Although the Germans had warned Parisians not to strike, on Bastille Day tens of thousands of people took to the streets in the largest demonstrations Paris had seen since before the war. Estimates vary, but it seems clear that the strikes, which were mainly centered in the working-class districts of eastern Paris, drew at least 100,000 people. Some neighborhoods, like Belleville, St. Antoine, and La Chapelle, shut down entirely, although in most middle-class neighborhoods the strikes and demonstrations had little impact. In the western parts of Paris, around the Avenue Foch, there were no strikes and no disturbances. Jacques Bardoux, a resident of that neighborhood, recorded his impressions of a day that had been “sad and quiet, calm and chilling. No strikes. . . . Paris remains sad, savagely decimated by the Germans and Vichy, crushed by Allied bombardments, [and] starved by famine.” Yves Cazaux agreed, bemoaning a “sad and heavy day” for a nation “that does not even have the right to fly its own flag.” 22
Some Parisians were more optimistic, seeing in the strikes a signal that their deliverance was near. Benoît Frachon, the head of the Confédération Générale du Travail, the French labor syndicate responsible for organizing the Bastille Day strikes, saw them in grandiose, historic terms: “In Paris today, the inspiration of our ancestors of 1792 is in the air. Paris, ravaged for four years, has started to make its torturers pay for their crimes.” Another Parisian sympathetic to the strikers recorded in her diary that night: “No, Paris has not become a dead and resigned city.” Even if they did not directly threaten the German position inside the city, the strikes were proof to this diarist and others that Paris was still alive.23
Rol was pleased by the strikes, as they demonstrated to him that the people of Paris would support a wider insurrection. Given that the Allies were still stuck in the Norman hedgerows, Rol thought that a general uprising was weeks away. Other, smaller signs of support could be seen in the city, however. A large number of Parisians wore blue, white, and red; some young Parisian girls, dressed as smartly as they could be given the wartime shortages, took to walking in groups of three, with the one on the left wearing a blue dress, the one in the center wearing a white dress, and the one on the right wearing a red dress. It may have been a small and ineffective act of resistance, but it was a symbol of a new mood developing in the city.24
A much more important message came from the Paris police, who were conspicuous by their inactivity. Despite their reputation in past years for violently breaking up marches, the police made no effort at all to disrupt the demonstrations. Some police officers stood on the streets with their arms folded; others sat in cafés and watched the unfolding spectacle like any other city resident. The strikers received the message: The police supported them, at least tacitly. The attitude of the police encouraged Rol and others. They were starting to see a shift in the balance of power in Paris. Even before the strikes, the police had begun to show significant restraint; of the 400 arrests made in the first two weeks of July in Paris, only 46 had been made by Paris policemen.25
The events of July 14 inspired the FFI and the French Communist Party leadership. Although still suspicious of the police, they drew confidence and momentum from the strikes. Some suspected the police of trying to atone for their odious behavior under the occupation, while others were afraid that the police were pulling some sort of a trick. The communist leader André Tollet was among those who remained deeply suspicious of the police, but he began to think about repeating the strikes on a much larger scale. He considered whether it might be possible to retake the city from the Germans even if the Allies could not provide any immediate help: If the Paris police could be convinced to join the Resistance, an even broader uprising might stand a fighting chance.26
The Paris police may have sat idle, but the Germans did not. Unable to rely on the police, the Germans rapidly took matters into their own hands. With the willing assistance of the Milice, they arrested more than 1,000 people, including several members of the French Senate whom they erroneously believed had been involved in planning the strikes. Many of the arrests were arbitrary, and few formal charges were filed. But the already overcrowded prisons of Fresnes and Cherche-Midi filled with more and more people. By the end of the month there were more than 10,000 political prisoners in Paris’s jails facing uncertain futures. The Milice also carried out 37 summary executions on July 14 and 15. The mood in Paris grew more tense by the day. “The massacre of the French population continues at an even faster pace,” noted Jacques Bardoux in his diary on July 15. “What will be left of France?” Three days later, he wrote, “Slowly but surely, without Algiers, Moscow, London, or Washington seeming to care, France is falling deeper and deeper into ruin, blood, and famine.”27
In the week following the strikes and the German reprisals, events began to accelerate. On July 20, Claus von Stauffenberg, a German officer who hoped to remove Hitler and then open peace negotiations with the Allies, placed a bomb under the table at Hitler’s “Wolf’s Lair” headquarters in Rastenburg, in modern-day Poland. The plot was part of wide conspiracy on the part of German officers, who had a variety of motivations. Some, like Stauffenberg, came from the old Prussian aristocracy, with whom the Nazis had always had a difficult relationship. The most common thread uniting the conspirators was a belief that Hitler and his coterie were unable to realize that Germany was being crushed on two fronts. The conspirators believed that they could negotiate more effectively with the western Allies if Hitler were out of the picture. An armistice with Britain and the United States would then allow the German Army to focus its efforts on the eastern front, where the Soviet Union had already entered Poland on its menacing drive toward the heart of the Reich.28
The Gestapo suspected that a cabal of German generals whom they called the Black Orchestra was responsible for the Rastenburg attack. They also suspected that a disproportionate number of the plotters were based in Paris, where the desire for a separate peace with the Americans and British had wide support from generals who had concluded that the German forces in France were, in the words of one of them, “badly trained and frequently ill people who were only fit for office work.” With the best of the German Army in the east, such generals saw an armistice as the only viable option for Germany. Still in possession of Paris, the western commanders thought that their position was stronger than it would be once the Allies finally did break through. Thus their support for the bomb plot was based on a desire to get what they could from a rapidly deteriorating military situation. Only a small minority were motivated by a sense of moral revulsion at the behavior of the German Army, the SS, and the Gestapo.29
The Gestapo was right to suspect the Paris high command of being involved in the plot. General Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, another old-line Prussian aristocrat who mistrusted the Nazis but did their genocidal bidding until the war began to turn against Germany, was a senior member of the plot. He had been closely involved in the negotiations over the 1940 armistice with France before going to the eastern front, where he had worked closely with the notorious Nazi death squads known as the Einsatzgruppen. Stülpnagel had then returned to France, where he had served as the military commander of the country since the spring of 1942. He pursued a consistent policy of brutality toward the French Resistance, often arresting the relatives of Resistance members in the hopes of influencing them to reduce their activities; Rol’s father-in-law, deported to Auschwitz, was one such hostage.
The Gestapo knew that some of the members of the Black Orchestra group had begun secret talks with the Allies through neutral intermediaries and diplomatic channels.30 They did not, however, know the identities of the conspirators with any certainty. Nor did they have enough information to prevent Stauffenberg from placing a briefcase bomb inside the room where Hitler was hosting his morning conference. The bomb that exploded in Rastenburg in fact represented the group’s fourth attempt to kill Hitler and some of his closest advisers. It contained a kilogram of explosives and a ten-minute timer to allow Stauffenberg to get away safel
y. Unfortunately for the plotters, Stauffenberg had not had the time to put a second kilogram of explosives in the briefcase; if he had, the bomb would surely have killed everyone in the room. Nevertheless, Stauffenberg was at first certain that the bomb had done its job. Unaware that Hitler had in fact survived, he left Rastenburg to put the pieces of the plot in motion. Generals sympathetic to the plot were ready to assume civil and military command in key places, including Berlin, Vienna, and Paris, as soon as they received word that Hitler was dead.
Stülpnagel received a call from Stauffenberg himself at 5:00 p.m. announcing prematurely that the first phase of the bomb plot had succeeded and that Hitler was dead. Stülpnagel then put in place his part of the plot, ordering the arrest of Paris’s 1,200 Gestapo and SS officers to prevent Nazi loyalists from foiling the unfolding plan. Stülpnagel also contacted another conspirator, General Guenther von Kluge, the man who had replaced Rundstedt as commander of German forces in the west just a few weeks earlier. Kluge, however, had more current information than Stülpnagel. He told Stülpnagel that, contrary to early reports, Hitler was wounded, but still alive. He then advised Stülpnagel to go underground and told him that, in an effort to stay in Hitler’s good graces, he would have no choice but to order the release of the Gestapo and SS officers that Stülpnagel had arrested.
The Paris garrison also contained hundreds of officers who disliked the Nazi regime but had been unaware of the plot. One of them was Gerhard Heller, a francophile who worked with French writers in the Nazi propaganda office. While hosting a party for French authors at the Institut Allemand, he received a phone call telling him that Hitler was dead. Heller grabbed a waiter and told him to fill some champagne glasses. He was preparing to announce the good news with the words that Goethe had used at Valmy in 1792: “From this place and from this day forth commences a new era in the world’s history and you can all say that you were present at its birth.” Suddenly, a friend pulled Heller aside and told him that he had just received a call warning that Hitler might not be dead after all. Heller just had time to stop the waiter, who had his trays of champagne ready in the kitchen. Heller recalled his first thought being that the Nazis would execute five thousand people in response to the assassination attempt.31
Parisians heard rumors of the plot but hardly knew what to make of them. Jacques Bardoux correctly deduced that the plot signaled Germany’s desire to cut a deal in the west before it was too late to prevent the Russians from entering Germany with a thirst for revenge. Of course, neither he nor anyone else could have hazarded a guess about what the terms of such a deal might entail for Paris or for France. In 1943, the Allies had committed to fight until the Germans surrendered unconditionally, but now they were stuck in the bocage, and they still had a war with Japan to conclude. Might the Allies and Germans negotiate a deal that would leave the Germans in control of Paris?32
Around midnight, Parisians heard the voice of Hitler himself on loudspeakers across the city and on the collaborationist Radio Paris, an event for which the Germans had made electricity temporarily available. “A very small clique of ambitious, wicked, and stupidly criminal officers forged a plot to eliminate me and, along with me, virtually the entire leadership of the Wehrmacht,” Hitler thundered. “We will settle accounts the way we National Socialists are accustomed to settling them.” Released from their jail cells with the thin explanation that the whole operation had been a training exercise, Gestapo and SS officials quickly resumed their places in the Rue des Saussaies and on the Avenue Foch. Pro-Nazi authorities were firmly back in charge, and the day’s events passed so quickly that neither the Paris police nor the Resistance had any time to react to them.33
The fallout from the bomb plot shook the German high command in Paris deeply. Virtually all of the senior officers in the city at least knew about the plot to take control of the army in the west after Hitler’s assassination; many of them were either sympathetic or actively supportive. Boineburg, a fast rising star in the German Army and the man directly in charge of Paris, had lost faith in Germany’s ability to win the war after the Battle of Stalingrad. He had been responsible for executing the arrest order, and in all likelihood he knew the details of the plot intimately. He heard Hitler’s voice on loudspeakers outside the Hôtel Raphaël and knew that the failure of the plot and his close association with Stülpnagel would place him under intense suspicion. Boineburg was relieved of command of the Greater Paris garrison on August 3 but was not arrested, and he survived the war.
The SS and the Gestapo, furious at the plot and their arrests, opened investigations on more than a thousand German officers in France alone. They executed ten officers and arrested hundreds more, removing from Paris what Ernst Jünger called “the last gentlemen, the last free spirits,” although that characterization is debatable and relative to the SS and Gestapo thugs in the city. Stülpnagel was among those suspected of being involved and ordered back to Germany for interrogation. While in Verdun, where he had fought in 1916, he managed to get a gun and tried to commit suicide, but he only succeeded in blinding himself. The Gestapo refused to give him medical attention and sent him to Berlin, where he died under interrogation while attached to meat hooks. Kluge at first thought he had managed to escape suspicion, but months later, as the Gestapo closed in, he obtained a cyanide capsule. He committed suicide with the pill after failing to contact American general George Patton in one final effort to negotiate a separate peace with the western Allies.34
Thereafter, the Gestapo and SS insisted on German troops in Paris using the Nazi salute, which up to then had been a rare gesture in the city, to show their loyalty to Hitler. The atmosphere in the city underwent a rapid change as the manifest tensions between the Gestapo and the SS, on one side, and infantrymen of the German Army, on the other, became obvious to all Parisians. The morale of the soldiers of the German Army in Paris also dropped precipitously. An FFI intelligence report on July 24 noted that the morale of German soldiers in the city was at its lowest point of the war, with many soldiers fighting on simply out of fear of the SS. Rumors quickly spread that the Germans were sending more SS troops into the city, including those units that had been responsible for the massacres at Oradur and Tulle.35
Fear of the SS, combined with the new attitude of German soldiers, created a strange new mood in the city. For the first time in the occupation, the frailties of the Germans were becoming clear to all. One Parisian could barely believe his eyes when he saw a German soldier turn to his comrades in a public place and say “Normandy! Germany! Kapout!” He was even more amazed to see the soldier’s comrades “make small gestures to show that they were in perfect agreement.” Such gestures had never before been in evidence in the city. Marguerite Duras heard from a Resistance friend code-named Morland (who was, in fact, the future president of France, François Mitterrand) that “the Germans are starting to get frightened, . . . some of them are deserting.” Charles Braibant recorded in his journal that German soldiers were buying or stealing the clothes of French civilians in an effort “to avoid the vengeance of the French after Germany’s capitulation.” Braibant noted, however, that their plans were unlikely to succeed, because German soldiers looked too well fed to blend in with the emaciated Paris crowds.36
The decline in German morale was not the only problem faced by the Paris garrison. The confusion caused by the bomb plot and the disorientation created by the turnover in the German officer corps further impeded any attempt to prepare proper defenses for the city. Two of the city’s four regimental commanders were among those arrested, and Kluge, under heavy suspicion for his role in the bomb plot, was perhaps understandably seized by frequent bouts of fear and indecisiveness. After the war, Boineburg gave American interrogators his strategic assessment of the condition of Paris at the moment that he handed over his command on August 3, saying: “Against an enemy attacking from the outside . . . there was no chance of success. . . . A battle for the open city of Paris would have been senseless for operational and tactical
reasons. But it also would have been irresponsible in view of the destruction of irreplaceable art treasures.”
Boineburg was not the last German general who would claim humanitarian reasons for his army’s failure to keep Paris out of Allied hands. Whether he was telling the truth or telling his American captors what he thought they might like to hear, he knew perfectly well that all he had the resources to do if the Allies attacked was to delay the inevitable. His men knew it, too. They did not need to be generals themselves to figure out that Germany had too few troops, far too few heavy weapons, and an antiaircraft system that would not be sufficient to stop the Allies if they attacked. As another German officer later noted, “construction of a coherent defensive front had become impossible,” because the Paris garrison lacked proper soldiers, weapons, and leadership.37
German morale, already low, suffered yet another blow just days after the failure of the bomb plot, when the Americans finally broke out of Normandy. The Allied plan, code-named Operation Cobra, got off to a miserable start on July 24, when bad weather and poor coordination led to a premature air attack that resulted in more than two dozen friendly-fire deaths. The next day, 1,850 Allied bombers dropped more than 4,000 tons of bombs, as well as napalm and antipersonnel weapons, in a ten-square-mile area just west of the town of St. Lô. The official U.S. Army historian of the campaign undoubtedly understated the impact of this massive use of bombers in a tactical role when he wrote that “the earth shook.” Nevertheless, accuracy remained a problem. Poor coordination at St. Lô again caused heavy friendly-fire casualties, including the death of Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair, the highest-ranking American officer killed in World War II.
The Blood of Free Men Page 11
