic: take Paris, take the west, and let the Allies overrun the front and take Berlin.

At midnight, everyone went quiet. The Führer was about to speak. Goebbels’s shrill, grating voice cracked through the radio.22 As it did, Arnim looked up to see Stülpnagel, back from his appeal to Kluge, quietly entering the room. The general said nothing, but the meeting with Kluge had not gone well. Over the course of the evening, Kluge had oscillated between embracing the putsch and condemning it. The decisive factor was Hitler. When a message arrived insisting Hitler was dead, Kluge spoke sternly about the “historic hour” and talked with General Blumentritt, who had been with him since around 18:00, about detailed plans for achieving a ceasefire on the western front.23 When a telex from Keitel arrived, Kluge immediately changed his tune, muttering about “a bungled assassination attempt.”24

Stülpnagel, Hofacker, Boineburg, and Linstow moved toward the radio. Hitler spoke of the “small clique of ambitious, unconscionable, and criminally stupid officers.” Stülpnagel stood expressionlessly as he listened, though the way he was slowly wringing his gloves behind his back betrayed something of his emotions to those who saw it.25 Few people, least of all Stülpnagel himself, believed that the general could save his command or his life. The only question now was who would go down with him.

Stülpnagel’s first move, bowing to the inevitable, was to order the release of those arrested. He ordered Boineburg to do so and to bring Oberg to him.26 While Boineburg approached Oberg with feigned casualness and an affected smile, his men released the prisoners in Saint-Denis and Fresnes.27 A good number of the SS prisoners refused to leave their cells out of fear that they might be shot.

When Oberg arrived at the Hotel Raphael there was, to put it mildly, a certain tension in the room. It was broken somewhat unexpectedly by Otto Abetz, the German ambassador. He was a fully paid-up Francophile, a looter of Jewish property, and a co-organizer of the Final Solution in France. He was also, by this point, unconvinced of Hitler’s merits. Without consulting Stülpnagel, Abetz said to Oberg, “Do you want to know why the general arrested you and the SD? He thought [the coup in Berlin] had something to do with some ambitious scheme of Himmler’s and wanted to keep you out of it … You cannot accuse the general of having broken his oath of loyalty. He simply, and in good faith, did what he thought was his duty.” He then appealed for unity in the face of a cracking western front, and everyone raised their champagne glasses as Stülpnagel stared dumbfounded at Abetz.28

Blumentritt left La Roche-Guyon for Paris well after midnight. He visited naval headquarters, shook hands, patted a few backs, and casually dismissed the whole affair.29 Blumentritt told Admiral Theodor Krancke, the commander of Naval Group West who was threatening to use his men to free the SS and SD prisoners, that he, Krancke, had been the “victim of a misunderstanding.”30 Blumentritt then visited Knochen, who, with vengeful satisfaction, told him that Oberg was on his way to the Hotel Majestic. In an inspired stroke, Blumentritt immediately replied, “I’m just going there. Come with me.”31 Blumentritt, Knochen, and a Standartenführer Hagen got into the car. Ten minutes into the drive, Knochen turned to Blumentritt: “We must get our stories straight!”32 It was just what Blumentritt wanted to hear.

When Blumentritt and Knochen entered room 405 at the Hotel Raphael, the heads of the SS and the army were there together. Stülpnagel, Oberg, Boineburg, Linstow, and Finckh, along with Abetz, sat at the table, while other men stood in groups chatting.33 Everyone was well lubricated.34

The only one missing was Hofacker, who had slipped into an adjoining room to destroy documents. Oberg, who had since learned that his prison cell had been prepared on July 19, repeated Knochen’s words: “We must get our stories straight.”35 In hushed tones, Blumentritt and Oberg outlined an agreement to present a united front to the outside world and, above all, to Himmler’s security apparatus.36 This agreement in hand, Blumentritt urged both sides to put the whole matter behind them. For their part, Oberg and Knochen made a point of appearing forgiving and made it clear, through their behaviour if not their words, that they would be good sports about the whole matter.37 During the dinner, Blumentritt took Stülpnagel aside and gently informed him of Kluge’s order to “keep away from your headquarters for three of four days until things have cleared up a bit.” It was an invitation to flee, and showed that Kluge was a better man than Fromm: there would be no face-saving executions in Paris.

But it could not end there.38 The arrest of the entire SS, SD, and Gestapo apparatus in Paris could not go completely unnoticed, and both sides needed to get on the same page. Blumentritt again took charge and had a text drawn up, which was to be read to all troops in the capital the next morning. It stated: “The SS and army units in Greater Paris organized a surprise exercise with live ammunition [mit scharfer Munition]. The exercise went well. I extend my thanks to all participants. Signed Oberg and Boineburg.” The ruse partially worked: the arrests made by the army in Paris were far more limited than those in Berlin, and the majority of those involved in the coup—Boineburg, Brehmer, Kraewel, and Arnim, among others—survived.

Oberg and Knochen’s seemingly magnanimous behaviour merits comment. A contemporary observer suggested they acted as they did out of some sense of larger soldierly solidarity or shared vulnerability in a foreign country.39 These factors may have played a role; motivation is always complex. But of likely greater effect was the simple fact that Oberg and Knochen had been made to look like complete asses. A single security regiment, hardly the cream of the German army, had arrested the whole of Hitler’s finest men in France before they could get a single shot off. The SS and SD had as much of an interest as the army did in covering the whole thing up. The more that came out about July 20, the more likely it was that suspicion would fall on Oberg.

*

LIKE THAT OF BERLIN, the story of July 20 in Paris is fascinating for what might have been. Unlike Berlin, however, the decisive matter was not the position of Stauffenberg’s bomb or the relocation of the conference from a bunker to a hut. The decisive matter was one of political and military choice. Had the coup occurred five days earlier, as originally planned, or had an RAF low-level strafing attack on one particular German vehicle not occurred, that choice would have partly been in the hands of Feldmarschall Erwin Rommel. As fate, so thoroughly unkind in July of 1944, would have it, the decision fell entirely to a very different character.

Notes

1. Arnim, Als Brandenburg noch die Mark hieß, 225.

2. Schramm, Aufstand der Generale, 138.

3. Galante, Operation Valkyrie, 29; Arnim, Als Brandenburg noch die Mark hieß, 225.

4. Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 475.

5. Schramm, Aufstand der Generale, 139.

6. Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 475.

7. Schramm, Aufstand der Generale, 139.

8. Ibid.

9. Schramm, Conspiracy among Generals, 68.

10. Schramm, Aufstand der Generale, 139; Bargatzky, Hotel Majestic, 134.

11. Schramm, Aufstand der Generale, 140; Bargatzky, Hotel Majestic, 134.

12. Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 475.

13. Schramm, Aufstand der Generale, 140.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 475.

17. Ibid.

18. Bargatzky, Hotel Majestic, 127.

19. Details in this paragraph from Arnim, Als Brandenburg noch die Mark hieß, 227.

20. Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 476.

21. Bargatzky, Hotel Majestic, 134.

22. Details in this paragraph from Arnim, Als Brandenburg noch die Mark hieß, 227–8.

23. Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 473; “Blumentritt: July 20, 1944,” August 19, 1945, UK National Archives (UKNA), WO 208/4170, SRGG 134.

24. Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 473.

25. Arnim, Als Brandenburg noch die Mark hieß, 227.

26. Schramm, Conspiracy among Generals, 99.

27. Ibid., 100; Hoffman, History of the German Resistance, 478.

28. Schramm, Conspiracy among Generals, 105.

29. “Blumentritt: July 20, 1944,” August 19, 1945, UKNA, WO 208/4170, SRGG 134.

30. Ibid.; Schramm, Conspiracy among Generals, 106.

31. Schramm, Conspiracy among Generals, 107–8.

32. “Da muß nach oben eine Sprachregelung gefunden werden!” quoted in Schramm, Aufstand der Generale, 188. The English version of Schramm’s book translates Sprachregelung as “formula,” meaning a crafty wording that would allow them to save face. The important point here, though, is that they were all on the same page in explaining themselves to their superiors.

33. “Blumentritt: July 20, 1944,” August 19, 1945, UKNA, WO 208/4170, SRGG 134.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid. See the note on the translation of “Sprachregelung,” supra. Emphasis in the original.

36. Schramm, Conspiracy among Generals, 109–10.

37. Arnim, Als Brandenburg noch die Mark hieß, 228; “Blumentritt: July 20, 1944,” August 19, 1945, UKNA, WO 208/4170, SRGG 134. According to Blumentritt, Stülpnagel and Oberg “were getting on famously.”

38. Details in this paragraph from Arnim, Als Brandenburg noch die Mark hieß, 228–9.

39. Schramm, Conspiracy among Generals, chapter 4.