Dietrich von Choltitz: Saved of Paris From Destruction During World War II

When de Gaulle learned of the plan to bypass the city and delay liberation, he became convinced that the Americans were for some as yet unknown reason plotting to destroy his political future. Whoever expelled the Germans and freed Paris would likely build for himself in the process a power base with which to dominate the entire country in years to come. De Gaulle estimated that the Communists had 25,000 armed men in the city (if this figure was accurate, they outnumbered the Germans); he ordered the cessation of all Resistance-bound arms drops into the area. While Eisenhower brooded in his gloomy headquarters, de Gaulle was in Algiers, busily sending trusted subordinates to the City of Light to do everything in their power to head off any premature insurrection that might well sow the seeds of a civil war. France, drained by four years of Nazi occupation, was in no condition to endure such a calamity.

During World War I, the Germans had been frustrated in their efforts to take Paris. Two million of them had died in the bloody mud of the Western Front. One of the scarred, embittered survivors was a young corporal named Adolf Hitler, and four years after the Nazis had triumphantly goose-stepped into the French capital, he was obsessed with defending it. However, Hitler also realized that he might lose Paris. If the city’s liberation became imminent, he decided, it was to be destroyed.

After three years of distinguished service on the Russian Front, Maj. Gen. Dietrich von Choltitz was brought west by Hitler. Since the July 20, 1944, bomb attempt on his life, the Fuhrer had had little faith in his military commanders’ trustworthiness; yet in Choltitz he believed he had found his man for a monumental task. Choltitz’s family heritage of generations of Prussian militarism left little room for an independent spirit. He had been raised to do as he was told. When he led the German invasion force into Holland in the spring of 1940, he commanded the bomber formations that pulverized Rotterdam before the city had a chance to surrender. During the gory July 1942 siege of the Crimean port of Sevastopol, Choltitz’s 4,800-man regiment was so decimated that he decided to force Russian POWs to carry shells and load the big guns being used against their comrades. While Choltitz suffered only an arm wound, all but 347 of his soldiers died in action. Transferred to Army Group Center a year later, he obediently followed the Fuhrer’s scorched-earth policy, making sure the advancing Russians found nothing but smoldering rubble in the wake of the withdrawing Wehrmacht.

Dietrich von Choltitz was indeed an able city destroyer, but by the time he arrived in Paris as its new military governor, he had had a couple of encounters that changed him radically. He had first met Hitler at a summer 1943 conference on the Russian Front, and though shocked by the Austrian peasant’s table manners during a luncheon, he was captivated by the powerful personality and contagious confidence of the Fuhrer. When he arrived at the Fuhrer’s headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia, a year later, however, he was in for a shocking disappointment. Hitler’s health had been wrecked by the incredible pressures of his life, the previous month’s attempted assassination and, some doctors suspected, Parkinson’s disease. After a rambling discourse on his career and the war, Hitler concluded with a shrieking diatribe against the Prussian officer corps. Finally, he told Choltitz he would be Befehlshaber, fortress commander, of Paris and should’stamp out without pity’ all civilian acts of disobedience or terrorism.

Leaving Hitler’s forest compound, Choltitz realized that the conference had not left him reassured about the war’s future. All it had done was clarify his new posting for what it was, another scorched-earth assignment. This time, however, it was not some dour industrial or farming town on the Russian steppes — it was Paris, the most beautiful city in the world. For the first time in his life, Choltitz thought of disobeying a direct order.