* The very northern part of France was attached to the military government of Belgium; the eastern provinces of Alsace and Lorraine (which Germany had assimilated in the Franco-Prussian War and lost in the 1918 armistice) were reabsorbed into the Reich. Sections of southeastern France were put under Italian control. But the most significant division was between what became known as the Occupied and the Unoccupied Zones (which lasted until November of 1942): the northern zone ranged from the Rhine to the entire Atlantic and Channel coasts, down to the Spanish border, and of course included Paris. The Unoccupied, Vichy, or “Free Zone” comprised essentially central and south-central France to the Pyrénées, including most of the Mediterranean coast.

* Investment is an underused English term for a military blockade or the imposition of a controlling authority.

* French astronomers, engineers, and the artillery corps began using a combination of guesswork, physics, geometry, and air reconnaissance to discover the site from which the Germans were lobbing these shells.

* Warsaw had been bombed into submission in 1939. On May 14, 1940, the Luftwaffe conducted a devastating air raid on Rotterdam, Europe’s largest port. The old center of the city was destroyed; hundreds were killed and tens of thousands made homeless. The Dutch government surrendered the next day. The scenes of shattered cities were thereafter embedded in the minds of Europeans under Nazi threat.

* What was the historical event that had occasioned this work? A French naval vessel, the Méduse, had foundered off the coast of western Africa. Crew and officers had escaped onto a hastily built raft with only enough water and food to last a few days. Although the men had intended to float to shore, the improvised raft moved farther out to sea. Before long there was a mutiny against the officers, who were killed. Many of the rest died before the raft was finally rescued. A subsequent trial brought out horrible stories of desperate attempts to survive, including murder and cannibalism. These published accounts tarnished the reputation of the French navy and the legacy of the French Revolution: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.

* The guide contained information about Paris’s most chic shops and services, Métro maps, lists of French phrases, cultural advice (e.g., how to deal with Parisian police), and many, many ads for bars, restaurants, and cabarets (even those featuring Gypsy music; while their fellows were murdering Romanies in eastern Europe, the touring soldiers would line up to hear Django Reinhardt and other “approved” Gypsy musicians).

* The Maginot Line was an extensive series of massive forts built into the terrain in the 1930s from the border of Switzerland to Luxembourg. This was France’s first line of defense against a German invasion. The Germans, of course, went around it in 1940.

* The French Communist Party was the best-organized political group on the political left. Its support of the leftist Front populaire government in 1936–37 and again in 1938, and of the Spanish Republic during that country’s civil war (1936–39), had given it much moral authority as an antagonist of fascism. Its membership growing in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Party had been hog-tied by Hitler’s cynical 1939 nonaggression pact with Stalin, signed just weeks before the invasion of Poland. Nevertheless, it continued to organize. The largest anti-fascist organization in France, it was also the most feared by the new, collaborationist Vichy government.

* Because a census of the dead was not taken immediately after the debacle, estimated numbers have bedeviled historians seeking certainty about the human cost of the Battle of France on the French army. Death figures have ranged between fifty thousand and ninety thousand. For details, see Jackson, The Fall of France, and Azéma, 1940: L’Année noire.

* “Fifth column” was a term that had originated during the Spanish Civil War, when a rebel general remarked that when he took Madrid his four columns would be supported by a virtual fifth—civilian supporters and guerrillas inside the city.

* Again, estimates vary according to which historian is doing the figuring and whether or not Paris per se (ca. three million inhabitants) or the entire Paris region (ca. five to seven million inhabitants) is being considered. The point is that millions of families took to roads already crowded with a retreating army. For details, see Diamond, Fleeing Hitler, and Leleu, et al., La France pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale: Atlas Historique.

* Mattresses, always mattresses—the sight is so attached to images of refugee flight that we have become used to it. There is probably no action more symbolic of leaving home in distress. What prompts refugees, even today, to load themselves down with their bedding? Refugees in 1940 may have brought their mattresses with them as pitiful protection against strafing planes or, especially, as temporary bedding. But it also makes sense that when being forced to leave home, one clings to some symbol of the private life that has been upended. An uncertain future demands a secure place in which to wait for it. (See O. F. Bollnow, Human Space.)

* The concept of an “open city” has an ambiguous place in international jurisprudence. It relies on two opposing armies to agree that a major conurbation will not be defended and thus not bombarded. The agreement has a logic for both sides: the attackers will not have to waste time, materiel, and men to take a heavily fortified metropolis, and the retreating army saves its citizens, its nation’s patrimony, and leaves a potential thorn in the side of the occupying forces. Of course, delicate negotiations have to precede such an arrangement, and such situations are rife with the possibility of misunderstandings.

* It is hard to believe, but it was only in March of 2013 that the last street in France named for Pétain was “debaptized.” Christened Rue du Maréchal Pétain in the 1930s, before he became associated with the Vichy government, the little avenue is in Belrain, a village of about forty inhabitants in the northeast of France, about twenty-five miles from Verdun. The town will rename the avenue, most likely after someone who resisted the Vichy government.

* The Gestapo (short for Geheime Staatspolizei, or secret state police) was a political police arm of the Third Reich, founded by Hermann Göring and greatly enhanced and led by Heinrich Himmler. It operated both in Germany and in the occupied countries.

* Billy Wilder, the Austrian-born American director (who had left Paris in 1933 for the United States), is reputed to have suggested that her performances were throwbacks to “those far off happy days in Paris when a siren was a brunette, and when a man turned off the light, it wasn’t on account of an air-raid” (cited in Hammond and O’Connor, Josephine Baker).

* Though hard to believe, confusion still surrounds the exact date of this visit. For years the date was thought to be Sunday, June 23, right after the signing of the armistice, but subsequent historians, especially Kershaw and Fest, have generally coalesced around the later date, Friday, June 28, though the former remains the most often cited.

* The Führer knew well the world’s most famous urban thoroughfare. He had remarked as early as 1936 that “the Champs-Élysées is 100 meters wide. In any case we’ll make our avenue [Berlin’s Unter den Linden] 20-odd meters wider.” Albert Speer writes that he was ordered to measure the width of the avenue during Hitler’s tour (Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs [New York: Macmillan, 1970], 76).

* Some have suggested that the Führer got out of his car again to walk along the Boulevard Saint-Michel, the famous Boul’ Mich’, which runs beside the Sorbonne and the prestigious Lycée Saint-Louis, but most accounts do not confirm this.

* It was built to house, and still does, the chief commercial law court of the city of Paris.

* I know of no other example of Hitler having passed through what he feared and despised the most, the ghetto, filled with undesirable non-Aryans.

* This strange-looking building was built at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, funded in large part by individual donations from all over France. The government had passed a “national vow” to build a church as penance for national “sins” committed during the Franco-Prussian War, especially for the brief Paris Commune (the first ever communist government) that had followed in 1871 the siege of Paris. So the church had its own peculiar connection to Franco-German history.

* “Weimar” Berlin—that is, Germany’s capital during 1919–33, that nation’s brief period of robust democracy—had been just as “decadent” as Paris had ever been. But the Nazis had cleaned up the city, brutally.

* Almost immediately, it was translated into French and published in 1930 as Dieu est-il français? (Is God French?), with a lengthy and critical afterword by its editor, Bernard Grasset. Its title refers to the German aphorism “Wie ein Gott in Frankreich leben” (to live like a god in France)—that is, to have the best possible life. It was published in the United States as Who Are These French? in 1938.

* In May of 1938, Mussolini had organized an elaborate tour of Rome and Florence for his friend from Germany. The preparations actually changed aspects of the cityscape to present a new facade to the curious Führer. An amusing account of that visit may be found in the journal of art historian Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, part of which was recently published in Paris as Quelques jours avec Hitler et Mussolini.

* The First World War had already introduced the practice of very long military occupations; northern France, but not Paris, was in German hands for almost four years, and Allied—especially French—forces had occupied Germany’s Rhineland and the Ruhr Valley until 1925.

* A still-remembered and much-repeated story tells of a French family, primarily known for its optical shops, that placed advertisements in French newspapers attesting that their name was Lissac, an old, respected French family name, and assuredly not Isaac, or newcomer Jews. The shops can still be found all over France.

* One of my interviewees, a pharmacy student during this period, opined with a sardonic smile that there was less obesity, less diabetes, fewer STDs, less asthma, and so forth during this time.

* Since the early nineteenth century, the western sections of Paris had become the haven of the wealthy Parisians. As a consequence, many large mansions had been built in the 8th, 16th, and 17th arrondissements, where the most prestigious hotels were located. The Germans confidently—and shamelessly—appropriated many homes (especially those owned by wealthy Jews) and most hotels in this area. The Latin Quarter, on the other hand, though with pockets of affluence, remained a warren of student housing, church property, and schools and colleges, affording much less hospitality to the selective Occupiers.

* Studying this period is frustratingly complicated by the plethora of acronyms used by both German and French bureaucracies, both as shorthand and as a means of covering up nefarious activities. ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg), MBF (Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich), OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht), Sipo-SD (Sicherheitspolizei Sicherheitsdienst), not to mention the better-known Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei) and SS (Schutzstaffel), festooned official posters and documents, along with the acronyms of dozens of their co-occupying agencies. Acronyms can be, and often are, a means to make banal the shameful.

* The internal political machinations of the Vichy government were byzantine. The government was divided between those who saw themselves as allies of the Germans and those who were faithful and traditional French patriots, though quite conservative. Laval was in the former group and had enemies in the latter cohort influential with the doddering Pétain. For a variety of reasons, Pétain fired Laval, his prime minister, in December of 1940. But in April of 1942, Laval, like an unsavory phoenix, rose again to that position and would remain head of the government until the end of the war.

* Otto Abetz was officially the German ambassador to France, both occupied and unoccupied. He had substantial authority over all aspects of French politics and culture and served in Paris throughout the Occupation.

* The symbolism of honoring Georges Clemenceau was evident: he was “the Tiger,” “the father of victory,” who had stood fast against the last Teutonic invasion of France; he had helped devise the Treaty of Versailles, which had devastated Germany diplomatically and financially.

* For reasons that are still unclear, Hitler did not attend the 1937 exposition, though most of his closest advisers did, basking in the light of French respect.

* This information, on the numbers of Germans assigned to Paris during the Occupation, has been most resistant to resolution in my research. Estimates vary widely, especially because the demands of the Russian front and, later, the Normandy front, meant that reassignments were continually being made. The types of units and the quality of personnel changed as well.

* MBF—the German Military Command in France, which had policing responsibility for the civilian population, an arrangement that would not change until late 1942, when the Gestapo would take over that job.

* I have found no archival or other support for this premise, though it is an oft-repeated assumption in accounts of the initial Occupation.

* Amazingly, the Wegleiter, the German guide to Paris, repeatedly printed advertisements for cabarets featuring “Gypsy” music and bands. As the Romanies were being murdered in eastern Europe, their compatriots were entertaining SS troops in the City of Light.

* With the invasion of Russia, many of these young men left for the Eastern Front—reportedly a great loss for the maisons closes (bordellos) of Paris.

* In eastern Europe, the Wehrmacht and the SS created their own bordellos, using Jewish and other “undesirables” as “comfort women,” an irony almost too bizarre to believe.

* Cynically, we must remember that Jünger’s journal was not published until 1949, after he had had the chance to edit his entries as well as his memories.

* The French refer to this sense of alienation as dépaysement—not feeling at home, or feeling like a fish out of water.

* In his work on the “personality” of urban spaces, the architectural historian Anthony Vidler argues: “The uncanny [is]… precisely the contrast between a secure and homely interior and the fearful invasion of an alien presence…, [a space] of silence, solitude, or internal confinement and suffocation” (Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 4, 39).

* Hessy Taft was one of about two dozen persons I interviewed both in the United States and France about their memories of the Occupation. These generous persons are listed in my acknowledgments.

* There is a stunning homemade film in the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam that shows how a group of Jewish residents (in the end, caught and deported) used their hearths and chimneys as secret passageways, enabling them to move between apartments and secret rooms.

* The opening scenes in Roberto Rossellini’s great film Roma, città aperta (1945) make use of what was common knowledge: escaping from an urban apartment house, across roofs into labyrinthine streets and alleys, had become a survival tactic in many European cities.

* I was especially fortunate to be offered a collection of high school notebooks filled with newspaper clippings, drawings, and photographs. The young student who kept this journal, Philippe Lemaire, was meticulous in following the trajectory of the war as the Germans were pushed back home.

* In interview after interview, I would first be told, without fail, about how cold it was in Paris in the early 1940s, how large apartments became smaller as rooms were closed off, how few public spaces—cafés, churches, offices—were adequately heated. When I began to wonder if this was just a strategy to keep from talking about more controversial topics, an interlocutor retorted: “Being cold and hungry often pushes other considerations—political, ideological—to the side.”

* In Jean-Pierre Melville’s captivating film about the French resistance, L’Armée des ombres (Army of Shadows, 1969), there is a long scene that takes place inside one of these compartments within a cold apartment.

* Aside from the Métro lines, there were more than two thousand kilometers of sewers and underground caverns (most left over from centuries of limestone mining) underneath Paris; these places could be reached through more than five thousand entrances. During the first half of the century, many of the caverns had even been major mushroom-producing farms. Many had been mapped and were known; others were secret, forgotten, or had never been discovered. Today, Parisian police still keep an eye on these underground paths and rooms, for young people use them as art colonies, movie theaters, performance spaces, and places to smoke, drink, dance, and do other interesting stuff. Cataphiles (cave lovers) of all types roam these spaces, which were not unknown to the Germans: they used them for storage, just as the Resistance used them to hide their meager arms supplies. For example, between September of 1941 and March of 1942, German and French police said they found thousands of revolvers and rifles and even nineteen machine guns in subterranean Paris. As in Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862), those seeking safety took to the underground, either surreptitiously or legally, this time on the Métro.

* The Freemasons threatened the Nazi regime because they were believed to be heavily influenced by Anglo-Saxon values, defenders of a bourgeois parliamentary democracy, and adversaries of the Catholic Church (and thus of any totalitarian regime). They counted among their membership, especially in Germany and eastern Europe, where they were very strong, influential Jewish intellectuals and financiers. Right-wing adherents believed, without a doubt, that Masons were part of a plot to destroy Christian “democracy.” Jehovah’s Witnesses, of course, admit to no temporal power higher than God and his Son.

* Amusingly, the Wegleiter gives a positive review of this subversive film. Calling it a policier (detective story), the reviewer writes that the anonymous letters “are amusing unless one is the target!… The ending is surprising and very satisfying!” See Laurent Lemire, ed., 1940–1944 Der Deutsche Wegleiter (Paris: Alma, 2013), 119.

* I have endeavored to capitalize “resistance” whenever the term refers to the organized, quasimilitary opposition to the Occupation by French irregulars. I do not capitalize it when I am referring to the concept itself or to those who were not part of a formally recognized group. Many of the sources I cite do not make these distinctions, and, indeed, I occasionally slip up, too.

* In fact, until 1944, the Free French themselves referred to the combination of guerrillas and nonviolent members of resistance movements as une armée secrète, changing the name later to Forces françaises de l’Intérieur (the FFI, or Fifis).

* The best known of these reprisals was the massacre in June of 1944 of almost all the residents of Oradour-sur-Glane, in south-central France, and the destruction of the village itself. Das Reich, a division of SS soldiers rushing north to Normandy after the D-day invasion, reacted to suspected Resistance actions by rounding up, mowing down, and burning alive 642 men, women, and children; only five inhabitants escaped to tell the story. The new town was not rebuilt on the site of the martyred one but next to it; the destroyed village stands today as an official state monument to victims of Nazi war crimes.

* At the end of the nineteenth century, it was known especially for its neurological institute, the place where Jean-Martin Charcot, the creator of modern psychiatric research, practiced and where Freud studied as a young man. It is known today as the hospital in which Princess Diana died after being rushed there from her accident, which took place farther west, on the Seine autoroute. Josephine Baker also died there of a stroke in 1975.

* The young French “colonel” would be killed in a mine-clearing accident in Alsace-Lorraine in 1945.

* This was an especially trying time for the party, founded in France in 1920. It had gained support during the 1920s and early 1930s and was an important and an active participant in the leftist Front populaire government (1936). Many of its members had gone to Spain to fight alongside the Republicans against Franco’s coup d’état. They were well organized, many with battle experience, but Stalin’s Machiavellian pact with Hitler had sidelined them during the early days of the Occupation.

* Its sister lycée for girls, Jules-Ferry (where the diarist Berthe Auroy had taught), was a few blocks away. The kids would meet midway, on the Boulevard de Clichy, for their rendezvous.

* Jacques Lusseyran was finally arrested in 1943 and sent to Buchenwald. He survived there mainly because of his knowledge of the German language and, strangely enough, his blindness, which separated him from the harsher sections of the camp. He was liberated in 1945.

* After Germany attacked the USSR in June of 1941, the French Communist Party no longer felt bound by the German-Soviet Pact of August 1939; in fact, Moscow ordered their French comrades to set up an armed resistance to the German Occupation of France. And they were ready and eager to do so.

* There were a substantial number of black residents in Paris at the time. Some were American veterans of World War I who had stayed on rather than return to the Jim Crow atmosphere in the United States. And there were many West Africans coming from French colonies on that continent. The Germans despised people of African descent; they casually shot African members of the French army and initiated regulations against them even before they got around to doing the same against the Jews.

* The young assassin almost escaped German incarceration after June of 1940. French police spirited him off to the Unoccupied Zone, but he was betrayed by a Vichy sympathizer, turned over to the Germans, and taken to Berlin, where a show trial was prepared. For reasons that are still unclear, the trial was forgone, and Grynszpan disappeared into the “night and fog” of the Reich’s bureaucracy. Some think he survived the war, but that is most likely a myth. An informative book by Jonathan Kirsch, The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan, gives a formidable narrative history of this complex and important episode.

* Increasingly studied, these French camps played important roles during the late 1930s, when they were used for Spanish refugees, and during the war, when they were used first for German nationals and then for enemies of the Vichy regime, including Jews. Some of the best-known camps were at Beaune-la-Rolande, not far from Paris, and in the south, at Gurs, Rivesaltes, and Les Milles. The most notorious was at Drancy, outside Paris, which was eventually requisitioned by the Germans.

* After his name had been published in a clandestine newspaper, Montandon was attacked by résistants in his home in early August of 1944. Wounded, he was transferred to Germany, where he most likely died of a combination of cancer and the wounds.

* On his return to Paris after the war, the Baron Élie de Rothschild asked his maître d’hôtel (chief butler) who had visited the German residents of his home while he was a prisoner of war: “The same ones who came when you were here, monsieur le Baron.”

* At first they were put into third-class cars with seats. This did not last long, and cattle cars soon replaced those.

* Brunner has been the target of Nazi hunters ever since the war. Like Eichmann, he escaped from the Allies and wound up in Damascus, Syria, where he was afforded protection until his (putative) death.

* Kofman’s memoir is all the more poignant because she took her own life at the age of sixty, soon after having written it. A brilliant teacher and philosopher, she most likely still felt deep guilt at having survived by rejecting her birth mother and the traditions of her rabbi father.

* The street names are, coincidentally, quasihomonyms of ordinaire (ordinary) and là-bas (over there).

* As fortune would have it, the short avenue was the address also of the famous playwright, actor, and director Sacha Guitry, who was among those French artists, including Jean Cocteau, closely associated with the Germans and their Vichy collaborators.

* In order to avoid distribution problems, the Germans in Belgium had used a J for both the French Juif and the Flemish Jood, thereby having to print only one model of star. One is always amazed at the German knack for bureaucratic precision and efficiency.

* Annette’s thirty-four-year-old mother would be deported and killed before two months had passed.

* It is just plain luck that the correspondence exists. First, Sophie’s mother fortunately kept copies of her own letters to France as well as her daughter’s originals. Sophie’s older brother wanted the whole correspondence destroyed after the war in order to prevent young Gerard, who had escaped arrest and immigrated to the United States, from being wounded by the memory of his ordeal. But Sophie’s younger sister, living in Sweden, intervened, and Caspary, an accomplished medieval historian, spent the last years of his life annotating the correspondence, which proved to be a consolation to him as a survivor. I am grateful to Robert Weil for offering me this remarkable manuscript, and for encouraging me to write about it.

* Caspary also remembered that two years later, after the war, before he left for exile in the States, he returned to thank the principal for having stood by him. But “he was quite angry with me that I was leaving France”—that Caspary was not returning a patriotic Frenchman’s kindness with loyalty to the nation. Such a country and such an accusation must have seemed strange to that sixteen-year-old boy.

* In 2012, the city of Paris organized an exhibition, with the help of the Mémorial de la Shoah, called C’étaient des enfants (They Were Children). The stunning thoroughness of the Occupier at rounding up, imprisoning, transporting, and murdering French and non-French Jewish children (and many had been born in France, though of foreign parents) made the exhibition mesmerizing and completely dispiriting. Some of the anecdotes I recount come from the catalog for the exhibition, edited by Sarah Gensburger (see bibliography for details).

* Perhaps as many as ten thousand Jews, especially children, escaped this roundup; they just happened to be out or were hidden by Gentile Parisians or other Jews and later moved out of Paris into the countryside. Also, those who had children less than a year old or who were pregnant, were, strangely enough, exempted.

* The Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris is found on the Rue Geoffroy l’Asnier, in the Right Bank area known as the Marais. On entering the memorial, one passes by marble slabs engraved with the names of all those Parisian Jews who were deported between 1942 and 1944. Running your fingers across those marks, it is impossible to avoid seeing the birth dates of the victims: 1936, 1937, 1939, 1940, and 1941. For the extant letters of those who wrote from the arena, see Taieb and Rosnay, Je vous écris du Vél d’hiv.

* A quite melodramatic film about the Grande Rafle by Roselyne Bosch was made in 2010. La Rafle has some startling improvised sequences filmed at a re-created Vélodrome d’Hiver.

* The best-known Vichy official who went over to the other side was, of course, the fourth president of the French Republic, François Mitterrand, whose “confession” of his Vichy activities (he was minister of prisoners of war) cast a shadow over the last years of his presidency.

* One of France’s most engaging social critics, Pierre Bayard, has written a fascinating analysis of what might have been necessary for the average Gentile Frenchman to begin immediately resisting the Germans: Aurais-je été résistant ou bourreau? (Would I Have Been in the Resistance or an Executioner?, 2012).

* As early as March of 1941, the Occupation authorities had set substantial fines, followed by death sentences, for anyone caught or reported listening to broadcasts from the BBC and Swiss radio. Still, Parisians tuned in.

* Recent research has suggested that the warehouse was a bit farther west of where the Bibliothèque is located, closer to the Salpêtrière hospital. But Sebald’s point remains well taken: Paris has forgotten aspects of its sordid past.

* Earlier called the Mouvements unis de la Résistance (United Resistance Movements), this new configuration finally gave an official name and recognition to the uncoordinated resistance activities—both passive and direct—that had been going on at least since the first Germans had entered France in May of 1940.

* Some references to Franz Kafka in The Myth of Sisyphus had to be excised. Of course, no Jewish writer or thinker could be cited in a Vichy- or German-approved work.

* The staff also included Jean-Paul Sartre, Pascal Pia, Raymond Aron, and André Malraux. The newspaper would continue publication for two decades after the war. It had taken its name for the Resistance group Combat, which had its origins in northern France.

* Unknown to Camus, Jean Guéhenno was writing similarly in his private journal, referring to Paris after years of Occupation: “Air raids are constant. Five or six per day… The railroad stations around Paris are one after the other destroyed. From now on we feel almost completely isolated” (Guéhenno, 410). Time had become long and short at the same time, he continued, as signs proliferated that the Germans would leave soon, but still they stayed.

* An almost successful attempt had been made on Hitler’s life on July 20, 1944, at Wolf’s Lair, his headquarters in East Prussia. Carried out by anti-Nazi but still pro-victory Wehrmacht officers, the attack succeeded in only lightly wounding the Reich’s leader. Officers died around him, but he survived, thus feeding his megalomania. Searching for disloyal Wehrmacht staff officers severely disrupted military operations in the middle of a two-front war and led to Hitler’s decision to micromanage even more carefully the Reich’s war plans, including the defense of Paris. Several major officers stationed in Paris were later charged with treason; consequently the Occupation went through a very unsettling—for the Germans, at least—period of confusion.

* Pétain himself had from day one in Vichy pestered the Germans about moving the capital of the État français at least to Versailles, right outside Paris, if not to the capital itself. They of course refused; Paris was too rich a prize for them to.

* Estimates vary, as always, but there were about twenty thousand German troops of varying quality around Paris and perhaps only about five thousand within the city itself, a paltry number to defend a major metropolis against the Allies while protecting retreat paths for the Wehrmacht reeling from the Normandy breakout.

* When the last handful of women auxiliaries had to be evacuated from Paris, von Choltitz asked Nordling and the Red Cross to round them up and give them safe passage. Many carried heavy luggage that, when opened and searched, revealed linen, silver, and other fine goods that had been lifted from the luxurious hotels in which they had been working and living.

* For not having ordered the air bombardment of Paris, General Hans Speidel was arrested by the Gestapo a week after the Liberation. He had refused to use either the Luftwaffe or the V-1 and V-2 rockets that were being loosed on London—though later his orders would be countermanded, and about a dozen rockets did fall on and around Paris, but to little effect. He was also questioned about his role in the July 20 assassination attempt against Hitler. Miraculously, he survived these contretemps and would later return to Paris as NATO commander in chief from 1957 to 1963. French eyebrows were raised at this appointment.

* Von Choltitz was caught between two unruly forces—the FFI and his Führer—neither of which fully comprehended what was happening on the ground in Paris. Indeed, one historian reminds us that “[von] Choltitz… saw himself and his army not as oppressing Paris but as protecting it from the gang of violent thugs he believed the Resistance to be” (Neiberg, 148)—an argument von Choltitz would make for years after the war, to the point where many Parisians hailed him as the hero who had saved their capital.

* Among the most prized must have been the ones that had been put up only a few months before: ZUR NORMANDIE FRONT (To the Normandy front).

* A few days earlier, de Gaulle had landed at Saint-Lô, in Normandy, making his way through that region and Brittany as the liberated French wildly celebrated his arrival. Driving from Le Mans to Chartres, and then to Rambouillet, right outside Paris, he awaited news of the insurrection and prepared his triumphant victory march down the Champs-Élysées.

* And yet dozens if not more in the Second Armored Division were from Spain, veterans of the Republican war against Franco’s fascist regime. Spaniards also played important early roles in the armed resistance, since most French soldiers were away in prison camps. In 2004, the city of Paris recognized the part these men from south of the Pyrenees played in the liberation of Paris. There is a memorial plaque now on the Seine side of the Hôtel de Ville, the city hall.

* The Germans could not leave without one last measure of defiance toward the city that had defeated them. German planes flying in from Holland and Germany dropped more than a thousand bombs on the capital, primarily in the eastern sections, on the evening of August 26; there were hundreds of civilian casualties in this, the last bombing of the city.

* This unit was a part of the American First Army’s V Corps, under the command of Major General Leonard Gerow, with whom General Leclerc would have serious command issues. At one point, Gerow wanted to court-martial Leclerc for having taken the initiative against Paris on the orders of General de Gaulle rather than defer to Allied command.

* De Gaulle, worried that his sparse Free French forces could not pacify the capital alone, had begged Eisenhower to leave behind enough Allied troops to supplement his. Ike refused, but he did agree to this grand victory parade, larger even than the one organized by the Germans four years earlier.

* The American army estimated that 85 percent of GIs were virgins when they joined up or were drafted. (One wonders how the survey gathered that information.)

* For years afterward he would brag, with a palpable wistfulness, that he had “liberated the Ritz Hotel,” where German elites (and Coco Chanel) had lived in cosseted style for more than four years.

* The British took a backseat in the Liberation, primarily because of the lingering antipathy of many Frenchmen toward their erstwhile allies. The aforementioned Pocket Guide to France took notice of this rift. In the section called “A Few Pages of French History,” after explaining the 1940 defeat, the narrator addresses his readers directly: “Some citizens of France in defeat have harbored bitter feelings toward their British allies. Don’t you help anybody to dig up past history in arguments. This is a war to fight the Nazis, not a debating society.”

* Tondre is the French term for “shearing” and refers mainly, as does the English word, to the shaving of wool from sheep. It can also mean “mowing,” as a lawn. Those shaved are called the tondues, or “sheared women.”

* Immediately after the war, in 1946, the Fourth Republic voted to outlaw prostitution. Maisons closes, or bordellos, disappeared from the Parisian cityscape. The explanations for this act range all over the political and moral spectrum, but the effect, of course, was predictable: legal prostitution just became illegal prostitution. Coincidentally, French women won the right to vote from the provisional government in the spring of 1944 and were first able to exercise it in 1945. These two “positive,” pro-women initiatives fell on either side of the tontes, that is, the public haircuttings.

* In the early 1970s, Tanguy would legally change his name to Rol-Tanguy.

* Later, halfhearted efforts were made to find out exactly which specific group was responsible for the murders at the Institut dentaire, but to little avail. The FFI insisted it had never given orders to the FTP for this sort of rafle and imposition of casual justice; the FTP, supported by the Communist Party, insisted that it had had authority from the FFI—though Colonel Rol always denied it. Besides, the FTP asserted, the ones who were killed deserved it, all of them being unpatriotic Frenchmen—that is, salauds (bastards).

* Another well-known fascist and anti-Semitic French journalist, Robert Brasillach, was not so fortunate. Arrested after the Liberation, he was tried for treason and quickly found guilty. Despite having received a letter signed by such literary and artistic figures as Colette, Camus, Aymé, and Cocteau, General de Gaulle refused to commute his sentence; he was executed—shot—in early 1945.

* This is my somewhat free translation, in which I emphasize the blatant emotion of a masterful speaker and writer as he composes the first French history of the Occupation. The original French may be found in an appendix.

* Most historians set the bar at sixteen thousand Communists shot or deported to their deaths by the Germans—not a measly number, but not seventy-five thousand, either.

* In February of 2014, President François Hollande announced that two more women would join Marie Curie in the Panthéon. Both Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz (a niece of Charles de Gaulle) and Germaine Tillion participated actively in the Resistance.

* Since Pétain’s death, at the age of ninety-five, in 1951, his supporters have been petitioning that his remains be moved from this isolated island off the Atlantic coast of France to join his World War I comrades in arms at Verdun, the site of his great victory. They remain on the Île d’Yeu.

* In 1871, as a result of the civil war that had produced the government known as the Commune, Paris had been stripped of much of its autonomy. The prefect of the city had been appointed by the state, but in 1976 substantial administrative autonomy was returned to the city.

* Ever since his execution, the Communist Party had insisted that Môquet was one of theirs, a valiant example of the “party of seventy thousand,” who had died in opposition to the German Occupier.

* His first essay, “The Republic of Silence,” was composed and published only a month after the city’s liberation and contains the existentially ambiguous phrase “Never were we freer than under the German occupation” (Sartre, Aftermath of War, 3).

* Signal was an illustrated biweekly, much like Life, that featured home-front news as well as German military escapades. Controlled by the Wehrmacht rather than Goebbels’s ministry of propaganda, it was published at its height in more than twenty-five languages and had well over two million subscribers. Available in the United States until January of 1942, it never appeared in Germany itself. It was distributed in occupied territories, countries allied with the Reich, and in Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland.

* In his preface to the catalog, the historian Jean-Pierre Azéma does draw attention to the contradiction between the “black and white” Occupation and the Occupation “in color”: “What catches Zucca’s lens is the Paris of the good life, where pleasures continue as if nothing had happened… The Paris of Zucca is a bit empty, but serene, without a serious problem, almost existing out of time (Baronnet, ed., Les Parisiens Sous l’Occupation, 10).”

* Given at the Hôtel de Ville, August 25, 1944.