About 16, German soldiers and 80 tanks were in the city under the command of General Dietrich von Choltitz, who was holed up at the central Hotel Meurice. The Swedish consul general, Raoul Nordling, managed to convince von Choltitz to accept a minute ceasefire on August 19 and again the following day. From August 22 barricades started going up, made out of burned-out vehicles, manhole covers and even Paris' infamous street urinals.
Others would have just collapsed, but the Germans didn't know which was which," he recalled. The Resistance gradually extended control over whole neighbourhoods and took city hall, confining the disorganised Germans to certain areas. An AFP reporter saw the notorious Gestapo secret police "hastily burn files, which became small smoking piles on the pavement".
Eisenhower, was persuaded that French troops needed to go to Paris. The first French armoured tanks penetrated the city on the evening of August 24, reaching city hall around pm. They are here! Although spared the physical devastation that befell other major European capitals like London, Berlin, and Warsaw, the occupation upended life in Paris. Tuberculosis cases climbed, as did the rates of childhood illnesses and malnutrition.
These conditions did not immediately improve after liberation. In March , the average Parisian was still consuming less than 1, calories per day. And then there were those Parisians who did not live to see liberation. At least 40, 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.
The Nazis killed more than 1, members of the Resistance in the skirmishes during liberation itself. Parisian Jews being rounded up for transport from the Drancy detention camp, August For some, liberation meant a reckoning. 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. French women accused of having slept with Germans are paraded through the streets of Paris with their heads shaved and swastikas painted on their faces, summer In most cases, however, separating out the heroes and villains of occupation was far more complicated.
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? Paris martyred! But Paris liberated! 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!
Since the enemy which held Paris has capitulated into our hands, France returns to Paris, to her home. She returns bloody, but quite resolute. She returns there enlightened by the immense lesson, but more certain than ever of her duties and of her rights. I speak of her duties first, and I will sum them all up by saying that for now, it is a matter of the duties of war.
The enemy is staggering, but he is not beaten yet. He remains on our soil. A French captain stopped all correspondents one mile from town and insisted he had orders that no one without a written permit could enter the city. He told three British correspondents they would be shot if they drove by without a pass. As American colonel heard the story and said the captain was acting without proper authority.
I drove to the blockade and suddenly my jeep lurched forward into the column of troops. Unfortunately it was too late to turn back so I kept going. Two miles farther the column halted. Forward elements had run into a German strongpoint and mines on the road. French Brig. Jacques Leclerc and his staff went into conference.
Tanks wheeled and started to outflank the position, but after a while they returned because they ran into the route of an American infantry advance. Then the column began to roll again. The strongpoint had been knocked out ahead of us. And at a. Never do I expect to see such scenes as I saw on the streets of Paris. There was only a narrow lane through which the armor could roll.
Men and women cried with joy. They grabbed the arms and hands of soldiers and cheered until their voices were hoarse. One old man came up, saluted, and said with tears in his eyes: "God bless America.
You have saved France. And they were wild with emotion. Crowds were banked from the center of the streets to the sidewalks in a colorful, cheering throng which stretched for miles.
There seemed to be no end and apparently everyone in Paris except the Germans and collaborationists was standing there to cheer, shout, cry and leave themselves exhausted with happiness. Our column moved to a point one block from the Luxembourg Gardens. Then from all sides burst machine-gun fire. From housetops and windows guns rattled.
Machine guns of tanks opened up in reply. We leaped from the jeep and took cover behind a tank.
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