by Douglas Boyd
In Paris, although German forces returned fire in self-defence, Von Choltitz refused to order reprisals against the FFI. Swedish consul-general in Paris since 1905, Raoul Nordling had heard that in the retreat from Caen 200 prisoners had been shot because there was no transport to evacuate them, and was concerned for the fate of the 4,213 prisoners held by the Germans in Paris prisons. He arranged a bizarre deal with Von Choltitz, by which all the prisoners were to be released in return for the release of five Germans per head. Von Choltitz knew perfectly well that the FFI had nothing like this many prisoners, but wanted the agreement to look good in Berlin.
A piece of paper was one thing, but Nordling was a man of action, who hurried to Fresnes, Cherche-Midi and Drancy to oversee the release of prisoners there. He arrived at Romainville in the nick of time, for the Russian SS guards were drunk and already planning a massacre before leaving. At Compiègne, he just missed a train of prisoners pulling out east-bound, but was able to have it stopped before the German border. Returning to Von Choltitz on Sunday 20 August after a thunderstorm so violent that many Parisians thought the city was being shelled or bombed, Nordling negotiated a general truce, during which the last Stabshelferinnen ‘grey mice’ were evacuated after selling their bicycles and stores of tinned food in a buyers’ market.
Despite the attempts of Alexandre Parodi to prevent an uprising that would invite wholesale reprisals the truce announced by joint patrols of German soldiers and FFI fighters with loudspeakers was continually broken between 22 and 24 August by communist factions under Rol’s provocative slogan ‘A chacun son Boche!’ (‘Let everyone kill his Kraut!’).
The resultant deaths on both sides were militarily purposeless, the Protestant bodies being laid in state at the Oratory and the Catholic ones at Notre Dame des Victoires. At one point during the truce, Parodi and two other Resistance heads were taken prisoner and conducted to the Hôtel Meurice, where Von Choltitz ordered their release and offered to shake hands as a courtesy between officers and gentlemen. They refused.
Until 23 August, Eisenhower planned to out-flank the Germans in Paris without entering the inner city, because he did not want to be burdened with having to feed the population. It was planned for General Omar Bradley to take the city ‘sometime in September’. Credit for changing this plan and advancing the date to prevent the FFI-Wehrmacht conflict escalating dangerously goes largely to Consul General Nordling, who persuaded Von Choltitz to allow him to take a motley delegation, including an otherwise unidentified Monsieur Armoux, said to be ‘head of British Intelligence in Paris’, through the lines. By sheer force of personality, Nordling managed to get his team to General Patton, who flew them to Bradley, who personally cleared an earlier liberation of the capital with Eisenhower. Nordling now sought de Gaulle’s approval, which was not forthcoming: de Gaulle disliked being confronted with a fait accompli but for political reasons it was decided to let General Jacques Philippe Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division be the first Allied troops to enter Paris.
While most PCF members obeyed party instructions during the Liberation, the renegade Georges Guingouin was one of only twelve later honoured with the title Compagnon de la Libération for disobeying PCF orders to attack the city of Limoges in July because he judged it pointless to ‘liberate’ the city for a few hours and retreat, calling down reprisals on the population, as had happened at Tulle. When his forces on Mount Gargan, totalling about 20,000 men, found themselves in a pitched battle with Von Jesser’s motorised columns, he managed to extricate them from certain annihilation, suffering ninety-two casualties to the enemy’s 340. His caution was vindicated when, instead of the massacres in Tulle, St-Amand and Oradour, the German commander in Limoges surrendered the garrison bloodlessly to him on 21 August.
Proving that disobeying orders was not a French prerogative, a Kriegsmarine Chief Petty Officer from Dortmund single-handedly saved the major port city of Bordeaux from widespread destruction and many deaths. With the Allies driving east from Normandy and northwards up the Rhône Valley from Provence, there was a danger of them joining and cutting off the retreat of German forces in the west of the country. Lieutenant General Nake of 159th Division had orders to demolish the port of Bordeaux and sink every ship there before withdrawing, as well as to blow every bridge over the Garonne, Dordogne and Isle rivers behind his last troops. Feldwebel Heinz Stahlschmidt, who was in charge of the demolition stores, takes the story from there:
I asked a French docker to put me in contact with the Resistance, and met these guys. They knew who I was and offered me 100,000 francs to destroy the demolition fuses stored in a secure magazine. Without the fuses, the charges were useless. I didn’t want the money. I wanted them to promise me a new identity, so that I could go underground and stay in Bordeaux with my girlfriend when the Wehrmacht and Kriegsmarine pulled out. On the night of 22 August I set a charge that blew the magazine sky-high. After that, there was no going back. I didn’t return to Germany until twenty-seven years later, to explain my actions to the family. People there thought I was a traitor, you see.10
However, the charges were still in place, so on 23 August in a typically Bordelais business deal wine exporter Louis Eschenauer, who had sold wine worth 10 million francs to the Germans during the occupation,11 agreed to talk to the German harbour master who, in civilian life, was a Berlin wine importer with whom Eschenauer had done business for years and with whom he lunched each week. His friend Commander Kühnemann agreed that the planned destruction of the port was pointless since Allied use of the Gironde estuary was interdicted by the Royan pocket of resistance. He revealed the contact to his superior, Lieutenant General Nake, who shared this opinion, but was himself ordered to carry out the destruction with what fuses remained. He was then offered a deal by the FFI through Prefect Sabatier and the mayor of Bordeaux: the Resistance agreed not to harass the German withdrawal if the Wehrmacht and Kriegsmarine refrained from any demolition. Nake himself dictated and had printed the following announcement:
Notice to the population
As supreme commander of German forces in the Bordeaux region, I declare that no destruction will take place in greater Bordeaux, and that the harbour and bridges which are mined will not be destroyed, if the population refrains from all acts of sabotage in greater Bordeaux until the withdrawal from Bordeaux of all German forces.
(signed: Nake, Lt Gen)
On Saturday 26 August the notices were displayed throughout the city. On the reverse of the original was handwritten the second stage of the deal agreed by Kühnemann and Maj Rougès, local commander of the FFI:
It is agreed as follows:
All the German occupation forces must have left the city of Bordeaux by 2400 hrs on Sunday 27 August. The city, the port, port installations and bridges must remain intact. American and Allied troops and the Maquis may only occupy the city from 0001 hrs on 28 August 1944.
(signed) Commandant Rougès / Hafenkommandant Kühnemann.
There was little more to it than that, apart from a few uneasy moments on both sides. On 28 August Bordeaux was liberated bloodlessly only a few hours after the departure of Nake’s last troops. With habitual modesty, all Stahlschmidt said after emerging from hiding to marry his French girlfriend was, ‘It was the best thing I ever did’.12
Estimates based on the liberation of Marseille and Grenoble on 23 August suggest that he saved the lives of 3,000 people – German and French. In the evening of the following day, after Patton’s tankers had pulled off the roads to allow three columns of Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division be first to enter Paris, the lead tanks drove into the suburbs, accepting the surrender of German strongpoints, more often delayed by the delirious welcome of civilians than by enemy action.
Vichy, however, was not liberated until 26 August. Six days after Pétain’s forced departure, Xavier Vallat was the last cabinet minister left in the Hôtel du Parc, deserted apart from him and a small detachment of guards on the ground floor. Limping next door to the Majestic for lunch,
Vallat saw French flags being hastily removed from the façade – a measure of prudence sparked by rumours that a German column was heading that way. About 4 p.m., standing on the balcony of his office, Vallat watched demonstrators in the street chanting ‘Vive de Gaulle!’ while a sad little cluster of Pétain’s faithful quietly intoned the anthem ‘Maréchal, nous voilà!’13
NOTES
1. L. Chabrun et al., L’Express, 10 October 2005.
2. Thornton, The Liberation of Paris, p. 146.
3. From the French for ‘tank’, which is char d’assaut.
4. Laval, Unpublished Diary, p. 175.
5. The French title is Huit Clos.
6. Personal communication with the author. Name of informant changed.
7. Personal communication with the author.
8. Letter from police commissioner to his superior in Toulouse dated 7 December 1944, quoted in Boulet, ‘Histoire de Moissac’, p. 155.
9. Police report dated 27 December 1944, quoted in Boulet, p. 155.
10. Interview with the author.
11. Nossiter, France and the Nazis, pp. 52–5, 70.
12. G. Penaud, Histoire Secrète de la Résistance dans le Sud-ouest (Bordeaux: Éditions Sud Ouest, 1993), pp. 245–62.
13. Nossiter, The Algeria Hotel, pp. 217–18.
24
A CARPET OF
WOMEN’S HAIR
Though Wehrmacht communications were almost non-existent in France on the evening of 24 August, fortunately the French telephone system was still working in Paris, enabling Von Choltitz to take a call from the local Luftwaffe commander, who had been ordered to bomb the capital.
‘By daylight, I presume?’ Von Choltitz queried.
‘That’s too dangerous. It’ll be by night.’
‘In that case, you’ll miss the targets.’ Von Choltitz knew the lines were monitored by the Gestapo. ‘I’m not going to have my soldiers killed by German bombs, so I’ll have to withdraw them. Will you accept responsibility for that?’
The answer was a categorical, ‘Nein, Herr General!’
On such a slender thread hung many lives on the final night of the German occupation of Paris. Next morning a Free French army lieutenant entered Von Choltitz’s room and asked if he would order the ceasefire. Relieved that his lonely mutiny was over, the last military governor of Paris replied without quibbling over their difference in rank: ‘Since you are already in my bedroom, it’s a bit late for that.’
Escorted outside, the small party of German officers suffered catcalls from civilians in rue de Rivoli before being ushered into a Red Cross van and driven to the Préfecture de Police. Expecting to be shot, Helmut Rademacher was surprised to find his captors polite and correct. In return, he agreed to accompany a Free French officer in uniform to a number of strongpoints where Wehrmacht personnel were still holding out, since there was no other way to cease their resistance.
There were actually two surrender protocols signed in Leclerc’s temporary HQ, a draughty little office at the Gare Montparnasse. On the first, he insisted that, as senior officer present, his signature covered all French forces. With an eye to history, Rol and Kriegel-Valrimont argued that Rol was commander of all FFI units in Greater Paris and not Leclerc’s subordinate. To avoid the danger of their men refusing to cease fire, Leclerc signed a second copy of the document below Rol’s signature.
Predictably, there were some incidents when unarmed Germans were attacked and killed after surrendering. In the worst, a grenade was thrown into a column of prisoners near the Place de l’Étoile, after which a lone machine gun mowed down several survivors. At 4 p.m. de Gaulle was driven into Paris in an open-topped car and spent the night in the War Ministry, where the office out of which he had walked as Under Secretary for War in May 1940 was as he had left it, right down to the names on his internal phone buttons.
His walkabout next day down the Champs Elysées defied sniper fire from rooftops. The official line was that this was the work of German stay-behinds. In fact, some miliciens reckoned they had nothing to lose by a ‘heroic last stand’, and on 29 August nine of them were lined up and shot without trial in Paris’ Roman amphitheatre by the Hotel Lutetia. However, since the main bursts of firing on the day of the walkabout were co-ordinated at 5 p.m. on the Place de l’Étoile, the Hôtel de Ville and Place de la Concorde,1 it was widely accepted that the snipers were PCF hardliners deterring the population from going into the streets to manifest support for de Gaulle as enthusiastically as they had cheered Pétain sixteen weeks earlier. The ploy succeeded.
At Troyes prison in central France, detainees tapped out on the heating pipes ‘American tanks are in Paris!’ But the SS guards continued like automata calling out the names of men to fill their last remaining truck, driven to the peaceful fields of Creney just outside town, where they were machine-gunned before their killers returned for another insane ‘selection’. Hostage Roger Bruge bade farewell to the men in his cell one by one as they were taken away, leaving him alone. When the footsteps returned and his cell door was thrown open, he braced himself. But this was no guard. In the corridor stood a volunteer firemen and a blonde girl, who hurried him away. In the confusion of people running along the corridors, a distraught man caught up with them and asked for news of his brother.
‘Taken away an hour ago,’ Bruge replied.
‘Hurry,’ said the blonde girl. ‘They may come back.’
The SS returned just after the last prisoner had fled, but forty-nine still-warm bodies lay in the fields at Creney.2
On August 30 ‘Madame Robert’ saw the first US troops arrive in Villiers-Adam. Disappointed that they were not English or French, she hurried to greet them, but the sole fell off one of her worn-out shoes. Hobbling back into the house, she re-emerged to embrace an American officer, who was relieved to find someone who could speak English and he told the villagers through her to take down homemade Allied flags hung at their windows, in case a German unit chanced through, as the front was still very fluid. Sweets for the children and cigarettes for the adults from the soldiers were reciprocated with fruit from the villagers and well water to drink. There had been no piped water for days, nor electricity, so this was the first ‘Madame Robert’ heard about the liberation of Paris on 25 August. The last candles having been used up long since, people went to bed at nightfall as usual.
Life for ‘Madame Robert’ changed, as did her identity, when a British officer walked up the garden path and introduced himself as Victor Rothschild, whom she had known as a child. Freshly arrived as British ambassador in Paris, Duff Cooper had asked him to ‘drop in’ and tell her it was safe to return to the capital. After travelling back in her old clothes and shoes on a train crowded with refugees, life resumed pretty much where it had left off in June 1940 the moment she walked into the de Rothschild mansion on Avenue Marigny and she became the elegant Madame Cahen D’Anvers again. Even those lucky enough to be invited into a de Rothschild residence had to wait until Saturday for a bath, because there was no hot water for anyone on other days. Her greatest joy was the reunion with her daughter Renée and granddaughter Françoise. After a journey of thirty-six hours from Montauban, which included crossing the river at Tours on a temporary footbridge because both road and rail bridges over the Loire had been destroyed, they brought the news that no one in the immediate family had been killed or deported during the occupation, although many other relatives were dead.3
Back in Moissac after nearly two weeks’ confinement in Lauzerte, Marie-Rose Dupont was interrogated violently by FFI men hunting a collabo who had gone to ground. Unable to tell them anything, she emerged with cuts and severe bruising on her legs from blows with the butts of their rifles. On the Sunday – exactly two weeks after the liberation of the town – she and three other female detainees were taken out of the collège and led through the streets to the square in front of St Catherine’s church, where a wooden dais had been erected. Praying that none of her family was there, Marie-Rose stared straight ahead
as she was led through the large crowd waiting to see the fun.
A colleague of hers who ran a barbershop in the town was supposed to shave the women’s heads, but could not bring himself to do this to Marie-Rose, with whom he had been at school. Unable to look her in the face, he handed the clippers to one of the FFI men, who did not know how to handle them. Her public humiliation was thus clumsy and painful as she tried to block out the ugly noise of the crowd’s insults by praying to the Virgin Mary. Keeping her eyes raised to the sky, she avoided looking at the people below, but recalls that one of the girls on the dais was an 18-year-old prostitute from a local maison close. Since, in general, whores were not troubled, presumably this girl’s crime was to have fallen in love with a German client. It is interesting that well-connected Madame Delmas, at whose dîners dansants Marie-Rose had met Willi, was denounced neither then nor later.4
Armed FFI men roughly bundled the women off the platform and onto the back of a flatbed truck with two armed guards. Their shame was then paraded around Moissac for two hours, the klaxon blaring to attract maximum attention. For the same reason, the driver made a long halt outside the hairdressing salon, where a number of Marie-Rose’s clients were watching. None of them showed what they were thinking, but the mild-mannered little music teacher who had taught her in the collège came up to the truck and took both her hands in his. Ignoring the FFI men and the crowd staring at them, he said, ‘Courage! Ça va bientôt se terminer’ (‘Bear up, it’ll soon be over’).
