AUGUST 9, 1944
PARIS, FRANCE
MORNING
General Dietrich von Choltitz has orders from the Führer.
The new military commander of Paris awakens in room 213 of Le Meurice, a luxury hotel smack in the heart of the city. Blackout curtains. Red-carpeted hallways. Breakfast of marmalade, black coffee, and four slices of toast delivered by longtime aide Corporal Helmut Mayer.
This is the general’s first morning in charge. A garrison of 25,000 soldiers is now at his beck and call. Choltitz has absolute control of absolutely everything in the City of Lights. Food, women, fast cars—all are his for the asking. In the history of mankind, very few individuals have been able to make that claim. The citizens may be suffering right now—starving, angry, praying for relief—but to be ruler of Paris is to be sovereign lord of the finest pleasures life has to offer, a most wondrous joy indeed.
On this warm summer morning, that man is Dietrich von Choltitz, a forty-nine-year-old monocle-wearing career officer with a budding heart condition and the sudden awareness that he has a conscience.
Thus, rather than greeting the day awash in joy, General von Choltitz is wrapped in gloom.
The general has just traveled by train and automobile from Adolf Hitler’s headquarters in faraway East Prussia, the Wolfsschanze—the Wolf’s Lair. The differences between that remote utilitarian bunker and gay Paree could not be more remarkable. Choltitz has been everywhere in this war: accepting the surrender in Rotterdam, enduring the bitter siege of Sevastopol, and most recently fighting in Normandy. He thought he had seen and done it all.
Then came his meeting with Hitler.
Von Choltitz now awakens in a room overlooking the Louvre and Tuileries and tries to make sense of his new moral compass.
It is nine hundred miles from the Wolf’s Lair to Paris. Plenty of time to work through the memory of his visit with Hitler. The two met in a windowless cement bunker. Choltitz was jarred by the Führer’s feeble appearance. “I saw an old, bent-over, flabby man with thinning gray hair—a trembling, physically demolished human being,” Choltitz will write.
But that fragile exterior was set aside as Hitler launched into a rambling dissertation on his life and career that ended with the Führer venting his rage about a recent assassination plot. “He spoke in a bloodthirsty language with froth literally coming out of his mouth. His entire body trembled. Sweat was running down his face,” Choltitz adds.
General Dietrich von Choltitz is a faithful soldier and follower of Hitler, a career officer with a paunch and reputation for completing a job at all costs. He has taken part in the persecution of Jews and kept his mouth shut about it.
But as he stood in the pale artificial light of the remote bunker, Choltitz realized the war was lost. Hitler ranted about a new weapon technology that would turn the tide of the war but it was clear that the Führer’s grasp on reality was slipping. “I saw in front of me someone who has lost his mind. The fact that the life of our nation was in the hands of an insane being who could no longer judge the situation or was unwilling to see it realistically depressed me immensely,” the general will lament.
But Choltitz had no choice but to stand and endure the harangue.
Hitler finally got to the point.
“Now,” the Führer barked. “You are going to Paris.”
More bile as Hitler derided the soft lifestyle of soldiers stationed in the city.
“You will stamp out without pity any uprising by the civilian population, any act of terrorism, any act of sabotage against the German garrison,” Hitler rants. “For that, Herr General, you will receive from me all the support you need.”
Choltitz now faces a cruel choice as he begins his first day as commander of Paris. He can either follow Hitler’s order to defend the city at all costs, which will eventually mean the destruction of any resources of which the Allies can make use: power plants, fuel depots, water supply, and even the picturesque bridges across the Seine.
Or Choltitz can defy those orders, save hundreds of thousands of lives, prevent the sort of lengthy siege that destroyed every city block in Stalingrad and reduced its residents to cannibalism in order to stay alive.
All he has to do is surrender.
The war is almost lost. Surrender would be simple. The French did it so easily four years ago.
Yet, there is a consequence.
Thus, the heavy gloom that has settled over General von Choltitz.
Should he defy Adolf Hitler, the Nazis will enact a policy known as the Sippenhaft. This brutal practice of punishing relatives for the actions of a family member was originally invoked during the Middle Ages.
Sippenhaft means that if Choltitz violates the Führer’s direct order and surrenders Paris intact, his wife, Huberta, their two daughters, Maria and Anna, and infant son Timo will be executed.
General Dietrich von Choltitz must make his decision soon.
The Allies are coming. Time is running out.