Revealed: Hitler's mass-slaughter plan to blow up Paris... and the audacious scheme that foiled him
Book of the week: Paris '44: The Shame And The Glory by Patrick Bishop (Viking £25, 400pp)
The Olympic Games are proving a wonderful showcase for the historic sites of Paris as athletes from around the world race along its Haussmann boulevards and over its imposing bridges, passing Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Palais du Luxembourg, Les Invalides, one architectural gem after another.
Strange, then, to realise that exactly 80 years ago, in the first weeks of August 1944, the people of the French capital were living in fear that all of this magnificent, irreplaceable heritage was about to be destroyed – blown up and burnt down by German occupiers bent on revenge, now forced to flee as Allied forces neared the city.
A different sort of Olympian struggle, a life-and-death one, was under way.
How close Paris came to being laid waste – and many of its citizens being massacred in an almighty bloodbath – is vividly and thrillingly recounted by British war historian and Paris resident Patrick Bishop.
Adolf Hitler with right-hand man and Nazi architect Albert Speer, left, and German sculptor Arno Breker by the Eiffel Tower in Paris in June 1940
Allied tanks and other army vehicles in the Champs-Elysees during the liberation parade in August 1944 as cheering crowds watch on
We re-live the tension of those terror-filled days and, even though we know the outcome beforehand, it still comes as a relief when the city emerges intact. It could so very easily have had a different, catastrophic ending.
Four years earlier in 1940, Parisians had been shamed when their city fell to Hitler's Nazis without a fight, their disgrace compounded by supine co-operation with their new masters, to the point of active collaboration in many cases.
More than a year passed before any sort of formal Resistance emerged and even then it was patchy, disorganised and riven by political rivalries and suspicion, notably between communists of the FTP and supporters of Charles de Gaulle, the tetchy, self-aggrandising Free French chief who had fled to England and whom many condemned for deserting France.
August 1944, with the Germans beginning to pull out, was the chance for the French to hit back, and for the majority who had kept their heads down – the attentistes as they were known, the ones who waited – to jump on the bandwagon, 'eager to redeem their mortgaged manhood' as Bishop puts it, and pretend they'd been resisting all along.
American troops marching down the Champs-Elysees in Paris with the Arc de Triomphe in the background
German soldiers giving themselves up to French troops in August 1944 before the liberation of Paris
Prime Minister Winston Churchill with French leader Charles de Gaulle in Paris in November 1944
But choosing the right time to take to the streets and man the barricades was critical. On the far side of Europe, SS stormtroopers were mercilessly crushing an uprising that aimed to liberate Warsaw. Move too soon and Paris might face a similar fate.
Amid the chaos and uncertainty, enduring myths were created. After the war, the German commander in Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz, claimed to be the hero who saved the city by daring to defy Hitler's instruction to raze it. And indeed he had stalled, then parleyed and surrendered, without pressing the destruct button.
But Bishop reckons the general was stretching the truth, that he never had the explosives or the manpower to cause wholesale damage, and that his main motivation was to save his own skin.
The real credit for Paris's survival intact, the author argues, should go to the supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe, General Eisenhower.
The military plan, agreed at the very top, had always been to bypass the capital and concentrate all resources on forcing the enemy back to the German border. Paris was viewed as a potentially dangerous distraction, slowing progress and jeopardising victory.
But Ike was quietly nobbled by the wily de Gaulle, who persuaded him that leaving Paris to fend for itself risked massive loss of life, anarchy and, worst of all, the communists taking control.
Against orders from on high, the American pledged to make sure de Gaulle was able to stamp his authority as the new leader of France. To which end, he agreed that French troops, albeit backed up by the Americans and the British, would lead the liberation of the capital.
By mid-August, serious unrest was growing inside Paris, with strikes paralysing both the city and the police – who throughout the occupation had been hand-in-glove with the Germans, but were, crucially, changing sides.
German tanks roamed the boulevards, crushing makeshift barricades. From rooftops, German snipers randomly picked off people. Anyone caught carrying arms was shot on the spot.
Casualties mounted on both sides in what was now a people's war, a popular uprising against the occupiers. They were, though, massively outgunned and barely hanging on.
But salvation was on its way. Under their commander, General Philippe Leclerc, the tanks and 16,000 men of the 2nd Armoured Division of the Free French Army were approaching Paris. When they entered the city through cheering crowds, those at the head of the column – most of whom had never set foot in Paris before – didn't know the way to the centre.
A moped rider came forward and led them through meandering streets to the Seine. It was 9.22 in the evening of Thursday, August 24, that Captain Raymond Dronne entered the Hotel de Ville to cries of 'Vive de Gaulle' and 'Vive la France'. All over the city bells rang out, culminating with the great bell of Notre Dame.
The Marseillaise – banned throughout the occupation – was sung on street corners. 'We all had tears in our eyes,' a soldier remembered. 'This was the sound of freedom, the sound of victory.'
But whose victory? When de Gaulle – 'radiating majesty' and determined the credit should come only his way – led the victory parade down the Champs-Elysees, he sidelined the communists in the Resistance and in a speech gave only a passing nod to the Allies for their 'help'.
Another myth was born – that France had freed itself. Though a travesty of the truth, the past was successfully re-written.
What happened next was not pretty. Parisians turned on anyone they could scapegoat. Brutal treatment was handed out to women who had slept with Germans, as many as 20,000 of them. Thousands of collaborators were summarily executed.
Bishop is scathing: 'Few of their persecutors had done much to be proud of during the occupation. It is hard not to see this as an attempt to wipe out the years of acceptance in an orgy of phoney righteousness.'
His book's subtitle, 'The shame and the glory', is there for good reason.
