BOOK OF THE WEEK
THE HOTEL ON THE PLACE VENDOME: LOVE, DEATH AND BETRAYAL AT THE HOTEL RITZ IN PARIS
THE causes of World War II are manifold — German humiliation at the Treaty of Versailles; Hitler’s megalomania; t he i nvasion of Poland — but my theory is that the Nazis wanted to be able to stay at the Paris Ritz.
It was more than a hotel. It was a paradise of gilded salons, polished mirrors and immaculate brass and mahogany fittings. ‘The champagne flowed,’ says Tilar J. Mazzeo. ‘Bellhops in caps whisked away fur stoles and chauffeurs waited on street corners.’
The Ritz had 450 employees, ‘ from bartenders and chambermaids to waiters and oysterbuyers’. It had opened in 1898 and was notable for such newfangled innovations as builtin wardrobes, private bathrooms and flushing lavatories.
It is scandalous more than it is admirable, however, that at the Ritz it was business as usual during the Occupation. Highranking German officers and their Axis counterparts appeared in whitetie in the dining room each evening, having first checked in their pistols at a kiosk near the Place Vendome entrance.
‘Champagne cocktails and white linen table cloths’ carried on being in evidence. ‘Everything was as it had always been, waiters in tails, the food, the wine.’
There were even fashion shows in the ballroom. (Longserving manager Claude Auzello shot himself in despair — not during the war, however, but in 1969, after gentlemen clad in ‘velour lounge pants and outlandish blazers started appearing in the dining room’.)
MEANWHILE, the rest of Paris suffered ‘devastating food shortages and malnutrition. Beyond the doors of the Hotel Ritz, France was spiralling into a brutal chaos’. In June 1940, when the Germans were on the outskirts of the city, 70 per cent of the population fled southwards, ‘hauling their possessions and their infirm relatives behind them’.
There was a mass roundup of the Jews, who were held in the Velodrome d’Hiver. Passersby could hear ‘the screams of those who had gone mad or were trying to commit suicide’.
Similarly, through the windows of the Gestapo HQ, screams of pain and terror issued all day and late at night as the Nazis conducted their interrogations.
The swastika flew above the Eiffel Tower and the other luxurious hotels ‘vanished behind shutters’, but at the Ritz, the suites were full. The hotel was ostensibly spared because MarieLouise, the Germanspeaking widow of the founder, Cesar Ritz, was Swiss.