Chapter Two

Waiting for Hitler

Paris worried Hitler.

—August von Kageneck¹

“They” Arrive, and Are Surprised

In mid-June of 1940, the German army arrived before Paris, exuberant but stunned. They could see in the distance the Eiffel Tower, standing as confidently over the world’s most recognized cityscape as when it had first appeared there just fifty-one years earlier. The Wehrmacht had been almost as surprised as the French at the ease of their foray into the Low Countries and France. Their victory had not been a foregone conclusion. Hindsight has given us a quite benign view of what the Allies and Germans expected in 1940: “The campaign was won so swiftly and decisively that, retrospectively, both sides came to view its outcome as inevitable.”² More imaginative and forceful leadership on behalf of the Allies could well have stymied even the panzer-led Blitzkrieg the Germans had so brilliantly planned. The Battle of France could have bogged down in the same area as it had in the First World War, and Germany could have been quickly bled and spent to death before realizing its aims. But luck and Allied pusillanimity made Hitler into a military genius, and now another German army was ready to occupy, this time for years, the capital of France.

Just a generation before, the Kaiser’s troops had lost major battles in their attempt to take the city. Still, the Germans were a bit abashed at their new responsibility as occupiers: “The German generals, of whom many had fought in the First World War, had psychological difficulty in realizing the depth, and especially the rapidity of their victory [over the French Army].” One young lieutenant wrote home: “My thoughts are turning in on themselves. My mind truly wants to understand. We are the victors. But our heart is not yet ready to seize the immensity of this fact, all the grandeur of these events, the full significance of our victory. We talk about it amongst ourselves, we try to understand it, but without success.”³ The fact of their victory was in effect more intimidating than had been the armed forces of their enemy.

There had been almost no French military defense of Paris, so there had been no excuse for the Wehrmacht to hesitate in driving right into the prize. But an awkward lull had briefly prevailed. Waiting outside the city on June 13, a day before his army would formally enter it, one young lieutenant was impatient. Asked to make plans for his battalion’s quarters when they entered the capital, he borrowed a BMW motorcycle, and using the Byzantine dome of the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur as his guide, drove straight into Montmartre, on the city’s northern edge. The streets, he felt, were strangely empty, but when he stopped in the neighborhood’s most famous plaza, the Place du Tertre, a crowd instantly gathered. They were looking at their first German soldier—who suddenly lost his earlier exuberance. Turning around, he sped back behind his lines to safety.

Because French authorities had devised few sensible plans about how to protect against the military capture of Paris, they had been forced to resort at the last minute to the open-city strategy. Had Parisians fought to defend their capital street by street, at least for a while, the sense of helplessness, despair, and humiliation that they would feel for years might have been somewhat mitigated. Many of the eyewitness accounts we have from the first Germans to enter the city underline both their surprise at the ease of occupying the world’s best-known capital and their pleasure at being able to enjoy its advantages from day one.

Not one shot had been fired in the city’s defense. Now Teutons were riding brazenly through the streets of the City of Light for the first time since 1870, with plans to stay much longer. Their own curiosity was manifest in every action they took: How should we treat the occupants of a city that had not lifted a finger against us? Later in the day, when regular army formations began to roll more confidently down the city’s grand boulevards, Wehrmacht soldiers expressed consternation, even derision, at the many smiling, waving French: Don’t they have any pride? But the French were amazed—and relieved—at the handsome, “correct,” and well-behaved German ranks. To some, they almost seemed to have deserved victory over the poorly led and poorly trained French army.

That first morning, Roger Langeron’s assistant informed him that two official German army automobiles had driven up to the Préfecture. Four officers had gotten out and walked calmly into the reception area, where they made a polite request to speak with the police chief. Langeron had been waiting for some sort of official communiqué since news had reached him earlier that German patrols had entered the city proper. They had taken up positions throughout Paris, but no official contact between his administration and the conquering army had yet occurred. When the young German officers arrived in his office, they were almost deferential, he thought, too young to have fought in the Great War and thus too green to understand the enormous symbolism of their victory over the French. The present German army was filled with men born during the last war or right after—youth who had been brought up on hatred for the way the French had treated their fathers in defeat and anger at the occupation of the Rhineland in the 1920s. Langeron also wondered if these officers might be from the German provinces rather than from a large city, for they seemed uncomfortable in the nerve center of Paris. The Germans politely requested that Langeron appear at the Hôtel de Crillon, their temporary headquarters on the Place de la Concorde, at 11:00 that morning to meet the general in command of the army that was supervising the Occupation. Finally, Langeron thought, he would receive instructions on protocol and his legal responsibilities. The Germans would tell him what the French military command of Paris could—or would—not do.

Reports had continued to arrive at the Préfecture that German troops and vehicles, both logistical and armed, were entering Paris from the north and northeast. Strangely enough, horses and mules pulled much of the materiel. The wagons had pneumatic tires, but Parisian observers were startled and not a little amused by the disjunction between the reputation of the highly mechanized Wehrmacht, with its notorious panzer divisions, and this nineteenth-century mode of transport. The city remained quiescent; the citizens who had not left stayed inside, shutters closed. German foot and motorcycle patrols were traversing the city, from the Boulevard Saint-Michel on the Left Bank to the Avenue des Champs-Élysées on the Right Bank. Advance units of Germans were lowering French flags from official buildings and replacing them with a striking red flag bearing a black swastika inside a white circle. (Purported French sabotage of the Eiffel Tower’s elevators meant that the Nazi flag had to be carried up the one-thousand-foot monument on booted feet.) German cars fitted with loudspeakers circulated, demanding the surrender of private arms and threatening with the death penalty any hostile acts against the Occupation authorities. Germans were putting up signs in their language to help direct the new, massive military traffic. Nevertheless, Paris remained calm, almost somnolent. Even passive resistance was minimal, if it occurred at all. The Wehrmacht was able to move into the city with alacrity and precision and to establish firm control. Langeron took pride in maintaining order during this awkward period and in the fact that so few of his officers had left with the exodus. The French police maintained what remained of general traffic, occasionally with the polite assistance of their German counterparts. Were the police collaborating with a new authority, or were they protecting their city from the whims of a nervous occupier? The question would persist for years, and Langeron himself would be investigated for collaboration after the war.

Unbeknownst to those who had breathed a sigh of relief at the polite invasion of their city by the Wehrmacht, the Gestapo had followed on the army’s heels.^* Langeron, in his diary, presents a vignette that must have been repeated throughout the city in those early days. He was in his private apartment, in the Préfecture de police, when he was informed that a high Nazi official wished to see him downstairs in his office. The police chief took his time to get dressed and had to be called once again. Finally he showed up to confront an exasperated representative of the Occupation authorities, this time a civilian, not an army officer.

Langeron surmised that his guest must be from the Gestapo. Sitting down at his desk, the chief watched as the smug bureaucrat, whom he had left standing, grew more and more agitated at this lack of respect. Finally the German sat down and asked if Langeron still believed himself to be under the orders of that “Jew Mandel.” The man added, “We know you are anti-German, Monsieur Langeron.” Earlier, in September of 1939, when the German diplomatic delegation was leaving Paris for Berlin at the beginning of hostilities, the head of the legation had offered his hand to the Parisian police chief, who had refused to take it. That minor sign of resistance had been noted in the Gestapo’s files. Langeron was amused at the pettiness of his new bosses, but then the German asked a much more serious question: “Where are the police files?” Langeron wrote that his heart beat faster with pleasure, for he had outsmarted this pompous secret policeman and his cohort. A few days before, the French police had loaded onto two barges, docked at the Quai des Orfèvres, right alongside the Préfecture, a large consignment of the police files; on one boat were those of foreigners, on another those dealing with delicate matters of espionage and politics. The barges had proceeded downstream, loaded with explosives in case of capture. He told the agent that the police files had been evacuated with other official dossiers when the government decamped to Tours and Bordeaux, and he had no idea of their whereabouts. Red-faced and blustering, the agent demanded to see Langeron’s department heads. Brought in, they repeated the same story. When the German official left, in more than a huff, Langeron was quite delighted at his initial effort at resistance but also sadly aware that the tone of the Occupation would change inexorably from one of genteel accommodation to one of mutual suspicion.

As the refugees began returning or through Paris in late June and early July, they were surprised to see a city more relaxed than the one they had so quickly left behind. After two or three weeks on the crowded roads south of Paris, they were exhausted and fearful. Yet everything seemed to be as it had been, except for the gray-green uniforms of thousands of foreign soldiers. The swastika was indeed flying from the Eiffel Tower, and the German language was everywhere. One American, married to a prominent Frenchman, was especially offended by the plethora of red, white, and black German standards: “The horrible and hideous symbols of German domination made the city I loved hateful. They did not float over the housetops and towers like the flags of civilized nations so that one had to raise the eye to see them, but hung in the direct line of vision, suspended like huge carpets waiting to be beaten.”⁴

Swastika banners were everywhere. (Musée de la Résistance nationale)

But while there was no doubt that the Germans were there, none of the anticipated destruction or panic or shortages were manifest. This would be one of the major contradictions that would define the early Occupation. The newsreels of the German army’s advance through Europe that Parisians had watched for months in movie houses had not prepared them for a “correct” invasion. Once again, they felt separated from a government that had persistently lied to them. Perhaps it would not be so bad to have the Germans here after all. At least now there was order, precision, and predictability.

For the next four months or so, until October of 1940, Langeron juggled three important responsibilities: maintaining distance between his police and the Occupation authorities; keeping the newly instituted État français (Vichy) government at arm’s length; and establishing a sort of “secular” order in a bewildered city. The return of the thousands of Parisians who had fled, though a welcome sight, placed increased and complex demands on the police forces. Once again, he had to worry about whether this new influx would be carrying a dangerous animus toward the Germans that could ignite an urban revolt. Working out an agreement with a novice and nervous Occupation force about how to reassimilate this enormous population demanded Langeron’s most subtle diplomatic skills. And the repopulation of the weary city proceeded with only minor disruptions.

One Who Stayed, One Who Left

His closest friends had slipped out of town before the arrival of the Germans, so the well-known Spanish artist Pablo Picasso had also escaped, traveling to Royan, on France’s southwestern coast, far from Paris, ostensibly to ride out the occupation, which did not yet have a capital O. The Germans, most thought, would leave Paris soon, after the British had surrendered or had also signed an armistice. Yet even that “soon” was not enough for Picasso, who decided to return to Paris in August of 1940, where he remained for the duration. The question persists: Why did this timorous artist, whose masterpiece, Guernica, had blatantly criticized the muscular fascism of the Germans at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in 1937, scurry back? He was world famous, which might provide a degree of protection, but he was also an outspoken supporter of those who opposed Franco. Rumors continued to persist among many on the right that he was Jewish or Communist—or, maybe worse, both; he was certainly on the left. Yet he refused repeated offers to wait out the war in New York or South America.

Picasso told his friend Brassaï (the pseudonym of the brilliant Hungarian photographer Gyula Halász) that he had returned to Paris because he could only get certain materials for his work there, that he trusted only the printers and foundries of Paris. Whatever the reason, the draw of the city was too strong to resist for the Spanish genius. Still, he was never quite at rest in the changed capital. One can only imagine the vacillations that accompanied his decision to return to Paris only two months after the Germans had arrived. As the art historian Rosalind Krauss has suggested, Picasso’s fine-tuned sensitivity dominated his every waking moment (and most likely his dreams): “[Picasso’s anxiety] is there in what [Françoise] Gilot [his mistress] calls ‘the disease of the will that made it impossible for him to make the slightest domestic decision’, a disease that produces… frequent scenes during which Picasso argues with an irrational persistence that reduces [his] interlocutors to tears.”⁵ After the war, he would assume a mask of boldness that put to rest many questions regarding his apparent “neutrality” while living in the city during the Occupation: “He explained how he had been able to work in the face of Nazi occupation and [that] party’s antagonism to all forms of modern art, saying: ‘It was not a time for creative man to fail, to shrink, to stop working,’ and ‘there was nothing else to do but work seriously and devotedly, struggle for food, see friends quietly and look forward to freedom’.”⁶ He was fined once, for eating a steak in a restaurant on a meatless day, but this was as close as he came to confronting the Occupation authorities. In fact, having remained in Paris during the Occupation, then joining the Communist Party immediately after the Liberation, gave Picasso a postwar cachet of courageous resistance that is generally belied by the low profile he kept during the dark years. He had only one, very discreet, gallery show between 1940 and 1944, and though he received many visitors and kept up relations with a wide variety of artists—many of whom were openly anti-Vichy, if not anti-Nazi—Picasso’s silhouette was gray against a dark background.

Picasso in his Left Bank studio. (© Pierre Jahan / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works)

Picasso established a studio on the Rue des Grands-Augustins, in the Left Bank’s 6th arrondissement, right next to the Seine, and he would walk there daily from his much fancier apartment in the Rue La Boétie, across the river. Soon he abandoned the latter and settled in a large, loftlike apartment on the Left Bank, quite near his favorite restaurant, Le Catalan, and the bustle of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés crossroads. And he did work during those four years. On the top floors of this old building (which one may now visit), he put a sign at his door that said simply: ICI (“Here”). German officers would stop by (and even, against orders, so would German enlisted men), as would other admirers who were in Paris during those troubled years. Indeed, the home of the world’s best-known artist became a required tourist stop in the occupied city. He adroitly used his notoriety to protect himself from those who did not wish him well, who could not understand why he was allowed to continue to live a free man given his anti-fascism. He was protected, too, by some of the Reich’s own artists, most notably the sculptor Arno Breker, one of Hitler’s favorites. And he was discreet. There is an anecdote in the diary of the Russian-British journalist Alexander Werth describing how Picasso even stood in line to request French nationality, just as any other foreigner had to do: “He’s fed up with being a Spaniard. But you know what our red tape is like. Not long ago, I found him standing in a long queue at the Préfecture [de police]; and I had to rescue him. Do you know that Picasso is one of the very biggest taxpayers in France? Last year he paid 750,000 francs in income tax.”⁷

Still, though the reasons why he stayed there were never clear—either to his friends or, perhaps, even to himself—Picasso’s presence in Paris reassured other artists and writers that there could be life and productivity under the Germans. (The Germans might have tolerated his presence as part of their mission to make their Occupation seem relatively benign. Picasso probably intuited this was true.) Henri Matisse, almost as well known as Picasso, had also elected to remain in France during the war, residing in Nice and Vence, in southeastern France. That area was a bit safer, for the Italians controlled it, and they were much less restrictive than the Germans. He, too, ignored pleas from all over the world to emigrate. Matisse, however, was French, not Spanish; he was never considered a Jew or a leftist, as was Picasso. In his conversations with Picasso and his friends, Brassaï quotes an exchange he had with the poet Jacques Prévert. They were discussing Picasso in October of 1943:

We should be grateful to [Picasso]. [Staying] was an act of courage. The man is not a hero. Just like anyone who has something to say or to defend. It’s easy to be a hero when you’re only risking your life. For his part, he could, and can still lose everything. Who knows what turn the war will take. Paris may be destroyed. He’s got a bad record with the Nazis, and could be interned, deported, taken hostage. Even his works—“degenerate” art and “Bolshevik” art—have already been condemned and could be burned at the stake.… And the more desperate Hitler and his acolytes become, the more dangerous, deadly, and destructive their rage may be. Can Picasso guess how they might react? He has assumed the risk. He is with us. Picasso is a fine guy.⁸

Josephine Baker. (© TopFoto / The Image Works)

For the Germans, even the most ignorant of them, Paris was not just any city; it was an idea, a myth. By serendipity, creative planning, and massive amounts of public funding, the French capital had come to represent tolerance, liberty, and a crucible for the imagination. No one represented this image more than a young African American woman who came to Paris at the age of nineteen in 1925. Josephine Baker arrived fresh, seductive, and very brown to a jazz-obsessed city. Straight from Saint Louis, Missouri, she became an overnight sensation at the Casino de Paris and the Folies Bergère with her production La Revue nègre. Brilliantly playing upon the contradictory European fascination with and abhorrence of black sexuality, she adapted her style and performances to the newfound Parisian love for American popular music, imported by African American soldiers during the First World War. Her sensuous dancing elicited an almost hypnotic response from white male audiences all over Europe. By 1940, after the enormous success of her revue, the provocative Baker had become a transnational celebrity.

Wrote one critic:

With Miss Joséphine Baker everything seems to change. The rhythmic spurt comes from her, with her frenzied flutterings and reckless, dislocated movements. She seems to dictate to the spellbound drummer, to the saxophonist who leans lovingly towards her with pulsating language of the blues, [whose] insistent ear-splitting hammering is punctuated by the most unexpected syncopations. In mid-air, syllable for syllable, the jazz players catch hold of the fantastic monologue of this crazed body. The music is created by the dance. And what a dance!… This brief pas de deux sauvage in the finale reaches the heights with ferocious and superb bestiality.⁹

The Revue nègre offered other black bodies, often half nude (or more), sweating in exotic dances devised by Baker, who exploited the stereotypes that Europeans had about “primitive savages.” The posters that plastered Paris, and that made their way across Europe, reproduced all the stereotypes of Africanness: jutting buttocks, thick lips, wide eyes, shiny teeth, kinky hair. Seeing these joyful ads for the revue at the Music-hall des Champs-Élysées, our smile becomes embarrassed when we realize that the Nazis would use the same stereotypes for their attacks in the 1930s on “degenerate art.”

Soon after their Parisian triumph, Baker’s producers realized that there was more money to be made throughout Europe, so an extensive tour was planned. In 1926, her troupe was a sensation in Berlin, where the freedom of the Weimar Republic art scene was at its height. Baker and the show had visibly influenced German musicians and artists, who livened up their own productions in efforts to catch her energy and style. But on her return to Berlin in 1928, when she was the featured artist, not just part of a show, Baker found a new, less tolerant city. She had always brushed off hysterical newspaper reviews, but now the audiences were themselves belligerent. The Depression had made Europe tenser, less tolerant, and more ready to look for scapegoats. Eastern Europe welcomed her with an aggressive, almost palpable hatred, where, in Germany especially, blacks were looked on with unmitigated scorn.

When she appeared in Berlin, after having been to Budapest, Basel, Belgrade, Lucerne, Amsterdam, and Oslo, trouble began. In some cities, proper critics expressed their distaste of her performances, but only on “artistic” grounds. In Berlin, Nazi brownshirts in the audience whistled and hooted at the show (this was the period when the Nazis were seen primarily as a nuisance, certainly not a major political party). Baker represented what the Nazis most despised and most feared about the influence of Paris: the “degeneration” of racial and moral standards, the loosening of ethical certainties, and the freedom of expression, both artistic and political. Blackness and Frenchness—racial mixing that caused degeneration—became firmly connected in the German mind, this despite the fact that there were fewer blacks in Europe than there were Romanies or Jews. Hitler had reserved his most heinous comments for the “subhumans” that had slipped into European culture; the fact that black musicians, artists, and performers were immensely popular drove him to inarticulate fury. And it was Paris where this suggestive dancer, who threatened the “white race” with her blatant sexuality, became popular. One of the world’s best-known and most photographed women, she was like a traveling billboard, advertising her lifestyle throughout Europe, performing in a way that threatened to ruin centuries of dogmatic tradition. She may have been American-born, but she was now Parisian, and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s began to become, in the eyes of fascists, a prime site of hedonism and political threat. Just a decade later, when the Germans would arrive in Paris, they had Baker in mind, for she represented, in many ways, the “other”; she was the forbidden, the dangerous, the diseased, and the profligate. She had even married a Jew.

Nazi ideology sought to destroy the Bakers of Europe, yet the Nazis also wanted some of them to remain in Paris to keep up the image of that city as being just as gay under Nazi control as it had been before. But by June of 1940, the most famous Baker of them all was no longer in Paris. It appears that the advent of the war caught her by surprise. Though still popular, her shows had come to seem somewhat passé.^* Still, she knew that, given her race and her husband’s ethnicity, she would not be able to perform in Paris under German Occupation, despite their program to “keep Paris Paris.” Baker’s last show in Paris was a small revue in the fall of 1939 costarring the popular song-and-dance man Maurice Chevalier (who would stay and perform in the city until 1943, when he became nervous about appearing to support the Vichy regime). Like Picasso, Baker thought the Germans would depart in a few months, but it would be years before she appeared again on a Parisian stage. She would not perform again on French soil until the Germans had left. Volunteering for the Red Cross, and doing a little intelligence work, she was soon moving throughout North Africa and the Middle East, entertaining the Free French and eventually catching the attention of Charles de Gaulle. (After the war, he awarded her France’s highest honor for members of the Resistance.) She had left Paris, but only to serve her beloved France better.

“They” Settle In

Seeing a German soldier in his field uniform for the first time must have been searing, for every memoir, journal, and commentary about the invasion mentions the experience in its first few pages. This was visual, almost tactile proof that France was no longer in charge of its own destiny. With the division of the country in 1940 into Occupied and Unoccupied Zones, it would be more than two years before citizens in the latter areas would catch much sight of Germans other than in newsreels. But in northern France, and in Paris, there was an almost eerie preoccupation with the behavior, dress, and physical characteristics of this “other.” For several of those whose journals I have used in this work, their first sight of a German was not in Paris itself but in the small village or town in which the writers found themselves in June of 1940, having left Paris on the verge of the Occupation. There is something even more intimate about coming face-to-face with one’s nemesis in a rural village, on a country road, or on the streets of a provincial city.

Irène Némirovsky builds her story “Dolce,” part of Suite Française, around this very point. The Germans arrive in a village during Sunday mass, and their heavy boots can be heard as the communicants try to follow the sermon:

The men seemed very young. They had rosy complexions and golden hair. They rode magnificent, well-fed horses with wide, shiny rumps, which they tied up in the square, around the War Memorial. The soldiers broke ranks and started to make themselves at home. The village was filled with the sound of boots, foreign voices, the rattling of spurs and weapons. In the better houses, they hid away the linen.¹⁰

“Dolce” recounts in mesmerizing detail how the intimacy of country living enhanced the sense of being “occupied,” of having to make place where there was not much place to be made, where “accommodation” became unavoidable, and where one could fall into “collaboration” almost casually. Némirovsky wrote this piece almost contemporaneously with the events; she had left Paris (where she had seen her first Germans) to hide in Burgundy, where the French police would later arrest her.

Simone de Beauvoir, having joined the exodus, was in the Pays de la Loire, a region southwest of Paris, when she saw her first Germans close-up:

[In La Flèche was] where I saw the first steel-gray uniforms; all the Germans in La Pouèze [another village nearby] had been wearing Italian-green. Those in La Flèche, in their beautiful uniforms and their beautiful cars of the same color, had an elegant look about them; they were not blond as were the Germans in La Pouèze. There were many different kinds of them, and of all I saw afterward these showed the greatest diversity.¹¹

She comments further on how their laughter, their clicking heels, their confidence, their near joy in victory made French humiliation manifest.

Jean Guéhenno, a literary critic and lycée instructor, witnessed his first Germans in Clermont-Ferrand, a city in central France: “I don’t want to comment here about these grey men that I have been passing in the streets. It’s an invasion of rats.”¹² (This image, of course, presages by a half decade Albert Camus’s allegory, The Plague.) And another Parisian schoolteacher saw her first Germans in Moulins, a village in Burgundy:

An uninterrupted flood of tanks, armored cars, cannons, trucks, motorcycles filing by with a hellish noise and at a fearful speed.… The soldiers riding them stand proudly, arms crossed as fierce victors. Others, more magnanimous, smilingly throw packets of chocolate (chocolate looted from our shops) to stunned kids.… I have just realized the totality of our poor country’s defeat. I feel crushed by these tanks.¹³

The Parisian sisters Benoîte and Flora Groult (both would later become journalists and writers) produced a journal that gives us a day-by-day account of the rising anxiety as war news befuddled a waiting populace. Their parents had taken their two teenage daughters to Brittany in May, to a grandmother’s home, fearful for the young girls’ safety should the Germans reach Paris. Settled in the quaint town of Concarneau, everyone listened assiduously to the radio. The French newscasters bragged frequently about the “enormous losses” incurred by the Germans, while the news the family was receiving from fleeing refugees and passing soldiers implied the opposite. As one of the sisters wrote: “How much longer can an army have ‘enormous losses’ without being bled to death?”¹⁴ The sisters wondered what would happen if the soldiers reached Paris while the family was in Brittany: Would they pillage the family’s apartment there, on Rue Vavin, in the 6th arrondissement?

Eventually, as the first Germans arrived in little Concarneau, and everyone ran to the town square to look them over. Wrote Flora, age fifteen: “I was in town; I saw them, on grey vehicles—camouflaged with branches, stiff, red, immobile, completely normal-looking men. Handsome for the most part, with stiff necks and identical equipment, impressive. They did indeed have the arrogant gaze of a victor, they were impassive, accomplishing their mission.”¹⁵ She notices, too, that town girls were flirting with the handsome German boys, climbing onto their trucks, teasing them with oranges. Flora was horrified, calling her peers “bitches in heat,” but the image is a strong one and indicates a fact: there was a sexual frisson that passed through many of the crowds that watched those handsome, virile young men take over town after town. The unspoken comparison with the demasculinized, defeated French army would remain fixed in the imaginations of most French people right up until the end of the war. (We will see, too, how the Groult sisters reacted to the new soldiers on the block, the Americans, when they helped liberate Paris in August of 1944.)

Meanwhile, back in Paris: “I’ve just seen one,” murmured a stunned maid to her employer, who had run to see why her servant had cried out. “He came into the courtyard, Madame, looked around, and then walked out.”¹⁶ Nervous citizens gazed at nervous invaders. A German tank commander described what he saw:

Everywhere we find the same scene [as we crossed into Paris]. The populace watches as if frozen by astonishment and fear. Then, suddenly, they are all running away! Mothers snatch their children from the street to hide them in their houses. Doors and windows close. Finally, realizing that there is no gunfire and that our column is rolling peacefully along, people come back out and line up with curiosity on the sidewalks.… On the place in front of the [Paris] City Hall… the French standard that had been flying over the building is lowered, to be replaced by a German flag. A crowd of the curious gathered in front of the building, and when the swastika slowly rises on the pole, we felt coming from that crowd something like a heavy sigh.¹⁷

The Germans’ precision and efficiency awed Paris. The invaders swept through the city on that Friday morning in mid-June with all the efficiency for which the new Germany had become known. Official and unofficial histories of the period state, or strongly imply, that the German bureaucracy had indeed run a network of spies inside Paris before the war, taking careful notes of buildings, apartments, crossroads, transport, and Métro stations. “They knew where everything was” was a sentence repeated by the stunned Parisian spectator. Their assumption of the spaces of the city was breathtaking. They knew which crossroads were crucial, which buildings were to be immediately requisitioned; they knew where important archives were to be found, which art galleries were Jewish-owned, which museums still had important collections; they had dozens of signs already painted, with black borders, directing traffic in the German language. They set up traffic police at every major intersection and moved with confidence into government buildings. They organized military parades around the Arc de Triomphe, using all twelve of Haussmann’s radiating avenues as staging grounds. They set up bands and orchestras in key places—the Rond-point des Champs-Élysées, in front of Notre-Dame Cathedral, and in the Jardin des Tuileries—to entertain both their troops and curious Parisians. Still and motion pictures were put to immediate use; scaffolding for cameramen and photographers was set up on the Place de la Concorde to record the spectacle of German officers and troops coming and going in the great eighteenth-century palaces that border the northern side of that plaza: the Hôtel de Crillon (still perhaps Paris’s most prestigious hotel) and the Hôtel de la Marine (until recently, the Ministry of the Navy). They showed off their technological sophistication by having three small Messerschmitt reconnaissance planes land in the Place de la Concorde itself; one even carried the general in command of Paris during the first days of the Occupation.

German directions on the Place de la Concorde. (Editions Granger / Collection Claude Giasone)

The Battle of France was still going on elsewhere. So the Germans immediately sent motorized loudspeakers throughout the city, repeating the admonitions of thousands of previously distributed leaflets: “You have been completely betrayed. There is no longer any efficacious resistance you can mount against German-Italian military superiority. [It is useless] to continue the struggle.… Think of your poor children, of your unfortunate wives. Demand that your government end this struggle that has no hope of success.”¹⁸ Despite their apprehension, such large crowds of citizens surrounded German traffic controllers, soldiers on assignment, and their vehicles that orders had to be given to the public to allow the Wehrmacht to perform its jobs so that newly occupied Paris might return to normal as soon as possible.

Wehrmacht on the Place de la Concorde. (Bundesarchiv)

The Nazi hierarchy wanted the Occupation to appear almost seamless, not only to influence world opinion but also to give the impression to the English and Russians that the Third Reich could be a flexible and compassionate European ally. “Keep Paris Paris,” the order, both implied and specific, rolled out from the propaganda office in Berlin. Tourism was immediately encouraged, and the city was soon filled with busloads of wide-eyed, curious German troops wishing that they had been assigned to this sensual, beautiful oasis. Even those who had never been to either city realized that Berlin was no Paris; it was too far east, too isolated, too Prussian. Vienna could compare in some ways with Paris, but it shared its influence with Budapest, in the barely unified remains of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. It, too, was in the east, too far away from the mercantile giants of England, France, and Holland to be but an attractive shadow of Paris. And Hitler knew this, too: one of his generals would ask him in late 1941 what his first impressions of France’s capital had been; the Führer answered, “I was very happy to think that there was at least one city in the Reich that was superior to Paris from the point of view of taste—I mean, Vienna. At present Berlin doesn’t exist, but one day she’ll be more beautiful than Paris.” He went on about how he had saved Paris and would have no compunction about destroying Moscow or Leningrad. “On the whole,” he concluded, “Paris remains one of the jewels of Europe.”¹⁹ This attitude would dominate the early Occupation. The “correct” military investment of Paris was to be an example of the Reich’s respect for Europe’s non-Bolshevik civilization. The Germans would present themselves immediately, and up to the end, as the protectors of this architectural gem. They were not barbarians but rather the shield against those who would undermine centuries of tradition. As if blessed by the gods, Paris continued to benefit from a magnificent spring that year. Even nature seemed to welcome the new regime.

In an article, “Tourists in Uniform,” published in the magazine L’Illustration a couple of months after the arrival of the Germans, we read one version of the early Parisian reactions to their occupiers:

What struck us at the sight of these military moving among us was their obvious youth. Under the feldgrau [field gray] uniform, we couldn’t distinguish social class, or profession. But we could sense that there were many intellectuals, among these young people, university students, who would take up their interrupted studies and who would profit from their visit to learn about French culture and to increase their learning and experience. They probably had only a bookish knowledge of our culture. This occasion would help them, to their benefit, to see the real face of France, to be able to get to know its citizens, and to familiarize themselves with our customs and our spirit.²⁰

The Vichy-German propaganda machine had easily introduced itself into popular Parisian culture. “Visitors” and “tourists” are not the first terms that came to mind for most Parisians, but this editorial fantasy would prevail for most of the Occupation.

French propaganda prior to the Occupation had been telling its audience for months that the Germans were undernourished, poorly armed, and uncommitted to the Nazi regime. File after file of smart-looking, cadence-stepping, evidently well-armed young men belied these canards and further undermined confidence in the leadership of the Third Republic. There were not a few Parisians relieved that they were seeing fascist rather than communist soldiers marching through their streets. The fear of another Commune of 1870, when communist cadres had briefly ruled the city, was not uncommon, and there was hope that a well-trained and well-led army, even though foreign, would keep away the threat of a leftist takeover of the city. To add to this sense of a reasserted security—one that seemed to put to rest almost overnight the residual fear of the Huns of the First World War—was the near total absence of any French military or guerrilla resistance to the invasion of Paris. There were no gunshots in the night, no sounds of careening vehicles, no insistent police sirens, no air raid warnings, and no troops running from building to building. It seemed as if Paris had literally opened its city gates to a benevolent victor and that its generosity was being repaid in kind.

Of course, there were many other citizens who were mortified at what had happened, especially among the older veterans of the Great War; tears streamed down their faces as they watched, with their medals pinned to their suit coats, a spectacle of arrogance: smug victors revealing their superiority to a befuddled and morally weak population. Thierry de Martel, one of the most prominent surgeons in France and the director of the American Hospital, killed himself and made sure his friends knew why: he could not bear the sight of German uniforms infecting Paris. There were other reported suicides. (Including, some say, the old security guard at the Pasteur Institute, who as a boy had been the great scientist’s first rabies patient.) And, of course, most of the population of Paris was not in the city when the first troops arrived but was caught somewhere south, between the retreating French army and the advancing German one. Soon seen on the streets again were the children of those who had stayed, fascinated with the smart-looking soldiers and their shiny equipment. Stores were reopening, most victuals (except milk, which had to come from the still-war-ravaged countryside) were available; rationing had not yet been set up. The Germans set immediately to shopping—another Blitzkrieg—eager to snap up what had been rationed in their country for almost a year. Paris had become “Germanized” almost overnight, with only small incidents reminding them that they were interlopers.

Still, many Parisians felt ill at ease. Some were more aware of what was to come than others; many hoped that the worst had passed. These were the foreign immigrants who had been arriving for years in Paris from Germany and Austria, then from Czechoslovakia and Poland. They were socialists, communists, intellectuals, Jews, and other adversaries of Nazism. They were in Paris because the city had attracted them by virtue of its reputation as the European center for artistic and intellectual tolerance. French Jews, of course, were for the most part unworried, for they were French first, Jews second, and surely any French government would protect them as they would all their citizens. Nor were recently naturalized French citizens from Europe and North Africa overly concerned—after all, they were French as well. And of course a French government would protect decorated veterans despite their religion or political affiliation. However, anxiety was almost palpable in the immigrant sections of Paris, especially in the working-class quarters, where rent was affordable and where many immigrants had settled. What would happen to them should these “correct” Germans attempt to impose the rigorous limitations they had already imposed in Germany, Austria, and Poland?

The Armistice had demanded that all anti-Nazi German citizens be immediately arrested and handed over to the Occupation authorities. Americans were unconcerned and would remain unmolested in Paris for another year and a half, until Pearl Harbor. But there were not a small number of citizens of the British Empire, still a belligerent force, caught in Paris. Archives in the Imperial War Museum in London contain several diaries and letters that offer a non-French perspective on the Occupation of Paris. One particular document details how much effort Nazi propaganda—almost instantly on the walls of Paris—forcefully and directly sought to drive a wedge between Great Britain and France. Posters reminded the French that it was the British who had executed Joan of Arc and that it was Churchill who was interested only in protecting the British Empire and not its “ally,” the loyal nation of France. “How painful it was to see our brave men so falsely represented and read such ignominious lies. No sooner were these posters put up than they were torn to pieces or covered with mud but ever to be renewed, until the day came when circumstances absolutely prevented anyone from touching them,” the diarist wrote.²¹ British citizens were required to go daily to the local police station and to sign a register. They could, of course, be arrested at the drop of a hat, but women were generally left alone as long as they regularly signaled their residency and kept low profiles. Once, our diarist forgot to make her daily trudge to the station; so the next day she appeared tentatively, expecting at any minute to be challenged. Unnoticed, she took the register from an inattentive clerk’s desk, retired to a bench, and signed it twice, hoping no one would notice. It worked. A daily signature meant a ration card; without one, getting food was almost impossible. Such cards were even more important than an Ausweis, the pass one received to move about in certain monitored areas.

Our “English civilian” also recounted that a large number of dogs and cats roamed the Parisian streets; feeding them had become an awkward burden in a time of rationing. Concierges often woke in the morning to find a basket or dustbin filled with puppies or kittens at their doorsteps, for the city’s apartment-building gatekeepers were known for their love of animals. Later, the police put out warnings that eating cat meat was not healthy because cats fed on rats, animals known for carrying deadly diseases. But upon arrival, the Nazis were more focused on what they saw as a more immediately worrisome sort of “vermin.” As the English diarist records:

No time was lost by the Germans before occupying the luxurious homes of the wealthy Jews.… Huge pantechnicons [moving vans] were soon seen stationed before their houses.… Beautiful tapestries, carpets, busts, masterpieces, china, furniture, blankets, sheets, all were taken away to Germany.… [In the home of a friend, two German officers] went to the wine cellar, the contents of which they evidently knew; they asked for all the Burgundy, etc., and then made for the Benedictine, Chartreuses and Hungarian Apricot Liqueurs.… After, the Germans visited the garage. One of the officers stepped inside the Delage, had the pictures and bottles carried there and departed. A few hours later the little Simca was fetched by two German soldiers.²²

Like so many others, the diarist was staggered by the Germans’ sinister preparations. “The knowledge revealed by the Germans of the interior of flats and houses was astonishing.” This “comprehension” of a major metropolis is one of the reasons that Parisians felt so helpless, almost benumbed, in the summer of 1940. The combination of an effortless assumption of the control of Paris with the invaders’ apparently “correct” behavior, coupled with an armistice that had preserved some French honor, all worked together to make the Occupation of Paris seem embarrassingly easy both to Parisians and their new masters. Upon closer examination, we see that perhaps the vast assertion of authority lacked focus (too many entities too eager to put their units’ imprints on the newly acquired jewel), but an unmistakable message came through: as if by magic, Paris had become a suburb of Berlin.

In notes for her great novel, Irène Némirovsky took notice of how ready the French were for an end to the brief war that had devastated their country and how fed up they were with the incompetence of a failed government: “The French grew tired of the Republic as if she were an old wife. For them, the [Pétain] dictatorship [that followed] was a brief affair, adultery. But they intended to cheat on their wife, not to kill her. Now they realize she’s dead, their Republic, their freedom. They’re mourning her.… Who will win out?”²³ It would take four long—very long—years to find out.

Hitler’s Own Tour

About 6:00 a.m. on Friday, June 28, 1940, a convoy of convertible Mercedes limousines almost mockingly entered nearly abandoned Paris, zigzagging around military barriers and passing a few staring Parisian police officers and bystanders. They had come from the northeast, speeding down Avenue de Flandre, then Rue La Fayette, to their first stop, the Opéra de Paris. Adolf Hitler was tense with excitement.^*

Just two weeks before this visit, Hitler’s Wehrmacht had occupied Paris almost without firing a shot, and only a week earlier, at Compiègne, he had watched as his generals signed an armistice with a sullen French military, a reversal of what had happened in the same place twenty-two years earlier. The German leader had already toured Belgium and northern France, where he had spent the youthful years he most liked to recall. He had been a battlefield runner during the last war, the soldier given the dangerous task of carrying messages between headquarters. For his courage under fire, he had been awarded the Iron Cross. In 1940, as German armies pushed southward toward France, he had established a headquarters, named Wolfsschlucht (Wolf’s Lair), in the village of Brûly-de-Pesche, near Brussels. From there, by air and by car, he revisited each of the places where he had been billeted during the Great War, and he had also toured Belgium’s capital. He had taken a leave in Brussels in 1917; using his memory of that time, he carefully planned his return as its conqueror. As he would in Paris, he stopped before the city’s great state buildings, including the mammoth Palais de Justice, testimony in stone to the excessive fantasies of a colonial state yet fascinating to him, for it fed the visual megalomania that he was already directing toward the construction of a new, more monumental Berlin.

During this nostalgic tour through prostrate Belgium, Hitler passed through the city of Ghent. A Belgian witness describes a convoy of armored carriers, motorcyclists, and a large convertible Mercedes with a special passenger holding on to the rim of the windshield. He was “standing upright, very straight.… He looked like the ancient statues of regal, imperial figures, like, if one could admit it, a Germanic Napoleon.… A black mustache, stoutly built, rigid cap visor. Hitler is passing in front of us; I see his somber, yet passionate look, between the mustache and visor. I think of the images of Roman civilization that I found in my grandfather’s library.”²⁴ We know from one of his companions on the trip that Hitler was not only reviewing his present success but also revisiting a reassuring past. We do not have a similar eyewitness account by a Parisian of Hitler’s visit to that city, but we can be certain that it held none of the emotional nostalgia of this one.

On the day of Hitler’s Paris tour, the city was nearly empty. Estimates agree that somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of Parisians had fled in fear of the Nazi advance, leaving the capital uncannily silent. A nervous Arno Breker, the favored sculptor, accompanied his Führer on the trip. He describes how Gestapo officers had awakened him in Munich, then rushed him by special plane to front headquarters in Belgium. Hitler had wanted someone at his side who had lived in the French capital, as Breker had while studying art in the 1920s. Breker, too, was taken aback by the city’s appearance on that early Friday morning: “Paris seemed dead. Not a soul. Groups of buildings that life seemed to have abandoned passed by, ghost-like and unreal.… As if he shared my reflections, Hitler remained silent and sullen.”²⁵ Had the Nazi leader expected at least a modest welcome from the curious? If so, why had he come so early in the morning? Nighttime curfews did not end until early morning, around six o’clock; only the hardiest citizens or most urgently needed personnel would venture onto the streets before that time. The anticlimax of entering almost furtively the world’s best-known city must have removed some of the pleasure derived from the conqueror’s review. Hitler must have felt a mixture of disappointment as well as awe. Rather than a vibrant metropolis, before him was vacancy and facade. Compared to his adulatory entry into Vienna in March of 1938 and his review of a triumphant parade of his army in a devastated Warsaw in November of 1939, this visit tended toward the pathetic.

Films of Hitler’s Parisian tour were shown widely in Germany immediately after the visit. Soon they were being seen in America and even Britain, but they would not appear in France until later in 1940, after the Occupation had been firmly seated. By then the message had made its impression around the globe: the Nazis were benevolently in charge of one of the “civilized” world’s most important sites. There is, in the films and photographs, a sense of entitlement, of situational arrogance. Yet one could argue that Goebbels underestimated the visual disjunction between his Führer’s brisk roll through a captured Paris and the stark emptiness of a city whose reputation had been built as much on its effervescence as its architecture.²⁶ The visit was intended to make clear that the Germans were in command, but the visual record also showed a city turning its back on its new conqueror. For a while, the first message would dominate world opinion; later, the second vision would begin to mitigate the arrogance of this Occupation.

His may have been a visite éclair (lightning visit), but it had been minutely prepared and perfectly enacted. Hitler seems to have ignored any possibility of assassination during his visit, riding with apparent sangfroid in an open limousine, one that often stopped so he could stand and look around. He would leave his car at the most public places, entering through the most public doorways. The formal uniforms, the impressive limousines, the streets as if emptied for the conqueror, the easy accessibility of some of Paris’s most revered monuments, the posed photographs that implied ownership of the cityscape: all combined to project not only a strapping image of martial self-confidence but of inevitability. Still, one senses a smallness, a half-hidden tentativeness in the lonely cortege’s progress through this magnificent built environment.

In his diary from Spandau (the Berlin prison where he served his postwar incarceration), Albert Speer writes extensively about Hitler’s visual intelligence: “[His] passion for the theater,… [his] amazing knowledge of stage-craft and especially different lighting techniques” had enthralled his entourage.²⁷ Whenever he attended a theatrical or operatic production, he first analyzed, then criticized, the stage setting and the lighting before commenting on the actors or musicians. Performance was at the heart of Nazi self-projection, and it would be an essential part of the Occupation. So it made sense that the group’s first stop was at the Palais Garnier, site of the Opéra de Paris, constructed between 1861 and 1875. This beautiful building sits regally in the midst of the 9th arrondissement, near the center of the city. Then as now, this Right Bank neighborhood is the site of some of Paris’s most elegant department stores and borders the city’s wealthiest sections—where many German bureaucrats and officers were already finding luxurious lodging. The opera house is positioned at the head of the Avenue de l’Opéra, one of the best-known boulevards of Paris. Slicing through packed neighborhoods when it was built by Haussmann’s engineers in the late nineteenth century, the broad thoroughfare was repeatedly and imaginatively painted by such artists as Pissarro, Monet, and Caillebotte, each trying to capture on canvas a newer, modernized city. The only major avenue in Paris not bordered by trees, it was specially constructed to draw attention to the Opéra building itself and, as one looks southward, to tie this new building with the massive Louvre on the Seine. Hitler could not have chosen a more typically monumental site as his first stop.

Approximate route of Hitler’s tour

The tour continues. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Films show Hitler quickly leaving his car and climbing purposefully the stairs of the imposingly baroque building, as if it alone had been the sole reason for his visit. His entourage was impressed at how intimately familiar he was with the structure, inside and out. (The German leader knew so well this great temple to opera, built by the architect Charles Garnier, that he claimed to have no use for the French guide who had been assigned to welcome him.) He wondered at the edifice’s spacious interior and its neo-baroque decoration; he remarked in detail on its public and private spaces, even noticing that a small alcove that he remembered from his study of blueprints had been removed. He stayed at the Opéra longer than he stayed anywhere else on his tour; the newsreels of this visit emphasize a connoisseur carefully examining an architectural masterpiece, one dedicated to the mannered, neo-baroque art of the late nineteenth century.

Happy Easter from the Paris Opera House. (Editions Granger / Collection Claude Giasone)

Why did Europe’s most celebrated opera house so enthrall a military conqueror? Goebbels and his cultural machinery had made National Socialism into a spectacle—indeed, its ethical mandate demanded an imposition of visual order to heal a disordered world. This meant stunning uniforms, grand parades, intricately designed mass rallies, nighttime events, and a generally brilliant use of lighting and music to accompany these performances. It also meant that special attention was paid to the particular militaristic and traditional tastes of the youngest and the oldest of German citizens. Yet Hitler’s visit also reminds us of how much of Nazi art was kitsch—that is, a cheapened, unironic appropriation of traditional aesthetic forms for mass consumption. Kitsch plays exclusively to the emotions; it is a hollowed-out, sentimental expression, not an intellectual one. Garnier’s opera house was the final visually extravagant monument of Napoleon III’s own kitschy reign—baroque-like statuary and decoration, gilt everywhere, massive stairways leading to red velvet seats and boxes—thus it was in sync with the Nazi attempt to revive dated architectural and artistic traditions. Having organized the devastatingly pejorative show of the entartete Kunst (degenerate arts) in Munich in 1937, which derided jazz, cubism, Bauhaus, and other modernist expressions, Hitler had already imposed on German society a Nazi “modernism,” one whose antecedents he was especially eager to find in Paris. He did not begin his tour at the Louvre (which anyway had been emptied of many of its treasures in anticipation of his army’s “visit”) but rather at this site, where his knowledge of architectural history and his belief in the transformative power of the performing arts—vocal, physical, theatrical—could be admired. The great opera houses of Europe were, for this upstart bourgeois, the locus of “nondegenerate” artistic expression.

Hitler’s love for nineteenth-century opera is well known, and his passion for Wagner continues to mark that genius’s reputation. (It seems that the German people, who preferred Verdi and Mozart, did not share widely this Wagnerophilia.) Opera, an opulent combination of several forms of art, was to be used by the Nazis to inculcate a “popular” culture, one that did what many of the public performances of party events themselves did: create a cohesive and seduced multitude riveted by imposed taste. According to a historian of Nazi aesthetics, Hitler believed fervently that “a community [should] regard its opera house as an object of civic pride.… ‘An opera house is the standard by which the culture of a city or civilization is measured,’ was how he once put it to Speer.”²⁸ Hitler’s obsession with opera houses even affected his war aims:

“The bombing of an opera house,” Speer recalled, “pained him more than the destruction of whole residential quarters.” Whenever this occurred—in Berlin with the State Opera in 1941 and the German Opera in 1943, in Mainz and Saarbrücken in 1942 and in Munich in 1943—he ordered their immediate reconstruction. To Goebbels’s argument that this would not be popular in light of the catastrophic housing shortage resulting from air raids, Hitler responded, “… the theatre is not merely a communal achievement but the one structure that belongs exclusively to the community. From this point of view, reconstructing housing would not achieve as much as reconstructing opera houses and theatres.… Of course, all this opera house construction means a loss of material for war production; but so be it.”²⁹

Garnier’s building was thus an appropriate first stop for another “phantom of the opera.”

Hitler wanted to see examples of Paris’s past, not its present or future, to understand how it had arrived at the center of the world’s urban imagination, how it had melded architecture, ideas, fashion, style, and revolution to become the model of metropolitan sophistication. The Occupation would be defined, in part, by similar attempts at “freezing” Paris in its past, by trying to limit change, ignoring the fact that all metropolises must change in order to prosper. Hitler’s visit, then, introduces two major strategies of the Occupation: one, to keep Paris in stasis as an example of the ideal city, and two, to undermine a metropolis’s most distinctive trait, its porosity—that is, its openness to new ideas and to foreigners.

The Führer’s next stop was down the street from the Opéra. Breker notes that “the Boulevard des Capucines, empty of people, without traffic, seemed a stage set” as they approached the imposing eighteenth-century Église de la Madeleine.³⁰ Again, Hitler jumped out of his car and vigorously mounted the steps to the temple’s portals. Looking southward, he could see the Place de la Concorde, with its Egyptian obelisk, and, farther across the Seine, another eighteenth-century building, the former Palais Bourbon, then the seat of the Chambre des députés (most of whom had by then fled to Bordeaux). The view before him remains one of the most imposing vistas one can enjoy of neoclassical Paris, and it must have been especially compelling then, for there was almost no traffic. It was as if a museumlike replica of Paris had been especially prepared for the Leader’s eye. From there, the cortege sped down the Rue Royale, past the restaurant Maxim’s, which would become one of the favorite spots of German officials. They circled the impressive Place de la Concorde—where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had lost their heads—passing in front of the Hôtel de Crillon and the Hôtel de la Marine, the first headquarters of the occupying army. At each of the four corners of the grand square stand monuments to the major cities of France, among them Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace, then part of the new Reich, as it had been part of Germany after the Franco-Prussian War. At the square’s entrance to the city’s most famous thoroughfare, the Champs-Élysées, Hitler’s limousine paused; standing in the car, he grabbed the windshield and gazed pensively at what was before and behind him. His cameras find two or three Parisian police officers on the sidewalk. We do not know if they were there coincidentally or by order. Then a figure in a dark cloak crosses our field of vision, almost certainly a member of a religious order, rushing across the street before the cortege continues.

Gazing at his prize. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Hitler proceeded slowly up the Avenue des Champs-Élysées toward the Arc de Triomphe.^* The cavalcade approached the Place de l’Étoile, where it slowly circled the Arc de Triomphe, host to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a memorial to a war whose loss Hitler was avenging. For the rest of the Occupation, German civilians and military would obsessively and respectfully visit this site. One of their most frequently photographed Parisian monuments would be the eternal flame, often covered with bouquets and wreaths. It might seem perverse that Germans in the 1940s would show such respect to an army that had defeated them in 1918 until one remembers the fervent belief in military honor that informed the Wehrmacht. For the Nazis, also, such visits and respect were obviously a political move, meant to keep the French as quiescent as possible.

A popular German tourist site. (Editions Granger / Collection Claude Giasone)

By way of the elegant Avenue Foch, where the Gestapo and other Occupation authorities offices were already in residence, and the Avenue Raymond-Poincaré, the cortege arrived at the Place du Trocadéro, a large open space between two curved buildings that provided a magnificent perspective over the Pont d’Iéna and, across the Seine, on to the Eiffel Tower. This should have been a familiar site to Hitler; it certainly was to Speer, for here, in 1937—to showcase Nazi ingenuity and products to the visiting millions—the Germans had erected a massive hall for the international exposition. On Trocadéro Hill, the French government had constructed two enormous buildings, still used today as museums and conference halls. Standing between these curved edifices, one can look down the slope toward the Seine and then across the river up at the imposing Eiffel Tower. Tourists still do it as Hitler did then, with cameras rolling.

By 1940, the fifty-one-year-old Eiffel Tower had become a metonym for Paris. Design experts often stated that, along with Charlie Chaplin’s bowler and Mickey Mouse’s ears, its silhouette was the most recognized in the world’s visual archive. The very “uselessness” and “meaninglessness” (its architecture was without any symbolic interest) of a tower built essentially as an advertisement for an engineer’s genius were suggestive of the contemporary art so despised by Nazi aesthetics. Yet Hitler could not resist—nor could he avoid—posing with the tower in the background. Of the nine times he got out of his car on his tour, this one would produce the most iconic photograph. The juxtaposition of the conqueror of France in a tourist shot with Paris’s best-known monument wavers, once more, between the sinister and the kitschy. Though the photograph became the most reproduced of all the day’s images, its irony was not evident to Hitler and his entourage. Highly desirous of being recognized as connoisseurs of beauty, deeply moved by their new responsibility to protect the world’s best-loved city, the group was oblivious to the moment’s contradictions. Time and subsequent events would give this famous snapshot an aura of the absurd. Here was Hitler, arrogant yet respectful, a tourist yet a conqueror, posing in front of a French structure whose monumentality belittled him.

A tourist at the Eiffel Tower. (© AKG Images / The Image Works)

The cortege next crossed the Seine for the first time, traversing the Pont d’Iéna, to stop at the Hôtel des Invalides, constructed by Louis XIV in the seventeenth century for his aged and ill soldiers. Hitler left his limousine here and walked carefully around the massive church that was at the center of the old soldiers’ home. Ascending the steps on the building’s south side, the group solemnly walked into the massive chapel to look down on the sepulchre of the Führer’s great antecedent. In another of the visit’s most reproduced photographs, a thoughtful Hitler, wearing a light duster rather than the leather coat he had had on earlier, stands out from his entourage. (So many visiting German soldiers would repeat this visit during the Occupation that a wooden covering had to be laid over the chapel’s precious marble floor to protect it from the hobnailed boots of the Teutonic tourists.) Looking down on the porphyry sarcophagus, Hitler must have seen the list of victories inscribed around the emperor’s tomb, one of which is MOSCOWA. This staged scene reflects another major strategy of Hitler’s brief visit, namely, to be seen paying respect to a leader who had also sought to create a “new Europe” held together by military strength and his own charismatic leadership. In 1806, prints had been made and published of a similarly somber Napoleon visiting the grave, in Potsdam, of Frederick the Great. The French emperor had also been a radical leader, seeking to derive legitimacy by proximity to the remains of a mythical predecessor.

For a closer look at the sarcophagus, Hitler then descended into the crypt, whose entrance is inscribed with the famous words from Napoleon’s will—JE DÉSIRE QUE MES CENDRES REPOSENT SUR LES BORDS DE LA SEINE, AU MILIEU DE CE PEUPLE FRANÇAIS QUE J’AI TANT AIMÉ (May my ashes rest on the banks of the Seine, among the French people I loved so well). Then, leaving the Invalides, the group sped along the fashionable and narrow Rue de Lille, passing by the German embassy, sited in the Hôtel de Beauharnais (another Napoleonic connection; Josephine’s first husband was a Beauharnais), then down the Boulevard Saint-Germain to the Rue Bonaparte and the Latin Quarter.^* The group headed next for the neighborhood of Montparnasse and its well-known expatriate hangout, the Closerie des Lilas, where Hitler teased Breker about his dissolute days as a student in the Latin Quarter. The cars then turned north again to the Île de la Cité, the mythical center of Paris. They cruised past the exquisite thirteenth-century Sainte-Chapelle, and drove even more slowly in front of Notre-Dame Cathedral, but Hitler did not set foot on the Île de la Cité. Was the tour taking too much time? Or was the medieval genius of the place too foreign to his sensibility? He once again impressed his entourage with his knowledge of the rather unknown—and mediocre—Palais du Tribunal de Commerce, another Second Empire building on the island’s Quai de la Corse. (Few Parisians today could tell you where to find the Tribunal de Commerce, or, in fact, what it is.^*)

Hitler channels Napoleon. (The Granger Collection)

Visiting a famous tomb. (Musée de la Résistance nationale)

Breker reiterates that Hitler entertained his companions with an almost continuous architectural patter; he mused openly about each building and monument they slowed down to see. Yet this was partly—if not predominantly—why Hitler left the city without seeing or understanding what made it an exceptional expression of urban energy. Monuments alone do not define a city. They crossed the Pont d’Arcole to return to the Right Bank, passing by the Hôtel de Ville, Paris’s city hall. Then, surprisingly, the group turned into the Marais, a decrepit neighborhood chockablock with crammed tenements housing eastern European immigrants, mostly Jews.^* A sad irony of this particular detour is that the future victims of Hitler’s pathology were asleep while he was within meters of what they had thought was a haven. In two short years, one of the largest roundups of these “undesirables” would bring terror to the same narrow streets.

The limousines then paraded up the mansion-laden Rue des Francs-Bourgeois to the Place des Vosges, a perfectly landscaped square bordered by one of Paris’s first and most coveted apartment complexes. They turned west onto the Rue de Rivoli, the wide artery that serves as the major east-west axis of the city, taking them to the neighborhood of Les Halles, the famous food marketplace known as the “belly of Paris.” Like the rest of the city, the vast market was almost empty; but the cortege did pass some fishwives waiting for their delivery. The women stared at the shiny automobiles as they slowly passed by; according to Breker, a young man setting up his newspaper kiosk suddenly recognized whom he was seeing, and yelled: “It’s him. Oh, it’s him!” before running off to hide from the devil himself. Here the entourage began their climb to Montmartre, the highest hill in Paris, site of the Place de Clichy and the Place Pigalle—the latter infamous before, during, and after the war for its plethora of streetwalkers and garish cafés. (Allied soldiers would call it Pig Alley.) Overlooking the city from the Butte Montmartre is the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur, “a surprising choice,” wrote Albert Speer later, “even given Hitler’s taste.”³¹ Speer (like almost every Parisian I know) held in unconcealed distaste the quasi-Byzantine, quasiclassical, brilliantly white “wedding cake” at the top of hill, one of the two or three most photographed and thus most representative Paris landmarks.^* Consecrated in 1919 it was only about two decades old when Hitler saw it. One of the most compelling reasons for the Führer’s visit to this bizarre temple is that the basilica’s large parvis offers a spectacular natural view of the city. Here he stood and congratulated himself on having saved this magnificent metropolis for Western civilization.

Église du Sacré-Coeur. (Creative Commons)

Again, Hitler alternated between the gaze of the tourist—who seeks to make as banal and nonthreatening as possible the object contemplated—and the gaze of the conqueror, who seeks to command what he sees before him. The tourist is curious, adventurous, and yet anxious before an unfamiliar phenomenon. His intellectual interest combines with his pride at having arrived at a new site. But this exhilaration is tempered by timidity, partially prompted by a fear of the unknown city and its unfamiliar inhabitants, and an anxiety about appearing ignorant. On the other hand, the conqueror seeks to control with a glance, to impose order by virtue of his will rather than his imagination. He temporarily represses thoughts of insurrection, of provisioning, and of governance in order to assume spiritual ownership of a heterogeneous, labyrinthine urban center. The exhilaration Hitler must have felt made him “generously” offer the city back—at least metaphorically—to its citizens, from whom he expected to receive kudos. Speer later wrote about how startled he was that Hitler seemed to treat the glorious city as though it were a plaything: “Maybe I’ll protect it; maybe I won’t. It’s up to me.” This is, of course, the attitude of any megalomaniac.

Assuming Hitler’s first-person point of view, Breker reported the chancellor’s musings as he contemplated Paris from Sacré-Coeur:

Paris has always fascinated me. For years, I had the strongest desire to go there. After 1918, the political era I entered and the evolution of events made this desire impossible [to act upon]. Now, the city’s gates are open to me! Since the news [of its capitulation] I have had no other idea in my head than to visit this metropolis of the arts with my own artists. Paris for me is a model. I’m sure we will learn many lessons from her. We can [use her] in planning the transformation of our most important cities, a project that has already begun. I have a strong interest in understanding the structure of [this] city, one known to me in theory, and to feel [in my visit] the force of its energy. I could have marched at the head of my troops under the Arc de Triomphe—the classic event of all victory parades—but I did not want, under any pretext, to inflict this humiliation on the French people after their defeat. I want no obstacle to the entente franco-allemande, which will happen, I am sure.³²

In these observations, there is a tone of envy, an almost palpable recognition that Germany was a new country, jerry-built into a nation by Bismarck and others less than a century earlier. Berlin had only been a national capital since then; its history could not begin to compare to that of Paris, even though much attention had been paid to it during the Second Reich (1871–1918) and thereafter. But Hitler was planning that Berlin would become a major capital soon, after the victories of 1939–41; what had been a barely disguised wish would become a certainty.

Many of the German observers of Paris during the Occupation glowed with satisfaction that this old, respectable, and beautiful capital would be overshadowed by the majestic example of a resurgent Berlin. Tobin Siebers has argued that “Hitler’s Germany was a dictatorship of the aesthetic… [but one where] beauty was a thing of the blood.”³³ A fascination with decadence (which extended to racial and ethnic qualities), with the decline of a civilization remembered nostalgically, informed Nazi ideology; this obsession was transferred to those who, they thought, represented the decline of that Western civilization. On the other hand, the attraction of Paris was so powerful that some sort of ethical and aesthetic compromise had to be made by the arrogant, though impressed, Occupiers. To admire Paris was fine, but to admire the French ingenuity that had created it was not. This contradiction subtends not only Hitler’s short tour but also German conduct during the city’s fifty-month Occupation. Part of Goebbels’s general cultural project for the “new Europe” was to reduce the influence of French culture, which had led, he believed, to the weaknesses that had allowed France to be overrun by the purer Nazis in less than a month. Nazi ideology demanded an unbreakable link between racial purity, ethical certainty, and cultural expression. Yet Paris represented, as it had for more than a century, a site of impurity, moral relativism, and cultural radicalism.^* Though the French may have fielded ineffectual armies, they had succeeded through their “decadent” arts, including jazz and cubism, in colonizing the European imagination. Goebbels spent a considerable amount of time devising propaganda and a machinery for artistic appropriation that would make Berlin, not Paris, the art, film, and fashion center of the “new Europe.” He would in the end fail, to the world’s relief.

After fewer than three hours, the Führer’s cavalcade sped back to the airport at Le Bourget to fly to its Belgian headquarters. As his plane rose from the field, Hitler asked his pilot to make a slow turn over Paris so that he could see it again. Once more, the German leader captured in his glance the panorama of a mythical city, lying below him in a bright sunlight, cut in two by the silver meandering of a strong river. It would be the last time he would gaze upon Paris, though the city never left his imagination. Until the final days in his bunker, Hitler would still dream of the city he thought he had conquered, unaware to his death how the City of Light would vanquish him.

The Führer’s Urbanophobia

The memoranda of Hitler’s private (recorded) conversations are replete with offhand and direct references to Paris. Sometimes he implies that Paris is simply an architectural congeries of beautiful buildings and monuments; at other moments, he muses that it is the model for all cities, or he might compare it unfavorably to Rome. He never mentions its vibrancy or the exhilarating confusion of daily life; instead, he reduces the image of Paris to that of an open-air museum, the result of centuries of good taste.

The First World War had given a new dimension to the fascination Germany and France have historically had for each other: Were they now to be brothers in peace, standing in opposition to Bolshevik Russia and imperial Great Britain, or were they forever to be locked in an embrace of scorpions, at any moment ready to sting the fraternal other? After that devastating war, books and essays had been published in Germany, especially in the late 1920s and 1930s, that had a great effect on how the Germans would consider and treat France once they had her in their thrall. For the most part, these works depicted France as a once-great country that had lost its way. It had degenerated, had become an empty plaster cast of its former greatness. By far the most widely read of these books, including by Hitler, was the journalist Friedrich Sieburg’s Gott in Frankreich? (To Live Like God in France; 1929).^* Written from the perspective of someone who purportedly loves France, it is patronizing and vigorously pro-German. The Vichy government republished it, for it outlined their own conviction that France had lost much of its former claim to glory through moral decay, leftist politics, and unfounded arrogance. A typical description of the Parisian cityscape follows:

Will the fixed forms of this city’s life ever be shaken? Certainly not, as long as the house-fronts retain their precious silver-grey, as long as the domes of the Panthéon and the Invalides force their way up through the heavy mist, as long as the Place de la Concorde has the sky for a roof, as long as the gentle crumbling of the stone softens even the most glaring new buildings, as long as the Champs-Elysées take one in a straight line through the Arc of Triomphe into the middle of the dream of Glory, as long as the tangled paths offer a green refuge to the despairing and the idle, as long as the river Seine gives the citizen his Sunday dram of fish, as long as there is red wine and white bread to be had. But a lover’s anxious eye can already detect cracks in the everlasting structure.³⁴

The passage not only outlines the tour itinerary that the future Führer would take a decade later, during his only visit to the city, but also insinuates that the glory that was Paris was passing. It was time for a new capital of Europe.

Great urban sites attracted Hitler but intimidated him as well; many of his recorded conversations about cities reveal a need to criticize as well as to exalt the human achievement that cities represent. In Mein Kampf, he describes them as sites of teeming apartment buildings and restive populations. When he remarks favorably about them, he analyzes their structures and their built environments. For him, the most interesting metropolis would be empty of its innumerable, often churlish citizens. Coincidentally, the Paris he visited that early Friday morning, while most of its inhabitants were either asleep or fleeing southward, would come close to that ideal.^* Mein Kampf sparingly mentions the massive urban resurgence during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but a close reading shows a general distrust of cities and of the masses that congregated in them. It is common knowledge that the early National Socialist electoral successes came from the rural areas and small towns of Germany. Hitler always appeared a bit befuddled by large cities, including the German capital.

Hitler had not spent much time in Berlin before his appointment as chancellor; the two major Germanic cities he knew best were Munich and Vienna. The latter held a complexly nostalgic place in the Führer’s mind. He had spent his formative years there as an aspiring artist, but poverty and rejection had left less pleasant memories. His fraught relationship with the capital city of his native Austria can give us another window into his general attitude toward cities. On March 18, 1938, two years before he would sneak into Paris, Hitler arrived in a motorcade before rapturous Viennese: “Many hundreds of thousands were on their way to hear him. Streets are dipped in a frenzy of color. The Heldenplatz could not hold the masses.… Sieg Heil shouts storm across the square, many thousands of arms are raised in the German salute.”³⁵

Vienna was the best-known metropolis swallowed by the Third Reich before Paris, to which it was often compared, and in his oration to the crowd, Hitler referred to it as the Reich’s second city. The Austrians, for the most part and at first, were ecstatic, and showed their enthusiasm about the Anschluss (the political union of Germany and Austria in 1938, forming the greater Reich) through many violent acts against Jews, Socialists, and Communists both preceding and during the union. However, what followed after the annexation was a transparent, brutal Aryanization (the ejection of Jewish business owners and their removal from teaching and other professions) of Hitler’s “pearl” city, an attempt to make it into a cultural beacon for the entire Third Reich. Not long after, these two goals—making Vienna a free-spirited sister to Paris as well as a stepsister of the Reich’s capital—came into conflict, and, sooner rather than later, Vienna increasingly became a problem for the Berlin government, a site of tough and tenacious resistance to the Nazi regime. It began to promote itself as the “first” cultural city of the Reich, and the previously delirious Viennese Nazis were soon impatient with rule from Berlin. “I can’t afford to have a mutinous large city at the southeast corner of the Reich,” Hitler supposedly told Baldur von Schirach, his choice for gauleiter and reichsstatthalter (boss) of Vienna.³⁶ The Austrian capital would remain a problem, so Hitler’s attention focused on the much smaller Linz, his Austrian birthplace, as a “counter-Vienna,” one he would rebuild along the lines of Berlin and Paris. Indeed, Hitler’s reaction to the Occupation of Paris, both his joy and his anxiety, may well have been influenced by his frustrations with a persistently querulous Vienna.

In general, the Germans sought to appropriate and then to fix Paris in a time that was embedded in the collective memory of the cosmopolitan world. In so doing, they hoped to slow down the unpredictable energy that defines metropolises and thus to provide more security for themselves and their motives. Cities were too porous, too difficult to control. The author of Mein Kampf wrote in the mid-1920s that “the meaning and purpose of revolutions is not to tear down the whole building, but to remove what is bad or unsuitable and to continue building on the same spot that has been laid bare.”³⁷ Using an architectural metaphor, he is speaking of ideas; but the Nazi anxiety would translate into a desire to “cleanse” cities as well as minds, just as they were “cleansing” through ethnic removal. Continued Hitler:

How truly deplorable the relation between state buildings and private buildings has become today! If the fate of [imperial] Rome should strike Berlin, future generations would some day admire the department stores of a few Jews as the mightiest works of our era and [the large buildings] of a few corporations as the characteristic expression of the culture of our times. Just compare the miserable discrepancy prevailing in [even a city like Berlin] between the structures of Reich and those of finance and commerce.³⁸

Cities, according to Hitler, are filled with citizens who frequently change addresses and, thus, in his mind, identities. (Throughout occupied Europe, Jews were forbidden to sell, rent, or move from their apartments.) This undermines the authority of the state that must protect itself against the anonymity of its citizens. Immigration threatens the state’s promise to provide its urban citizens a secure, consistently recognizable, and “nonsinister” environment. City life can weaken the bonds that are essential to a well-managed and predictable political and cultural entity. Urban centers should be spaces of cultural greatness, as long as the culture is imposed by tradition and the state and not by the city’s unpredictable population. Without the dominant hand of a confident ideology, they risk becoming only “human settlements,” sites of rootlessness and passing through. Nazism sought to reconstruct the urban environment through application of a nationalistic culture that would bind citizens more securely than did such human needs.

So with Paris, Hitler found himself confronted by a “monumental” urban center, recognized across the world as a carefully planned conglomeration of private and public buildings modernized (by Baron Haussmann and Napoleon III) according to the very principles of an imperial monument-city. Yet it was as well a haven for a massive influx of immigrants from eastern Europe and elsewhere; it was teeming with all he hated and feared: anti-Nazis, Jews, homosexuals, mixed-race degenerates, and “modern” artists. As a consequence, the newly arrived Germans set about mediating those aspects of Parisian life that most threatened their presence as well as those that could be manipulated to strengthen their defenses: movement through the city, nourishment and bodily comfort, personal identity, signs and symbols, pastimes, entertainment, even time itself. These restrictive regulations demanded of the Parisian a constant, fatiguing, and stressful reorientation vis-à-vis their own city. The German occupiers wanted to unmake dynamic Paris, to create a static simulacrum, preserving its most banal characteristics for their own enjoyment. They thought they could persuade the world that they, too, were culturally and aesthetically sensitive while keeping Parisians literally in line. For a time, the strategy seemed to work.