by Alex Kershaw
On other major buildings throughout central Paris, bloodred flags with crooked crosses were soon flapping lazily in the summer breezes. In Neuilly, at the American Hospital, from Sumner’s terrace, German troops in field gray were visible in the tree-lined streets. The men’s faces were dirty with dust and sweat. Elsewhere a few Parisians stood, nervous but with no hatred in their eyes as they watched large chestnut horses with bleached tails pull well-used artillery pieces toward the city’s center.
Along the Avenue Foch, as in most of Paris, there was still a heavy silence. Most homes were shuttered. It seemed no one had stayed to see the Germans arrive. That afternoon a depressing drizzle fell on the iron fences and lamps that were a feature of the widest avenue in Paris, 120 meters wide and 1,300 long, flanked by sidewalks and riding paths that led to the Bois de Boulogne at the western end, shaded by rows of towering chestnut trees.
At the Ritz, senior German officers, in spotless gray uniforms covered in gold braid, were finishing their dessert of fresh fruit. Meanwhile, less than a mile away, in the study of his home at 18, Rue Weber, sixty-five-year-old Dr. Thierry de Martel, Sumner Jackson’s close friend, sat on a couch. The previous day de Martel had written to William Bullitt, the American ambassador: “I made you the promise that I wouldn’t leave Paris. I didn’t say whether I would stay in Paris alive or dead.” He had lost his only son in the First World War in the great bloodletting that had prevented the Germans from destroying France. Now the Nazis, the Jew-haters, the philistines, the heralds of a new dark age, were almost at his door, their tanks’ tracks clanking on the cobbles of the Champs-Élysées. So de Martel pulled out a syringe, placed a needle in his arm, and pushed the plunger, injecting strychnine. Even a small dose would have acted almost immediately. The strychnine sent his body into seizures, then violent convulsions, before he became unconscious.
At the American Hospital in Neuilly, Sumner learned that an important colleague, Dr. Edmund Gros, had suffered a stroke. If he kept losing staff at this rate, the hospital would not be able to function. Around this time, one of Sumner’s fellow doctors found that “a stillness like the quiet of a human being who has stopped breathing permeated the grounds” of the American Hospital. The doctor went into the reception room. “The cork-tiled floor deadened [my] footsteps as always; but for once the silence was disquieting.”
The doctor came across a colleague. “What’s wrong here?” he asked. “Everything looks dead.”
“Everything is dead,” replied his colleague. “I’m going home to America. I advise you to get out too.”
—
THE SOLDIERS that Helmut Knochen passed early that morning, the vanguard of the mighty Wehrmacht, had been hunched down in their heavy gray field coats, weary and wet from the rain. By contrast, his face was not deeply bronzed. He had not been fighting for over a month to take Paris. Nor were he or his entourage in combat uniform. They were in fact in disguise, wearing the uniforms of military police, the Feldgendarmerie, their epaulettes trimmed with orange, small bull’s-eyes on their caps, as they entered the outskirts of Paris.
Thirty-year-old SS-Standartenführer Helmut Knochen, the man with the pale face, recognized many of the landmarks as his car headed to the heart of the city, sites he had grown to adore on his last visit in 1937 to attend the World’s Fair: the golden dome of Les Invalides; the Place de la Concorde, where that morning two Storch light planes had deposited senior German officers; the Tuileries Garden; the Palais du Louvre. This highly effective agent had auburn hair and a rather weak chin, and stood around five feet ten inches tall. A source for British intelligence had described him more generously as having a wide, somewhat feminine mouth that had a slight twist to the left that made him always look sardonic.
Knochen was certainly no foot soldier. He had been in an office, working heroic hours, planning the greatest moment of his already distinguished career: the occupation of Paris, his beloved Paris. He must have been utterly elated, energized, for he and his men had long prepared for this day. He himself had studied the French political situation and closely followed events in Paris, known within his department by the code word “Region V,” since 1935. It was a glorious moment for any Francophile German—to enter the fabled city as its conqueror, as part of its new master race, as momentous a day as when he had been decorated with the Iron Cross by Hitler himself at a special ceremony the previous November in the vast Reich Chancellery in Berlin. The Führer’s extraordinary magnetism had of course totally seduced him, just as it had captivated so many millions of Germans. Paris was Knochen’s reward for excellent work: he had played a critical key role in the greatest German intelligence coup of the war so far, the kidnapping of two British spies in November 1939 in Holland, which would be known in espionage folklore as the Venlo Incident.
Knochen’s fleet of fast cars sped through the empty streets, dull and gray beneath heavy clouds, seemingly in grief. The unmarked cars pulled up on the corner of the Rue Saint-Honoré before the Hôtel du Louvre, one of the grand dames of Paris hotels. Two dozen or so Germans stepped out of the cars and made their way into the lobby, among the finest in the city. The front desk was a few yards from two huge Doric columns of black marble.
The Germans’ watches were set to Berlin time; all of France would now live by it. Their mission was to make sure of that and much more, for they were not soldiers but men of the Geheime Staatspolizei, the Secret State Police, otherwise known as the Gestapo. They were, notably, under the administrative control of the SS, the so-called Schutzstaffel, which would ultimately be responsible for most of Nazi Germany’s crimes against humanity. Ardent anti-Semites, among the more intelligent and cultured of the Nazis’ secret policemen, their remit was wide indeed. They were to investigate cases of espionage, sabotage, and treason, and all criminal attacks on the Nazi Party and Germany. In 1936 they had been given carte blanche to operate without legal oversight, meaning they were effectively above the law, unlike the military. As SS-Obergruppenführer Werner Best, one of Knochen’s colleagues and a former head of legal affairs in the Gestapo, had explained: “As long as the [Gestapo] carries out the will of the leadership, it is acting legally.”
Knochen stepped forward and then entered the hotel. Mr. Bones—that was what his name meant in German. He was from bourgeois origins, not the gutter, a polished performer with a first-rate intellect. His father, Karl, had been a strict schoolmaster and just as tough a disciplinarian when it came to his own son. As soon as possible he had enrolled Helmut, at age sixteen, in the Stahlhelm, a violent paramilitary organization. Helmut had excelled academically and attended the universities of Leipzig, Göttingen and Halle, where he had gained a doctorate in medieval English literature. But instead of becoming an academic he had joined the Nazi party’s official press agency in 1936, working as an editor, and while covering the Berlin Olympics he had met a former professor who soon recognized his fine analytical mind and recruited him to the Gestapo. His first job had been to monitor the German press, on the lookout for articles written by possible subversives.
It was a heady evening in the City of Light. In some restaurants the Germans, sick of army rations, sat down at tables and, grinning from ear to ear, ordered two-pound steaks and dozen-egg omelettes. At the headquarters for General Gerd von Rundstedt’s forces in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, about twelve miles from the city, brisk orderlies placed a large map of Paris on a wall and then studded it with pins. Blue pins indicated the best restaurants. The red ones were for the best brothels. There would be nothing but the finest for the victorious Übermenschen.
Like his idol, Adolf Hitler, Knochen had a great deal to celebrate. But he and his men did not venture into the grand hotels nearby, the Meurice, the Crillon, the Majestic, and the Ritz, already occupied by the German army’s top generals. The head of the Reich Main Security Office, Reinhard Heydrich, Knochen’s mentor and boss, had ordered him to keep a low profile. Many of the Prussian aristocrats in the top ranks of the Wehrmacht despis
ed the “black men” of the SS, who personified everything they loathed and feared about Nazism. They had fought hard to make sure the Gestapo would have no supremacy in Paris, unlike in other conquered cities in Nazi Europe where mass arrests and executions had rapidly turned civilian populations against their new rulers.
The best brothels were already open for business. A few minutes’ walk from the Hôtel du Louvre was the legendary Chabanais, a whorehouse much frequented by European nobility. And a few more minutes farther west on foot was number 122 Rue de Provence, the address of what would become the most celebrated of Paris’s many wartime brothels, the One Two Two. It was unlikely that Knochen visited either, unlike so many of his compatriots, that first night in Paris. He had to be up early the next morning, ready to raid the prefectural offices for records containing the names of German émigrés and other potential enemies of the Reich. Indeed, there were urgent tasks, work that would within just a few days earn him, according to an Allied intelligence report, the goodwill of General Alfred Streccius, chief of the German military administration in France. He could truly indulge later. In any case, he was interested in a more refined breed of mademoiselle: the aristocratic and sensual elite, the women of Parisian high society, Le Tout-Paris, who were drawn to men of power like moths to a flame, whether or not they were dressed in an SS uniform.
Knochen had a burning ambition. One day France would be an SS state, totally controlled by the “black bastards” of Hitler’s elite security force, and Knochen would be running affairs. While his powers were limited for now—he could not yet even make arrests—Knochen was confident that eventually, if he was as cunning as he was patient, he would be able to do what he wanted: ruthlessly destroy all opposition to German rule in France.
—
THAT EVENING, as the light began to fade, German vehicles fitted with loudspeakers trundled along the Avenue Foch and the other grand avenues leading from the Place de l’Étoile, then fanned out across Paris, passing through suburbs like Neuilly.
“Parisians!” they announced. “German troops will be passing through Paris for the next forty-eight hours. Stock what provisions you need, then go home and stay there. No demonstrations will be allowed.”
It had been perhaps the saddest day of Sumner’s life. That night he was bereft and full of grief: his close friend and colleague was dead. At some point that day, Dr. Thierry Martel had been admitted to the American Hospital. He had been found in his apartment lying next to an open book, Victor Hugo’s play Hernani. Among the last words he had read were: “Since one must be tall to die, I arise.” According to one of his colleagues, Martel died after three hours without even opening his eyes. He had made certain he would be “dead on the day the Germans entered Paris.” Sumner and his colleagues had done everything they could to save him.
That night the lights did not go on in Paris. The unthinkable had happened. The Nazis had taken over without a shot being fired. No one had imagined they would so quickly and easily become the new masters of the most beautiful capital in Europe. There was a strict curfew at 11:00 p.m. Seen in the distance from Sumner’s terrace, the Eiffel Tower no longer glittered. From its peak flew a huge swastika. The stunned city spread out below lay hushed in a darkness it had never known.
FOUR
DAY TRIPPERS
ALL OVER CONQUERED Europe that dark summer of 1940, countless people tuned in to the BBC. Sumner Jackson listened to the British broadcaster regularly now that it was the only news source that he could trust. He would have heard the news reports with the volume turned low, the radio set placed far from a door or window so a potential informer did not hear. One could never be too cautious, and in the first days of the occupation those, like Sumner, who despised the Nazis were understandably somewhat paranoid. Indeed, he had good reason to be careful. The Germans had set up their headquarters in Neuilly, their Kommandantur, right opposite the American Hospital’s main entrance gate. Sumner was no doubt relieved that, thankfully, at least for the time being, they had not demanded to take over the hospital.
In several BBC broadcasts that June, fifty-year-old general Charles de Gaulle implored patriotic Frenchmen to join him in London and continue to fight the Germans.
“Is the last word said?” asked de Gaulle. “Has all hope gone?”
The war was yet to be won even if France had been occupied.
“The cause of France is not lost,” declared de Gaulle. “The very factors that brought about our defeat may one day lead us to victory. For, remember this, France does not stand alone. She is not isolated. Behind her is a vast empire, and she can make common cause with the British empire, which commands the seas and is continuing the struggle. Like England, she can draw unreservedly on the immense industrial resources of the United States.”
Finally, de Gaulle exhorted his fellow citizens to never give up, assuring them: “Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not and shall not die.”
The first call to the French to resist Nazism had been made.
Like de Gaulle, Sumner was determined to fight back in some way.
—
ON JUNE 22, 1940, Knochen and his fellow Gestapo members were issued telephone directories of the military administration. The numbers were mostly for the city’s swankiest hotels: the Lutetia, the Majestic, the Meurice. Knochen had spent a week in the capital making sure he and his men stayed away from the places where the Prussian generals of the high command and their effete aides could be found quaffing the best vintages. The non-Nazi elites had no idea as of yet that the “black men” of the SS, the Gestapo, were even in the city.
Armed with his new telephone directory, Knochen could quickly contact anyone who mattered in Paris. That night of June 22, he faced his first major task of the occupation: helping arrange security for Hitler. The Führer would arrive the very next morning.
It was just after dawn when Hitler’s Storch rumbled along the runway at Le Bourget airfield. A giant cloud of oil fumes that had hovered over Paris since June 1 had miraculously disappeared, just in time for the Führer’s visit. Five large Mercedes sedans with their leather roofs rolled back were soon cruising along empty boulevards, their occupants dressed in smart uniforms, heads bobbing in unison whenever they went over cobblestones.
At 6:35 a.m., Hitler’s convoy circled the Arc de Triomphe twice and then set off down Avenue Foch, the wealthiest street in all of vanquished Europe. The fifty-one-year-old Führer was soon passing the street lamps and elegant black iron railings designed by Gabriel Davioud that fronted the Jacksons’ ground floor home at number 11 and other buildings along the avenue. To Hitler’s right, on the north side of the avenue, which was totally deserted, stood a white memorial to Jean-Charles Alphand, the chief engineer responsible for the avenue’s construction during the reign of Napoleon III. Alphand purposely made the promenade extra-wide so that wealthy Parisians in their open-top coaches could pass directly from the center of the city to the Bois de Boulogne. Named Avenue Foch in 1929, many of the elder residents still called it by its popular name during La Belle Époque: Avenue Bois.
Hitler was not impressed by the neat gardens with exotic flowers, the riding paths, the crisscrossing alleys, and the honey-colored mansions. Perhaps it was simply the avenue’s name that displeased him. It was Marshal Foch, no less, who had taken the German surrender in 1918. In the eyes of rabid German nationalists, Foch was the anti-Christ. It was also Foch who had urged that extremely severe peace terms be imposed so Germany could never threaten France again. When Germany was not dismembered, Foch had been furious. “This is not a peace,” he had warned. “It is an armistice for twenty years.” He had been wrong by just 68 days.
Whether it was the buildings or the name, Avenue Foch held no appeal for Hitler. He was blind to its magnificence. For the first time, he seemed to lose interest in his surroundings. The motorcade made a sharp left midway along the avenue and headed south, toward the Seine. By 9:00 a.m. the tour was over. Hitler would never return. “It
was the dream of my life to be permitted to see Paris,” he told his favorite architect, Albert Speer, who had accompanied him around the city. “I cannot say how happy I am to have that dream fulfilled today.”
That evening Speer met with Hitler in a room in a village in northern France. Hitler was seated alone at a small table.
“Wasn’t Paris beautiful?” he mused. “But Berlin must be made far more beautiful. In the past I often considered whether we would not have to destroy Paris. But when we are finished in Berlin, Paris will only be a shadow. So why should we destroy it?”
Hitler was lying. When the time came, he would destroy anything that suited his sadism. But Paris would be looted first—carefully—and the best of its portable wonders brought to him. In Mein Kampf, his autobiographical manifesto published in 1925, Hitler had clearly stated his true views about France. It was a great rival, its capital full of Bolshevik Jews, its people the “mortal enemy” of Germany. In his masterpiece of fascist and racist cant, one theme dominated: his hatred for the Jews. Once Helmut Knochen and his colleagues—Hitler’s most loyal servants—had purged the city of these and other degenerates, Paris would enjoy a true golden age—a National Socialist “Belle Époque.”
FIVE
SPIES OF SUMMER
THE GIRL’S DRESS was torn and soiled. She had not washed for several days. She looked haunted. Her face was etched with permanent disillusion. A tall American in a small car would never forget her expression as he passed her on a road leading to Paris. In his eyes she symbolized defeated France. She had seen the complete “moral breakdown and degradation of her own people,” recalled the American diplomat George F. Kennan. “She saw them fight with each other and stumble over each other in their blind stampede to get away and to save their possessions….She saw her own people pillaging and looting in a veritable orgy of dissolution as they fled before the enemy…”
