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

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Despite his guest’s threat to withdraw the 2nd Free French Armored Division from Allied forces and send it to Paris alone, Eisenhower still refused to change his battle plan. The day before de Gaulle’s arrival, the Allied commander had received a dispatch from intelligence sources informing him that German reinforcements had left Denmark en route to the Paris area. This reinforced Eisenhower’s conviction that the Germans were prepared to defend the city with all of the forces at their disposal.

Back in the capital, the head of the Communist resistance, ‘Colonel Rol,’ was doing his best to disrupt the truce his Gaullist rivals were managing to impose. Issuing orders to his men to attack Germans at every opportunity, he denounced the cease-fire as a ruse to ‘exterminate the working classes of Paris,’ and permit ‘those stirred by hatred and fear of the people to work their dirty deals.’ Rol was uninterested in sparing the city from destruction; he wanted only to establish his faction as the ruling government. ‘Paris,’ he declared, ‘is worth 200,000 dead.’

Sure enough, by late afternoon on August 20, the truce was dying under the steady gunfire of Communist insurgents and patrolling squads of Germans. By midnight, 106 Frenchman and an undetermined number of Nazis were dead. Just as the situation was at its worst and it seemed that Choltitz would be compelled to commence demolition and launch an outright major offensive against the partisans, there came a breakthrough.

An SS patrol arrested three Resistance leaders caught in a car filled with arms and classified papers. Rather than leftists, they turned out to be staunch Gaullists — ‘ministers of de Gaulle,’ Choltitz was informed by the officer in charge of their apprehension. One of the trio was Alexandre Parodi, de Gaulle’s representative in occupied France. After outlining to him the dire potential consequences of the deteriorating cease-fire, Choltitz released the stunned Frenchman and his companions to do what they could to restore the peace.

Racing to his apartment on the Rue Sain-Augustin, Parodi initiated the previously prepared Operation Prise du Pouvoir. For every minister in de Gaulle’s government-in-exile, there was a carefully screened, Paris-based stand-in. Parodi began placing as many of them as he could locate in their respective ministries. Aided by an energetic young Gaullist partisan named Yvon Morandat, whom the Communists had tried to assassinate 10 days earlier, Parodi assembled his ersatz cabinet at the prime minister’s residence at the Hotel de Matignon, where he intended to boldly declare his assembly as the newly returned government of France, headed by General Charles de Gaulle. He, too, would beat the leftists to the draw.

After his initial success, however, Parodi was unable to bring unity to the splintered Resistance. In a stormy meeting in an apartment over the Avenue de Parc-Montsouris, the Communists refused to agree to any kind of cease-fire extension. They would do all-out battle with the occupiers immediately and threatened that, if the Gaullists refused to join in, they would plaster every wall and building in Paris with placards accusing the Gaullists of’stabbing the people of Paris in the back.’

The truce was dead, but the time the Gaullists managed to expend in establishing this seemingly disastrous fact would be all that was needed. While the Resistance leaders of Paris bickered, 122 miles to the west the 16,000 men of the 2nd French Armored Division were mobilizing. The division’s commander, General Jacques Philippe Leclerc, had been preparing for this move for some time. To ensure that the Americans would be unable to prevent his outfit’s attacking independently, he had not reported tanks and other vehicles that had been lost in action and had continued drawing gasoline allotments for machines he no longer had. For the previous three nights the men had filched the rest of the fuel and ammunition they needed from American supply dumps. Now, in the pre-dawn of August 21, Leclerc — after attempting repeatedly and futilely to obtain permission from his American superiors to advance, and receiving no word of instruction of any kind from de Gaulle — was moving out on his own authority.

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Foreign Affairs, Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, World War II