THE BARRICADES, and the street more generally, enjoy a prominent place in the French memory. Erected throughout Paris during the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, barricades have both enabled and nostalgized a tendency by the French people for mass protest in the streets. Inspiration was found specifically in the Spanish Civil War, but given this intellectual and cultural background, it was inevitable—or “overdetermined” as professors like to say—that barricades would once again spring up throughout the streets of Paris in August 1944.1

They did so on the morning of August 21. Prodded on by Communist leaflets, Parisians took to the streets. They began cutting down trees and digging up cobblestones. They piled sandbags and pushed trucks without gasoline into the streets. On Rol-Tanguy’s instructions, the trucks were filled with cobblestones.2 Trees, parapets from the quay, and tram tracks were piled up, creating a barricade.3 Armed resisters then set up positions behind them, waiting for unsuspecting Germans to come by. A particularly robust barricade was set up in front of the fountain on Place Saint-Michel, but they also appeared along the quays and at multiple, not always strategically comprehensible points across the city.4 They served, it must be said, no useful military purpose. A single 88 mm shell could have destroyed the most solid among them.5 But that did not really matter. The barricades held symbolic value and encouraged Parisians of all ages to take part in winning back their city all the while creating the impression that the resistance controlled the streets.

At first, it went well. As Parisians became aware that resistance did not mean sudden death, the ranks of resisters started to swell by the hour. More and more people joined existing barricades, and others set up new ones. In the Prefecture, the atmosphere was almost festive: cooks prepared meals with food requisitioned daily from the marketplace at Les Halles, and access to the building was so safe that people would come by throughout the day looking for something to eat. Even the combatants’ perpetual shortage of ammmunition appeared to improve: that morning, an expedition set out for the sixteenth arrondissement and returned with three tons of ammunition, mostly grenades and bullets.6 But for those who wished to see them, there were signs that not all was well.

The first of these appeared in the afternoon. Brimming with youthful confidence, a troop of FFI set out to free French prisoners detained at one of the most important German positions in the city: the Hotel Continental, across the street from the Hotel Meurice and connected to it by an underground passage.7 The Germans easily repulsed them; the hotel, the French noted, was “seriously protected.”8 That should not have come as a surprise.

As the French resisters were retreating from the streets around the Tuileries, Choltitz decided once again to make a show of force. Irritated that the truce had been so consistently flouted, he sent out the tanks.9 Germans at three positions in the city launched separate attacks at exactly 11:45. In the seventeenth arrondissement, tanks opened fire on a public building. On the avenue d’Italie, five tanks fired on a crowd, but it is not clear if there were any casualties as a result.10 Finally, on the Pont au Double, infantry or tanks or both opened fire on a group of French police, injuring seven men.11

These attacks may not have been coordinated, but their simultaneity showed that the Germans meant business at least to some extent. And they continued to do so. At 12:40, the Germans launched an assault on the Charonne post office in the twentieth arrondissement.12 Within forty minutes, all French resistance had been overcome, several policemen were dead, and the post office was in German hands. Several hours later, at 17:15, they launched their most determined attack of the day. Ten tanks opened fire on the prominent barricade at Saint-Michel.13 In the heart of the city, it blocked one of the main access points to the Île de la Cité and the Prefecture. Frantically calling on support, the French were able to hold out.

In doing so, they set the pattern that would prevail over the next day. The Germans’ success in the twentieth arrondissement would not be followed up: they would launch attacks on French positions, including the Prefecture, but they did not succeed in dislodging any of them.14 There were, unsurprisingly, acts of cruel brutality: shortly before the failed attack on the Prefecture on August 21, a German tank crew picked up a gardien. Possibly acting on their own orders, they tortured him to extract information about the defences in and around the Prefecture and then killed him.15 Yet there were also acts of kindness. Despite their losses, the French responded with soldierly grace when the Germans requested to retrieve their fallen soldiers from the area around the Panthéon.16 It might have been a sense of magnanimity in victory that inspired French accord, for things seemed to be going their way. Over the course of the twenty-second, the Germans abandoned a number of positions across the city, leaving the French large stores—over two tons in one case—of ammunition.17 The resisters in the Prefecture, looking back on the day, concluded that it had been a “good” one for the resistance.18 Such confidence (or hubris—the two are never far apart) inspired them to issue a further call to arms at 15:40, which was broadcast though loudspeakers mounted atop vehicles: “The Commanders of the FFI and the Provisional Government of the Republic call on the population of Paris to make every possible effort [to resist the Germans]. Impede the movement of armoured vehicles throughout the city and immediately reinforce the barricades. As in 1830, as in 1848, protect the renaissance of the French republic, and the Parisian way of life.”19

*

CHOLTITZ SURVEYED THE EVENTS of August 21 and 22 from his comfortable rooms in the Hotel Meurice. They gave him no reason to be sanguine. As attacks on his troops multiplied, the pressure from Berlin ratcheted up once more. At 17:45 on the twenty-first, he received an order to “come down brutally on the FFI in Paris.”20 “The battle in Paris,” OKW ordered, “must be conducted mercilessly, and the city’s bridges are to be blown up.”21 Another, even clearer order from Hitler followed on August 22: “Paris is to become a heap of rubble. The commanding general is to defend the city to the last man, and, if necessary, to go down with the city.”22 Choltitz replied that he had only two battalions to defend Paris—an understatement or outright lie—and he requested the transfer of a military police division and artillery to the capital.23 Model replied, as he had to Hitler, that no troops could be sent. The type of unit Choltitz requested was not a coincidence: military police were trained to keep order, prevent panic, and round up deserters. They were neither regular soldiers trained in defence nor engineers trained in demolition. Army Group B instead ordered an engineer (Pionier) battalion and an artillery battalion into the city, though even Model thought that not all of Paris’s bridges could be destroyed.24

Yet another group in Paris made trouble for both Choltitz and the FFI: the SS. There were several thousand SS troops in the city, and they were hardly under Choltitz’s control, even at the best of times. Indeed, they treated the truce with a contempt not unlike that of the Communists.25 As the situation in the capital deteriorated, they acted increasingly as a force unto themselves.

Sometimes they used terror. Just before 11:00 on August 21, around a hundred SS soldiers occupied the Lycée Lakanal. They took four Jewish hostages and threatened to execute them if there were any incidents in the street.26 That evening, just after 18:00, French resisters reported ten times that number—a thousand SS soldiers—in the area between the Pont de la Folie in Bobigny (northeast Paris outside the ring road) and the Porte de la Villette (in the nineteenth arrondissement); they sprayed machine-gun fire.27

More often they resorted to murder. On August 16, the SS killed thirty-five resisters in the Bois de Boulogne; most were young and the majority from the FFI, though members of other resistance organizations were among the dead.28 Five days later, just before 15:00, German (most likely SS) troops picked up six police officers who had been arrested earlier in the day on the boulevard des Invalides and drove them to the École Militaire to be shot.29 The resisters sent men to rescue them, but to no avail: their bodies were exhumed a week later.

It is pointless to rank them in this respect, but one case was particularly brutal. Early on in the insurrection, the SS arrested eight police officers. They held the arrestees against a wall and acted as if they were about to execute them—but that would have been too quick. The SS lowered the men’s arms and forced them into a truck. The truck took them to Vincennes, where a second simulated execution took place. The next day, the SS forced the men to view the mutilated bodies of eleven comrades. They had been tortured to death; flesh was hanging from the corpses’ limbs, and their chests were smashed in (défoncé). The SS then performed yet another mock execution. The Germans then forced the men to carry heavy stones and beams under the hot sun until they collapsed with exhaustion. Finally, ignoring their pleas for mercy, the SS forced them to dig their own graves, and then murdered them. The sadism had lasted a full five days. When their bodies were eventually exhumed, the evidence of their final torture was clear: bruises, distended eyes, and flayed hands.30

*

MARAUDING SS WERE NOT the only units beyond Choltitz’s control. On the morning of August 23, a German column made up of two armoured cars, three tanks, two flat wagons, and thirty other vehicles made their way past the Arc de Triomphe, down the Champs-Élysées, and toward one of Paris’s most famous buildings: the Grand Palais, a vast exhibition hall with a great, glass-domed roof built for the Universal Exhibition of 1900.31 The column, which was not under Choltitz’s command, had heard of the truce and was attempting to pass through the city.32 When the troops reached the Grand Palais, French police opened fire from an adjacent position, killing one German soldier.33 The Germans responded not merely with gunfire but by preparing two small, toy-like tanks. They looked almost harmless: four feet long, two feet wide, and one foot high.34 They were in fact Goliath tracked mines, containing some fifty kilograms of explosives. Around 10:30, operated by a remote-controlled device, the little “toy” tanks approached the Palais.35

The building exploded. The great glass roof shattered instantly, and shards showered down on anyone below.36 For blocks around the structure, buildings shook, and the sound of the explosion echoed across Paris. In the Palais, lions, tigers, and horses—all being kept there by a would-be Swedish profiteer planning a celebratory circus for after the liberation—joined a band of prostitutes—imprisoned there by the police—in an attempt to escape. Screaming lions and screaming prostitutes ran through the building.37 Outside, the Germans surrounded the structure and waited.38 A column of black smoke rose slowly up into the Paris sky.39 By 11:25, the building was burning on all sides. The Paris firemen attempted to reach it, but the Germans blocked them until it was too late.40 By 11:55, it was all over: led by the police commissariat’s only German prisoner, a “dignified little baron,” forty policemen came out, holding a white flag.41 The German officer delivered them to Choltitz, who agreed to treat them as regular prisoners of war.42 This show of force gave the French resistance the first real shock of the past four days, and it demonstrated the capabilities of a German general less inclined to tolerate the insurgency.

Less tolerance, to put it no more strongly, was of course precisely what Hitler wanted. On the morning of the Grand Palais attack, Hitler issued his firmest order yet: “[The] defense of Paris is of decisive military and political significance. Its loss would tear open [the] whole coastal front north of [the] Seine and deprive Germany of bases for very long-range warfare. Defense [is] to be conducted from [a] blocking belt in front of the city … The sharpest measures to quell [the] insurrection inside the city must be taken. Never, or at any rate only as a heap of rubble, may Paris fall into Allied hands.”43

Other German officers were glad to help. The same day, Luftwaffe Generaloberst Otto Deßloch, commander of Luftflotte 3, telephoned Choltitz. He had orders, Deßloch told Choltitz, to bomb Paris, and he intended to use his fleet. Choltitz, arguing that his troops would otherwise be at risk, insisted that the attack take place by day. Deßloch argued that the attack could only take place at night, citing Allied fighters around Paris. As Choltitz knew all too well, given poor visibility, night raids by a few hundred airplanes could inflict substantial damage, particularly if the wind cooperated in creating large fires in a city made up of narrow streets. He therefore played his last card: if the Luftwaffe bombed the city, Choltitz would pull his troops out of any bombed areas and place blame on the Luftwaffe for compelling the retreat. Deßloch backed down, and the raid was called off.44

Deßloch’s offer was not the only support refused by Choltitz. A week earlier, Army Group B approved a request for Panzer Lehr Division to be prepared to divert troops into Paris in the event of an uprising.45 High Command also ordered General der Infanterie Erwin Vierow, Commander of North-West France, to ready his forces for the defence of Paris. Another commander offered a platoon of tanks to reinforce Paris’s defences.46 Choltitz declined all these offers, and he informed OB West that he personally would ensure order in Paris (“hat die Aufrechterhaltung der Ordnung in Paris selbst übertragen erhalten”).47

Choltitz also left the right paper trails. According to the Lagebericht (status report) of Army Group B, “local resistance that has flamed up [örtlich aufflammender Widerstand] has thus far been brutally crushed.”48 This could be nothing but a deliberate exaggeration, and it was part of a pattern. A few days earlier, as Rol-Tanguy was ordering Parisians to the barricades, Choltitz called Generalleutnant Hans Speidel, who had served as chief of staff to Rommel, Kluge, and now Model. Choltitz planned, he told Speidel, to blow up the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Opéra, among other landmarks. A few weeks before, the two men had agreed that Hitler was deranged; the conversation was a ruse to fool the Gestapo wire tappers.49

At the same time that he let Berlin know how much he was doing, Choltitz told those closer to him—including Feldmarschall Walter Model on the western front—the opposite: there was nothing he could do. “For days,” he replied on August 23 in direct response to Hitler’s order to destroy Paris, “the mob has ruled this city, and my men have suffered great losses. We do not have the forces to put down this resistance. Terrorists have occupied the Louvre. The Grand Palais is burning. From the twenty-fifth, there will be no more food supplies.”50 Choltitz failed to mention that German forces, not “terrorists,” had set the Grand Palais alight. He noted on the same day that he had written to General Günther Blumentritt of Chief of General Staff, OB West. Probably because he expressed such early sympathy for Stauffenberg and Stülpnagel, Blumentritt was now and would remain a firmly obedient commander ready to expend the last drop of blood in fighting the Allies. Choltitz told Blumentritt that he could not guarantee the general’s passage into the city, as barricades in the city’s outer districts made this impossible.51

And this, in turn, meant that he could not follow precisely the Führer’s order: “The police are loyal [!], but powerless. Supplying the defence strongholds and the outer quartiers is barely possible anymore. There’s shooting everywhere.”52 This was hardly an accurate description of the stalemate that had developed in Paris. In many parts of the city, people could have been forgiven for thinking that nothing was happening. Choltitz continued: “The shootings and other retaliatory actions called for by the Führer can no longer be implemented. In order to blow up bridges, we need to battle our way to them; in the case of 75 bridges, this is no longer possible. Any such measure could drive the majority of the still-passive population into the hands of the enemy.”53 The number seventy-five was carefully selected, as Berlin had ordered Choltitz to blow up seventy-two of Paris’s bridges.54 All of these claims were lies, or at least terrific exaggerations: Paris was not a battlefield, the resistance controlled nothing like seventy-five bridges, and the population’s horrified but largely passive reaction to the destruction of the Grand Palais hardly suggested that it was made up of armed resistersin-waiting. And Choltitz seems not to have mentioned the large store of explosives within easy reach. The Kriegsmarine had a large torpedo depot near Paris in Saint-Cloud to support the navy bases on the French coast, and it possessed enough explosives to inflict some serious damage. Boineburg had refused to deploy them. Choltitz lacked the engineers to prepare them, and he made no effort to acquire any.55

As much as Choltitz deceived Berlin, and as moderate as he was in his reaction to the FFI, Paris could not be liberated until he surrendered.56 And he refused to surrender to the “terrorists”. Nordling knew this all too well and decided to get in touch with the FFI again. Aware that Choltitz had no intention of evacuating the city, Nordling called Parodi and urged him to meet in order to discuss the modalities of a German evacuation. On August 23, Parodi sent a young finance inspector named Colonel Cruse to meet, with or without Choltitz’s knowledge, Emil Bender at the Swiss consulate.57

At first, Bender stalled for time. He held meandering conversations with Cruse throughout Wednesday night and into Thursday, all the while hoping that Nordling would return with definitive news of Allied movements. When he did not, Bender had to come to the point: all the German garrisons in the city would defend themselves. The outcome of a battle with the Allies was not in doubt, but the road to it could still be cluttered with many bodies. He decided to tell Cruse the truth: “General von Choltitz cannot capitulate without an exchange of fire. His family is threatened; they are hostages to Hitler. He is a soldier bound by the requirements of military honour. He simply cannot surrender without a fight.”58 Bender stopped. He hesitated. Then, fighting back tears, he decided to commit treason. “So, it’s necessary for you to fight. But why attack on all sides? The key to Paris’s defences is the Hotel Meurice where the General is based…. The General will defend himself … [but] once he’s defeated, all the other points of resistance will collapse.”59 It could not have been clearer: Choltitz would not surrender to the FFI; he would surrender only after a fight; and fighting him was the key to freeing Paris. Cruse had to get a message to General Jacques-Philippe Leclerc, head of the French Second Armoured Division.60

Notes

1. Barricades also sprang up all over southern France in reaction to the Allied landings at Normandy. See Max Hastings, Das Reich: Resistance and the March of the 2nd SS Panzer Division through France, June 1944 (London: Michael Joseph, 1981), 75.

2. Dansette, Histoire de la libération de Paris, 236.

3. Ibid.

4. “Rôle de la Police Parisienne dans les Combats de la Libération du 19 au 26 Août 1944,” n.d., 74, APPP.

5. Dansette, Histoire de la libération de Paris, 236.

6. “Rôle de la Police Parisienne dans les Combats de la Libération du 19 au 26 Août 1944,” n.d., 74, APPP.

7. The story about the passageway was related to me by a longtime official at the hotel who had met Choltitz when he and his men came back for a reunion banquet. The Hotel Continental is now the Westin Paris–Vendôme. On the prisoners: the French believed that the police officers would be shot. Libération de Paris: Historique. Main Courante des Journées d’insurrection (20 au 26 Août 1944), “Journée du 21 Août, 1944,” 5, APPP.

8. “Rôle de la Police Parisienne dans les Combats de la Libération du 19 au 26 Août 1944,” n.d., 74, APPP. Later in the day, at 12:25, a less robust approach bore results: five French prisoners at the Hotel were traded for four Germans.

9. There is some debate about the number of tanks at Choltitz’s disposal. Rumours at the time suggested as many as two hundred, but this was clearly too high a figure. Early postwar accounts suggested fifty. More recent research put the figure at twenty, but this is perhaps too low. Archival French sources from the time recorded fifteen tanks at different locations at 14:00 on August 21, 1944. See Libération de Paris: Historique. Main Courante des Journées d’insurrection (20 au 26 Août 1944), “Journée du 20 Août, 1944,” 8, APPP. It is hard to imagine that Choltitz had only five more tanks in the entire city of Paris. Another eyewitness noted a strong presence of German tanks around Place de la Concorde and the Jardin des Tuileries on August 20. Betts-Quintaine, “Journal de Guerre,” MdC TE 361, 73.

10. Libération de Paris: Historique. Main Courante des Journées d’insurrection (20 au 26 Août 1944), “Journée du 21 Août, 1944,” 7, APPP. According to this source, the tanks fired “without provocation” after “being stopped.” Presumably the Germans viewed being stopped as the provocation.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., 8.

13. Ibid., 10.

14. For the attack on the Prefecture, see “Résumé des journées glorieuses d’insurrection à la préfecture de police (19 au 26 Août 1944),” n.d., 74, APPP.

15. Ibid., 75.

16. Libération de Paris: Historique. Main Courante des Journées d’insurrection (20 au 26 Août 1944), “Journée du 22 Août, 1944,” 15, APPP.

17. Ibid., 18.

18. “Résumé des journées glorieuses d’insurrection à la préfecture de police (19 au 26 Août 1944),” n.d., 77, APPP.

19. Ibid., 75.

20. Libération de Paris: Historique. Main Courante des Journées d’insurrection (20 au 26 Août 1944), “Journée du 21 Août, 1944,” 9, APPP.

21. Besprechungen, Erwägungen, Entschlüsse, August 21, 1944, BArch RH 19 IX/18, fol. 66–7; Müller, “Die Befreiung von Paris,” 46.

22. Choltitz, Soldat unter Soldaten, 256; Müller, “Die Befreiung von Paris,” 47. The order was issued on August 21 but was apparently received by Choltitz the next day. According to Hans Speidel, the order ended with “even if residential areas and artistic monuments are destroyed thereby.” Hans Speidel, Invasion 1944: Rommel and the Normandy Campaign (repr. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1971; Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1950), 143.

23. Besprechungen, Erwägungen, Entschlüsse, August 21, 1944, BArch RH 19 IX/18, fol. 66, 68.

24. Ibid., fol. 72–3.

25. Dansette, Histoire de la libération de Paris, 195.

26. Libération de Paris: Historique. Main Courante des Journées d’insurrection (20 au 26 Août 1944), “Journée du 21 Août, 1944,” 7, APPP.

27. Ibid., 11.

28. Les fusillées de la Cascade du bois de Boulogne 16 août 1944 (Paris: Marie de Paris, 2004).

29. Libération de Paris: Historique. Main Courante des Journées d’insurrection (20 au 26 Août 1944), “Journée du 21 Août, 1944,” 27, APPP.

30. Story of the SS atrocities from Dansette, Histoire de la libération de Paris, 242.

31. Ibid.

32. Nordling, Sauver Paris, 218.

33. On the avenue de Selves. Dansette, Histoire de la libération de Paris, 243.

34. One is on display at the Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr, Dresden.

35. The police reported the Grand Palais on fire at 10:45. Libération de Paris: Historique. Main Courante des Journées d’insurrection (20 au 26 Août 1944), “Journée du 23 Août, 1944,” 24, APPP.

36. Ibid.

37. Cobb, Eleven Days in August, 230–1 on the animals; Neiberg, Blood of Free Men, 197 on the prostitutes.

38. Libération de Paris: Historique. Main Courante des Journées d’insurrection (20 au 26 Août 1944), “Journée du 23 Août, 1944,” 24, APPP.

39. Cobb, Eleven Days in August, 231.

40. Libération de Paris: Historique. Main Courante des Journées d’insurrection (20 au 26 Août 1944), “Journée du 23 Août, 1944,” 24, APPP; Dansette, Histoire de la libération de Paris, 243.

41. Ibid. On the baron, see Collins and Lapierre, Is Paris Burning?, 202–3 and Neiberg, Blood of Free Men, 197.

42. Nordling, Sauver Paris, 218.

43. Transmit from Group Captain Jones to Group Captain Winterbotham, August 25, 1944, UKNA, HW 1/3187. This communication is an Ultra intercept.

44. Details in this paragraph from Zaloga, Liberation of Paris, 66–7. The main source for this story is Choltitz himself, but primary sources confirm Luftwaffe activity west of Paris on August 24, 1944, suggesting that a bombing raid would have been possible. “Summary: GAF Report,” August 24, 1944, UKNA, HW 1/3187. And, indeed, after the German surrender, Deßloch ordered a bombing raid on the northern suburbs of Paris that caused substantial damage and killed two hundred people. A similar raid on the centre of Paris would have caused great damage to the city’s historic core. For the details of the late raid, see Cobb, Eleven Days in August, 334–6.

45. Besprechungen, Erwägungen, Entschlüsse, August 13, 1944, BArch RH 19 IX/87, fol. 226.

46. Nordling, Sauver Paris, 199.

47. Besprechungen, Erwägungen, Entschlüsse, August 16, 1944, BArch RH 19 IX/18, fol. 11.

48. BArch RH 19 IX/88, fol. 90. Quoted in Müller, “Die Befreiung von Paris,” 48.

49. Zaloga, Liberation of Paris, 65.

50. Besprechungen, Erwägungen, Entschlüsse, August 23, 1944, BArch RH 19 IX/18, fol. 95.

51. Müller, “Die Befreiung von Paris,” 49.

52. Quotations in this paragraph from Wehrm.Bef. Paris um 22.15 Uhr; Lageorienterung an HGR B, BArch RH 19 IX/9, fol. 106, quoted ibid., 49.

53. Ibid.

54. Nordling, Sauver Paris, 209.

55. UKNA, WO 208/4364, GRGG 210, October 11–12, 1944, 6 (Choltitz’s testimony to a British interrogator).

56. Information and quotations in this paragraph from Dansette, Histoire de la libération de Paris, 260–1.

57. Ibid., 260.

58. Quoted ibid., 261.

59. Quoted ibid. Choltitz claimed after the war to have known nothing about the meetings. Ibid., 260.

60. Leclerc was a nom de guerre. His real name was Philippe de Hauteclocque.