Bobkowski’s conclusions were widespread. Most Parisians saw the “Warsaw Rising” as brave but ultimately pointless. While almost all Parisians admired the courage of the Warsaw Home Army, few wanted the French Resistance to imitate it. The thought of Paris turning into Warsaw or Stalingrad was too much for most residents to contemplate, and yet the possibility of such an outcome was terrifyingly close. Chaban had warned the British on his daring trip to London that “if you want Paris to become another Warsaw you have only to continue your policy.” Just outside the city, a young officer in the Deuxième Division Blindée who had lived in Germany before the war—and had seen the Nazi danger firsthand—thought that events in Warsaw were reason enough for the Allies to change their plans and drive onto Paris as quickly as possible. Captain Raymond Dronne, whose role in the liberation of the city later vaulted him to a seat in the French Senate, thought that “if they [the Germans] were reserving for Paris the fate that they were imposing on Warsaw,” then the soldiers of the Deuxième Division Blindée had a moral obligation to liberate the city, with or without the Americans by their side. Not for nothing was Leclerc hoarding gasoline for his tanks and trucks.37
Although most Parisians drew the same conclusions from Warsaw’s terrible precedent, they had differing interpretations. For collaborationists and Paris city officials, Warsaw was a grim specter of what happened when civilians took up armed struggle. Pierre Taittinger later justified his close working relationship with Choltitz by saying that the two had to work together so that Paris “might, above all, avoid the fate of Warsaw.” But if Warsaw held out the terrifying possibility that Paris might be destroyed in the very act of its liberation, the thought did not intimidate everyone. Alexandre Parodi, de Gaulle’s political representative in Paris, later wrote that “the fate of Warsaw has, since [1944] shown us how much this might have cost.” Still, he noted, “the risk was known and taken.”38
Like the residents of Warsaw, the members of the FFI and countless thousands of other Parisians were unwilling to stand by any longer. As Léo Hamon, editor of the clandestine communist newspaper Combat and one of the bravest Resistance fighters in the city, noted, “Parisians cannot sit like passive spectators at their own deliverance.” The Allies were approaching, but no one knew whether they planned to fight for the city, bypass it, or besiege it. As Parisians went to sleep on August 14, their deliverance was anything but certain. Nor did anyone know where that liberation might lead or how much it might cost in blood. But Parisians were increasingly steeling themselves to try to regain their freedom and their city with or without the help of the Allies. The city was approaching an insurrection. All that was missing was a spark.39
5
THE GUNS GO OFF, AUGUST 15–18
WRITING OF ANOTHER LANDMARK PERIOD IN PARISIAN history, Victor Hugo had once observed that “the great city is like a piece of artillery. When it is loaded, a spark need only fall and the gun goes off.” The angst and anger of Paris’s residents had been developing for years, as it had been in the buildup to the 1832 revolution that Hugo described in his novel Les Misérables. But without a catalyst, the city’s explosive tensions had stayed pent up even as the pressure mounted.
The spark that lit the guns of insurrection in Paris during the hot days of mid-August 1944 came from a surprising and unlikely source: the Paris police. Reviled by many of the city’s residents for the dirty work they had done assisting the Germans and Vichy officials, the police were soon to rescue their reputation. That reputation had been badly tarnished by years of collaboration. In 1940, the police had moved seamlessly from serving the French Republic to serving the German occupiers, doing some of the regime’s dirtiest work, most notoriously during the roundups that led to the virtual disappearance of Paris’s Jewish community. The police had also been instrumental in the arrests of anti-Vichy political activists and in forcing compliance with the labor conscription system. Enforcing the laws of the occupiers did not endear the police to the population of Paris. Like most Parisians, however, the city’s police officers saw little choice but to accept the authority of the new regime, especially once Vichy assumed the legal mantle of the French state.1
But there was another, if much less obvious, side to the Paris police. As their fellow countrymen became increasingly disillusioned with Vichy after 1942, so, too, did many members of the police force. By spring 1944, perhaps as many as one in ten members of the police force belonged to one of three major police Resistance groups. These groups, of course, operated under the strictest silence. They were further hampered in their activities by internal divisions. Recruitment was furtive, with police officers carefully approaching comrades who might share their political views. They had good reason to be secretive: The constant presence of unsympathetic officers and the looming shadows of the Gestapo made the organization of Resistance activities within the police force extremely dangerous.
Nevertheless, some police officers were willing to take the risks. As events later showed, even if only one in ten members was an active member of a Resistance group, there was a large reservoir of support inside the force for their activities. Like the Resistance more generally, the three police Resistance groups were based around political affiliations. The Gaullist Honneur de la Police, with around 400 members, was the first group formed and was the best organized. It contained most of the high-ranking police Resistance leaders, a factor that proved to be critically important in the crucial days of August. The socialist Police et Patrie, which represented 250 police officers and 400 nonuniformed police employees, had been the most active group, specializing in providing identity cards and passports to résistants and escaped prisoners. These documents carried false names but were in every other way genuine, coming as they did from the police themselves. As such, they were critically important to the Resistance movement. The largest of the groups was the communist-influenced Front National de la Police, with almost 800 active members and many more sympathizers within the force. It was part of a much larger movement inside Paris directed and led by the French Communist Party. Its close links to the communists made it suspect in the eyes of the other two groups, some of whose members feared it might be the armed vanguard of a future communist coup d’état.
Although they shared many common goals, political differences led to much mutual suspicion between the police Resistance groups in the tense and murky world of occupied Paris. All of the police groups, moreover, ran the risk of being infiltrated by the Gestapo or by French fascist groups like the paramilitary Milice. Each group also feared infiltration and double-crossing by one of the others. Still, each brought its own strengths to the movement to oust the Germans and the Vichy-led administration of Paris. As a result of these fears and the natural secrecy that surrounded the Resistance movement, the three police groups had worked carefully behind the scenes, but had not fused together.
Mutual suspicions and fears notwithstanding, there were a few linkages between the police and the leadership of the Resistance more generally. Over the years of the occupation, the leaders of the French Resistance had urged policemen who opposed the occupiers to remain on the job. The Resistance saw the obvious value of having some police officers working clandestinely on the side of the people of Paris, even if those same policemen had to simultaneously carry out some of the more odious orders they received from the Germans and Vichy. As a result, the leaders of the French Resistance advised the police to “disobey orders intelligently,” meaning that they were to act with all due caution and even to look the other way when French patriots committed acts of resistance, but were to do nothing that would attract suspicion or reveal their true political leanings. To do so might bring interrogation and the end of the clandestine police networks the Resistance was then trying to establish. These efforts seemed to pay important dividends. As early as August 1943, the Germans had begun to acknowledge that the Paris police were no longer fully reliable.2
The untrustworthiness of the Paris police to its German and Vichy
masters grew throughout 1944. The behavior of the police during the strikes of July 14, inspiring calls from the crowd of “La police avec nous!” (“The police are with us!”), had not been an isolated incident, as the police had virtually stopped monitoring the activities of Resistance groups. They had also looked the other way when Resistance figures in the city committed nonviolent acts of opposition, such as posting notices and organizing demonstrations. In some working-class neighborhoods, it was even possible by spring 1944 for Resistance members to meet in cafés that the police were known to intentionally avoid.
Some police officers did more than take a passive attitude toward the Resistance. Many members of the police Resistance groups had begun monitoring Gestapo activity and taking careful note of the German Army’s defensive positions. The police were the only Frenchmen allowed on the streets at night, giving them a rare and strategically important opportunity to observe the Germans. As a result, the police became a critical source of badly needed intelligence on the comings and goings of the Germans and of Vichy officials.
Still, on the surface the police continued to work with the Germans and Vichy, mainly out of fear of being arrested or disarmed. Most police officers still took their orders from the occupiers; they played the enabling role in the deportation of hundreds of Jews (including many children) to Drancy on July 31, 1942, following the horrific Vel d’Hiv roundup of July 16 and 17. The clandestine communist newspaper L’Humanité was concerned enough about the role of the police in supporting the regime to note, in late June, that “if, by lack of courage or lack of patriotic conscience[,] the police remain in the service of (Joseph) Darnard [the widely despised leader of the Milice] they will be committing a crime against the Fatherland for which there will be a settling of scores.” Nevertheless, it is clear that a change of heart had begun to occur among many police officers who, as one of them noted, “were against the Germans and only waited for the chance to settle some scores.” Others stayed on the job out of a sense of duty (the Paris police had never in its history gone on strike) or out of a belief that they served as a shield between the people of Paris and the German and Vichy security forces. Some police therefore followed the thinking of the Vichy prefect of police, Amédée Bussières, who told his officers, with typical collaborationist logic, “Imagine what will happen if the Gestapo or the Milice takes your place.” Or, as another police officer noted, “to resist by night, we had to collaborate by day.”3
All three police Resistance groups had ties of varying kinds to Charles de Gaulle’s political allies in Algiers and London. De Gaulle and his advisers had known of the resistance sentiments inside the police and had counted them as a political asset since at least the middle of 1943. De Gaulle expected the Paris police to provide most of the security for the city after the German departure, thus avoiding the need for a postliberation government to rely upon FFI agents, who were not government employees, for policing. If de Gaulle did not want the untrained and politically unreliable FFI in control of the city’s security, he also did not want the Allied armies to assume responsibility for policing Paris. Neither owed any loyalty to his provisional government, meaning that they could not form a critical foundation for the security of a future French state. Nor would either necessarily respond to his leadership. He preferred to keep the Paris police on the job, but he knew that for the police to have any legitimacy after the war they would need to gain at least some modicum of trust from the people of Paris.
How the police responded to the coming crisis would therefore determine much of the future of the liberation. The Resistance leaders who favored a general uprising hoped to convince the police to join their efforts, or at the very least not interrupt them. Rol addressed a meeting of about a dozen police Resistance leaders on August 14 in response to a German decision to disarm the police in two Paris suburbs, St. Denis and Asnières, because of the refusal of the police to put down strikes. Police officers in both places pledged to go on strike themselves unless the Germans reversed the disarmament order. Events in the suburbs foreshadowed a possible confrontation between the police and the Germans in Paris itself. For more than a month, Rol, the police, and Roland Pré, a senior Gaullist agent living in Paris, had envisioned just such a scenario. They knew that if the Germans threatened to disarm the Paris police, the situation in the capital, where France’s largest police force resided, would be much more serious than that in two relatively unimportant suburbs. Now the events in St. Denis and Asnières, combined with the widespread disappearance of Paris policemen from the city’s streets, had made the disarmament of the Paris police a distinct possibility, leading Rol to arrange a meeting of the representatives of the police Resistance groups.
The debates inside the police Resistance groups mirrored those inside the Resistance more generally. Rol and the Front National de la Police leadership argued passionately that the police could not allow themselves to be disarmed, even at the risk of a direct confrontation with the Germans. They must, Rol contended, go on strike instead, both to ensure that they did not find themselves without weapons at the crucial moment and to inspire the population of Paris. A police strike would show the entire city that the police, at long last, were actively and unquestionably on their side. Most importantly, the lack of a police presence on the streets would signal to the FFI that they could step up their efforts against the occupiers without police interference. The most radical members of the police Resistance threw their full weight behind Rol’s plan; the Front National leaders went as far as to urge that any police officer who did not honor the strike be tarred as a traitor.
Both the idea of a general strike and the harsh tone of the Front National scared the members of Honneur de la Police, the much more moderate Gaullist group. They argued that the Front National’s overheated rhetoric threatened to split the police Resistance movement in two at the very moment that it most needed unity. More importantly, they, like Parodi and Chaban, thought a general strike premature unless and until Allied armies could provide direct assistance. Otherwise, they feared that the Germans still had enough combat power in the city to arrest or kill them in large numbers. The leaders of the socialist Police et Patrie also urged caution, arguing that they could not be responsible for starting a strike that might lead to Paris becoming another Warsaw.4
Rol broke the logjam, arguing that the other groups would be left behind if they did not follow the lead of the Front National. Implied in Rol’s argument was the notion that the Front National, and the Communist Party to which it was closely connected, would get the credit for leading the people of Paris out of their misery while the other groups, and the police more generally, remained blackened by their direct association with the Germans and Vichy. After some heated debate, the three groups agreed to distribute leaflets with printing on both sides: on one side, an appeal by the FFI for a strike, and on the other, a similar appeal by the Paris police Resistance groups. The objective was to show the unity of the Resistance generally and the police in this critical hour. Although there had been debate about the exact wording of the leaflets, the FFI appeal did in the end include strong language warning any police officers who failed to honor the strike that they would be seen as traitors and treated as such. The leaflets soon took their place among others calling for resistance on the city’s many kiosks as well as on walls and park benches. “For the final combat,” they read, “everyone must go forward with the people of Paris.” That night, messages appeared at every Parisian police station that read, “No police officer shall allow himself to be disarmed or become the target of any coercive measure whatsoever.”5
Bussières, the prefect of police, urged his policemen to ignore the telegrams and stay on the job. “Will you abandon your responsibilities to the people of Paris at the hour when our hopes may soon be realized?” he asked his men in a message sent to all police stations in the city. “Will you fail to be there at the moment that the Anglo-American armies arrive at the gates of Paris?” Even though the last part of
the message seemed to point toward a time when the police would no longer need to obey the Germans or Vichy, it was clear from the behavior of the police that Bussières had lost the confidence and faith of his force.
The rapidly spreading police strike sent the immediate message to other Resistance groups that they could now operate more freely throughout the city. Among their sympathizers were the city’s printers, members of one of the most pro-Resistance of professions. Having worked carefully and quietly behind the scenes for years to print clandestine newspapers, the printers could now begin to flood the city with newspapers and leaflets designed to extend the police strike throughout the entire city. Cooperating police officers sped around Paris through the night to post leaflets on the walls of neighborhood police stations, known as commissariats. Word also spread like wildfire by word of mouth. The printers then stopped publishing collaborationist newspapers, which disappeared immediately, sending another clear message that the days of Vichy were numbered.
The next morning, August 15, Parisians awoke to a strange, unprecedented sight: The streets were empty of policemen. All but a small handful of the city’s 15,000 police officers had obeyed the call to strike, an indication of the depth of anti-German feeling that the police had harbored despite their history of collaboration. The strike had been flawlessly executed, with police officers taking the time to remove and hide weapons stored inside their commissariats in order to keep them out of German hands. While some policemen began to picket outside their commissariats in civilian clothes, others worked to encourage their fellow public-sector employees inside the city to join the general strike. Meanwhile, the FFI took advantage of the situation to begin moving around the city openly, often sporting armbands with the widely recognizable Cross of Lorraine, the symbol of Free France.
The Blood of Free Men Page 15
