Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation

by Charles Glass

  Clara did not know that, in a school a few streets away, veteran and newly recruited résistants with captured German weapons were planning to attack the Palais du Luxembourg. Their leader, 25-year-old Pierre Fabien, was one of those whose actions, in his case assassinating a German naval cadet at the Barbès Metro station in 1941, had been strongly condemned by Clara. Their assault would give the SS a pretext to blast the explosives under the building. With the clash looming, most of the rue de Vaugirard’s residents evacuated. Clara would not budge. From her balcony vantage, she kept a detached lookout on résistants and German soldiers below. The whole neighbourhood might be destroyed at any moment. But Clara’s only fear was for Aldebert, who rang to tell her that a battle was raging in Neuilly at the gates of the American Hospital.

  While Clara was apprehensive about the stand-off below her window, Sylvia Beach was thrilled to learn that résistants were liberating one Parisian quarter after another. She received an unexpected visit from the painter Paul-Emile Becat, husband of Adrienne’s sister Rinette: ‘He came on his bicycle, which was ornamented with a little French flag.’ Becat arrived in time to see the Germans destroy the old Hôtel Corneille near Sylvia’s flat. ‘The Germans had used it as offices,’ Sylvia wrote, ‘and, when they left, they destroyed it, with all their papers.’ Sylvia had been fond of the Corneille, because James Joyce had lived there, ‘and, before Joyce, Yeats and Synge’. Becat said he had come to offer congratulations on the liberation of Paris. Seeing the hotel on fire and the skirmishing near the Luxembourg Gardens, he realized his congratulations would have to wait. He left, carrying his bicycle, through a maze of cellars under the houses.

  When General Aldebert de Chambrun called Clara at two o’clock, he was in his office at the American Hospital. The Resistance, which had lost its first battle at Neuilly Town Hall on 19 August, had returned to destroy or capture the German Kommandatur a few hundred yards from the hospital. Aldebert described the scene to Clara, ‘Cannon is roaring. Leclerc or the Americans can’t be very far away, but the trouble is the Germans have organized a veritable fortified camp and have posted big guns in all the avenues leading towards us. They seem to possess quantities of machine guns and wherever you look you can see boche soldiers. It would be pretty sad if they eliminated the hospital.’ Aldebert explained later, ‘The hospital found itself in the middle of the skirmish line and was equally endangered on both sides. After repeated colloquy with the German commander he became convinced that further resistance would only entail much bloodshed and the destruction of the hospital.’ Colonel Bernhuber needed the hospital for German wounded, and fighting while the Germans were about to surrender Paris had become senseless to him. At nine o’clock in the morning, he went into the Memorial Building of the hospital and found General de Chambrun. Without preamble, he announced, ‘I am, General, an officer of the German Army, but I am neither a Nazi nor even a German. I am an Austrian, and, since this war is nearly lost, I am ready to capitulate. But the soldier that you are will understand, I am sure, that I refuse to deliver my men and myself to a gang of snipers. I ask to meet a French officer or an American officer to offer my surrender. ’ (Clara recalled her husband telling her, ‘I asked why he did not surrender. “What? To this mob … I still have strong enough means of defense not to capitulate to such a rabble.”’) General de Chambrun promised to contact the American or French command, but he had no direct means of communication with either. He would have to go out and find them somewhere beyond the city limits of Paris. Colonel Bernhuber provided him with a laissez-passer to help him through the German checkpoints.

  General de Chambrun left the hospital. His route took him past the battle in the avenue Victor Hugo towards the southwest, where the Allies were rumoured to be advancing. After crossing the German lines with Bernhuber’s laissez-passer, Aldebert found an American advance unit about twenty-five miles from Neuilly. The American colonel in charge contacted his commanding officer to ask who could accept Colonel Bernhuber’s surrender. After a short telephone call, he turned to General de Chambrun and said, ‘The French have to receive the surrender, because a French division–Leclerc’s, I believe–is going to be the first to enter the capital.’ The task now was to find Leclerc. If Aldebert did not contact him soon, the hospital would be destroyed.

  General de Chambrun had dealt at the hospital with a man he knew only as ‘Monsieur Jean’, a chief in de Gaulle’s underground Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI). At three o’clock, when Aldebert returned to the hospital, he got in touch with Monsieur Jean and asked him to find Leclerc. Then, he called Clara. The battle outside had not abated. ‘More wounded have been brought in,’ he told her, ‘and the cannon sounds much nearer.’ Hearing the explosions down the line, Clara commented, ‘I did not need the telephone to tell me that.’ Soon, Monsieur Jean called General de Chambrun to relay a message from Leclerc’s Second Armoured Division headquarters. Aldebert was to inform Colonel Bernhuber that Leclerc would send one or two tanks in the morning to the traffic roundabout where the boulevard Inkermann crossed the avenue Victor Hugo, a few hundred yards from the hospital. A German officer should ‘carry a white flag to confirm the surrender without conditions by Colonel Bernhuber and the troops under his command’.

  Bernhuber accepted the terms, but no one had the power to stop the fighting until he surrendered in the morning. In the hospital, doctors operated all night on the battle’s most severely wounded victims and prayed they could hold out until the shooting stopped.

  While battle raged outside the hospital, Clara saw a few tanks of General Jacques Leclerc’s French Second Armoured Division rolling past the rue de Vaugirard on their way to the Hôtel de Ville. Clara had known Leclerc by his real name, Philippe de Hautecloque, and as the cousin of her old friend Henry de Castries. However much Clara disliked Leclerc’s commander de Gaulle, she was relieved to see the arrival of his regular force under a professional, Saint-Cyr-trained soldier, who also happened to be, like her husband, an aristocrat. Leclerc, she believed, could control the résistants who remained, to her, so much riff-raff.

  A small vanguard of Leclerc’s tanks reached the square of the Hotel de Ville during the night, and ecstatic crowds assumed Paris had been liberated. Although the Germans still controlled 85 per cent of the city, résistants who captured the radio station broadcast an appeal to the churches to ring their bells to proclaim the liberation. The Left Bank churches responded immediately. Then, at twenty-two minutes past eleven, 13-ton ‘Emmanuel’, the largest of Notre Dame’s bells, rang out in F-sharp so loud it could be heard at least five miles away–for the first time since Robert Murphy heard the bells at midnight on 14 June 1940. Nearby, in the Hôtel Meurice, Paris commander General von Choltitz was speaking to Berlin. Holding the phone to the window, he told General Alfred Jodl, who had been ordering him again to destroy Paris, ‘What you hear is announcing that Paris is going to be liberated and Germany without doubt has lost the war.’ Outside, Parisians sang La Marseillaise. Celebration by the ‘Resistance of the Eleventh Hour’, as the real résistants derisively called the majority who declared their opposition to the Germans only that night when the bells pealed, was premature. The bulk of Leclerc’s Second Armoured Division had yet to arrive, and the Americans, who had the only force strong enough to defeat the Germans in battle, were massing for an assault in the morning.

  The sound of the bells reached all the way to Neuilly. As Otto Gresser recalled, he, Aldebert de Chambrun, Elisabeth Comte, the other nurses and doctors ‘went to the roof of the hospital, we heard all the Paris bells ringing in the churches to celebrate the victory, while we were still surrounded by German troops with guns and tanks’. This was the roof where, for four years, Dr Sumner Jackson had gone to look at the night sky and enjoy a cigar. A year earlier on the same spot, he and his son Phillip had watched American and German warplanes duelling for control of the Paris skies. All that General de Chambrun knew for certain was that Jackson, his wife and his son had been missing since 24
May. There were many rumours: they had been arrested by the Gestapo, detained by the Milice, interned as Americans, tortured as résistants, deported, lost, killed. General de Chambrun had approached the Red Cross, which usually had access to internees and prisoners of war. The American Legation in Berne was informed, and the Swiss Consulate asked the Germans for information. Aldebert appealed to his friends in the Vichy government, but Laval’s arrest and departure on 17 August had closed that avenue. On 19 August, even General Karl Oberg, whose secret police knew where the Jacksons were, had fled Paris. The one member of the hospital’s staff who had done more than any other to hasten the liberation was not on the roof to witness it.

  On schedule, a command car and a tank from Leclerc’s Second Armoured Division appeared near the American Hospital at nine thirty on the morning of 25 August. Austrian Colonel Bernhuber, carrying a white flag of surrender, walked cautiously to the boulevard Inkermann–avenue Victor Hugo roundabout. A French officer accepted his capitulation, and Bernhuber ordered his men, ‘Stack arms.’ The battle of Neuilly, however, was not quite over.

  The ‘fanatic’ Major Goetz and his men refused to abandon their Stützpunkt without direct orders from General von Choltitz. The French tank fired on their bunker, setting their trucks ablaze. Before Goetz and his men were burned alive, they laid down their arms and surrendered. The American Hospital of Paris was saved.

  Supplies for the hospital had run short. To find food for more than five hundred staff and patients, Otto Gresser drove out in a hospital car into almost-liberated Paris. He recalled that ‘we met within three hours German, French, American and British troops and again German troops when returning to the hospital’. Gresser, whose resourcefulness had kept the hospital well victualled for four years and was revered in the food markets of Les Halles as the buyer ‘Ferdinand’, brought back enough for the hospital’s personnel to survive until the American army brought fresh provisions. In the meantime, Gresser managed to save the rifles, thirty grenades and 2,000 rounds of ammunition that he had taken from the German patients in the hospital. When more units of Leclerc’s Second Armoured Division arrived, he proudly donated them to the French army. General de Chambrun was not as fortunate with the weapons and military vehicles of Colonel Bernhuber’s unit: they were pillaged by the Resistance.

  Secretary of State Cordell Hull sent an urgent telegram to the American Minister in Switzerland, Leland Harrison, on 25 August. ‘Telegraph exact location Moulin [sic] and request Swiss to report urgently latest known whereabouts of Jackson family.’ The Americans were out of date, Sumner and Phillip Jackson having been sent from Moulins to Neuengamme concentration camp a month earlier. The State Department put together what information on Sumner, Phillip and Toquette that it could from a variety of sources. Minister Harrison informed Cordell Hull on 28 August that all three Jacksons might have been moved to Germany ‘as hostages’. Hull fired back instructions that the Swiss insist, on America’s behalf, that the Germans reveal their whereabouts. The Germans did not respond.

  PART SEVEN

  24–26 August 1944

  FIFTY

  Liberating the Rooftops

  ‘IT WAS SATURDAY THE 26TH, the day of the assassination attempt on General de Gaulle,’ Adrienne Monnier, who spent that morning with her sister, Rinette, and Sylvia Beach, remembered. ‘We had left the house with the intention of going to Notre-Dame, but the gunfire caught us in the Boulevard du Palais and obliged us to turn around and go back the way we came.’ That morning, Charles de Gaulle had relit the flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe which had been extinguished in June 1940 and marched with Leclerc’s Second Armoured Division to symbolize the resumption of French sovereignty. He went to a traditional Te Deum of thanksgiving at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, where he attracted a crowd similar to the one that had welcomed Maréchal Pétain only four months earlier. As he walked towards the cathedral’s open Door of the Final Judgement, gunmen started shooting. The general stood erect, while most of those around him hit the ground. Firing continued inside the church, where the congregation dived under chairs. De Gaulle strode in and took his seat.

  The wild shooting, whose source was never determined, stopped Adrienne, Rinette and Sylvia from reaching the cathedral. ‘The way back,’ Adrienne remembered, ‘was punctuated by splendid bursts of fire from the rooftops.’ When they reached Adrienne’s flat, it was impossible for them to tell from her window which snipers were German and which résistants. The three women waited indoors for the shooting to stop. Suddenly, in the afternoon, they heard a voice in the street calling, ‘Sylvia! Sylvia!’ It was Maurice Saillet, the young writer who worked downstairs in Adrienne’s bookshop. Cupping his hands around his mouth, he bellowed, ‘Sylvia! Hemingway is here!’

  Sylvia ran down the stairs and rushed outside. For Sylvia and Adrienne, the most glorious moment of the war had arrived. Sylvia wrote, ‘I flew downstairs; we met with a crash; he picked me up and swung me around and kissed me while people on the street and in the windows cheered.’ Adrienne watched the scene from above: ‘Sylvia ran down the stairs four at a time and my sister and I saw little Sylvia down below, leaping into and lifted up by two Michelangelesque arms, her legs beating the air. I went downstairs myself. Ah, yes, it was Hemingway, more a giant than ever, bareheaded, in shirtsleeves, a cave-man with a shrewd and studious look behind his placid eyeglasses.’

  With Hemingway were four jeeps and sixteen irregular fighters, French and American, whom he called the ‘Hem Division’. Hemingway had returned to France after the first waves of the Allied invasion as a correspondent for Collier’s magazine. On the way from Brittany to Paris, he collected a small Resistance band that did some fighting. ‘War correspondents are forbidden to command troops,’ he admitted, ‘and I had simply conducted these guerrilla fighters to the infantry command post in order that they might give information.’ His ragbag comrades took part in the liberation of Rambouillet, but the real prize for him was the city where he became a writer, the Paris of his Moveable Feast. The day before reaching the rue de l’Odéon, he stared at Paris in the distance and reflected, ‘I couldn’t say anything more then because I had a funny choke in my throat and I had to clean my glasses because there now, below us, gray and always beautiful, was the city I love best in all the world.’

  Up and down the rue de l’Odéon, the eccentric and unshaved Franco-American warriors attracted admiring attention. Hemingway introduced Sylvia and Adrienne to his bodyguard, a French maquisard named Marceau. ‘For the moment, hardly in a hurry to put down their arms, they had come to purge the Rue de l’Odéon of its snipers on the roofs,’ Adrienne wrote. ‘They had already climbed to the top of several suspect houses, which the onlookers vied with one another to point out to them; but really they had not yet found anything.’ Adrienne approached Hemingway’s freedom fighters and ‘invited them to come and drink the wine I had kept for them, like every good, self-respecting French person’. They declined, saying that other Parisians had given them too much to drink already. Hemingway, Marceau and a young American went with Sylvia and Adrienne up to the flat. The rest of the ‘Hem Division’ kept watch outside.

  ‘We went up to Adrienne’s apartment and sat Hemingway down,’ Sylvia wrote. ‘He was in battledress, grimy and bloody.’ She noticed ‘his clanking machine guns’, undoubtedly the first ever in the apartment. Hemingway, as playful as the hungry young writer he had been at Shakespeare and Company twenty years earlier, teased Adrienne. Adrienne recalled the exchange,Hadn’t I, Adrienne, during those years of the Occupation, been brought to the point of collaborating a little? In which case he offered to draw me out of all possible danger. (Obviously, he must have thought, that fat gourmande couldn’t endure the rationing; she must have weakened.) I seriously examined my conscience. No, I swear I had not ‘collaborated.’ He drew Sylvia off to a corner and repeated the question to her: ‘Are you sure, Sylvia, that Adrienne did not collaborate and that she does not need a little help?’–‘N
ot at all,’ Sylvia answered. ‘If she collaborated, it was with us, the Americans.’ Hemingway seemed to show some regret at not being able to be the knight errant–a slight regret that flickered across his good face as it became serene again.

  Sylvia and Adrienne offered to give Hemingway anything he needed. ‘He asked Adrienne for a piece of soap, and she gave him her last cake,’ Sylvia remembered. Adrienne confessed, ‘I gave him, without hesitating too much, my last piece. (Let’s be frank, it was the next to the last.)’ Hemingway took the much-needed soap and asked what he could do for them. ‘Liberate us. Liberate us,’ they said. Sylvia wrote that ‘the enemy was still firing from the roof. And the Resistance was firing also from the roofs, and this shooting was going on all the time, day and night. And especially on Adrienne Monnier’s roof.’ Hemingway called his comrades from the street. ‘He brought his men up, and they all went up on the roof. And we heard a great deal of shooting going on for a few minutes. Then the shooting stopped forever.’

  When Hemingway brought his men back to the flat, Sylvia and Adrienne invited them to stay for a drink. ‘Oh, no,’ the author of For Whom the Bell Tolls said. ‘I have to liberate the cellar of the Ritz.’ The Hem Division trundled downstairs, jumped into their jeeps and roared out of the rue de l’Odéon. Having liberated Odéonia, they intended to do the same for the finest wines that the Ritz’s Swiss manager had kept from the Germans. Sylvia stayed with Adrienne in the rue de l’Odéon and waited for her other American ‘bunnies’ to come back to Paris.