Major Personalities

Parisian and French

Berthe Auroy: Retired Parisian schoolteacher

Simone de Beauvoir: Novelist and essayist

Hélène Berr: Jewish teenager

Brassaï: Photographer

Jean Bruller (aka Vercors): Author and résistant

Albert Camus: Author and clandestine editor

Jacques Chirac: Fifth president of the French Fifth Republic, 1995–2007

Jean Cocteau: Poet, dramatist, and filmmaker

Colette: Novelist and journalist

Marguerite Duras: Writer and résistante

Charles de Gaulle: Leader of the Free French; first president of the Fifth Republic

Benoîte and Flora Groult: Novelists and journalists; sisters

Jean Guéhenno: Lycée instructor; diarist

François Hollande: Seventh president of the French Fifth Republic, 2012–

Dominique Jamet: Commentator who writes about his youth in occupied Paris

Vivienne Jamet: Bordello madam; no relation to Dominique

Maurice Jouhandeau: Pro-Vichy author and professor

Sarah Kofman: Philosopher and memoirist

Roger Langeron: Prefect of Paris police when Germans arrived

Pierre Laval: Two-time president of Council of Ministers under Pétain

Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque: Commanded Deuxième Division Blindée (Second Armored Division), which helped liberate Paris

Jacques Lusseyran: Blind teenager who ran one of the largest resistance groups

Missak Manouchian: Resistance leader; born in Armenia

François Mitterrand: Fourth president of the French Fifth Republic (1981–95), early member of Vichy government and later a résistant

Guy Môquet: Teenage résistant

Philippe Pétain: President of the État français (Vichy); hero of Verdun (World War I)

Georges Pompidou: Second president of the French Fifth Republic (1969–1974)

Henri Rol-Tanguy: Communist and leader of the Free French Forces at the Liberation

Nicolas Sarkozy: Sixth president of the French Fifth Republic (2007–12)

Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosopher

Liliane Schroeder: Parisian memoirist

Françoise Siefridt: Parisian teenager

Jean Texcier: Journalist

Jacques Yonnet: Writer and résistant

André Zucca: Photographer

German

Otto Abetz: Third Reich’s ambassador to France

Arno Breker: Sculptor

Dietrich von Choltitz: Commander of Paris at the Liberation

Joseph Goebbels: Head of Reich’s Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda

Hermann Göring: Head of the Luftwaffe; heir apparent to Hitler

Felix Hartlaub: Historian and soldier assigned to Paris

Gerhard Heller: Propaganda bureaucrat in Paris

Adolf Hitler: Tourist

Ernst Jünger: Novelist and aide-de-camp to military administrator of Paris

Friedrich Sieburg: Author of Gott in Frankreich? (To Live Like God in France)

Albert Speer: Hitler’s architect and city planner

Hans Speidel: Chief of staff to general commanding German troops in France

Other

Josephine Baker: American entertainer in Paris; member of the Resistance

Jacques Biélinky: Russian-Jewish journalist

Dora Bruder: Immigrant Jewish teenager and runaway

William Bullitt: American ambassador to France at time of Occupation

Edmond Dubois: Swiss journalist; visited Paris often during the Occupation

Hélène Elek: Hungarian-born mother of Thomas Elek

Thomas Elek: Teenage résistant and member of the Manouchian Group

Janet Flanner: Columnist for The New Yorker; Genêt was her pseudonym

Albert Grunberg: Jewish barber who hid in an attic room on the Left Bank of Paris for two years

Ernest Hemingway: American novelist

A. J. Liebling: American journalist

Irène Némirovsky: Russian novelist and Jewish; wrote in French; deported from France and died in concentration camp

Raoul Nordling: Swedish diplomat in Paris during the Liberation

Pablo Picasso: Spanish artist

Gertrude Stein: American novelist and essayist