Liberation of Paris : How Eisenhower, De Gaulle, and Von Choltitz Saved the City of Light (9781501164941)

by Smith, Jean Edward

  Ike and de Gaulle at Eisenhower’s headquarters

  What Laval proposed is a matter of record. He would convene the French National Assembly, which had not met since 1940, and officially welcome the Allies to Paris. Direct military rule would thus be established through local Vichy officials. Allen Dulles, heading OSS efforts in Bern, Switzerland, was in contact with Laval, as was the American embassy in Madrid. How much the White House was involved has never been proven. French historians tend to accept de Gaulle’s version; others are skeptical.40 Ultimately the plot imploded when Laval could find no French notables to support him.

  De Gaulle may be overstating the issue, but it is clear that he believed Laval was planning a coup. He also noted the Resistance activity in Paris and suggested that timely Allied intervention was essential. When Ike said the Resistance had started fighting too soon, de Gaulle met the charge directly. “Why too soon, since at this very moment your forces are on the Seine?”41 The relationship between de Gaulle and Eisenhower was always warm. Ike acknowledged the problem, and assured de Gaulle that while he could not establish an exact date, he would shortly order Leclerc’s division to march on Paris. In his memoirs de Gaulle said he found Washington’s policy “quite depressing,” but was reassured by Eisenhower’s presence.42

  The following day de Gaulle wrote Eisenhower pressing him once more to move on Paris. “The information which I received today from Paris leads me to believe that owing to the nearly complete disappearance of the police force and the German forces from Paris, the present extreme shortage of food that exists, that serious trouble must be foreseen in the Capital within a short time. I believe that it is really necessary to occupy Paris as soon as possible with French and Allied forces, even if it should produce some fighting and some damage within the city.”

  De Gaulle said he was sending General Koenig to confer with Eisenhower “on the question of occupation in case you decide to proceed without delay.”43 De Gaulle understood Eisenhower and anticipated that the supreme commander’s decision to take Paris would be coming shortly.

  I. Roosevelt’s health began to fail badly in early 1944. When he died in April 1945, his medical records, including all clinical notes and test results, were immediately destroyed by Admiral Ross McIntire, his personal physician. Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2007), 602–607.

   IV

  The German Defense

  “The loss of Paris always means the loss of France.”

  —ADOLF HITLER, AUGUST 23, 1944

  The German army in France was in disarray. With a large portion surrounded in the Falaise Pocket, and with General Patton’s troops moving toward the Seine, defeat seemed imminent. To complicate matters further, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, the overall commander, had been ordered back to Berlin to answer questions about the July 20 plot to kill Hitler. Kluge was close to Hitler, but he was also close to the plotters of the assassination attempt, and his possible role was being investigated. The plot to assassinate Hitler was long-standing. Many German generals were involved, and the attempt failed at the last minute when the briefcase with the bomb was moved from where Hitler was sitting and put down on the table. When it exploded, the table saved Hitler. Kluge was relieved of command on August 17, almost a month after the failed coup, and on August 19, while driving back to Germany, he committed suicide by swallowing cyanide near Valmy, France.

  Hitler appointed Field Marshal Walther Model as the new German commander in France. Sometimes known as “Hitler’s fireman,” he was highly respected for his defensive success on the Russian front. For almost three years Model had slowed the Red Army’s advance, and had done a masterful job restoring German battle lines after the Russian Operation Bagration offensive in early 1944. Model was the youngest field marshal in the German army, and a devoted follower of the Führer.

  In Paris the situation was also highly precarious. The overall occupation commander in France, General Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel, who was heavily implicated in the July 20 plot, had been relieved, and after a failed suicide attempt was awaiting trial in Berlin. The Paris occupation commander, General Hans von Boineburg-Lengsfeld, was peripherally implicated in the July 20 plot and was relieved of command on August 3.I To fill the vacancy, Hitler chose General Dietrich von Choltitz, who was then commanding a corps on the Western Front. Von Choltitz was recommended to Hitler by General Wilhelm Burgdorff, the chief of army personnel at Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia, because von Choltitz’s loyalty to Hitler and the Third Reich had never flagged. After the July 20 plot, Hitler needed commanders who were loyal, and both Model and von Choltitz fit the bill. Von Choltitz was also a commander who, in Burgdorff’s words, “never questioned an order no matter how harsh it was.”1 If Paris was to be defended to the end, von Choltitz was the man to do so.

  Because of the importance Hitler attached to defending Paris, he wanted to meet von Choltitz personally. On Hitler’s orders, von Choltitz came by train to the Wolf’s Lair, the Führer’s headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia, on August 6. Von Choltitz’s military record was exemplary. In May 1940, as a lieutenant colonel, he had led the German paratroop attack on Rotterdam. After the bombardment of Rotterdam, during a meeting with the Dutch discussing the terms of surrender, the popular German general Kurt Student was shot in the head. Von Choltitz intervened and prevented the execution of all the Dutch who were present at the meeting. In July 1942 he led the attack on the Russian fortress of Sebastopol and was promoted to general after capturing it. His regiment began its assault with 4,800 men. When it was over, only 349 survived, and von Choltitz had been wounded in the arm. In 1943, he assisted in the German retreat in Russia, faithfully executing all of the orders he was given. That ensured his reputation as a general who never questioned an order.II He was sent to Italy in early 1944, where he commanded an armored corps attempting to smash the Anzio beachhead, and then was given command of the Eighty-Fourth Korps facing the Americans in Normandy.

  Field Marshal Walther Model

  Von Choltitz went to Hitler’s headquarters with confidence. He believed that Germany could still win the war and, as he expressed it in his memoirs, was anxious “to be convinced again by Hitler” that that was the case. He wanted, above all, to leave the meeting “with his spirit raised by Hitler, reassured that there was still a chance to change the course of the war.”2 When he arrived he was met by General Burgdorff. Why, he asked Burgdorff, had he been chosen for the Paris assignment? “Because we know you can do the job that has to be done there,” Burgdorff replied.3

  But the meeting with Hitler turned into a disaster. As soon as he saw the Führer, von Choltitz realized the war was lost. Hitler was not the same man he had met in 1943 at Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s headquarters on the Russian front, where von Choltitz had sat opposite the Führer at a lunch given by Manstein. Von Choltitz was shocked at how Hitler looked. “I saw an old, bent-over, flabby man with thinning grey hair—a trembling, physically demolished human being. I had been told not to press his hand too hard since it had been injured in the plot. When I placed my right hand carefully into his, he gave me a grateful glance, the only one in a horrible hour.”4

  Hitler began the meeting by talking in a quiet tone about his early career, how he founded the Nazi Party and molded it to govern Germany. No nation in the world will be able to defeat a people that has such a party organization, said Hitler. “The more he talked about events of the past, the more his voice rose uncontrollably. Finally, he spoke of the war and recent events.”

  General Dietrich von Choltitz

  He began with Normandy and the invasion and the German soldiers fighting there. I used a pause in his speech to say: “My Führer, I am the commander of the 84th Korps in Normandy and have come to…” He interrupted me immediately, raising his hands and replying, “I am well informed,” and continued with his harangue, saying he had hope that the counteroffensive would be successful and that the enemy would be driven into the sea. Whether
he was trying to convince himself or whether he was saying this in order to keep the people around him fighting was never clear to me. Having just been in Normandy fighting for seven weeks under constant bombardment and lacking the necessary supplies, I knew the desperate face of the German soldier who began to lose his will to fight.5

  Hitler then ranted at the top of his voice about the July 20 plot. As von Choltitz recalled,

  I witnessed the terrible eruption of a hateful mind. He yelled at me saying he was glad to have caught the entire opposition in one stroke and that he would annihilate them. He spoke in a bloodthirsty language with froth literally coming out of his mouth. His entire body trembled. Sweat was running down his face while he spoke excitedly about the hanging of the generals. I saw in front of me someone who had lost his mind. The entire tragedy of my country was made clear to me. The fact that the life of our nation was in the hands of an insane being who could no longer judge the situation or was unwilling to see it realistically depressed me immensely.6

  Hitler after the July 20 plot, 1944

  Finally, Hitler ended his tirade and sank into his chair. After a considerable pause, he turned to the issue that had brought von Choltitz to his headquarters.

  “You are going to Paris,” said the Führer. At the present time, Hitler told him, the garrison in Paris was a disgrace. “The only fighting going on is over seats at the officers’ mess.” Von Choltitz’s job, he said, was to make Paris “a frontline city” and restore “discipline among troops accustomed to easy living.” Hitler said he was making von Choltitz a Befehlshaber, a fortress commander, and that Paris was to be considered a fortress under his command. “You will stamp out without pity any uprising by the civilian population, any act of terrorism, any act of sabotage against the German garrison. For that, Herr General, you will receive from me all the support you need.”7

  The interview was over. That evening, August 7, von Choltitz boarded the train for his return to Berlin. As he acknowledged later, “a heavy gloom” had settled over him. He had come to Rastenburg looking for encouragement. He was leaving shaken and demoralized. He now recognized that Germany would lose the war, and that Hitler was out of control. “I asked myself the difficult question of whether a general, a leader of men, can in his soul and in his conscience take the responsibility of sacrificing his poor soldiers for a cause that has lost all hope.”8 It was clear to von Choltitz as he left East Prussia that both Hitler and his staff had no idea how the war in France was going.

  The train ride back was equally upsetting. Also on the train was Robert Ley, an SS Reichsleiter and head of the Nazi labor movement (DAF). Over a bottle of wine that evening, Ley told von Choltitz of a new law that Hitler had just approved called the Sippenhaft (imprisoned families). Under its terms, a general’s family would be held responsible for his failings. In effect, they would become hostages, the guarantors of a general’s conduct. And according to Ley, the law was very strict. If a general escaped German justice by being taken prisoner, his family could be executed. Von Choltitz was stunned. “For the first time in my life I heard the term ‘Sippenhaft.’ My heart stopped and I was deeply ashamed that our country had fallen into that kind of behavior.” Germany was returning to the Middle Ages, he told Ley.

  “Yes, perhaps,” Ley replied. “These are exceptional times.”9

  According to von Choltitz, Ley’s answers were always “ice cold. He obviously lived in a different world than I did. I parted from him that evening deeply concerned about the fate of our nation and did not sleep that night.”10

  When von Choltitz arrived in Berlin the next morning, he was told that Hitler had promoted him to general der infanterie, the German equivalent of lieutenant general. On his way back to Paris, von Choltitz stopped briefly in Baden-Baden, where his family lived. His wife, Uberta, was the daughter of a general in Kaiser Wilhelm II’s World War I army, and they had two daughters, age ten and eight, and a young son of four months. Von Choltitz himself descended from Prussian military aristocracy, and as a youth had served as a page in the court of the Queen of Saxony. He spent the morning of August 9 with his family—a painful reminder of the Sippenhaft—and then left for Paris by automobile, planning to arrive there before nightfall.

  Von Choltitz was eager to return to Paris because General von Boineburg-Lengsfeld, the outgoing commander, had invited him to dinner that evening. The commander of the Paris occupation lived in an elegant townhouse at 26 Raspail, just across the Seine from the Louvre and the Tuileries. As soon as he saw it, von Choltitz told Boineburg-Lengsfeld that he didn’t need the house. “For the days ahead, I need a headquarters, not a residence,” said von Choltitz.11 And he took rooms at the Hotel Meurice, where German headquarters was located.

  The dinner that evening was an opportunity for von Choltitz to meet the senior officers of the command whom Boineburg-Lengsfeld had invited, and take their measure. The conversation was formal, and von Choltitz gave no indication of his change of heart. After dinner, von Choltitz and Boineburg-Lengsfeld, joined by Boineburg-Lengsfeld’s chief of staff, Colonel Karl von Unger, and his aide, Dankwart von Arnim, had a long conversation over brandy and cigars. With the guests gone, the conversation took on an air of cold realism verging on outright resistance to Hitler’s orders to destroy Paris. Boineburg-Lengsfeld and Unger appealed to von Choltitz to save the city. According to Arnim, “It was clear that Boineburg and Unger were on the best of terms with von Choltitz…. There was clearly an agreement to focus exclusively on military and administrative matters, and that the most important issue at stake was the future of Paris.”12 All three men agreed there was no military value in defending Paris, and that the city should be preserved. Arnim’s notes of the meeting that evening are instructive in that they show that von Choltitz had already decided to save Paris rather than destroy it in battle.

  Hotel Meurice, Rue de Rivoli

  Afterward, von Choltitz was driven back to the Hotel Meurice by Arnim. On the ride, Arnim asked him if he could be transferred to the Lehr Panzer Division in Normandy. Von Choltitz said no. He told Arnim that he had already talked to Boineburg-Lengsfeld about Arnim’s future employment. He said he needed an aide whom he could trust, one who understood the complexities of Paris. He therefore needed Arnim to stay on, and Boineburg-Lengsfeld had agreed. Interestingly, von Choltitz and Arnim were distant relatives. Also, the fact that von Choltitz consulted Boineburg-Lengsfeld—who had been implicated in the July 20 plot—further suggests that von Choltitz did not become convinced to save Paris because of his exposure to the city. He had been determined to save it prior to his arrival. “I cannot implement this insane order,” Arnim quotes von Choltitz as saying.13

  The Sippenhaft was a major obstacle. If von Choltitz made it clear he was going to save Paris, his family in Baden-Baden might be executed. That concern motivated him throughout and helps explain why he would cover his tracks as best he could. And defense of the city was not easy. Hitler had told von Choltitz that he could keep all of the troops presently in Paris and place them under his command. That turned out not to be the case. Field Marshal Hugo Sparrle, chief of the Luftwaffe in France, and General Karl Kitzinger, who had succeeded Stülpnagel as overall occupation commander, had between them some six thousand men in Paris. They were immediately withdrawn.

  That left von Choltitz with between twenty thousand and twenty-five thousand troops. Of those, two divisions, the Forty-Eighth and the 338th Infantry, were stationed across the Seine to guard approaches to the city. The remainder, some fifteen thousand men, remained in Paris. But for the most part they were not combat troops but members of the Paris garrison. Von Choltitz had little artillery and very few tanks. The available artillery were largely anti-aircraft guns manned by seventeen-year-olds who had never seen combat. And there were few experienced battlefield commanders. After quickly reviewing the situation, von Choltitz told General Günther Blumentritt, the operations officer at Kluge’s headquarters, that they were facing a catastrophe of unimaginable dimensi
ons. “No way,” Blumentritt replied. “Don’t speak about it.”14

  According to von Choltitz, original German plans called for suppressing revolt inside Paris but made no provision for defending the city from an Allied onslaught. “According to the original plan I was to have 36 different defensive positions in case there was a revolt inside the city. Was I to move all troops into the center of Paris and occupy major street intersections and the parks? This would not change the military situation…. And so I decided to keep order in the city with a minimum force and prepare for a defense—if you could call it that—outside the city.”15

  On August 10, von Choltitz’s first full day in Paris, he met with the German ambassador to France, Otto Abetz. “We had a calm and leisurely talk,” said von Choltitz. “I informed him of my role in Paris and mentioned the threat we faced. Abetz listened calmly. After a conversation that lasted forty-five minutes, I said to him, ‘Mr. Ambassador, we live here together and must stay in contact.’ He then thanked me for my unvarnished presentation of the situation. I could not tell whether he was surprised or whether he had expected it.”16

  To clarify the command structure, on Sunday, August 13, von Choltitz drove himself to see Field Marshal von Kluge at his headquarters in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Von Choltitz wanted command of all the troops in the area, not just in Paris itself, and he also sought reinforcements. Kluge agreed on both points, but the reinforcements would have to wait. In Kluge’s view, they were not yet required. As for the command structure, Kluge asked von Choltitz when he departed, “Are you now satisfied?”