The Hotel on Place Vendome

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Lily and Blanche were hauled off to the notorious prison camp at Fresnes immediately for showing disrespect to the Germans. It was foolish and not just because of the immediate consequences. Now Lily and Blanche were both under investigation. If the Gestapo discovered what they had really been up to, the result was going to be summary execution. And they wouldn’t be the only ones, either. They could easily pull a good part of the Ritz staff down with them.

  Lily Kharmayeff had fought in Spain during the civil war and now was involved with the Franco-Spanish resistance in Paris. She was also likely part of the circle of Russian émigré filmmakers and actors who worked in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s with director Yakov Protazanov. Perhaps she and Blanche first met on the set of his 1923 film Pour une nuit d’amour (For a Night of Love). One of the supporting actresses in the film was Blanche Ross—Blanche Rubenstein’s stage name in the 1920s and the name she eventually used on her false passport.

  However they first met, Lily now recruited her old friend into the network. Blanche smuggled military photographs out of Paris by impersonating the wife of a railway worker and—most dangerously for them all—once hid Lily and a wounded communist fighter named Vincenzo in room 414 at the Hôtel Ritz while he recovered from his injuries. Again, some of the staff had known about it. The concierge had given them the keys, and Claude—kept in the dark about her cloak-and-dagger activities—had still covered for her when the Nazis suspected that something was up. It was Marie-Louise Ritz that everyone had moved heaven and earth to keep in the dark. As her son Charley put it, she saw “every damned thing.” Sooner or later, someone was going to have to warn Marie-Louise that it was dangerous to be so friendly with the Germans.

  The Germans already suspected Blanche of harboring fugitives and of political terrorism, and if she cracked now and the Gestapo decided to interrogate Claude, there was plenty to discover. He had already been arrested once, too, on the suspicion that he was a communist sympathizer. He wasn’t caught up with any of the city’s loosely organized movements, but with some of the other staff he was running his own resistance network, informing the Allies when the Hôtel Ritz hosted high-value “guests of the Führer.” The Germans already guessed that he was an agent for the British intelligence service. Both Frank and the hotel’s doorman, the “chasseur” Jacques, were working with the director.

  Claude’s network was an ingenious system that utilized the hotel’s Swiss contacts. Working with a business associate in the occupied zone, Claude would call from his office and casually convey the coded information. Claude’s contact passed the information along to a railway worker near the Swiss border, who carried the information with him down the line to Allied agents in neutral territory. There were numbers assigned to each German military or political figure—or sometimes the code was based on quantities of fruits and vegetables. They had sardonically nicknamed Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring “potato.” Claude had tried to get other hotel managers in Paris to join the network. When his counterpart at the Georges V refused, Claude vowed that was the end of their friendship.

  On the afternoon of July 21, in the hours after the failed assassination of Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring, Frank Meier might not have been the most immediate suspect, but he was in dire jeopardy if his secrets were discovered. It wasn’t just down to Blanche whether he made it through the next week of reprisals. The storm troopers at the Ritz that day weren’t looking for wounded gunmen or members of the French resistance. It was the German plot they were working to uncover. The Ritz bar—Frank’s domain—had been a center of the German resistance in Paris, almost since the war began.

  And the Austrian-born Frank had been their secret mailbox. He didn’t know what had been in all those messages. He was far too smart to be that dangerously curious. But he had passed messages throughout the war for both Carl von Stülpnagel and Hans Speidel and was a high-value asset.

  The Ritz bar had been at the heart of a good deal of espionage action. There were spy offices all along the Place Vendôme. At No. 7 were the offices of Compagnie Intercommerciale, an intelligence front run by the German economist Dr. Franz Grüger, providing cover for foreign sections of the Abwehr. Another spymaster, Hauptmann Wiegand, had his quarters at No. 22 on the Place Vendôme, along with a “very bad tempered” Corsican agent named Pierre Costantini. The rue Cambon bar had also been a favorite hangout for the “painted doll,” the buxom German socialite named Inga Haag, who was the niece of the Abwehr director, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, himself a double agent for Britain’s MI-6 spy organization.

  During the early years of the war, Inga Haag worked as a secretary at the German high command over at the requisitioned Hôtel Lutétia, but several times a week she and her friends came to swill Frank’s signature cocktails on rue Cambon. Frank never knew for certain, but Haag—like most of her friends in that circle—was another spy for her uncle’s Abwehr and part of the German resistance. Her brief was to supply Jewish residents with the necessary false passports. They were in the same business.

  One of those Hôtel Ritz regulars who came to the bar with Inga was Pierre André Chavannes. He was there often enough that Frank had invented a signature cocktail just for him, the Happy Honey Annie—two-thirds brandy, one-third grapefruit juice, and a dash of honey. Pierre André was also part of the anti-Nazi network in Paris, but he had been arrested back in 1941 and sentenced to execution. Ironically, it was Frank’s The Artistry of Mixing Drinks (1936) that inexplicably saved Pierre André’s life at the eleventh hour in Paris. At Pierre André’s apartment on avenue Foch with his German captors, the translator in tow with the Germans happened to see a copy of Frank’s famous cocktail bible. A few stiff drinks later and he was able to make a dramatic escape from his addled jail masters and flee to safety beyond Paris.

  Frank had passed messages for Inga and her friends. But Inga noticed that he seemed also to be passing messages for Carl von Stülpnagel and Hans Speidel—and they were protecting the bartender. Ironically, it was one circle of the German resistance spying on another circle, each suspecting the other of loyalty to Berlin. Inga and her uncle never seem to have discovered—just as Claude didn’t learn until later what Blanche was up to—that von Stülpnagel and Speidel were plotting an unimaginably bold action. It was just too dangerous to trust anyone with those kinds of life-or-death secrets.

  Inga’s uncle, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, had disappeared suddenly in February 1944, and his replacement was the greasy Walter Schellenberg. No one knew precisely what Walter Schellenberg and Coco Chanel were up to, but the couturière made two trips to Berlin with his help in the winter of 1943 and 1944, and no one suspected that SS general Walter Schellenberg was part of the German resistance.

  Now Frank couldn’t help but notice that another set of regulars at the Ritz had disappeared in the aftermath of this attempt on the life of Hitler and Göring. The story was being broadcast over the British radio, and those with hidden transistors were finally learning the tale in tantalizingly vague bits and pieces. Eventually, the whole world would know the details.

  What had transpired was an astonishing story of courage and betrayal. In recent days, the three main conspirators in Paris—Hans Speidel, Caesar von Hofacker, and Carl von Stülpnagel—had persuaded Speidel’s boss, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, to meet with them in Paris for a secret war council.

  The field marshal had promised in February to support his old friend von Stülpnagel’s plan for a military toppling of the Führer, but he had stubbornly drawn the line at a political assassination.

  All that had changed during their last meeting in Paris around the time of the Bastille Day riots. The field marshal agreed, at last, that there was no question that Hitler had descended into fantasy and madness. As the commander of Army Group B, Rommel knew better than anyone that the German hold on France was growing more precarious with each passing day, as the Allies continued their march eastward and northward toward the capital.

  Rommel was still morally opposed to a
ssassination, and he wanted to give the Führer one last chance to see reason. If he would not, then the Desert Fox vowed that he would throw in his full weight with the conspirators, “openly and unconditionally,” to the end. And he vowed that he would do everything in his power to make sure that his second-in-command, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, didn’t balk at the last minute. Von Kluge had agreed to support the conspiracy, but everyone had doubts about his reliability.

  Then the conspirators lost Erwin Rommel after all, in a car crash on July 17. On a French country road that day, the Canadian Royal Air Force hit the field marshal’s car with a volley of machine-gun fire. His driver was killed instantly. The result was a terrible wreck as the car hurtled into a roadside ditch at top speed. The Desert Fox had dangerous head injuries and was definitely out of commission. He would spend the coming days in a hospital, before being transferred back to Germany for recuperation—and, after what had happened now, inevitable execution.

  They would now have to rely on von Kluge for support when they took control of Paris. He was now in charge of the German military in northern France.

  Maybe Günther von Kluge had even intended to give his support to the plan, depending on the outcome. At last, on July 20, Operation Valkyrie finally swung into motion, after months—even years—of secret consternation and planning. In Hitler’s distant Wolf’s Lair headquarters, Caesar von Hofacker’s cousin, Prince Claus von Stauffenberg, planted a briefcase wired with explosives under the Führer’s table. He lit the fuse and excused himself calmly. When the bomb blast ripped through the wooden barrack, Claus boarded a waiting plane back to Berlin to set in motion stage two of the military takeover.

  In Paris, Hans, Caesar, and Carl had waited anxiously all afternoon that Thursday. At 4:45 P.M. the long-wished-for telegram came over the wires, with the simple statement “internal unrest.” It was the code word that meant Adolf Hitler was dead.

  At six P.M. another telegram arrived. In the case of the death of the Führer, there was a fixed plan in place, in which the local commanding generals would be given control of occupied districts. These were the very men who had been carefully recruited into the plot to take command of Germany. Von Stülpnagel—the military governor of France—embraced the orders. He immediately ordered the arrest and detention of the entire command structure of the fearsome SS and its intelligence branch, the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD.

  By early evening on July 20, 1944, Paris was entirely in the hands of the German resistance.

  Soon there would have been a tipping point. In a matter of hours, the word would have spread through the streets of Paris. After that Bastille Day demonstration, the conspirators could not have doubted that the French would soon make any continued occupation impossible.

  It all depended only on Günther von Kluge ordering the military to support the governor.

  Carl and Caesar raced to the army headquarters at La Roche-Guyon that evening to plan the final stages of the internal liberation of France with the field marshal. With the backing of the military, the occupation would crumble. The capital would be laid open to the Allies, already only a few hundred miles from the city, and they would broker a deal that would save Germany. For months already, those plotting against the Führer and his Reichsmarschall had been trying to gather information on what it might take to convince the Allies to end their war with a post-Hitler Germany.

  At the La Roche-Guyon château, von Stülpnagel burst into von Kluge’s office with the news. They had immobilized the elite Nazi security troops. Paris was in hand. Now von Kluge needed only contact the Allies and negotiate a peace settlement in France.

  In a moment, von Kluge broke the news to them that there would be no armistice. At 7 P.M. Hitler had gone on the radio to assure his commanders that he was not dead. Claus von Stauffenberg had not stayed in the Wolf’s Lair long enough to discover that the suitcase with the bomb had been moved away from Hitler only moments before the explosion. They had acted before confirming that the most crucial element of the plan had been successful. It was a catastrophic tactical error.

  In light of this failure, Günther von Kluge refused to support them. It would be different, he told von Stülpnagel, “if the pig were dead.” But if the military would back them, they argued, the plan to wrest control of France from Adolf Hitler could still succeed. Von Kluge, however, wasn’t prepared to take that gamble. For von Hofacker and von Stülpnagel, it was a long and desperate ride back to Paris. As their car pulled away, von Kluge decided to protect himself from the coming brutal reparations. Von Stülpnagel would have to be arrested and turned over to the Gestapo. He issued the order immediately.

  Hans, Caesar, and Carl did not return to the palatial suites at the Hôtel Ritz or to the rue Cambon bar that evening. Still home of the elite German leadership that remained, it would have been far too dangerous. Instead, the conspirators gathered in suite 703 of the Hôtel Raphäel, a stone’s throw from the headquarters of the SD and the Gestapo on avenue Foch. The Hôtel Raphäel had been their primary operational headquarters for certain organizational meetings.

  Word had already reached their other conspirators in Paris. While a small group of German resistors waited for Carl and Caesar to return from La Roche-Guyon that evening, Carl’s chief of staff, Colonel Hans von Linstow, listened in stunned silence to the desperate message by telephone from Germany. He stumbled into the room to tell the others, and someone rose to steady him, thinking the colonel was having a heart attack. Instead he looked at them in horror and choked out the words. “It’s all over in Berlin,” he cried. “Stauffenberg just called. He gave the news himself and told me that his assassins were at the door.”

  Back in Berlin, Claus von Stauffenberg did not survive the night. He was summarily court-martialed. At ten minutes past midnight, on July 21, he and three other German ringleaders of the plot to assassinate Hitler and Göring were executed in the low beam of army headlights by a firing squad in the courtyard of the military headquarters. There in Paris, no one doubted that they, too, would be next.

  When Carl von Stülpnagel returned at last, he had decided to make a desperate final play for survival. The arrested SS and SD officers had been imprisoned in the grand ballroom of the Hôtel Continental. Confused and worried, the leaders had passed the evening getting drunk on expensive cognac. Ultimately, Carl now knew they would have to release the prisoners. He knew, too, that the ease with which the elite security forces had been disabled was more than an embarrassment. Heads would roll when Hitler learned of it. This was part of the reason why that next morning in the Hôtel Ritz even the SS was frightened.

  Carl summoned the SS leader, Carl Oberg, and the German ambassador, Otto Abetz, to the Hôtel Raphäel for an emergency conference. They agreed to all come up with a story to save the SS and SD from embarrassment—in exchange for covering up the plot of the conspirators. They agreed that they would all tell Hitler and Himmler that it was a joint exercise to show that the city could deal with any threat to the Reich.

  It all might have worked, except for von Kluge. He called Hitler and explained exactly what Carl and the conspirators had done. Already that night, Carl knew that he was a dead man. He and Caesar stayed up until dawn, destroying as many documents as they could to protect the other conspirators.

  In the morning, sometime between eight and eight thirty, Carl went to his office in the military headquarters at the Hôtel Majestic. Thirty minutes later, the order came: the Führer wanted his military commandant of Paris to report to Berlin by plane, instantly. Taking one last look around his office, Carl knew that there was nothing more to be done.

  He called Berlin to say he was en route and decided there could be no harm in disobeying one last order. He would drive there instead. Heading east out of Paris, on a French country road, he ordered his driver and his attendant to pull over at a First World War battlefield. He had fought there once and watched friends die in the meadow. The German humiliation at the Treaty of Versailles was part of what had brou
ght them all to this present juncture. He wanted just a few moments of private reflection, Carl told his attendants. He walked into the distance. Soon, out of the silence, came the echo of two gunshots. His driver found him, one eye blown out and a bullet wound to the head, floating in bloodied canal water. They rushed him to the hospital in Verdun, where he was patched back up and then tortured—ultimately betraying Erwin Rommel in his delirium of anguish.

  Adolf Hitler, in his fury, would order the merciless roundup of conspirators and all their relatives and decree that the traitors be killed like cattle—hanged from meat hooks and strung up with piano wire. It was an agonizing death by slow strangulation, and it followed days and sometimes weeks of horrific torture. Hitler and his intimate circle watched filmed recordings of the executions in the evenings with a grisly pleasure. Before the summer was over, Carl would swing from those wires in Berlin.

  In Paris, the others ran. The Gestapo was on the hunt for them already. Hans von Linstow would survive on the run for only a matter of days. Caesar von Hofacker made it six days in Paris. Under torture, he would also betray Erwin Rommel. They, too, would end on the wires in Berlin.

  In the weeks that followed, some five thousand people were arrested throughout the Third Reich and nearly two hundred of them were executed as a result of that failed plot, many of them innocent.

  In the days to come in Paris, only Hans Speidel survived the immediate bloodbath. After July 20, the German resisters were fugitives in enemy territory, and if Hans were captured he would pay with his life. He was on the run, hunted by the Gestapo in the capital.

  If those who had helped those conspirators were discovered, they, too, would pay the consequences. Watching over the rue Cambon bar that evening, as nervous Germans glided in and out of the doorway, everyone listening anxiously for boots and doors banging, Frank Meier knew this was so. They had all played a role in the conspiracy, in one small way or another. With Blanche in the hands of a half-crazed Gestapo, Claude was looking especially pinched and haggard. The regular games of backgammon in the bar were subdued, and even the normal steady stream of small bets that Frank took odds on most days were surprisingly tempered. On a day like this, no one much felt like gambling.