The Germans enter Paris

Early on the morning of Friday 14 June 1940 the first units of the German Eighteenth Army marched into Paris. The French capital, declared an open city a few days earlier, surrendered without a single shot. The government had left it four days before, and at least two-thirds of its inhabitants had followed. The Germans found empty streets, shuttered shops and deserted apartment blocks. Before noon swastika flags were flying over the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, and German infantry marched down the Champs-Élysées. The city that the Germans had failed to take in 1914–1918 despite four years of fighting fell after a campaign of less than five weeks. The occupation of Paris lasted more than four years, until August 1944.

The battle for the Weygand Line

After the end of the Dunkirk evacuation on 4 June, France stood alone on the Continent. In the battle in Flanders she had lost her best armies, almost all the equipment of the British Expeditionary Force had been left on the beaches, and Belgium and the Netherlands had capitulated. The Commander-in-Chief, General Maxime Weygand, who had replaced Gamelin in May, built a new defensive line from the mouth of the Somme along that river, the Crozat Canal, the Ailette and the Aisne as far as the Maginot Line. He had at his disposal some 60 divisions, most of them under strength or already once shattered, along with the British 51st (Highland) Infantry Division and the remnants of the British armoured units. Against them the Germans fielded more than 130 divisions, including all ten panzer divisions, and the Luftwaffe ruled the skies. On 3 June its bombers attacked airfields and factories around Paris in Operation Paula, and more than two hundred people, most of them civilians, were killed in the city and its suburbs.

Weygand knew he did not have the strength for a continuous front. He therefore ordered villages, woods and crossroads to be held as self-contained strongpoints, so-called “hedgehogs”, which were to fight on even when surrounded, let the tanks pass and cut them off from the infantry following behind. French soldiers had learned from the defeats of May and had learned how to fight tanks, and the artillery, regarded as excellent even by the Germans, shot accurately. In his order of the day of 5 June Weygand wrote that the “last quarter of an hour” had come and called on his soldiers to hold their ground with no thought of retreat.

At dawn on 5 June Colonel General Fedor von Bock’s Army Group B attacked on the Somme and the Ailette. Thus began the second phase of the campaign, called Case Red (“Fall Rot”) in the German plans. The first days cost the attackers heavily. General Ewald von Kleist’s panzer group, attacking from the bridgeheads at Amiens and Péronne, could not break through the French defences for two days, and German reports spoke of “hard and costly” fighting against an enemy who defended himself fiercely in woods and copses even after German units had bypassed him. On the western flank, however, between Abbeville and Amiens, the French front gave way as early as 7 June. General Hermann Hoth’s panzer corps, with General Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division, reached the Seine at Rouen in two days, then turned towards the sea and on 12 June accepted the surrender of the Scots and the French at Saint-Valery-en-Caux. The French Tenth Army, cut in two, fell back behind the Seine.

On 9 June Colonel General Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group A went over to the attack on the Aisne. Here too the first attempts to cross the river near Rethel failed, but after two days General Heinz Guderian’s panzer divisions broke out onto the open plains of Champagne and drove south, towards the Marne and on towards the Swiss border, into the rear of the Maginot Line. In these days Polish units in France also went into action: from 13 June Brigadier General Stanisław Maczek’s 10th Armoured Cavalry Brigade fought in Champagne, while in Lorraine Brigadier General Bolesław Bronisław Duch’s 1st Grenadier Division was preparing for battle.

The decision: Paris will not be defended

On the Paris sector Bock was faced by the French Seventh Army, while in the capital itself and around it stood General Pierre Héring, the military governor of Paris, who from 8 June also commanded the hastily formed Army of Paris. Under pressure from the north and with the front broken on both flanks, on 10 June the government left Paris and moved to the Loire, to the area around Tours. That same day Italy declared war on France and Britain. Most of the ministries, embassies and newspaper offices left Paris. Remaining in the city were the Prefect of Police, Roger Langeron, the Prefect of the Seine department and the United States Ambassador, William Bullitt, who refused to leave with the government, judging that his presence might be of use to the population.

The question of whether to defend the capital was settled within a few days. The British urged the French to fight for every street, since the defence of a great city might tie down German forces for a long time. The Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, and some of his ministers held a similar view. Marshal Philippe Pétain replied that turning Paris into ruins would change nothing, and Weygand saw no sense in a fight that would destroy the city without offering any hope of reversing the course of the battle. All of them had before their eyes the destruction of Warsaw in September 1939 and of Rotterdam in May 1940. On 11 June Weygand decided that Paris would not be defended, and on 12 June, when he issued the order for a general retreat, this was officially announced. Héring withdrew his troops southwards behind the Loire, and on 13 June his place as military governor of Paris was taken by his deputy, General Henri Dentz – with only one task: to hand the city over to the enemy in such a way as to avoid fighting and casualties.

The date of the German entry is not in doubt. The date on which Paris was declared an open city is given variously in different sources: 10, 11, 12 or 13 June, depending on whether they mean the first discussions, Weygand’s decision, the official communiqué or the posters put up in the city. According to French studies, Weygand took the decision on 11 June and it was announced the following day.

The talks at Écouen

By 13 June German units were already in the northern suburbs. According to accounts from those days, German envoys who tried to make their way into the city were fired on by French colonial troops who did not know of the high command’s decision, and had to turn back. The Germans then threatened that if the city did not send a delegation it would be treated as a defended fortress. Early on the morning of 14 June two officers from Dentz’s staff, Major Devouges and Lieutenant Holtzer, who accompanied him as interpreter, drove through Sarcelles to the château at Écouen, where the German headquarters was located. They were received by Lieutenant Colonel Hans Speidel, later chief of staff to the German military commander in France.

The terms were simple. French troops were to cease resistance throughout the area around the capital – according to accounts, within a ring of towns from Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Versailles to Juvisy, Saint-Maur and Meaux – and the French authorities were to maintain order and keep the waterworks, power stations and municipal services running until the Germans took them over. The inhabitants were to stay in their homes. The French officers accepted the terms, having in any case no room for manoeuvre. The dispute concerned mainly the boundaries of the zone in which the French were to lay down their arms.

The Germans march in

At around 5.30 a.m. on 14 June the first German units entered the city through the Porte de la Villette in the north-east and headed for the centre along the rue de Flandre. Behind them further columns came in through other gates and, following a set plan, occupied the main crossroads, bridges and public buildings. According to most studies, the first unit into Paris was General Bogislav von Studnitz’s 87th Infantry Division. Its commander became the first German commandant of the city and set up his headquarters in the Hôtel de Crillon on the Place de la Concorde. Loudspeaker cars drove through the streets, calling on the inhabitants in French not to leave their homes and warning that any act of hostility would be severely punished. That same day German officers presented themselves at Les Invalides, the seat of the military governor, and at the Prefecture of Police. Politely but firmly, they informed Dentz and Langeron that from then on they were to carry out the orders of the occupation authorities.

From the very first hours the occupiers made it plain who was master of the city. The tricolours on the ministries, the National Assembly and the Senate were replaced by swastika flags. A huge Reich flag was hung from the Arc de Triomphe, above the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. German soldiers had to climb the Eiffel Tower by the stairs, because the French had disabled the lifts by cutting the cables. The tricolour had been taken down from the tower on 13 June by a Frenchman, Lucien Sarniguet, who four years later, in August 1944, tried to raise it there again. According to a popular account, the first German swastika war ensign was so large that within a few hours the wind tore it away and it had to be replaced with a smaller one. The lifts were not put back into service until 1946.

In the afternoon the first parade of German infantry, with a band, took place beneath the Arc de Triomphe and along the Champs-Élysées, staged above all for newsreel cameramen and the photographers of the propaganda companies. The salute was taken by Bock, who arrived in the conquered city that day and then toured it by car. German parades on the Champs-Élysées and the Avenue Foch were repeated almost daily for many weeks afterwards. Photographs of soldiers marching beneath the Arc de Triomphe went round the world and remain to this day one of the best-known symbols of France’s defeat.

The occupation authorities at once imposed a curfew from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. and put the clocks forward an hour to Berlin time. The inhabitants had to hand in their weapons and soon their short-wave radio sets as well. German soldiers received strict orders to behave correctly towards the population, and posters appeared on the walls urging the French to “trust the German soldier”. Parisians who had stayed in the city noted with astonishment that the occupiers, most of them young, paid for their purchases, photographed the sights and asked the way. Behind this courtesy, however, lay a calculated policy. The Germans wanted quiet in the rear, a swift restart of the economy for their own needs, and to show the world that civilised France had nothing to fear.

An empty city

The Paris the Germans found was a depopulated city. From mid-May crowds of refugees from Belgium and northern France had been passing through the capital, and after 10 June, when the government left, Parisians themselves took flight. French historians estimate that about two-thirds of the inhabitants left the city – of nearly three million about one million remained, and according to some accounts fewer, most of them elderly, poor, or people whose duties did not allow them to leave. At the railway stations there were fights for places on the trains, to which goods wagons were eventually added. The roads south were jammed with cars, horse-drawn carts, bicycles and people on foot pushing handcarts piled with their belongings. The French exode, the great flight of the population in May and June 1940, involved, according to various estimates, between six and ten million people. The columns of refugees, strafed and bombed from the air, became mixed up with the retreating troops and paralysed movement behind the front.

For many of those who stayed, 14 June was a day of mourning. That day Thierry de Martel, an eminent surgeon, one of the founders of French neurosurgery and a veteran of the previous war, took his own life in his flat in the rue Weber. For many French people the news of his death became a symbol of the despair of those days. At the city gates and in the deserted districts there reigned a silence that witnesses remembered more vividly than the tramp of German boots.

The fall of Paris did not yet mean the end of the campaign. That same day the French government was moving from Tours to Bordeaux, and within it the dispute continued over whether to fight on from the colonial empire or to ask for an armistice. Weygand and Pétain already regarded the war as lost. On 14 June Army Group C attacked the Maginot Line in the Saar, and Guderian’s divisions were approaching the Swiss border, closing a ring around the French troops in Lorraine and Alsace.

Significance

The capture of Paris sealed the outcome of the French campaign, although in military terms it was a consequence of defeat rather than its cause. The loss of the capital – the seat of the government and the authorities and the country’s most important communications hub – combined with the breaching of the Weygand Line, robbed the French of their last hope. Within the next few days Reynaud resigned, and on 17 June Pétain’s new government asked the Germans for terms for an armistice, which was signed on 22 June in the forest near Compiègne. Paris lay in the occupied zone, and in the summer the government moved not to the capital but to the spa town of Vichy. To the world, the image of German soldiers beneath the Arc de Triomphe meant that one of Europe’s two great democracies, a power regarded until recently as the foremost military power on the Continent, had ceased to count in the war. Winston Churchill’s Britain was left alone.

For Hitler the capture of Paris was a personal triumph and revenge for 1918. Early on the morning of Sunday 23 June (some earlier accounts give the date as 28 June) Adolf Hitler flew into Le Bourget airfield and, accompanied by the architects Albert Speer and Hermann Giesler and the sculptor Arno Breker, toured the capital – still empty at dawn – in about three hours. He visited the Opéra Garnier, was photographed on the terrace of the Trocadéro against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower, stood for a long time over Napoleon’s tomb in the Dôme des Invalides (PL) and ended at Montmartre. It was his only visit to Paris.

The occupation of the capital lasted more than four years. Paris became the seat of the German military command in France, a centre of collaboration and of the looting of works of art, the scene of round-ups of Jews – above all the Vel’ d’Hiv round-up of July 1942 – and of the execution of hostages, but also of Resistance conspiracy. It ended with the Paris uprising and the entry of French and American troops on 25 August 1944. The German commandant of the city, General Dietrich von Choltitz, did not then carry out Hitler’s order to leave it in ashes. The decision of June 1940 not to defend Paris saved the city from the fate of Warsaw, but for four years made it the Third Reich’s greatest prize in the West.