Paris in World War II
Paris was liberated on the 25th of August 1944, after four years under German control. The next evening, General Charles de Gaulle stood before a crowd at the Hôtel de Ville. He called out, "Paris! Paris humiliated! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But now Paris liberated!" Those four words, humiliated, broken, martyred, liberated, frame years most Parisians spent the rest of their lives trying to explain. This is the story of what filled those years. A curfew put the city to sleep every night at nine. Neighbors had to decide, in ways small and large, which side of the occupation they were really on. Some of those choices protected strangers. Others sent people to their deaths. What made a city built on light spend four years going dark? And what finally brought its own residents into the streets to take their city back?
On the 2nd of February 1939, Paris ran its first civil defense exercise. City workers began digging 20 kilometers of trenches through the squares and parks to serve as bomb shelters. Gas masks reached civilians on the 10th of March, and by the 19th, signs pointed Parisians toward the nearest shelter. On the 23rd of August, Parisians were startled to learn of a new pact. German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet minister Vyacheslav Molotov had signed a non-aggression agreement. The French Communist Party paper L'Humanité welcomed it, sending "warmest greetings" to "the country of socialism" and its leader Stalin. Police seized the paper and suspended its publication. On the 31st of August, the government evacuated 30,000 children to the countryside and switched off the city's street lights. News that Germany had invaded Poland reached Paris on the 1st of September, and France declared war. The fighting that followed felt distant for eight months, a lull the French called the Phoney War. That ended on the 10th of May 1940, when the Germans bypassed the Maginot Line through the Ardennes forest. By the 15th, panzer divisions stood just 35 kilometers from Laon, racing for the English Channel. Britain began pulling its army off the beaches at Dunkirk on the 28th. On the 3rd of June, German bombers hit Paris and its suburbs for the first time, aiming at the Citroën factory. The raid killed 254 people, 195 of them civilians. Prime Minister Paul Reynaud fired his military commander, Maurice Gamelin, and replaced him with the 73 year old Maxime Weygand. He named the 84 year old World War I hero Philippe Pétain as his deputy. Neither man believed the war could still be won. By the 8th of June, distant artillery was audible in the capital, and trains left Gare d'Austerlitz with no announced destination. The government fled to Tours and then Bordeaux on the 10th. Parisians followed by the thousands, in cars, buses, carts and on foot. The resulting column took ten hours to cover 30 kilometers. The working class 14th arrondissement emptied from 178,000 residents to 49,000. The British urged a defense of the city street by street. Pétain refused. "To make Paris into a city of ruins will not affect the issue," he said. The government declared Paris an open city on the 12th of June. At 5:30 in the morning on the 14th, German troops entered at the Porte de La Villette. By evening a swastika flag flew from the Arc de Triomphe. Officers marched a band down the Champs-Élysées for the newsreel cameras. Reynaud resigned on the evening of the 16th of June, and General de Gaulle flew from Bordeaux to London the next morning. At midday, Parisians gathered around radios to hear Pétain, the new head of government. "It is with a heavy heart that I tell you today that we must cease hostilities," he said. "The fighting must stop." No armistice had yet been signed, but the French army simply stopped. On the 24th of June, Adolf Hitler made his only visit to the city, touring by car with sculptor Arno Breker and architect Albert Speer. He viewed the Eiffel Tower from the Palais de Chaillot and paid homage at Napoleon's tomb. Then the occupation settled into its long, gray routine.
On the 27th of August 1939, workmen began taking down the stained glass windows of the Sainte-Chapelle in anticipation of air raids. That same day, curators at the Louvre, called back from their summer holidays, started crating the museum's major works. Packers from the nearby La Samaritaine and Bazar de l'Hôtel de Ville department stores helped them. Each crate was labeled only with a number, to disguise its contents. The Winged Victory of Samothrace was wheeled down a wooden ramp built over the museum's grand staircase. It was trucked to the Château de Valençay in the Indre. Vehicles normally used to move Comédie-Française scenery carried the larger canvases, including Géricault's Raft of the Medusa. They traveled in blacked-out convoys bound for châteaux across the Loire Valley. A darker story began on the 30th of June 1940, when Hitler ordered that all art in France, public and private, be "safeguarded." The Gestapo began raiding bank vaults and the empty homes of Jewish families who had fled the country. A new law simply canceled their citizenship. Pieces from the fifteen largest Jewish-owned galleries in Paris were seized and hauled away in French police vans. A new Nazi unit, the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce, set up shop in September at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume. It eventually catalogued 218 major collections there. Hermann Göring toured the Jeu de Paume repeatedly, personally choosing 27 paintings. They included works by Rembrandt and Van Dyck taken from Edouard de Rothschild, along with stained glass and furniture bound for his hunting lodge, Carinhall. A Rothschild-owned Vermeer, The Astronomer, was set aside for Hitler himself. Between April 1941 and July 1944, 4,174 crates filling 138 boxcars left Paris for Germany. Much of it, though not all, came home after the war. Pablo Picasso spent most of 1939 in a villa near Bordeaux, before returning to his studio on Rue des Grands-Augustins. He handed out postcards of his anti-fascist painting Guernica to curious German visitors, including the writer Ernst Jünger. Though the Nazis officially condemned his work as "degenerate," his paintings kept selling at the Hôtel Drouot auction house. When German officials searched his bank vault hunting for Jewish-owned art, Picasso confused them about ownership so thoroughly that they left empty-handed. He even persuaded them that Georges Braque's paintings in the next vault belonged to him. Braque himself had returned to Paris in the autumn of 1940 and quietly kept working. Henri Matisse, sending drawings up from Nice, and Wassily Kandinsky faced the same official condemnation but still sold through the back rooms of Paris galleries. The writer Colette, 67 when the war began, worked on her memoirs at her apartment beside the Palais-Royal gardens. The Gestapo arrested her Jewish husband, Maurice Goudeket, in December 1941, but he was freed within months. In 1944 she published Gigi. The singer Maurice Chevalier debuted a revue at the Casino de Paris in 1941. He refused a Nazi invitation to perform in Berlin. He did sing for French prisoners of war, though, and won the release of ten of them in exchange. Jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt kept playing with the Quintette du Hot Club de France. The actress Arletty, star of Les Enfants du paradis, took a Luftwaffe officer as a lover. Afterward she told an interrogator from the French Forces of the Interior, "My heart is French, but my a-- is international." Jewish performers were barred from the stage entirely. The actor Robert-Hugues Lambert was deported and murdered at the Flossenbürg camp on the 7th of March 1945. It was most likely over his relationship with a German officer he refused to name.
The German high command moved its headquarters into the Majestic Hotel on Avenue Kléber once the occupation began. Military intelligence, the Abwehr, took the Hôtel Lutetia. The Luftwaffe claimed the Ritz. The navy took the Hôtel de la Marine on the Place de la Concorde. The German commandant of Paris settled into the Hôtel Meurice on Rue de Rivoli. Under the slogan "Jeder einmal in Paris," every German soldier was promised at least one visit to the city. A guidebook for them, Der deutsche Wegleiter für Paris, appeared within a month of the occupation's start. A dedicated soldiers' newspaper, the Pariser Zeitung, followed. Officers dined at the Ritz, Maxim's and the Coupole, favored by an exchange rate fixed in Germany's interest. Brothels across the city adjusted to a new clientele. The SS counter-intelligence branch, the Sicherheitsdienst, set up at 84 Avenue Foch. Its French auxiliaries, nicknamed the Carlingue, worked out of 93 Rue Lauriston in the 16th arrondissement from 1941 to 1944. A corrupt former policeman named Pierre Bonny founded the group. It later passed to two career criminals, Henri Lafont and Pierre Loutrel. On the 2nd of September 1941, every magistrate in Paris was ordered to swear allegiance to Pétain. Only one, Paul Didier, refused. The surrender document had placed the capital under direct German military authority rather than Pétain's Vichy government. It instructed French officials to "collaborate with those in a correct manner." In February 1943, the Germans backed the creation of a French fascist paramilitary force, the Milice. It set up headquarters on Rue Le Peletier and turned the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand into barracks. When Paris fell in August 1944, most of its members fled toward Germany rather than face what awaited them at home.
By the 1st of January 1941, the city's population had climbed back to 2.5 million. The two-thirds who had fled in the Exodus of May 1940 gradually returned. It fell again in early 1943. Allied air raids, arrests of Jews and foreigners, and a forced factory labor draft pulled residents away once more. That draft was known as the Service du travail obligatoire. Feeding those who remained fell to a new Ministry of Agriculture and Supply, created on the 16th of June 1940. It began rationing bread, fat, rice and sugar by August. It steadily added butter, meat and coffee, then chocolate and wine, as the war ground on. A bureaucracy of more than 9,000 city employees ran the coupon system from offices in every arrondissement, though promised goods routinely failed to appear. Leather vanished into army boots, replaced by shoes with wooden soles, while ersatz coffee brewed from chicory stood in for the real thing. A historian who lived through the occupation described paying 500 francs for a pork chop hidden under cabbage at a restaurant on Rue Dauphine. It came without the required tickets, alongside a liter of Beaujolais and real coffee. Sometimes it was served within earshot of Picasso, listening to the BBC at the next table. Coal for heating stayed scarce enough that normal supplies were not restored until 1949. The number of cars on Paris streets fell from 350,000 before the war to under 4,500. One café customer on the Place de la Bourse counted only three cars passing in half an hour. Of roughly 3,500 buses running in 1939, just 500 remained by autumn 1940, and a used bicycle came to cost a month's salary. Gasoline stayed scarce for years after the liberation too, long after the ration cards themselves disappeared.
On the 18th of October 1940, German authorities barred Jews in Paris from the professions. They seized Jewish property under a decree called the Ordonnance d'aryanisation. Adolf Eichmann, head of the Gestapo's anti-Jewish section, gave the secret order for mass deportation on the 23rd of May 1942. On the 29th, every Jew over six in the occupied zone was ordered to wear the yellow Star of David. On the 16th and the 17th of July that year, French police rounded up 13,152 Jews, acting on German orders. Among them were 4,115 children, 5,919 women and 3,118 men. Families were herded into the Vélodrome d'Hiver stadium and held there for five days. The summer heat was intense, and there was almost no food, water or sanitation. From there they were sent onward to Drancy and other camps, way stations to Auschwitz. The Germans had readied trains for 32,000 people and counted the roundup a failure. Arrests continued through 1943 and 1944. By the time of the liberation, an estimated 43,000 Jews from the Paris region had been deported, roughly half the community. About 34,000 of them were murdered. The Reich Security Main Office's Special Brigades operated under the Paris police prefecture. They hunted resistance fighters, Allied agents and Jews alike, and routinely tortured the prisoners they captured.
On the 18th of June 1940, Parisians listening to the BBC caught a broadcast from London. It came from an obscure French brigadier general named Charles de Gaulle, appealing for continued resistance. Few heard it live, but it circulated widely afterward. On the 11th of November, the anniversary of the World War I armistice, some 20,000 Paris students defied a German ban on commemoration. They gathered at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. By evening, 3,000 remained, chanting slogans. German soldiers charged them with fixed bayonets, firing shots into the air and arresting 123. A day earlier, a 28 year old engineer named Jacques Bonsergent had been arrested after a scuffle with German soldiers. He refused to name his friends, was tried, and was shot by firing squad on the 23rd of December. He was the first French civilian executed for resisting the occupation. A Paris metro station later took his name. That autumn, scholars connected to the Musée de l'Homme formed the city's first significant resistance network. It was led by the Russian-born anthropologist Boris Vildé. They published an underground newspaper, Résistance, promising "to recreate France, pure and free." Amateurs at conspiracy, they were arrested in January 1941. Vildé and six others were executed by firing squad at Fort Mont Valérien on the 22nd of February 1942. Students meanwhile chalked the letter V for victory across the city. The Germans tried to co-opt the campaign, hanging their own giant Vs on the Eiffel Tower, but it had little effect. Communists stayed on the sidelines until Germany invaded the Soviet Union on the 22nd of June 1941. Two months later, a 21 year old militant using the name "Fabien" shot a German naval officer at the Barbés-Rochechouart metro station. The Germans executed three hostages in immediate reprisal, and 20 more within the month. Hitler then demanded a hundred deaths for every German killed, and 48 hostages were shot after the next attack. An estimated 1,400 hostages were eventually taken from the Paris region, and 981 were executed at Fort Mont Valérien. As 1944 approached, the communist-aligned Francs-Tireurs et Partisans grew into the largest, best armed resistance force in the city. In February it folded into the wider Forces françaises de l'intérieur, which would soon rise against the occupiers.
By the middle of August 1944, the occupation was already unraveling. Half of the region's 80,000 railroad workers struck on the 10th. The Paris police followed on the 15th, after learning their suburban colleagues were being disarmed. On the 19th, the National Council of the Resistance called for an uprising. It was commanded by the communist-aligned colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy, from a bunker 26 meters beneath the Lion de Belfort statue. A thousand Paris policemen joined in and seized the Prefecture of Police. Against roughly 20,000 German troops with 80 tanks, the Resistance could field about 20,000 fighters armed with only 60 handguns. The Allies had originally planned to bypass Paris entirely. When word of the uprising reached them, Generals Eisenhower and Bradley diverted General Leclerc's French 2nd Armored Division toward the city. It set out on the 23rd with 16,000 men, 4,200 vehicles and 200 tanks. That evening, an advance column under Captain Dronne reached the Hôtel de Ville. The main force entered two days later, and after fighting near Les Invalides, a French tricolor rose over the Eiffel Tower. German commander Dietrich von Choltitz had been ordered by Hitler to leave the city "a heap of burning ruins." Instead, through the Swedish consul general Raoul Nordling, he arranged a truce. That afternoon he signed the surrender with Leclerc, in the billiards room of the Montparnasse train station. About 2,000 Parisians died in the fighting for their own capital, along with roughly 800 resistance fighters and police and more than 100 Allied soldiers. The reckoning that followed was swift. Women accused of relationships with German soldiers had their heads shaved in public. The designer Coco Chanel, who had lived with a German officer, quietly left the country for years. Of 9,969 people arrested for collaboration in the Seine department, 8,335 were found guilty. 598 were sentenced to death, though only 116 were actually executed. Doctor Marcel Petiot had posed as a resistance operative smuggling Jews to Argentina, while murdering his clients for their valuables. He was finally tried in 1946 and guillotined on the 25th of May that year. The treasure he had promised his victims was never found, even after his house was demolished in 1966. On the 29th of April and the 13th of May 1945, Paris held its first municipal elections since the war began. For the first time in the city's history, French women cast a vote.
Common questions
When did Germany occupy Paris in World War II?
German troops entered Paris at 5:30 in the morning on the 14th of June 1940, after the French government had declared it an open city two days earlier. The occupation lasted until the city's liberation on the 25th of August 1944.
Who liberated Paris from German occupation in World War II?
General Leclerc's French 2nd Armored Division, supported by the American 4th Infantry Division, entered Paris on the 25th of August 1944 alongside the local Resistance uprising. German commander Dietrich von Choltitz surrendered to Leclerc that afternoon at the Montparnasse train station.
Why did France declare Paris an open city instead of defending it in 1940?
The French government declared Paris an open city on the 12th of June 1940 to spare it from street fighting. Marshal Philippe Pétain rejected British calls to defend the capital, saying, "To make Paris into a city of ruins will not affect the issue."
What happened to the Jews of Paris during the German occupation?
Jews in Paris were forced to wear the yellow Star of David from the 29th of May 1942 and were barred from many professions and public places. On the 16th and the 17th of July 1942, French police rounded up 13,152 Jews, including 4,115 children, and by the liberation about 43,000 Paris-region Jews had been deported and roughly 34,000 murdered.
What was daily life like in Paris under German occupation?
Parisians lived under a nightly curfew and strict rationing of food, coal, tobacco and clothing that grew worse each year. The number of cars on Paris streets fell from 350,000 before the war to under 4,500, and a thriving black market sprang up to supply what rationing could not.
How were French collaborators punished after the liberation of Paris?
In the Seine department, 9,969 people were arrested for collaboration, of whom 8,335 were found guilty and 598 were sentenced to death, though only 116 were actually executed. Women accused of relationships with German soldiers had their heads shaved in public as a separate, informal punishment.
All sources
10 references cited across the entry
- 1Deutsche Wehrmacht - Parade über die avenue fochDeustche Volksunion — 28 February 2012
- 2Le Guide du soldat allemand à Paris, ou comment occuper FritzEmmanuel Hetch — October 2013
- 3Marx Myths & Legends: Maximilien RubelMarxist Internet Archive
- 6BookThe City of DeathKing, David — Crown — 2011
- 7NewsDepth of French police collaboration with Nazis revealed19 September 2018
- 9Flouret Marcel PierreCour des Comptes