The inaccuracy of the air assault notwithstanding, the sheer weight of Cobra stunned and shocked the Germans who felt its full force. The entire German left flank collapsed, opening the route to the town of Avranches and then the gateways into Brittany, where the Allies intended to shut down German U-boat bases on the Atlantic coast. Although supply problems continued to slow the Allied advance, Cobra had changed the momentum of the war in northern France. General Dietrich von Choltitz, whose 84th Army Corps had suffered terribly near St. Lô, called the fighting in Normandy a “monstrous bloodbath,” the likes of which he had never seen. Choltitz soon received notification that he was being reassigned away from Normandy and given a new, potentially even more challenging assignment, but for the moment he had his hands full simply holding together the collapsing German defense. To Guenther von Kluge, his commander, the campaign in Normandy was devolving into “an awful mess” that the German Army could not contain with the resources it then had on hand.38
Although the Americans initially turned west into Brittany, the breakout had implications for Paris as well. By the end of July, it appeared as though the Germans were either retreating into their fortifications in Brittany or beginning to stream east in a state of disorganization. This new operational environment meant that the Allies could reduce the number of units they dedicated to the liberation of Brittany and focus more effort on the Seine River basin, which suddenly appeared to be within reach. As Eisenhower told General George Marshall, the U.S. Army chief of staff, on July 30, “The prospects for the future were unlimited.”39
Astonishingly, however, Paris still formed no part of those prospects. Allied planners continued to think in terms of bypassing the city to push the Germans as far east as possible. The most optimistic among them hoped for victory in the west in 1944 in order to allow the Allies to begin to move units to the Pacific theater for a spring campaign against Japan. Paris was still, in their eyes, a distraction and an unnecessary diversion of resources.
But circumstances soon forced Allied commanders to reconsider. Events were about to move much more rapidly, beginning with the arrival of a new German commander for Paris, a man known throughout the German high command as the “smasher of cities.”
4
THE SMASHER OF CITIES
ON AUGUST 7, DIETRICH VON CHOLTITZ ARRIVED AT THE “Wolf’s Lair” in Rastenburg in modern-day Poland for a meeting with Adolf Hitler. Choltitz, the heavy-set fifty-year-old general who had recently been mired in St. Lô, was a career soldier. He had been one of the four thousand officers who had served in the interwar German Army, which had been limited in size by the Versailles Treaty. Although he had met Hitler only once, he had, like most German generals of his generation, followed him loyally since 1933. He had received orders to come to Hitler’s headquarters, which was under unusually heavy security in the wake of the recent bomb plot, to discuss a new assignment. In the back of his mind, however, he wondered if he was going to be chastised for the collapse of his corps outside St. Lô during Operation Cobra or, worse still, if he had been incorrectly implicated in the assassination plot.
The area where the bomb had exploded still showed evidence of the attack, and the atmosphere at Rastenburg was tense. The fear and anxiety there could not have done much to alleviate Choltitz’s own anxiety. The rapidly advancing Red Army was just sixty miles away, exacerbating the already edgy environment among Hitler’s lieutenants. The impending arrival of the vengeful Russians on German soil was the main topic of conversation; Hitler’s daily briefings began with the situation on the eastern front no matter what was happening elsewhere. Rastenburg hardly looked like a headquarters ready to deal with the many crises Germany faced. Hitler could not even shake Choltitz’s hand firmly because of wounds suffered in the bomb blast.
The meeting unnerved Choltitz from the beginning. Hitler appeared, Choltitz later recalled, as an “old, stooped, and swollen man . . . a trembling being [who was] physically broken.” Choltitz recalled Hitler raging on about “the clique of Prussian generals” who tried to “prevent me, Adolf Hitler, from continuing my work, from fulfilling my destiny of leading the German people.” Dozens of those generals, Hitler reminded Choltitz unnecessarily, now “bounced at the end of a rope.” Choltitz realized that Hitler was a “soul filled with hate” against his own generals; that rage, he believed, prevented Hitler from seeing the true situation facing Germany. “I found myself in the presence of a madman,” he concluded. Even before the meeting went much further, Choltitz realized that Hitler had an unrealistic view of the true military situation in the west, which, Choltitz believed, was on the verge of complete and irrevocable collapse.1
During their meeting, Hitler gave Choltitz command of the Paris Military District with a demand that he reform it and make it more effective. Hitler railed against what he saw as the unmilitary and lax attitude of the officers in Paris, telling Choltitz that “the fighting going on [in Paris] is over the seats in the officers mess” rather than against the enemy. He wanted Choltitz to make Paris “a frontline city” and prepare it for a proper defense while restoring “discipline among troops accustomed to easy living.” Hitler offered Choltitz no new resources and left him no opportunity to ask questions. He then surprised Choltitz by telling him that a major counteroffensive would begin immediately that would change the military situation in the west in Germany’s favor. The announcement only further undermined Choltitz’s opinion of the strategic vision of the German high command. Hitler ended the meeting by telling Choltitz that he was extending his command authority, essentially making Choltitz an independent commander with powers akin to those of a fortress commander under siege. Choltitz would therefore have virtually unlimited control over German Army units in the city, although, in line with new security measures after the bomb plot, he would have no control over the Gestapo or the SS.2
Hitler and the German high command had chosen Choltitz as the new commander of Paris in large part for his presumed reliability in the wake of the bomb plot. He was one of the few German generals in France whose name had not come up in the Gestapo investigations following the assassination attempt, leading Hitler to believe that Choltitz could be trusted. He was also, in the words of the man he replaced, “a devoted Nazi and an unshakably obedient Prussian” who had always done what he was told without thinking about the consequences. Choltitz did indeed have a well-deserved reputation inside the German Army for never refusing an order. After the war, while sitting in an Allied prison and being secretly recorded by his British captors, he told another German officer that “the most difficult order of [his] life” had been the order he received in Russia to liquidate all Jews in his area of responsibility. He had nevertheless followed the order in its entirety and without any hesitation whatsoever.3
Ominously for his new assignment, Choltitz also had a reputation for ferocity in urban warfare. He had been responsible for the German Army’s ruthless devastation of several city centers, most notably Rotterdam in 1940 and Sevastopol in 1942. In Rotterdam, Choltitz’s aggressiveness resulted in almost a thousand civilian deaths after the surrender of the city, mostly from air raids he ordered that also left eighty thousand people in the city homeless. Operations in Sevastopol were far nastier, killing tens of thousands of noncombatants. Choltitz’s nickname, “the Smasher of Cities,” reflected his unusual area of specialty. So widespread was this reputation inside the German Army that he was often believed to be the man who had overseen the destruction of the fortifications of Warsaw in 1939, even though he had in fact not been involved. Part of his fearsome reputation came from the brutal way that Choltitz had treated civilians in the cities he devastated. Like many of his German comrades, he held irregular combatants in utter contempt. In his eyes, any fighter not wearing a uniform was a terrorist unworthy of any protections under the conventions of war. The communities that harbored these civilian fighters were also open to any form of collective retribution necessary to ensure order.
Choltitz is one of the
most difficult personalities in the history of the liberation of Paris to understand. After the war, he granted many contradictory interviews in which he alternatively revealed his disgust at Paris (and Parisians) and boasted that he, and he alone, had saved a Paris he had come to love from complete destruction. His memoirs, like all memoirs from Nazi generals, need to be corroborated by other sources and read with great care, as they are an obvious mixture of truths, half-truths, and convenient fictions. Choltitz, like most of his colleagues in their later recollections, tried to blame as much as he could on Hitler and the German high command, thus absolving himself of responsibilities for war crimes and fatal errors of judgment. In 1955, an interviewer wrote that “one must ask at what point, if ever, General Choltitz was sincere. This is a point that History might one day clarify.” Such clarification remains difficult to achieve decades later.4
Whatever the level of his sincerity, however, by 1944 Choltitz was clearly not the same aggressive general he had been in 1940–1942. Raoul Nordling, the Paris-born Swedish consul with whom Choltitz came to work closely, described him as “the very incarnation of Prussia . . . corpulent, powerful and broad-shouldered, extremely stiff, imposing, and, it seemed to me, of an overbearing Prussian demeanor.” Like many of his fellow generals, he had lost faith that Germany would win the war after the disaster at Stalingrad, and by the time of the Paris liberation he was badly disillusioned with the army’s leadership, a belief strongly reinforced by the meeting with Hitler at Rastenburg. Although there is no evidence linking him with the bomb plot, he shared the beliefs of the plotters that the best hope for Germany’s future rested in signing a favorable armistice with the Americans and the British. He was also suffering from heart problems, which had evidently sapped much of his customary energy.5
Choltitz left Rastenburg more demoralized than reenergized. He saw more clearly than ever that Germany would lose the war. “I asked myself,” he later wrote, “the difficult question of whether a general, a leader of men, can in his soul and in his conscience take the responsibility of sacrificing his poor soldiers for a cause that had lost all hope.” Evidently, he answered yes to that question, because he took the Paris assignment despite his belief that the orders had come from a man he described as a lunatic. He had come to the conclusion that both Hitler and his staff were delusional. Conveniently for him, however, Choltitz had concluded that this state of affairs “relieved [his] conscience as a soldier” if he decided not to follow their orders.6
Choltitz arrived in Paris on August 9 and quickly saw that the city was in no position to defend itself or to help the retreating German forces in France. It took him more than four days just to straighten out the confused and ever-changing command structure in the city. He found most of the newly assigned officers to the area anxious to use Paris as a base for offensive operations, but he knew that the necessary facilities and personnel did not exist. He was surprised to learn that the troops in Paris were in even worse condition than he had feared. Poorly armed and badly trained, they could not, he knew, “keep the enemy at bay outside the city for very long” if attacked. Some of the troops in the Paris Military District were using World War I–vintage rifles, and others had received little to no training in the use of heavy weapons. Most alarmingly, he found the morale of the Paris garrison beyond rehabilitation. In his mind, years of service in “beautiful France, with its magnificent climate and its charming inhabitants,” had sapped the “wild resolution” that had enabled German soldiers to win the Reich’s early victories.7
The francophile German officer Gerhard Heller recalled Paris at the time Choltitz arrived as a place where parties continued as a means for most German officials to avoid the unpleasant reality that their side would lose the war. “We tried to forget the hazards that weighed on us, keeping in our minds our sweet memories of Paris,” he recalled wistfully. Heller did note, however, that the Gestapo and the SS still contained diehard believers in the Nazi cause whose “hate, [and] whose thirst for destruction and death[,] had never been greater.” They spoke of any retreat from the city as being temporary and believed it would be followed by a new victory march “into a Paris even more beaten and submissive.” Dangerous though they could be, such men were in the minority. Most German officials, fully aware that their time in Paris was coming to an end, spent their days figuring out how many items from the city they could ship home on the limited transportation available.8
Garrison service in La Belle France was not the only reason for the decline in the fighting ability of the German Army. The effects of five years of trying to conquer Europe in the name of a morally bankrupt ideology, combined with the recent impacts of brutal combat in Normandy, had reduced the German Army in the west to a shell of its former self. Many of the German Army’s units in France, moreover, were still recovering from the frightful and murderous beatings they had taken on the eastern front. For Parisians like Gilles Perrault, the degradation of the German Army meant that the men of the Paris district were no longer “the splendid specimens of humanity” that had marched triumphantly into the city in 1940. Instead, they appeared to Perrault as “gray-haired old men . . . and lanky boys, dwarves, bandy-legs, hunchbacks—a whole army of ragged men. They reeked of disaster.” For Choltitz, a veteran of the prewar army and recently a corps commander of a frontline unit, the sight of so many men in such a poor physical and moral state must have come as quite an unpleasant surprise.9
Based on these observations, Choltitz quickly abandoned any thought of Paris serving as a major German stronghold. He decided instead on a strategy of keeping the city open for as long as possible as a German communication and transportation node. Doing so would allow the Germans to move troops and equipment west to assist with the counterattack the German headquarters was preparing at the very moment that Choltitz arrived at his new assignment. If, as Choltitz expected, the counterattack failed, then the German Army would need a secure Paris to move as many men as possible to a new defensive line east of the city. Given the resources he had at hand, Choltitz did not believe that he could accomplish much more.
Choltitz disliked the idea of being the man who would leave Paris in ruins, even though he knew that Hitler wanted him to do so. He may have had humanitarian reasons for his desire to save Paris, but he also had no wish to see his name forever associated with the destruction of the city unless doing so would help the German Army in some significant way. There is little evidence to suggest that Choltitz had ruled out destroying large parts of the city under any circumstances; although his attitude toward the war may have changed, he was still the same man who had decimated Rotterdam and Sevastopol earlier in the war. In August 1944, however, Choltitz had more reasons to keep Paris intact than he did to inflict intentional damage on the city. Given that the Germans already knew that the Allies did not have Paris in their short-term plans, denying it to them would not slow them down enough to justify its demolition. It would, however, make the safe withdrawal of German troops in northern France much more difficult. From a purely operational perspective, therefore, damaging Paris was senseless. Most importantly, destroying Paris would not put the Allies in a positive frame of mind to sign an armistice that might be relatively favorable to Germany. Obtaining such an armistice was the only strategic goal the German command in the west could envision.
Choltitz also knew that if it became evident that the Germans were preparing major demolitions inside Paris, it would likely lead the Resistance to rise in opposition and the majority of Parisians to become actively anti-German. An uprising in the city was Choltitz’s worst nightmare, because it would make control of the city’s transportation nodes virtually impossible. It would also involve his troops in the kind of guerrilla warfare for which they were untrained and unprepared. He therefore decided to implement a less risky defense plan for Paris that envisioned holding thirty-six mutually supporting strongpoints, including the Place de la Concorde near his headquarters in the Hôtel Meurice, the Luftwaffe headquarters in the Palais d
u Luxembourg, the large German barracks on the Place de la République, and critical infrastructure points, such as the main telephone exchange on the Rue de Grenelle and the city’s gas and water works. The plan also allowed for strongpoints to provide security for the main boulevards and avenues in the city in order to ensure smooth circulation for German mobile forces.
Despite his fears of an urban uprising, Choltitz seems not to have thought that the Resistance posed a serious threat to German control of the city. At least, he was relatively sanguine about this point during his first week as commander of Paris. Army Group B’s weekly reports at this time dismissed the Resistance as only capable of fighting what it called “miniature warfare,” noting that “the Resistance movement has been crippled by the capture of almost all of its leaders.” Choltitz was concerned that a new round of strikes, similar to those of July 14, could cause disruptions to German activity in the city, but he downplayed the possibility that the Resistance was capable of organizing operations on a large scale. Nor did he worry about the increasing unwillingness of the Paris police to assist German authorities.10
Choltitz did, however, make a priority of building a strong working relationship with several collaborationist officials, including Pierre Taittinger, Paris’s right-wing mayor. The two men shared a mutual dislike of the FFI and the city’s communist leaders, whom they both suspected of planning an insurrection and civil war that could destroy the city from within. At this point, Choltitz was still confident of his ability to break up any attempt by the FFI to disrupt order in the city, but he needed French allies to ensure that matters did not get out of hand. The Paris police were nominally under Taittinger’s authority and subject to his orders. For his part, Taittinger saw Choltitz as a powerful ally against his own political enemies. He also saw him as a viable alternative to the SS commanders in the city, whom he feared far more than he feared the German Army. Choltitz and Taittinger formed a tight bond that outlived their working relationship. Before leaving Paris, Choltitz gave Taittinger an autographed photo of himself as a parting gift, citing the “Christian and European” spirit that had “united their efforts” to save Paris from civil war and destruction. Taittinger later wrote the introduction to the French edition of Choltitz’s memoirs, calling him “chivalrous” and “humane.” Their relationship typified the collaboration between German and Vichy authorities that had served the interests of the occupiers at the expense of the people of Paris for four long years.11
The Blood of Free Men Page 12
