The Nazi General Who Saved Paris from Destruction
How an unlikely hero preserved a historic city
On August 1, 1944, Adolf Hitler appointed Dietrich von Choltitz to be general of the infantry, and a week later he was made military governor of Paris. Under direct orders to destroy the city in the face of defeat, he nevertheless failed to trigger the explosive charges on the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Seine bridges, and other significant monuments in the city. This is his story…
“S it still and drink this good brandy. For you can always watch parades, but you’ll never again celebrate the liberation of Paris at the Ritz.” Those were the words of Ernest Hemingway to fellow American journalist Helen Kirkpatrick on August 26, 1944. She was about to leave the luxury hotel and head over to the Champs-élysées to join the enormous joyful crowds of Parisians who were celebrating their jour de gloire. Only a day earlier the city’s German commander, General Dietrich von Choltitz, formally handed Paris over to Major General Philippe Leclerc at the Gare Montparnasse train station. Four onerous years of German occupation were finally over and the City of Light was free once more. But as the Parisians celebrated their victory, few of them realized how close they had come to catastrophe.
A FLOOD WAVE OVER PARIS
Could anyone today imagine a Paris without the Eiffel Tower, or the Notre Dame Cathedral, or Sacré-coeur, or the Arc de Triomphe? That’s how the city would have looked if Adolf Hitler’s infantry general had followed orders. Ironically, the German dictator was a great admirer of the French city. After his only visit—in June of 1940—he’d ordered his architect, Albert Speer, and his sculptor, Arno Breker, to make Berlin even lovelier than Paris. “Wasn’t Paris beautiful?” Hitler asked Speer. Then he told him, “Berlin must be far more beautiful. When we are finished in Berlin, Paris will only be a shadow.” But by the summer of 1944 Berlin was lying in ashes and rubble; the Allies had landed in Normandy, and Hitler decided that he wanted to see Paris in ruins. On August 1, 1944, he appointed Dietrich von Choltitz to be general of the infantry and a week later made him military governor of Paris. Von Choltitz was described as a man “who had never questioned an order—no matter how harsh it was.” The scion of an old family of Prussian aristocrats with a history of military service, von Choltitz demonstrated his willingness to carry out his prior missions with brutal severity. And so Hitler ordered his general to defend Paris at all costs and put down any attempts by the population to resist: “The strongest measures to quell an insurrection must be taken. Those will include, for example, blowing up whole city blocks, public execution of ringleaders, and total evacuation of affected districts.” In the event of a defeat, Hitler ordered von Choltitz to arrange to destroy the entire city: “All of the bridges across the Seine are to be prepared for demolition… Paris must not fall into enemy hands except as a field of ruins.”
The Seine bridges were targeted not only to sever any potential supply routes but also in the hope that their destruction would block the Seine— thereby triggering flooding and killing as many Parisians as possible. Hitler was aiming to make the magnificent city of Paris look like Warsaw, where he had responded to an uprising by ordering his engineers to burn and demolish the city’s historic buildings. By January 1945 that campaign was 94% effective, and 200,000 Polish civilians had died. But General von Choltitz had a mind of his own…
EXPLOSIVES ON THE EIFFEL TOWER
The armed uprising in Paris began on August 19. It followed a strike that had been started on August 15 by the gendarmerie, police, and Paris Métro workers, who were joined the next day by postal workers. By August 18, a general strike was under way. Parisians across the city heeded the revolutionary call that had been made famous by France’s national anthem, “La Marseillaise”: Aux armes, citoyens! (“To arms, citizens!”). Thus barricades and Molotov cocktails were prepared. Von Choltitz sent German tanks into the streets to fire on the barricades, and hundreds of people died in the ensuing violence. But the general was aware that his men and tanks could not hold the city against any popular uprising now that Allied forces were approaching Paris.
Then he’d received two visits that proved decisive. First, the municipal council chair of Paris, Pierre-charles
Taittinger, attempted to persuade him not to destroy the city and urged him to talk to representatives of General de Gaulle: “They are patriots, and if you were a Frenchman, you would be with them.” Von Choltitz also received a visit from the Paris-born Swedish consul-general Raoul Nordling, which changed everything: Nordling told him that destroying Paris would be a crime history would never forgive and that future generations would regard the von Choltitz family as barbarians. Five days later Hitler sent his ominous cable that included the infamous line: “Paris must not fall into enemy hands except as a field of ruins.”
Outright insubordination was not an option for a man who had never questioned an order, therefore the general proceeded to command his men to mount explosives on the Seine bridges, the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Louvre, and numerous important government buildings. Now they were waiting for an order to light the fuses. But the general hesitated. Despite his oath to defend the Führer, von Choltitz couldn’t forget Nordling’s prediction regarding the loss of honor that would threaten his family’s future. On the other hand, he knew very well that insubordination could cost him his life. In the weeks after an attempt to assassinate Hitler one month prior in July, the Gestapo had rounded up anyone even remotely connected to the plot and executed almost 5,000 suspected opposition sympathizers.
As the general struggled with his conscience, impatience was growing at German headquarters in Berlin. When news of Parisian street fighting had reached the German capital, the Wehrmacht chief of staff, General Alfred Jodl, reached out to the city’s military governor to inquire about his apparent hesitancy. Von Choltitz then played for time, saying there had been logistical problems, however he was acutely aware time was running out.
At Nordling’s urging he had brokered a ceasefire with the insurgents, but many Résistance groups rejected it, and skirmishes continued the next day. Nevertheless, the ceasefire had allowed him to save face and call off a planned Luftwaffe strike from which there would’ve been no turning back. What many were hoping was that the Allies would be able to enter Paris in time to save the city from destruction. If the German commander did not trigger the explosives beforehand, Paris would be rescued.
General von Choltitz knew it was only a matter of time before the jig was up. He was keenly reminded of his precarious position when four SS officers from Berlin paid him a visit at his office in the Hotel Meurice. The general assumed they had learned
“IS PARIS BURNING? YES OR NO, IS PARIS BURNING?”
Adolf Hitler
of his discussions with Nordling and had come to arrest him. Instead, they had been sent by the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, to take possession of the famous Bayeux Tapestry, which was being held for safekeeping in the basement of the Louvre just a short distance away. Since the Louvre was already occupied by the Résistance, the general offered to provide them with an armored car and a squad of soldiers. The men told him they would radio Berlin for instructions. Then they left and never came back.
On the evening of August 23, Hitler was becoming desperate about the fate of Paris and he screamed angrily at General Jodl: “Is Paris burning? Yes or no, is Paris burning?” But the Wehrmacht chief of staff didn’t know the answer. There had been no word from von Choltitz. By dawn on August 24, Allied troops were at the edge of Paris and the general decided not to destroy the city. On August 25 at 4:30 in the afternoon he formally handed over control of Paris to French Major General Philippe Leclerc at the Gare Montparnasse train station. For the first time since Germany began its occupation of Paris 1,533 days ago, the bells of Notre Dame rang out.
WHY DID HE DO IT?
In October 1949 General Dietrich von Choltitz wrote: “If I did not carry out the instructions that required me to destroy Paris, it was not because the idea of obeying orders was repugnant to me, but because I was forced to recognize that the orders sprung from a mind that had become a prey to madness.” But outlooks on why the general defied Hitler differ to this day. German historian Sönke Neitzel is of the opinion that von Choltitz did not have the means of putting up further resistance: The city was in an uproar and the Allies were at the gates. Thus von Choltitz had decided to do the only reasonable thing, which would spare him from being prosecuted as a war criminal.
When the story of von Choltitz’s decision became known, Parisians began viewing him as “the Savior of Paris.” General Charles de Gaulle saw von Choltitz’s insubordination to his orders from Hitler as the foundation of later Franco-german reconciliation. When von Choltitz was laid to rest in 1966 in Baden-baden, Germany, his funeral was attended by high-ranking officers from both countries, who all wanted to pay their last respects to Paris’s erstwhile German commander.