22 June 1940
EVEN IF ANY OF the soldiers in the escort had been willing to divulge his destination, the howl of the engines would have made conversation impossible. He pictured Berlin in the transparent light of a summer morning shrinking to the size of a balsa-wood model, and the pines of the Grunewald dropping into a bottomless gorge. The plane surged and sank, and he thought how fortunate it was that there had been no time for breakfast. A sudden modulation of the scream suggested that the plane had already levelled out. At that altitude, if there had been a window, he might have recognized the Königsallee in the pattern of streets, and even the exact spot where he had left Mimina in tears. The two SS men had worn insignia that would have revealed their rank if he had known how to interpret such things. He had kissed her briefly, as though embarrassed in front of strangers. He could not remember whether he had only thought it as they parted or had actually uttered the words: ‘In a dictatorship, anything is possible.’
There were no seats in the plane, just wooden benches along the sides, for paratroopers, he supposed. He looked along the line of faces towards the cockpit. He saw the light that came from the pilot’s window, but his view was obstructed by picnic baskets and crates of fruit juice that he had seen being loaded at Staaken airfield. Was there, he wondered, some little-known military tradition of summoning a sculptor to the victory picnic to preserve the moment in stone? A shrill telephone in a silent house at six in the morning was unlikely to announce a glorious commission. Ever since he had been ordered to devote all his future work to Berlin, and to consider himself, with this exception, a free agent, he had grown accustomed to visualizing every sculpture in his studio on a gargantuan scale, with triumphs and catastrophes to match. Speer, the only friend who might have been able to tell him what was going on, was out of town. All he knew was what the voice on the telephone had said: ‘Herr Breker. Geheime Staatspolizei.’ (He was sure that they had said secret police…) ‘You are ordered to prepare yourself for a short journey. The car will be at your door in an hour.’
The roar of the engines filled his ears and permeated his limbs. He half-slept for what might have been an hour. By now, they must have crossed the border, if there was still a border. The morning would be bright and sunny, and so the waxen light from the cockpit ruled out an easterly or a southerly direction. There was nothing to deduce from the soldiers’ demeanour or equipment, and the few words that punctuated the din told him nothing. He seemed to be invisible to them in his civilian clothes. He knew that this unaccompanied flight was somehow related to events of unimaginable grandeur and consequence. Vast new spaces were to be created for the artistic ‘energies’ that would be unleashed when the aspirations of the people were no longer frustrated by the obscurantism of modern artists. Somewhere below were human herds and hundred-mile-long traffic jams of cars with mattresses tied to the roof as a defence against the Stukas. (He knew this from talking to friends on the telephone rather than from the unreliable radio.) Hundreds of Parisians had queued for the number 39 bus to Vaugirard and taken it all the way to Bordeaux. There had been bonfires in Ministry courtyards, and barges on the Quai des Orfèvres piled high with police archives passed along a human chain. The Louvre had been surreptitiously evacuated: he imagined the Venus de Milo taking the sea air in Brittany or cluttering up the damp hallway of a château in the Auvergne.
More than two hours had passed when the plane began to lurch and lumber down a staircase of clouds and wind. The heat had become intolerable, and it was this that upset him most of all: the ominous discomfort that so clearly contradicted the Führer’s promise that his artists would never have to live in garrets or suffer material distress.
Brûly-de-Pesche, Belgium, 21 June 1940, 11.30 a.m.
HE CALLED IT THE Wolfsschlucht, which means the Wolf’s Gorge. There were some pleasant walks on the edge of the woods and behind the village whose inhabitants had been removed. It reminded him of the region of Linz in Upper Austria. The makeshift conference room in the parsonage, where maps of north-eastern France and the Low Countries hung on the walls, now smelled of leather and after-shave. The Wolfsschlucht had been his home for almost three weeks. That morning, after what the experts agreed was the most glorious victory of all time, the map of Paris had been unfurled, and, since then, he had talked of nothing else.
He had been looking forward to this for years. He had sent architects and planners to observe and take notes, but his own visit had remained a cherished dream. In the passion of youth, he had pored over street-maps and memorized blueprints of buildings and monuments. He had taught himself more than he could ever have learned from asinine professors who considered a diploma acquired at the age of seventeen to be the highest proof of artistic merit. Every detail had lodged in his memory, and when he came to make the final preparations, he was delighted to find everything still wonderfully fresh and accurate.
He was convinced that he knew Paris better than most of its inhabitants and could probably find his way about without a guide. The Baedeker had nothing to teach him. He himself had specified the composition of the tour group: Giesler, Breker and Speer; his pilot, his driver and his secretary; Frentz the cameraman, Hoffmann the photographer, and the press chief Dietrich; and General Keitel, who had asked to bring along General Bodenschatz, the physician and three adjutants. Speidel the former assistant military attaché would join them at the airport. They would fly in the Condor and take the six-wheeled Benz convertibles. He would lead the tour himself, which would be a useful lesson to them all. He often thought with a shudder of indignation of all those vapid Reiseführer and caretakers in blue uniforms who dispensed inane platitudes and cared only about petty restrictions – don’t touch the artefacts, don’t step on the parquet, stay between the ropes…
Six weeks before, he had astonished everyone by saying that he would enter Paris with his artists, and that he would do so in six weeks’ time. It was a source of tremendous pride and satisfaction to him that he was now in a position to pay this unprecedented compliment to what was after all, despite its foolish belligerence and the large numbers of southerners and Jews, a great Kulturvolk.
He knew that Parisians still thought of him as a house-painter and a garçon-coiffeur, because they could not yet bring themselves to see him as the defender of Paris. Time would change all that. If Churchill had had his way, there would have been fighting on every street-corner, and one of the world’s most beautiful cities would have been wiped off the map simply because a drunken, war-mongering journalist had hatched a plan of inconceivable stupidity from which his government was too cowardly to dissuade him. Baron Haussmann had seen to it – though obviously with something else in mind – that a modern army could enter Paris and occupy key positions within a few hours. Naturally, the two-thousand-year-old city had defects, but any work that had been brought to completion by kings and emperors was valuable as an example: a surgeon could study a cancerous growth and learn something from it, but what could he do with an incinerated corpse?
For the tenth time that morning, Adolf Hitler placed his finger on the map and ran it along the perpendicular avenues. When he looked up at the clock, it was almost time for lunch.
Brûly-de-Pesche, 22 June 1940, 2 p.m.
TO THE UNDISGUISED delight of his so-called friend, Arno Breker was visibly flustered. The pilot had pointed his plane at the ground and pulled up just in time to hit the airstrip like a wounded goose landing on the Teupitzsee. A staff car driven by a non-speaking private had taken him into a landscape of forest and moor whose inhabitants had either fled or been expelled. He had seen a meal on a table in a deserted farmhouse. He had heard cattle screaming and seen a cow choking on a bed-sheet. He had known nothing until the car had passed a crossroads with a recently carved fingerpost pointing to Brûly-de-Pesche, and even then had been none the wiser.
The staff car stopped in front of a small church and some wooden sheds marked ‘O.T.’ for Organisation Todt. A group of smiling officers came to greet him. Among them he recognized the architect Hermann Giesler and the man he had called his friend. Albert Speer’s face was a toothy, schoolboy grin.
‘You must have been petrified,’ said Speer. (It was an observation rather than a question.)
Breker suddenly felt the weight of his exhaustion. He looked at Speer and remembered how much he had had to enlarge his forehead and stiffen his mouth. ‘Why didn’t you get someone to tell me? I had to leave Mimina behind. She was in a terrible state…What’s going on?’
Speer paused for effect before replying. ‘You’re in Belgium, and this is command headquarters! You weren’t expecting that, were you?’
An orderly came to usher them into the parsonage, and before they had reached the door, Breker saw him standing there in his usual simple uniform, with that curiously balletic torso and the snake-charmer hands. The thought flashed through his mind that Adolf Hitler himself was part of the elaborate joke. He shook Breker’s hand and held it like a father welcoming home a son. The blue eyes that could make every man in a crowd of thirty thousand say, ‘The Führer looked straight at me,’ fastened themselves on Breker’s face. Hitler was still shaking his hand, nodding slowly as though confirming an earlier judgement: Herr Breker would be equal to the task. Then he touched his elbow and took him to one side.
‘I am sorry that this had to be done in such haste. Everything has gone according to plan and exactly as I expected. A new phase is now beginning.’
He spoke like an actor impersonating camaraderie or some complex form of duplicity. ‘Paris has always fascinated me. Now the gates stand open. As you know, it was my intention all along to visit the capital of art with my artists. A triumphal parade might have been arranged, but I did not wish to inflict further pain on the French people after their defeat.’
Breker thought of his friends in Paris and nodded.
‘I must think of the future,’ the Führer went on. ‘Paris is the city by which others are measured. It will inspire us to reconsider our plans for the reconstruction of our major cities. As an old Parisian, you will be able to devise an itinerary that includes all the architectural highpoints of the city.’
Some urgent news was brought to the Führer, and the audience ended. Breker was left to settle in to the guesthouse. He washed and shaved, then went for a short walk in the woods. The thought of seeing Paris again after so many years was thrilling, but he knew that it would be like visiting an old friend in hospital. When he returned from his walk, he was told that since the Führer did not want to be seen touring a captured city with civilians, they would all have to wear a military uniform. Breker chose a garrison cap that belonged to a lieutenant and a trench coat that covered his grey suit. They fitted him quite well but made his body feel small.
He telephoned Mimina, who had been told nothing, then sat at the table in his room and drew up a list of monuments, which he was to submit to the Führer’s staff. At six o’clock, he left the guesthouse in his borrowed clothes and walked over to the mess. It was a strange experience to see the soldiers salute him as he passed. When he entered the mess, dressed up as an officer and walking like a civilian, gales of laughter erupted from the Führer’s table.
Dinner was served by soldiers in white jackets. There was meat for anyone who did not wish to share the Führer’s vegetarian meal, but the only drinks were water and fruit juice. After nightfall, they heard the sound of thunder. Shortly afterwards, they went to bed. The storm had passed, and the only sounds outside were the hum of a generator and the tramp of a guard’s boots.
HE WAS STILL WAITING for sleep when an orderly came to wake him at three in the morning. He pulled on his uniform and walked out into the darkness. An hour later, he was back in the air, trying to remember the route he had submitted, and remembering instead his first days in Paris in 1927: his landlady had taken him to the Galeries Barbès to buy a double bed (she had insisted on a double), and at the Bal des Quat’z Arts, a beautiful negress had engaged him in a discussion about Nietzsche. He thought of his little studio at Gentilly, twenty-five minutes by Métro from the cafés of Montparnasse, where vegetable plots and hen-houses were guarded by dogs of mixed race.
The Condor had proper seats with windows. When the light began to colour the fields, he looked down and saw sheep and cattle but no other signs of life. The centipedal lines of refugees with their wheelbarrows and prams had passed away to the south. All around him, he heard cheerful conversations, and wondered why he seemed to be the only one who knew that they were embarked on a dangerous mission.
Paris, Sunday 23 June 1940
5.45 A.M.–THE ENORMOUS CLOUD of smoke that had filled the streets for several days, and that was said to have rained soot over the south coast of England, had finally drifted off. It had come and gone without explanation, and taken with it all the life of Paris. The city seemed to have been prepared for a grand occasion to which no one was invited. Two guardsmen at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier peered through the low, dawn mist along the Champs-Élysées and saw nothing move except the swastika flags and the grey pigeons.
Six miles across the city, at the far end of the Rue La Fayette, a car appeared from the direction of Le Bourget. It was followed by another, and then by three more, forming a little convoy of five sedans. The leather roofs had been rolled back, and as the cars rumbled across the cobbles, the heads bobbed about in perfect synchrony.
It was an interminable suburban street masquerading as an avenue with no particular destination. The buildings on either side amplified the noise of the engines. All of them seemed empty, their windows either shuttered or daubed with blue paint. In one of the cars, a man was standing up, holding a movie camera. Though the morning haze still clung to the ground, and the city showed itself only in outline, the day promised to be ideal for filming.
Orders were shouted out as they passed a concrete road-block. The Führer sat next to the chauffeur in the second car, with Breker, Giesler and Speer on the jump seats behind. He had been silent since the airport, and when Breker looked round from the fleeing doorways to the man in the passenger seat, he saw the Führer tightly clenched, almost cowering in his grey coat. He seemed depressed by the ghostly spectacle. It was a sign, thought Breker, of his extraordinary sensitivity, and his unerring ability to concentrate on the essential and to consign the rest to oblivion.
The armistice had yet to come into effect. At any moment, from one of a thousand windows, a sniper might have aimed the barrel of a machine-gun. Perhaps the route had been chosen because in no other part of Paris was it possible to travel so far towards the centre without passing anything of interest. Almost two miles of apartment blocks had gone by before the rear pediment of the Opéra rose unexpectedly above the roof tops.
It struck Breker all at once that this was not the route he had planned, and that the Führer must have studied the document he had submitted at Brûly-de-Pesche and cast it aside. They approached the building from behind, between two corner blocks, and drove along its eastern flank, as though to take it by surprise. Swerving into the empty square, they saw two German officers waiting on the steps. The Führer leapt out and ran into the building.
Inside, all the lights were blazing. Golden reflections danced off the marble and the gilt, and made the floor look as treacherous as ice. A white-haired janitor led them up the monumental staircase.
The man who had sat hunched in his car seat a moment before was almost unrecognizable: the Führer was literally shaking with excitement. ‘Wonderful, uniquely beautiful proportions!’ he shouted, waving his arms like a conductor. ‘And such pomp!’ The janitor stood silently by with the expressionless rigidity of a man about to suffer a heart attack.
‘You must imagine’, said the Führer, ‘the ladies in their ball-gowns descending the staircase between lines of men in uniform. – We must build something like this in Berlin, Herr Speer!’ At the top of the staircase, he turned and addressed the men who were still ascending. ‘Ignore that Belle Époque showiness, and the eclectic architecture, and the Baroque excess, and you still have a theatre with its own very distinctive character. Its architectural importance’, he explained, ‘consists in its beautiful proportions.’
They entered the auditorium and waited while the janitor threw switches and awakened the fairy-tale spectacle. The Führer swivelled on his heel, taking in the whole glorious scene, and cried out to the empty seats, ‘This is the most beautiful theatre in the world!’
He led the way, with the busy step that he always appeared to have in newsreels. The janitor followed as best he could. They saw the dressing rooms and the practice room, where, to Breker’s surprise, the Führer was reminded of the paintings of Edgar Degas. For several minutes, they occupied the stage, chatting among themselves or listening to the Führer’s disquisition. He appeared to know the Opéra in its most intimate details. Breker was asked to tell the janitor that they wished to see the presidential reception room. For some reason, Breker had difficulty formulating the question in French, and when he finally found the words, the janitor looked puzzled and denied that such a thing existed. But the Führer, certain of his knowledge, and exhibiting only the faintest glimmer of impatience, insisted on seeing the hypothetical room, and the man finally remembered that, indeed, there had been an imperial reception room, but that renovations had abolished it.
‘Now you see how well I know my way about!’ cried the Führer. Then he added, with an infectious laugh, ‘Gentlemen, observe democracy in action! The democratic republic does not even grant its president his own reception room!’
As they left the building, the Führer ordered one of the adjutants to give the janitor a fifty-mark note. The janitor politely declined the tip. Then the Führer asked Breker to try, and the man refused once again, saying that he was only doing his job.
Outside, Carpeaux’s famous sculpture, La Danse, which had scandalized the bourgeois of the Second Empire, retained the Führer’s full attention for a moment. Hefty nymphs cavorted around a tambourine-playing Bacchus. Despite the trails of black filth that made them look like laughing victims of an axe-murderer, the figures’ pearly stone teeth could be clearly seen. This the Führer proclaimed to be a work of genius: it was an example of the lightness and grace that foreigners found wanting in German architecture.
With that, they returned to the cars and left the Place de l’Opéra, turning right in front of the deserted Café de la Paix.
6.10 A.M.–EVEN THE DUMMIES were absent from the windows of the expensive shops along the Boulevard des Capucines. Next stop was La Madeleine, which they approached from the rear. An adjutant leapt out of the car while it was still moving and opened the door. The Führer was on the pavement before anyone else and was trotting up the steps when he stopped so abruptly to look up at the pediment that the others almost ran into the back of him. They spent barely a minute inside – just long enough to see the Judgement scene that turned Napoleon’s monument to the Grande Armée into a Christian temple. The Führer found the building disappointingly pedantic but superbly positioned for the view across the river to the Chambre des Députés. Then they drove down the Rue Royale and into the Place de la Concorde, where the chauffeur was ordered to drive slowly around the obelisk.
The Führer was standing up in the car, resting one hand on the chrome frame of the windscreen, delivering his observations. The obelisk was too small, and the walls of the square too puny to give it its proper prominence in the city. The radiant vistas, however, were magnificent and allowed the eye to travel unimpeded to different sectors of the city. Two gendarmes in their short capes were standing by a kerb, and the camera fastened on this evidence of human life to give the newsreel an air of normality. ‘Early in the morning’, the commentary would say, ‘the Führer pays a surprise visit to Paris!’ A dark shape was bustling across the road at the entrance to one of the avenues. The Führer glanced in its direction and saw a man in a black hat and robe, his head bent as if on the lookout for pot-holes or – ridiculously in that vast grey expanse – trying to pass unobserved. As the car went by, the camera turned to keep him in the frame. It would be a fleeting tableau of daily life in the French capital – a curé scuttling off to mass like a black beetle hurrying back to its hole.
Now, with a symphonic sense of architectural arrangements and the motions of the convoy, and as though anticipating the stately march that would accompany the images on the newsreel, the Führer ordered a halt at the entrance to the famous avenue. Slowly, then, they started up the long incline of the Champs-Élysées towards the Arc de Triomphe. The heads in the cars turned to right and left, along the side avenues, recognizing views they had seen in picture-books and on postcards: the Invaliden Dom with the Alexanderbrücke in the foreground, the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais, the Eiffel-turm in the distance, the fountains of the Rond-Point (but without water), and the terrace of Fouquet’s devoid of people. Cinema posters were still advertising two American movies that had not been seen since the exodus had begun: Going Places and You Can’t Take It With You. High up on the avenue ahead, a row of windows suddenly blazed with sunlight and darkened again as they passed. The Arch itself was a giant magnet, pulling them towards the portal through which triumphal parades traditionally passed in the opposite direction.
The cameraman filmed until the Arc de Triomphe was too large to fit into the frame. This was no longer the Paris that Arno Breker had known. It was some as yet imperfect dream-vision of the North– South axis of the future Berlin. The Grosse Torbogen, which the Führer had sketched in 1916 as he lay in his hospital bed, would be large enough for the Arc de Triomphe to fit inside with room to spare. The avenue that led up to it would be seventy feet wider than the Champs-Élysées, and it would not be constricted by the miserly segments of bourgeois habitation into which Hittorff had divided the Place de l’Étoile. Breker tried to see everything through the Führer’s eyes – a city whose overpowering glories would exist whether or not there were people there to see them.
They parked on the Place de l’Étoile. Some of the Arch was under scaffolding, but the Führer was able to read the Napoleonic inscriptions, which he seemed to know by heart. He stood with his hands behind his back, looking all the way down the Champs-Élysées towards the obelisk and the Louvre. Breker saw an expression on his face that he had noticed when the Führer was examining the master model of Berlin, crouching down to enhance the perspective. It was the look of pure excitement that immobilizes a child’s face when it tries to suck the object of its yearning into a mind evacuated of any other thought. When the time came to leave – it was already half-past six – the Führer could barely tear himself away.
6.35 A.M.–SO MANY AVENUES radiated from the Place de l’Étoile that, despite the presence of so many military strategists and connoisseurs of Paris, after circling the Arc de Triomphe a second time, the convoy slowed in confusion, and instead of waiting for the Avenue Victor Hugo or the Avenue Kléber to come around again, took the Avenue Foch and advanced as far as the first junction, where, somewhat indecisively, it turned left into the Avenue Poincaré. The Führer appeared momentarily to have lost interest in the tour: no doubt he was digesting the sights they had seen, assessing (as he had previously explained) the effects of atmosphere and daylight on the monuments he had known only in the abstract.
A few moments later, they were standing on the terrace of the Palais de Chaillot, gazing across the Seine at the Eiffel Tower. The cameraman was kneeling at the Führer’s feet, trying to fit his head and the top of the tower into the same shot. Meanwhile, the photographer was taking the picture that would prove to the world that Adolf Hitler had been to Paris: Breker, Speer and the Führer standing on the terrace with a papery Eiffel Tower behind them looking like the backdrop of a trick photograph. ‘A view of the Eiffel Tower!’, the newsreel commentator would say, jauntily hinting at holiday photograph-albums. ‘To the left of the Führer: Professor Speer.’ Professor Speer appeared to be suppressing a smirk. The round-shouldered mock-lieutenant with the pallid smile and the ill-fitting cap to the right of the Führer was not deemed worthy of a mention.
Nine days before, German soldiers, having found the elevators sabotaged, had raced up the one thousand six hundred and sixty-five steps to fly a swastika from the top of the Tower, but the winds had torn it to shreds and the smaller flag that replaced it was invisible in the haze. In the next frames, the Führer was seen turning away from the Tower with an upward glance in the direction of the gilt inscriptions on the Palais de Chaillot, but too briefly to have deciphered them:
HE WHO PASSES MUST DECIDE WHETHER I BE TOMB OR TREASURE, WHETHER I SPEAK OR REMAIN SILENT…–FRIEND, ENTER NOT WITHOUT DESIRE.
The sun was beginning to burn through the haze. The emptiness of the esplanade and the quais below looked strange and ominous. No barges passed on the river, and no sounds came from the city other than the whispered exhalation of an urban expanse. It was a mark of the Führer’s composure in the face of such unreality that he could think about topography and architectural dimensions. He was becoming quite astonishingly garrulous. He talked of the genius of the architects who had so perfectly aligned the Tower with the Palais de Chaillot and the Champ de Mars. He praised the Tower’s lightness and its impressive verticality. It was the only monument that gave Paris a character of its own; all the others might have been found in any city. He knew, as Breker told him, that the Tower had been built for the Great Exhibition, but it transcended its original purpose: it was the harbinger of the new age when engineers would work hand in hand with artists, and when technology would create structures on a scale previously undreamt of. It heralded a new Classicism of steel and reinforced concrete.
They crossed the Pont d’Iéna and drove past the foot of the Tower to the other end of the Champ de Mars, where they admired the stern facade of the Éole Militaire and looked back at the terrace on which they had been standing a moment before. Before climbing back into the car, the Führer cast a final, farewell glance at the Eiffel Tower. The day was becoming warmer, and an orderly took the Führer’s trench coat and helped him into a white coat without a belt. It made him look like a chemist or a man in a laboratory.
As the golden dome of Les Invalides approached along the Avenue de Tourville, they were all acutely aware of the fact that this would be the highpoint of the tour, and a moment of profound emotional significance for the Führer. He came as a conqueror, like Blücher and Bismarck before him, but also as an admirer of Napoleon, his equal, and a representative of the spirit of world history. But when the convoy pulled up on the Place Vauban, he happened to notice, standing proudly on its pedestal, the statue of General Mangin. It was Mangin’s vindictive army that had occupied the Rhineland in 1919. The Führer’s face darkened in an instant, and he was once again the avenger of national humiliation and the defender of German pride. He turned to the soldiers in the car behind and said, ‘Have it blown up. We should not burden the future with memories such as this.’
On hearing this, Breker reflected on the sad lot of a great leader: even at this special moment, he was forced to tear his mind away from art and to plunge back into the brutal world of politics and war.
Inside the Church of the Dome, they stood around the gallery of the circular crypt, gazing down on the maroon-coloured porphyry of Napoleon’s tomb. For once, the party was reduced almost to silence, entranced by the unearthly atmosphere and by the sombre light, which was dimmer than usual because of the sandbags that had been heaped against the windows before Paris had been declared an open city and spared the Luftwaffe’s bombs. The faded flags commemorating Napoleon’s most glorious victories hung from the pilasters. The conqueror of Paris gazed on the fifty-ton tomb of his predecessor, his head bowed, his cap held to his heart.
Breker was standing close enough to hear him breathing and had a spine-tingling sense of history in the making. He listened for the words that would mark the timeless meeting of the two great leaders. An audible whisper left the Führer’s lips as he turned to Giesler and said, ‘You shall build my tomb.’ Then, no longer whispering, he elaborated on the project, saying that the painted dome would be replaced by the vaulted heavens, from which, through an oculus similar to that of the Pantheon in Rome, the rain and light of the universe would pour down on the indestructible sarcophagus. The sarcophagus would bear these two words: ‘Adolf Hitler’.
The Führer chose this solemn moment to announce his ‘gift to France’: the remains of Napoleon’s son, the Duc de Reichstadt, would be taken from Vienna and placed in Les Invalides beside his father’s tomb. It would be another mark of his respect for the people of France and their glorious past.
7.15 A.M.–SUNLIGHT WAS RUSHING along the Seine as they passed the Palais Bourbon and turned to the east. A quarter past seven struck from a tower. Here and there, a concierge had ventured out with rag and broom to begin the daily purging of the doorstep. Dogs liberated from their owners’ apartments were going about their morning business. On the Boulevard Saint-Germain, they stopped briefly in front of the German embassy while the Führer gave instructions for the renovation of the building. Then, hurrying through the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter, they passed in front of Saint-Sulpice, the Luxembourg Palace and the Greek columns of the Odéon theatre. Two policemen saw them head along the Boulevard Saint-Michel and turn into the Rue Soufflot. Earlier that morning, a telephone call had woken the Préfet de Police, who was already accustomed to the sudden whims of his new masters. The gendarmerie of the fifth arrondissement had told him that the caretaker of the Panthéon had been roused from sleep by German soldiers carrying sub-machine-guns and ordered to have the iron gates open at seven sharp.
At about half-past seven, the Führer was seen marching briskly into the mausoleum and emerging a few moments later with a scowl on his face. He had been disgusted by the sculptures (‘cancerous growths’, he called them) and by the wretched coldness of the place, which affected him like a personal insult: ‘By God!’, he snarled, ‘It doesn’t deserve the name Pantheon, when you think of the one in Rome!’ Breker was familiar with the Führer’s views on sculpture and architecture, but he found it interesting to hear them applied to actual examples. According to the Führer, a piece of sculpture that deformed the human body was an insult to the Creator. He must have been thinking of the choir of the Panthéon and of Sicard’s tumultuous monument to the Convention Nationale, with its craggy, weather-worn soldiers and its defiant motto, ‘VIVRE LIBRE OU MOURIR’. A true artist, according to the Führer, did not use art to express his own personality; he took no interest in politics. Unlike the Jew, he felt no need to twist everything out of shape and to make it frivolous and ironic. Art and architecture were the work of human hands, like boots, except that a pair of boots was good for the rubbish heap after a year or two of wear and tear, whereas a work of art endured for centuries.
There was something in this public display of personal sentiment that inspired Arno Breker with feelings of filial gratitude. He realized that, while encouraging ‘his artists’ to believe that they were his guides to Paris, the Führer was in fact showing them the city as it ought to be seen and preparing them for the daunting task ahead. As they drove away from the Panthéon, the Führer turned in his seat and looked ‘Lieutenant’ Breker up and down with a sly smile on his face. Then he said, as if to console him for his ludicrous appearance, ‘No true artist is a soldier…’, and expressed a wish to see the quartier where the young Breker had begun his heroic struggle with the muse. ‘I, too, love Paris, and, like you, I would have studied here if fate had not driven me into politics, for my aspirations before the First World War were entirely artistic.’
Since there was nothing of architectural note in that part of Paris, the Führer’s request seemed all the more considerate. They drove along the Boulevard du Montparnasse and saw the famous café called the Closerie des Lilas, and Carpeaux’s fountain of ‘The Four Continents’, which confirmed the Führer’s high regard for Carpeaux’s work. Then they returned to the Boulevard Saint-Michel and drove swiftly down towards the river. There was still so much to see, but time was running out, and they were now a long way from the point of exit.
On the Place Saint-Michel, the Führer returned the salute of two policemen. They crossed to the island and turned along the lifeless quai towards Notre-Dame. Here, at least, Paris still exuded its mysterious charm. The walls of the Préfecture de Police slid away to the left like a curtain and the Gothic towers rose in the grey light like the backdrop of a Romantic drama. They drove past without stopping. They saw the Palais de Justice and the Sainte-Chapelle, which made no impression on the Führer, who noticed instead the dome on the other side of the street and said to Breker, ‘Isn’t that the dome of the Chambre de Commerce?’, at which Breker shook his head and answered, ‘No, it’s the dome of the Institut, I think.’ But when they drew level with the entrance, the Führer jerked his head and said to Breker, in great amusement, ‘See what’s written there?…Chambre de Commerce!’
7.50 A.M.–THEY CROSSED the Pont d’Arcole to the Hôtel de Ville, passed by the Carnavalet museum and the shuttered shop windows of the Jewish quarter to the Place des Vosges. Trees masked the cream and pink facades, and the Führer looked positively bored. The twittering sparrows, the leafy garden for nannies and well-heeled children and the cosy arcades gave off an intolerable air of bourgeois self-satisfaction. He did not become animated again until they were heading back along the Rue de Rivoli. This was the sort of nobility that he had in mind for Berlin: the endless row of identical house-fronts, the unmistakeable evidence of a grand design, and the invincible peace and happiness of a great imperial capital.
To the right were the dingy streets that led to Les Halles. Even here, the city seemed quite dead. There were no earthy vegetables blocking the roads, no traders massacring the French language, no smells of coffee and caporal. But then, penetrating the morning stillness, they heard the cry of a newsvendor. It sounded like the stranded relic of an earlier age. The owner of the voice was approaching from a side-street with his sing-song cry, ‘Le Matin! Le Matin!’ He saw the column of sedans and came running up, waving a copy of the paper, coming to the car in front and yelling, until the words stuck in his throat, ‘Le Matin!’ Staring in mute terror at the blue eyes that stared back at him, he fled, dropping his papers on the pavement. A little further on, a group of market women, slovenly and self-confident like all the women of Les Halles, stood talking in loud voices. The loudest and fattest of them peered at the convoy as it came along the street, and began to wave her arms about, pointing at Hitler and saying, ‘C’est lui – oh, c’est lui!’ Then, with a speed that belied their corpulence, they scattered in all directions.
‘I have no hesitation’, said the Führer, as the monumental facade of the Louvre hove into view, ‘in pronouncing this grandiose edifice one of the greatest works of genius in the history of architecture.’ A few moments later, he was just as impressed by the Place Vendôme, which, despite the vandalism of anarchists, still proclaimed the undying glory of the Emperor.
Soon, they were back at the Opéra, to see – as the Führer had intended – the gorgeous facade in the full light of day. Without stopping, they accelerated up the Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin and the Rue de Clichy, veered right on the square and followed the boulevards past the Moulin Rouge, as silent as ever on a Sunday morning, to Place Pigalle, but without seeing any of those Parisian women whose lipstick was said to be made from the grease of the Paris sewers.
Changing gear in rapid succession, the Benz sedans surged up the steep incline, threaded their way through the provincial streets and came out on the Parvis du Sacré-Cœur. They walked to the edge of the square. With their backs to the basilica, they looked out over the city. Church-goers were entering and leaving the building; some of them recognized Hitler but ignored him. He leaned on the balustrade, searching for the lines that would reveal the master plan of Baron Haussmann. At that height, the beauties of Paris were swamped by homes and factories and other utilitarian buildings; almost everything was washed away by the distance and the haze. Paris was an impression, a muddy watercolour, and the sturdy monuments they had seen at close quarters were like little buoys drifting in a grey sea.
Breker sensed the Führer’s disappointment. This had been Adolf Hitler’s one and only visit to the city he had studied so fervently and had longed to see for so many years. The tour had lasted barely two and a half hours, during which he had neither eaten a meal, nor entered a private house, nor spoken to any Parisian, nor even used a toilet. On the odd moments they had been able to exchange a few words, Speer had been as cynical as usual, calling the Führer ‘le Chef’, by way of a joke. But now, as Breker watched Hitler scanning the space bisected by the Seine and bounded by dark hills, he seemed to see his eyes gleam and moisten. ‘It was the dream of my life’, the Führer was saying, ‘to be permitted to see Paris. I am happy beyond words to see that dream fulfilled.’ Ever mindful of the purpose of the tour, he addressed his artists – Giesler, Breker and Speer – saying, ‘For you, the hard time is now beginning when you must work and strive to create the monuments and cities that are entrusted to you.’ Then, to his secretary, he said, ‘Nothing must be allowed to hinder their work.’
They stood at the balustrade for what seemed a long time. Finally, turning slowly from the scene, the Führer looked up at the white basilica behind, said, ‘Appalling,’ and then led the way back to the cars.
THE CONDOR took off from Le Bourget at ten o’clock. The Führer ordered the pilot to circle over the city a few times. They saw the sunlight catch the steel-blue curves of the Seine, which made it possible to work out exactly where everything was in relation to everything else: the islands, Notre-Dame, the Eiffel Tower, Les Invalides.
Paris fell away for the last time into the summer haze. Now, only forests and fields appeared through the windows. The Führer banged his fist on the armrest and said, ‘That was an experience!’ The satisfaction of having seen the legendary city outweighed the disappointments (he had imagined everything much grander than it was in reality), and its obvious defects in some way enhanced his appreciation and made him look forward to examining the master model of Berlin with a fresh eye. The only sour note came from Hermann Giesler, who told the Führer that he had not really seen Paris at all, because what was a city without its people? He should have visited it during the 1937 Exhibition, when it was alive with people and traffic. The Führer nodded his head in agreement, and said, ‘I can well imagine.’
Back at the Wolfsschlucht, the Führer shared his thoughts, during walks in the woods, with Giesler, Breker and Speer. While his impressions were still sharp, he made a decision which showed that, even in the absence of its human population, Paris had a powerful effect on anyone who saw it. He had often considered the possibility that the city would have to be annihilated but had now decided not to destroy it after all – for, as he told Speer that evening in the parsonage, ‘When we are finished with Berlin, Paris will be nothing but a shadow, so why should we destroy it?’
When Professor Breker came to record the notable events of his life in 1971, he found his impressions of the little tour even more vivid than memories of his early days in Montparnasse. That vanishing parade of grey monuments, and the newsreel images of himself standing next to the Führer, were more real to him than his own personal experience of the city. As he told his friends, he was grateful to have had the opportunity to witness an aspect of the Führer that few people ever saw – a Hitler who was, for a few hours, released from the cares of war and the mountains of paperwork under which, according to Breker, his enemies tried to bury his ambitions. Even when the monumental statues and bas-reliefs he had produced at the Führer’s behest lay in rubble, he remembered how brilliantly the architecture of Paris, when it was liberated from the distractions of people and traffic, had expressed the continuity of European civilization. He clung to his memories like a secret treasure, all through the difficult years when, as Speer smilingly predicted when they said farewell to each other in the ruins of Berlin in 1945, ‘even a dog will refuse to take food from your hand’.