Read this article yesterday. Thought it was worth a repost. FILE, this Aug. 28, 1944 file photo shows French girls, over the liberation of their beloved capital from the Germans, mob American soldiers as they entered the city with enthusiasm and gaiety in Paris. (AP Photo/Bert Brandt, file High ranking German officers as prisoners. Her code name was Rainer and she had a gun she called Oscar. Not yet 20, she aimed her weapon at a Nazi officer and shot him to death on a Paris bridge on a Sunday afternoon. That deed on July 23, 1944, was Madeleine Riffaud's summons to Parisians to rise up. "Everyone saw that a young girl on a bicycle can do this," she recalled in an interview with The Associated Press. Riffaud's solitary act represented an opening salvo for a popular uprising in Paris, which was spurred by the Allied landings in Normandy following four years of Nazi occupation. When American and French troops liberated the City of Light on Aug. 25, 1944, it came against a backdrop of jubilation and chaos. On Monday, Paris will mark the 70th anniversary of its freedom from Hitler's Third Reich with a day of tributes, including an outdoor ball, a speech at City Hall by President Francois Hollande, and a sound and light show re-enacting the day of liberation. The commemoration underscores how much has changed in a Europe, and wider world, that is confronting new dangers with echoes of the past. "I think there is a certain degree of forgetting precisely what the right wing across Europe in the 1930s actually meant," said University of Nottingham historian Karen Adler, who draws a parallel between that dark time and the rise of far-right parties across much of Europe today. Some Parisian elders who lived through the occupation now advocate unity and dialogue among Europeans to ensure that extremism can never take hold of the continent again. "What happened was monstrous," said Jacqueline Courret, now 85 and living at the Liberty rest home in Paris. During the occupation, Courret lived in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood on the Rue de Rivoli. She recalled how the Nazis' regular roundups of Jews meant that her school eventually closed because so many pupils had disappeared, including a friend. Some 77,320 Jews were deported from France during the war. From 1940 to 1944, a European capital that had epitomized culture, bounty and the sweet life fell to its knees as humiliation, hunger, cold and distrust became the measures of daily life. Long food lines, black markets and coveted ration tickets marked the memories of those years. Courret and two other women at the Liberty care home described how age-based food tickets determined their daily rations. Potatoes, rutabagas, soup and milk for the children were standard fare. Meat was a delicacy. Sometimes, Courret said, her parents served up cat meat. "There wasn't a cat left in Paris at the end of the war," she said, chuckling. Understanding how ordinary life goes on in an occupied country can be hard for outsiders to grasp. "Ordinary things go on as well as the terrible things and the spectacular things," Adler said. "People are still getting married. ... They're still having arguments with their spouse." Life, she said, "is not always being lived at an incredibly high pitch." With fuel scarce, bicycles provided taxi services. The family of 83-year-old Michele Le Meleder tried warming up in winter around an electric toaster. Scarcity bred a thriving black market for goods, some smuggled from the countryside. Parisians honed their bargaining skills. "One person had shoes; another had butter. We bartered," said Josepha Bercau, 93. Her family's fabric store helped put food on the table by trading fabric or clothes, some made from curtains. When their silk stockings failed, ladies resorted to using make-up on their legs to imitate the look of the stockings. Yet worries about whom to trust tainted relations and snuffed out the legendary ambiance of the city. Fears that neighbors could be collaborating with the Germans restrained conversations. Identifying the collaborators was no easy task. "Collaboration works at so many levels. It was every state agency, if you like, every ministry, every government agency," Adler said. Paris police carried out the Nazis' dastardly tasks until they rebelled on Aug. 19 as the uprising spread six days before the liberation. Women who consorted with Germans, derided as "horizontal collaborators," were paraded through the streets with shaved heads after the liberation. Adler offered a rough estimate that at least 20,000 women suffered this humiliation, even though some of them simply had a "visible" relationship with a German, even as a maid. Small-scale sabotage was part of life for some, from giving incorrect directions to a German soldier to drawing on a wall the Cross of Lorraine, the sign of Free French Forces leader Gen. Charles de Gaulle, then based in London. Riffaud, who turned 90 on Saturday, carried out more daring feats. As a member of a Paris resistance group of medical students, she put pamphlets in mailboxes and passed secret messages using the numbers on Metro tickets as a code. When Riffaud shot the German officer, she said, she waited until he turned — so that he wouldn't be shot in the back. She was arrested, tortured and eventually freed in a prisoner exchange. "We always knew we couldn't win alone," she said. The D-Day invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, fueled the fervor of Parisians and opened the way for American troops of the 4th American Infantry Division to march on Paris alongside the 2nd French Armored Division. "All the emotions suppressed by four years of German domination surged through the people," veteran AP correspondent Don Whitehead wrote on Aug. 25, 1944, in the first eyewitness account of the liberation. That joy was immortalized in iconic photos showing young ladies kissing American soldiers. Whitehead's dispatch describes the liberation as messy, chaotic and dangerous with shooting from Germans making their last stand. "Machine guns and rifles cracked on all sides as the column I was with drove within a block of the Luxembourg (Gardens)," Whitehead wrote. Riffaud saw one of her comrades fall dead from a gunshot wound at the Place de la Republique. "Everyone was hugging and kissing," she said. "People were happy. All the while, we were picking up dead bodies." http://www.theintell.com/news/national/paris-to-celebrate-end-to-nazi-rule-years-later/article_0778025c-85e7-54dd-99e7-194cdd782f1f.html
Thanks Lou, I wish I could have gone there and meet some of the 2nd armored Division Veterans who were there.
Lou, I concur with Skipper. If I could go back in time and witness an event I cannot think of one, off hand, that I would rather have seen than the liberation of Paris. I realize that there was much fighting left in Northern France but that does not detract from Paris being freed. To be a Free French soldier or a GI at that time is far beyond my imagination. Madeliene Riffaud's story is a fine summation of the event. That she is alive to see it is a near miracle. That is one brave lady. I have a great fondness of Paris but also of Amsterdam. With Market Garden falling short Amsterdam had to suffer further occupation, a terrible winter, little or no fuel or gas and starvation diets then hit by one of the worst North Sea storms causing huge floods in 1946. Quite a contrast . Gaines
The liberation of Paris had effects far beyond any tactical or strategic need. Paris was, and probably always will be, the cultural center of Europe and thus the entire western world. Even the Germans realized this and pulled back rather than have it destroyed as a battle zone. When Paris fell to LeClerc and the US 4th Infantry it electrified the entire war effort. When Paris fell, every citizen in occupied Europe knew that liberation was now a certainty rather than a possibility. Surely, most German soldiers realized that it was the beginning of the end as well. Eisenhower was criticized by many Americans and Brits for giving the honor to LeClerc rather than an Anglo/American unit, but that was a necessary and thoughtful gesture of great historical importance. France had suffered in the occupation and had plenty of grievances against the allies as well - the sinking of the French fleet by the Royal Navy and allied strategic bombing had cost them plenty. All of that was wiped out in hours when LeClerc's forces led the allies into Paris.
I don't think von Choltitz cared so much about saving Paris. He wanted to be remembered as the man who dissobied Hitler , not the man who destroyed many cities in the east. Also he was appointed only weeks before the Liberation, so he wasn't exactly going to start a "career" there. Also after the truce he could no longer blow up the city because he has loss the control of some strategic accesses . One famous example is the Townhall when a FFI sniper killed a German motorbike (without orders, as it meant suicide) driver who was scouting for tanks. the tanks were taken by surprise and they could have blasted the hell out of the building, but they only fired one shell and received orders to move out , not knowing which forces were inside (only a squad of soldiers with a handful of guns) . This is how the Germans lost one street after another and parts of the city before Leclerc even got to the center.
What kind of troops did he have at his disposal? He had 17k men but I doubt they were combat troops. A) such troops were needed elsewhere and b ) he could not suppress 20k very poorly armed resistance fighters. That make me think he had garrison troops at best, but administrative and supply units probably accounted for a sizable part of the 17,000 German troops.
I just picked up the new book "Disobeying Hitler" a few weeks ago and am currently working through it. Its a bit rambling, but the author presents a pretty concise picture of Chloitz's actions in Paris. It basically says that von Cholitz lacked the means to completely destroy the city as per Hitler's orders, but at the same time had the forces necessary to have crushed the uprising and severely damaged a lot of Paris. He was clearly against destroying the city or waging a full-out war against the Resistance fighters, but also didn't surrender the city without some fighting. In short its a more complicated story than some might think -- at least that's what the book says. I tend to agree with it too. If I have a chance I'll post the troop deposition. I can't recall all the details, but most troops were second-rate and he had few combat-ready troops at his disposal.
Figures go from 17K to 25k and the 20-22k one is generally admitted, depending whether comprising those on transit, the sick and wounded, the non-German office personnal (Belgian and Dutch secretaries for example). On the whole 9000 were taken POW. Most of the other ones managed to escape, but what is less mentionned is the fact that quite a few soldiers deserted or even joined the Resistance. To these forces were to be added some 'Vichy forces" (not the Police which was no longer reliable and were the first ones to rebel and triggered the insurrection, but I'm thinking of the 1.000 brand new Milice die-hard fanatics, who joined in July 1944 . The Germans had their SS units outside the city (they fought hard around Fresnes for example), but they did not exactly get along with the Wehrmacht after the July episode when they got locked in their casernes . Tanks I saw on archives are often the Old 1935 French Somua ones, still impressive ,but outdated and not effcient for urban warfare.
