When Paris Went Dark (11 page)

The Vichy-German propaganda machine had easily introduced itself into popular Parisian culture. “Visitors” and “tourists” are not the first terms that came to mind for most Parisians, but this editorial fantasy would prevail for most of the Occupation.

French propaganda prior to the Occupation had been telling its audience for months that the Germans were undernourished, poorly armed, and uncommitted to the Nazi regime. File after file of smart-looking, cadence-stepping, evidently well-armed young men belied these canards and further undermined confidence in the leadership of the Third Republic. There were not a few Parisians relieved that they were seeing fascist rather than communist soldiers marching through their streets. The fear of another Commune of 1870, when communist cadres had briefly ruled the city, was not uncommon, and there was hope that a well-trained and well-led army, even though foreign, would keep away the threat of a leftist takeover of the city. To add to this sense of a reasserted security—one that seemed to put to rest almost overnight the residual fear of the Huns of the First World War—was the near total absence of any French military or guerrilla resistance to the invasion of Paris. There were no gunshots in the night, no sounds of careening vehicles, no insistent police sirens, no air raid warnings, and no troops running from building to building. It seemed as if Paris had literally opened its city gates to a benevolent victor and that its generosity was being repaid in kind.

Of course, there were many other citizens who were mortified at what had happened, especially among the older veterans of the Great War; tears streamed down their faces as they watched, with their medals pinned to their suit coats, a spectacle of arrogance: smug victors revealing their superiority to a befuddled and morally weak population. Thierry de Martel, one of the most prominent surgeons in France and the director of the American Hospital, killed himself and made sure his friends knew why: he could not bear the sight of German uniforms infecting Paris. There were other reported suicides. (Including,
some say, the old security guard at the Pasteur Institute, who as a boy had been the great scientist’s first rabies patient.) And, of course, most of the population of Paris was not in the city when the first troops arrived but was caught somewhere south, between the retreating French army and the advancing German one. Soon seen on the streets again were the children of those who had stayed, fascinated with the smart-looking soldiers and their shiny equipment. Stores were reopening, most victuals (except milk, which had to come from the still-war-ravaged countryside) were available; rationing had not yet been set up. The Germans set immediately to shopping—another Blitzkrieg—eager to snap up what had been rationed in their country for almost a year. Paris had become “Germanized” almost overnight, with only small incidents reminding them that they were interlopers.

Still, many Parisians felt ill at ease. Some were more aware of what was to come than others; many hoped that the worst had passed. These were the foreign immigrants who had been arriving for years in Paris from Germany and Austria, then from Czechoslovakia and Poland. They were socialists, communists, intellectuals, Jews, and other adversaries of Nazism. They were in Paris because the city had attracted them by virtue of its reputation as the European center for artistic and intellectual tolerance. French Jews, of course, were for the most part unworried, for they were French first, Jews second, and surely any French government would protect them as they would all their citizens. Nor were recently naturalized French citizens from Europe and North Africa overly concerned—after all, they were French as well. And of course a French government would protect decorated veterans despite their religion or political affiliation. However, anxiety was almost palpable in the immigrant sections of Paris, especially in the working-class quarters, where rent was affordable and where many immigrants had settled. What would happen to them should these “correct” Germans attempt to impose the rigorous limitations they had already imposed in Germany, Austria, and Poland?

The Armistice had demanded that all anti-Nazi German citizens be immediately arrested and handed over to the Occupation authorities.
Americans were unconcerned and would remain unmolested in Paris for another year and a half, until Pearl Harbor. But there were not a small number of citizens of the British Empire, still a belligerent force, caught in Paris. Archives in the Imperial War Museum in London contain several diaries and letters that offer a non-French perspective on the Occupation of Paris. One particular document details how much effort Nazi propaganda—almost instantly on the walls of Paris—forcefully and directly sought to drive a wedge between Great Britain and France. Posters reminded the French that it was the British who had executed Joan of Arc and that it was Churchill who was interested only in protecting the British Empire and not its “ally,” the loyal nation of France. “How painful it was to see our brave men so falsely represented and read such ignominious lies. No sooner were these posters put up than they were torn to pieces or covered with mud but ever to be renewed, until the day came when circumstances absolutely prevented anyone from touching them,” the diarist wrote.
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British citizens were required to go daily to the local police station and to sign a register. They could, of course, be arrested at the drop of a hat, but women were generally left alone as long as they regularly signaled their residency and kept low profiles. Once, our diarist forgot to make her daily trudge to the station; so the next day she appeared tentatively, expecting at any minute to be challenged. Unnoticed, she took the register from an inattentive clerk’s desk, retired to a bench, and signed it twice, hoping no one would notice. It worked. A daily signature meant a ration card; without one, getting food was almost impossible. Such cards were even more important than an
Ausweis,
the pass one received to move about in certain monitored areas.

Our “English civilian” also recounted that a large number of dogs and cats roamed the Parisian streets; feeding them had become an awkward burden in a time of rationing. Concierges often woke in the morning to find a basket or dustbin filled with puppies or kittens at their doorsteps, for the city’s apartment-building gatekeepers were known for their love of animals. Later, the police put out warnings that eating cat meat was not healthy because cats fed on rats, animals known for carrying deadly diseases. But upon arrival, the Nazis were more
focused on what they saw as a more immediately worrisome sort of “vermin.” As the English diarist records:

Like so many others, the diarist was staggered by the Germans’ sinister preparations. “The knowledge revealed by the Germans of the interior of flats and houses was astonishing.” This “comprehension” of a major metropolis is one of the reasons that Parisians felt so helpless, almost benumbed, in the summer of 1940. The combination of an effortless assumption of the control of Paris with the invaders’ apparently “correct” behavior, coupled with an armistice that had preserved some French honor, all worked together to make the Occupation of Paris seem embarrassingly easy both to Parisians and their new masters. Upon closer examination, we see that perhaps the vast assertion of authority lacked focus (too many entities too eager to put their units’ imprints on the newly acquired jewel), but an unmistakable message came through: as if by magic, Paris had become a suburb of Berlin.

In notes for her great novel, Irène Némirovsky took notice of how ready the French were for an end to the brief war that had devastated their country and how fed up they were with the incompetence of a failed government: “The French grew tired of the Republic as if she were an old wife. For them, the [Pétain] dictatorship [that followed] was a brief affair, adultery. But they intended to cheat on their wife,
not to kill her. Now they realize she’s dead, their Republic, their freedom. They’re mourning her.… Who will win out?”
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It would take four long—very long—years to find out.

About 6:00 a.m. on Friday, June 28, 1940, a convoy of convertible Mercedes limousines almost mockingly entered nearly abandoned Paris, zigzagging around military barriers and passing a few staring Parisian police officers and bystanders. They had come from the northeast, speeding down Avenue de Flandre, then Rue La Fayette, to their first stop, the Opéra de Paris. Adolf Hitler was tense with excitement.
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Just two weeks before this visit, Hitler’s Wehrmacht had occupied Paris almost without firing a shot, and only a week earlier, at Compiègne, he had watched as his generals signed an armistice with a sullen French military, a reversal of what had happened in the same place twenty-two years earlier. The German leader had already toured Belgium and northern France, where he had spent the youthful years he most liked to recall. He had been a battlefield runner during the last war, the soldier given the dangerous task of carrying messages between headquarters. For his courage under fire, he had been awarded the Iron Cross. In 1940, as German armies pushed southward toward France, he had established a headquarters, named Wolfsschlucht (Wolf’s Lair), in the village of Brûly-de-Pesche, near Brussels. From there, by air and by car, he revisited each of the places where he had been billeted during the Great War, and he had also toured Belgium’s capital. He had taken a leave in Brussels in 1917; using his memory of that time, he carefully planned his return as its conqueror. As he would in Paris, he stopped before the city’s great state buildings, including the mammoth Palais de Justice, testimony in stone to the excessive fantasies of a
colonial state yet fascinating to him, for it fed the visual megalomania that he was already directing toward the construction of a new, more monumental Berlin.

During this nostalgic tour through prostrate Belgium, Hitler passed through the city of Ghent. A Belgian witness describes a convoy of armored carriers, motorcyclists, and a large convertible Mercedes with a special passenger holding on to the rim of the windshield. He was “standing upright, very straight.… He looked like the ancient statues of regal, imperial figures, like, if one could admit it, a Germanic Napoleon.… A black mustache, stoutly built, rigid cap visor. Hitler is passing in front of us; I see his somber, yet passionate look, between the mustache and visor. I think of the images of Roman civilization that I found in my grandfather’s library.”
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We know from one of his companions on the trip that Hitler was not only reviewing his present success but also revisiting a reassuring past. We do not have a similar eyewitness account by a Parisian of Hitler’s visit to that city, but we can be certain that it held none of the emotional nostalgia of this one.

On the day of Hitler’s Paris tour, the city was nearly empty. Estimates agree that somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of Parisians had fled in fear of the Nazi advance, leaving the capital uncannily silent. A nervous Arno Breker, the favored sculptor, accompanied his Führer on the trip. He describes how Gestapo officers had awakened him in Munich, then rushed him by special plane to front headquarters in Belgium. Hitler had wanted someone at his side who had lived in the French capital, as Breker had while studying art in the 1920s. Breker, too, was taken aback by the city’s appearance on that early Friday morning: “Paris seemed dead. Not a soul. Groups of buildings that life seemed to have abandoned passed by, ghost-like and unreal.… As if he shared my reflections, Hitler remained silent and sullen.”
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Had the Nazi leader expected at least a modest welcome from the curious? If so, why had he come so early in the morning? Nighttime curfews did not end until early morning, around six o’clock; only the hardiest citizens or most urgently needed personnel would venture onto the streets before that time. The anticlimax of entering almost furtively the world’s best-known city must have removed some of the pleasure
derived from the conqueror’s review. Hitler must have felt a mixture of disappointment as well as awe. Rather than a vibrant metropolis, before him was vacancy and facade. Compared to his adulatory entry into Vienna in March of 1938 and his review of a triumphant parade of his army in a devastated Warsaw in November of 1939, this visit tended toward the pathetic.

Films of Hitler’s Parisian tour were shown widely in Germany immediately after the visit. Soon they were being seen in America and even Britain, but they would not appear in France until later in 1940, after the Occupation had been firmly seated. By then the message had made its impression around the globe: the Nazis were benevolently in charge of one of the “civilized” world’s most important sites. There is, in the films and photographs, a sense of entitlement, of situational arrogance. Yet one could argue that Goebbels underestimated the visual disjunction between his Führer’s brisk roll through a captured Paris and the stark emptiness of a city whose reputation had been built as much on its effervescence as its architecture.
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The visit was intended to make clear that the Germans were in command, but the visual record also showed a city turning its back on its new conqueror. For a while, the first message would dominate world opinion; later, the second vision would begin to mitigate the arrogance of this Occupation.

His may have been a
visite éclair
(lightning visit), but it had been minutely prepared and perfectly enacted. Hitler seems to have ignored any possibility of assassination during his visit, riding with apparent sangfroid in an open limousine, one that often stopped so he could stand and look around. He would leave his car at the most public places, entering through the most public doorways. The formal uniforms, the impressive limousines, the streets as if emptied for the conqueror, the easy accessibility of some of Paris’s most revered monuments, the posed photographs that implied ownership of the cityscape: all combined to project not only a strapping image of martial self-confidence but of inevitability. Still, one senses a smallness, a half-hidden tentativeness in the lonely cortege’s progress through this magnificent built environment.

In his diary from Spandau (the Berlin prison where he served his postwar incarceration), Albert Speer writes extensively about Hitler’s visual intelligence: “[His] passion for the theater,… [his] amazing knowledge of stage-craft and especially different lighting techniques” had enthralled his entourage.
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Whenever he attended a theatrical or operatic production, he first analyzed, then criticized, the stage setting and the lighting before commenting on the actors or musicians. Performance was at the heart of Nazi self-projection, and it would be an essential part of the Occupation. So it made sense that the group’s first stop was at the Palais Garnier, site of the Opéra de Paris, constructed between 1861 and 1875. This beautiful building sits regally in the midst of the 9th arrondissement, near the center of the city. Then as now, this Right Bank neighborhood is the site of some of Paris’s most elegant department stores and borders the city’s wealthiest sections—where many German bureaucrats and officers were already finding luxurious lodging. The opera house is positioned at the head of the Avenue de l’Opéra, one of the best-known boulevards of Paris. Slicing through packed neighborhoods when it was built by Haussmann’s engineers in the late nineteenth century, the broad thoroughfare was repeatedly and imaginatively painted by such artists as Pissarro, Monet, and Caillebotte, each trying to capture on canvas a newer, modernized city. The only major avenue in Paris not bordered by trees, it was specially constructed to draw attention to the Opéra building itself and, as one looks southward, to tie this new building with the massive Louvre on the Seine. Hitler could not have chosen a more typically monumental site as his first stop.

Approximate route of Hitler’s tour

The tour continues.
(United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Films show Hitler quickly leaving his car and climbing purposefully the stairs of the imposingly baroque building, as if it alone had been the sole reason for his visit. His entourage was impressed at how intimately familiar he was with the structure, inside and out. (The German leader knew so well this great temple to opera, built by the architect Charles Garnier, that he claimed to have no use for the French guide who had been assigned to welcome him.) He wondered at the edifice’s spacious interior and its neo-baroque decoration; he remarked in detail on its public and private spaces, even noticing that a small alcove that he
remembered from his study of blueprints had been removed. He stayed at the Opéra longer than he stayed anywhere else on his tour; the newsreels of this visit emphasize a connoisseur carefully examining an architectural masterpiece, one dedicated to the mannered, neo-baroque art of the late nineteenth century.

Happy Easter from the Paris Opera House.
(Editions Granger / Collection Claude Giasone)

Why did Europe’s most celebrated opera house so enthrall a military conqueror? Goebbels and his cultural machinery had made National Socialism into a spectacle—indeed, its ethical mandate demanded an imposition of visual order to heal a disordered world. This meant stunning uniforms, grand parades, intricately designed mass rallies, nighttime events, and a generally brilliant use of lighting and music to accompany these performances. It also meant that special attention was paid to the particular militaristic and traditional tastes of the youngest and the oldest of German citizens. Yet Hitler’s visit also reminds us of how much of Nazi art was kitsch—that is, a cheapened, unironic appropriation of traditional aesthetic forms for mass consumption. Kitsch plays exclusively to the emotions; it is a hollowed-out,
sentimental expression, not an intellectual one. Garnier’s opera house was the final visually extravagant monument of Napoleon III’s own kitschy reign—baroque-like statuary and decoration, gilt everywhere, massive stairways leading to red velvet seats and boxes—thus it was in sync with the Nazi attempt to revive dated architectural and artistic traditions. Having organized the devastatingly pejorative show of the
entartete Kunst
(degenerate arts) in Munich in 1937, which derided jazz, cubism, Bauhaus, and other modernist expressions, Hitler had already imposed on German society a Nazi “modernism,” one whose antecedents he was especially eager to find in Paris. He did not begin his tour at the Louvre (which anyway had been emptied of many of its treasures in anticipation of his army’s “visit”) but rather at this site, where his knowledge of architectural history and his belief in the transformative power of the performing arts—vocal, physical, theatrical—could be admired. The great opera houses of Europe were, for this upstart bourgeois, the locus of “nondegenerate” artistic expression.

Hitler’s love for nineteenth-century opera is well known, and his passion for Wagner continues to mark that genius’s reputation. (It seems that the German people, who preferred Verdi and Mozart, did not share widely this Wagnerophilia.) Opera, an opulent combination of several forms of art, was to be used by the Nazis to inculcate a “popular” culture, one that did what many of the public performances of party events themselves did: create a cohesive and seduced multitude riveted by imposed taste. According to a historian of Nazi aesthetics, Hitler believed fervently that “a community [should] regard its opera house as an object of civic pride.… ‘An opera house is the standard by which the culture of a city or civilization is measured,’ was how he once put it to Speer.”
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Hitler’s obsession with opera houses even affected his war aims: