During World War II, the Liberation of Paris Saved the French Capital From Destruction

The square outside Notre-Dame Cathedral, usually empty early on a Saturday morning, filled with hundreds of policemen on August 19, 1944, all of them converging on the fortress-like Prefecture of Police headquarters. A flag unfurled atop the building: the blue, white and red French tricolor, banned by Paris’ German occupiers and last flown officially four years prior. The French police, on strike against the occupation, had returned, this time in revolt. Paris’ uprising against the Nazis had begun.

Across the City of Light, gunfire crackled as Frenchmen hunted and shot German soldiers. Here and there a car roared by, painted with the letters FFI, an abbreviation for the French Forces of the Interior, a coalition of resistance fighters. American and British troops, who’d invaded Normandy two months earlier, were pushing the German Army east, but they were still 150 miles away from the French capital. Parisians rose up to avenge France’s 1940 defeat by the Nazis and their subsequent years of oppression, hoping to liberate the city themselves.

The risk was huge, the decision contentious. Some resistance leaders had feared starting a bloodbath and provoking German reprisals that might destroy the city. Their fears were justified. Just a few weeks earlier, Adolf Hitler had ordered Dietrich von Choltitz, his top general in Paris, to “stamp out” any insurrection “without pity.” Since then, Choltitz had also received orders to destroy Paris’ waterworks and power plants, as well as dozens of bridges over the River Seine: historic landmarks, from the centuries-old Pont Neuf to the stunning Pont Alexandre III.

As Paris’ revolt grew, Hitler’s orders to Choltitz escalated. On August 20, the Nazi leader demanded “the widest destruction possible” in the city. On August 23, Hitler dictated another order. “Paris must not fall into the hands of the enemy,” read the führer’s cable to Choltitz, “or, if it does, he must find there nothing but a field of ruins.”

Why didn’t the German Army destroy Paris, as Hitler wanted? The answer is surprisingly simple: Because the Paris uprising forced Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower’s hand.

Eisenhower hadn’t planned to liberate Paris, but rather to encircle it so he could use the Allies’ limited fuel to drive Hitler’s armies back to the German border. The Paris uprising made the American general “damned mad,” he later told Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, authors of the 1965 nonfiction book Is Paris Burning? It was “just the kind of a situation I didn’t want, a situation that wasn’t under our control, that might force us to change our plans before we were ready for it,” Eisenhower said.

On August 20, Free French leader Charles de Gaulle, anxious to get to Paris and claim leadership over liberated France, arrived in Normandy and visited Eisenhower’s advance headquarters, located in an apple orchard in Granville, near Mont-Saint-Michel on the Atlantic coast. The supreme commander met de Gaulle in his map tent. Tapping the charts with a pointer, he explained the United States Army’s plans to surge around and past Paris.

“Why cross the Seine everywhere but Paris?” de Gaulle asked. He urged Eisenhower to reconsider. Liberating the capital was a matter of national importance to France, de Gaulle argued. He warned that the communists, a major force in the Paris resistance, might try to take over the city. Eisenhower told de Gaulle it was too early, concerned, he later recalled, that “we might get ourselves in a helluva fight there.”

Meanwhile, back in Paris, the 2,000 police inside the Prefecture had used Molotov cocktails to thwart an attack by three German tanks. A fragile cease-fire, negotiated by the Swedish consul in Paris, saved the French police just as their pistol and rifle ammunition was about to run out.

Resistance fighters erected around 600 street barricades—made of paving stones, trees, carts and sandbags—to stall and harass German troops. They seized government buildings, including the Hôtel de Ville (the city hall), where they pulled down a bust of Philippe Pétain, the French leader who’d collaborated with the Nazis, and replaced it with a portrait of de Gaulle. Uncensored newspapers appeared, their headlines celebrating Parisians’ fight: “France is resurrected!” “Paris wins its freedom.” “The Allies are approaching.” But the poorly armed resistance couldn’t push the Germans out of their strongholds around the city. According to Julian Jackson’s France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944, 901 FFI members and 582 French civilians died in the fighting.

Communist resistance leader Henri Rol-Tanguy sent an emissary, Roger Gallois, west through the war’s front lines to ask the Americans to airdrop arms. But as Gallois slipped across the German lines on August 22, he decided to urge the Allies to send troops instead. The insurrectionists could not liberate the city alone, a worried Gallois told American commanders; they would be killed if Allied soldiers didn’t arrive soon.

The Liberation of Paris (August 1944)

That same day, Choltitz sat in the German Army headquarters in Paris’ Hotel Meurice, struggling with his conscience. Hitler’s military operations chief, Alfred Jodl, had just repeated his orders to demolish Paris’ industry and the Seine’s bridges—orders that Choltitz had stalled rather than carry out. Choltitz had seen Hitler in person in Germany just weeks earlier, and the führer’s ragged condition and spittle-flecked rants about “final victory” had convinced him of two things: first, that the Nazi chief was falling apart fast, and second, that Germany would lose the war.

Choltitz calculated that his 22,000 troops in Paris weren’t enough to stop a general uprising. He knew that the German high command was planning to withdraw more forces eastward. Paris would eventually fall to the Allies. So why destroy it? “To defend Paris against an enemy, even at the cost of its destruction, was a militarily valid act,” wrote Collins and Lapierre. “But wantonly [ravaging] the city for the sole satisfaction of wiping one of the wonders of Europe from the map was an act without military justification.”

To defuse the situation, Choltitz turned to Swedish Consul Raoul Nordling, a neutral diplomat. He told Nordling that Hitler had ordered him to destroy large parts of the city. If he ignored the demands much longer, he feared he would be relieved of command. The German general asked Nordling to pass a message to the Allied enemy: Come to Paris quickly. Emissaries, including Nordling’s own brother, headed west and crossed the front lines, with Choltitz’s permission.

Also on August 22, Eisenhower changed his mind about protecting the French capital. De Gaulle’s arguments had stuck with him. “It looks now as if we’d be compelled to go into Paris,” Eisenhower wrote to his chief of staff that evening, scribbling on the top of a letter from de Gaulle. He ordered a Free French division toward the capital. “Information indicated that no great battle would take place,” Eisenhower recalled in his 1948 memoir, Crusade in Europe.

What influenced Eisenhower’s decision besides de Gaulle? Some sources, like Collins and Lapierre, credit Gallois’ personal plea to U.S. commanders. Others, including Charles Williams’ 1993 biography of de Gaulle, note that the U.S. Army’s G-2 intelligence division had told the Allied commander that the situation in Paris was worsening and that the Germans might counterattack.

“[General Omar] Bradley and his G-2 think we can and must walk in,” Eisenhower wrote to his chief of staff. And though Nordling’s emissaries didn’t reach the American commanders until August 23, de Gaulle biographer Don Cook later wrote that a diplomatic cable from Nordling had reached Eisenhower via London, predicting that a quick advance would lead to a German surrender.

On August 25, 1944—80 years ago this week—the Free French Second Armored Division rolled into Paris, with the American Fourth Infantry Division close behind. Rapturous crowds jammed the streets to greet the Allies, who encountered “15 solid miles of cheering, deliriously happy people waiting to shake your hand, to kiss you, to shower you with food and wine,” as a U.S. Army major recalled.

French and German tanks exchanged fire on the Champs-Élysées and fought around the Jardin des Tuileries. The French troops reached the nearby Hotel Meurice, where Choltitz surrendered after a short firefight. The general spent the next several hours convincing German holdouts around the city to lay down their arms. The French division liberated the capital, losing around 100 to 150 soldiers. “Is Paris burning?” Hitler ranted inside his military headquarters. It wasn’t.

That night, Parisians and American and French troops celebrated all across the city. One U.S. soldier quoted by Collins and Lapierre ended up at “a café where everything was free, the French were wild with joy, the women danced on the piano tops, [and] we all got high and kept singing the ‘Marseillaise’ even though we didn’t know the words.”

The next day, August 26, de Gaulle led a parade from the Arc de Triomphe down the Champs-Élysées. Paris was liberated—and saved.

When Choltitz died in 1966, the Associated Press called him “a central figure in saving Paris from destruction.” Eisenhower biographer Jean Edward Smith, meanwhile, wrote that “Paris was saved” by the actions of several leaders, including Choltitz, who “disobeyed the führer’s instruction to demolish the city; … de Gaulle, who steadfastly exerted every ounce of influence as president of the provisional government to save Paris; and Eisenhower, who rejected textbook military doctrine and let common sense prevail.” He added, “When confronted with the most important decision of his career to that point, [Eisenhower] made it without flinching.”