On August 25th, 1944, Paris was liberated after more than four years of Nazi occupation.
Following a week of guerilla combat between Resistance fighters and the occupying German
troops, General Philippe Leclerc’s Second Armored Division of the Free French Army rolled
through the city on the night of August 24th, supported by the U.S. Fourth Infantry Division.
The following morning, General Dietrich von Choltitz, the German military governor and
commander of the city’s German garrison, formally surrendered to the Allies. After
four years of occupation, humiliation, and the persecution of its most vulnerable citizens,
Paris was free. Eyewitness accounts captured the stunned delirium
and catharsis that pervaded the city. Jean Guéhenno, a resident of Paris, wrote in his
diary: “Friends call me, saying they can see huge
fireworks all over the Hôtel de Ville, with red and blue rockets answering them in the
south and west. It was the signal. The first tanks of Leclerc’s army had just rolled
up to Notre-Dame. And then all the bells of all the churches rang in the night, drowning
out the rumbling of the big guns.” On August 25th, Parisians took to the streets
en masse. “I have never seen in any face such joy as radiated from the faces of the
people of Paris this morning,” wrote Charles Christian Wertenbaker, Time Magazine’s
war correspondent. Six firefighters secretly scaled the Eiffel Tower and hung a homemade
French tricolor flag from its antenna. The American writer Ernest Hemingway, a longtime
Paris resident embedded with the 4th Infantry, made haste to the Ritz Hotel, where he “liberated”
its famous bar and helped himself to several dozen dry martinis.
Charles de Gaulle, leader of Free France and president of the Provisional Government of
the French Republic, gave a speech at the city hall. “Paris! Paris outraged! Paris
broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated!” he proclaimed. “Liberated by itself, liberated
by its people with the help of the French armies, with the support and the help of all
France, of the France that fights, of the only France, of the real France, of the eternal
France!” The following day, de Gaulle led a procession
of French troops down the Champs Elysées. A towering figure at six feet, five inches
tall, de Gaulle made a ripe target for German sharpshooters, yet he refused to duck as snipers
fired on the crowd. Later that day, he displayed similar bravado when shots rang out in the
middle of Notre-Dame Cathedral, midway through the recitation of the Te Deum prayer of
thanks. Today, these are all iconic scenes, but the
liberation of Paris almost didn’t happen in the summer of 1944. For U.S. and British
military officials at the time, Paris was simply not a high priority. They saw the capture
of the French capital as ancillary to the main Allied objective: ending the war in Europe
as quickly as possible by compelling the surrender of Germany, in order to pivot their focus
to the Pacific Theater and the war against Japan.
After landing on the beaches of Normandy on June 6th in Operation Overlord, the Allies’
advance had stalled for several weeks amid the thick hedgerows of the Norman countryside
and dug-in German opposition. Even after their successful breakout from the Normandy beachhead
in early August opened the road to Paris, Generals Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley
considered Paris an unnecessary detour that would slow the Allied advance towards Germany.
They sought to avoid the type of house-to-house urban fighting that had bogged down the Germans
at Stalingrad and were leery of having to feed the city’s nearly two million residents.
For de Gaulle, however, bypassing Paris was unthinkable. While the city’s value as a
military objective was limited, de Gaulle keenly understood its symbolic importance.
Whoever liberated France’s capital would gain a huge advantage in determining France’s
postwar political fate—and de Gaulle was determined that the advantage fall to the
Free French Army, rather than to British or American forces, or another Resistance group.
In the end, events on the ground rendered the debate moot. On August 18th, a general
strike broke out across Paris in reaction to news of the Allied advance. On August 20th,
the first barricades went up throughout the city: a telltale sign of Parisian unrest
dating back to the French Revolution. Resistance units in Paris began to mobilize and clashed
with the occupying German troops. As unenthusiastic as Eisenhower was about
diverting the Allied advance, he was also unwilling to stand by and allow German forces
to crush the uprising. On August 22nd, he authorized the French 2nd Armored Division
to take the city. While Allied command agreed to cede the primary
role in the liberation of Paris to French troops, the composition of those troops was
another matter. The only French unit to take part in Operation Overlord, the 2nd Armored
Division boasted extensive combat experience and an able commanding officer in Leclerc,
a de Gaulle loyalist. For American and British officials, however, its greatest asset was
demographic: the division had a higher proportion of white soldiers than the Free French Army
overall, which was composed largely of soldiers drawn from France’s African colonies.
The racial calculus behind the 2nd Armored Division’s selection for the liberation
of Paris was quite explicit. In January 1944, Eisenhower's Chief of Staff, Major General
Bedell Smith, wrote in a confidential memo: “It is most desirable that the division…
consist of white personnel and this would indicate the 2nd Armored division which, with
only one fourth native personnel, is the only French division operationally available that
could be made 100 percent white.” Contemporary sources fail to explain this
insistence on an all-white French unit. But historians have speculated that U.S. officials
may have been concerned about how the American public would react to newsreel footage of
the liberation of Paris that showed racially integrated troops. The desegregation of the
American armed forces would not occur for another four years.
Even when the 2nd Armored Division rolled into Paris, its ranks were not entirely French.
Many soldiers were actually Spanish Republicans who had joined the French Resistance after
fleeing the fascist regime of Francisco Franco. The Paris that French and American soldiers
found in August 1944 was not the same as it had been before the war. Although spared the
physical devastation that befell other major European capitals like London, Berlin, and Warsaw, the
occupation upended life in Paris. Four years of strict rationing had drastically reduced
Parisians’ food intake, especially those who were too poor to buy additional food on
the black market or who did not have relatives in the countryside who could send supplementary
parcels. Tuberculosis cases climbed, as did the rates of childhood illnesses and malnutrition.
These conditions did not immediately improve after liberation. In March 1945, the average
Parisian was still consuming less than 1,400 calories per day.
And then there were those Parisians who did not live to see liberation at all. At least
40,000 Jews, most of them foreign refugees, were deported east from the Drancy detention
camp on the outskirts of Paris to Auschwitz, where the vast majority perished. Hundreds of French
Resisters were executed, as well as hundreds more civilian “hostages” in retaliation
for acts of sabotage. The Nazis killed more than 1,500 members of the Resistance in the
skirmishes during liberation itself. For some, liberation meant a reckoning. The
German occupation of Paris had benefited from both the tacit consent of everyday French
citizens and the active support of high-ranking French officials and prominent elites like
fashion designer Coco Chanel and author Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
During the frenzied, chaotic first days after liberation, impromptu kangaroo courts sprung
up to deliver the people's justice. Residents exacted retribution on their neighbors, often
in public: women who had slept with German soldiers were humiliated, forced to have their
heads shaved and clothes torn. Hundreds of summary executions were carried out across
the city. In most cases, however, separating out the
heroes and villains of occupation was far more complicated. De Gaulle’s claim that
“all France” had liberated Paris was more patriotic myth than historical fact, an attempt
to manufacture unity and restore national pride. The reality of living in an occupied
city for four years meant that most people did not fall into the easy binary of collaborator
or resister. Even General von Choltitz defies easy categorization.
Military governor of Paris for only three weeks before liberation, Choltitz was a committed
Nazi who had overseen the destruction of the cities of Rotterdam and Sevastopol earlier
in the war. Even so, when Adolf Hitler ordered him to raze Paris rather than let it fall
into Allied hands, Choltitz ignored the command. Choltitz's motivations have been the subject
of debate and speculation for decades. Was he persuaded to spare the city by the entreaties
of its prominent residents? Disillusioned with Hitler and the war? Looking to save his
own reputation and avoid Allied prosecution for war crimes?
In his memoirs, Choltitz maintained that he had defied Hitler out of the love of Paris.
In truth, far more pragmatic concerns likely carried the day. Nevertheless, this idea that
the City of Light was saved by its own beauty, that it enchanted even the man explicitly
charged with destroying it, remains undeniably compelling to all who visit Paris today.
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