When Paris Went Dark (8 page)

Thus did France begin its collaboration with the regime that had defeated it.

In mid-June of 1940, the German army arrived before Paris, exuberant but stunned. They could see in the distance the Eiffel Tower, standing as confidently over the world’s most recognized cityscape as when it had first appeared there just fifty-one years earlier. The Wehrmacht had been almost as surprised as the French at the ease of their foray into the Low Countries and France. Their victory had not been a foregone conclusion. Hindsight has given us a quite benign view of what the Allies and Germans expected in 1940: “The campaign was won so swiftly and decisively that, retrospectively, both sides came to view its outcome as inevitable.”
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More imaginative and forceful leadership on behalf of the Allies could well have stymied even the panzer-led Blitzkrieg the Germans had so brilliantly planned. The Battle of France could have bogged down in the same area as it had in the First World War, and Germany could have been quickly bled and spent to death before realizing its aims. But luck and Allied pusillanimity made Hitler into a military genius, and now another German army was ready to occupy, this time for years, the capital of France.

Just a generation before, the Kaiser’s troops had lost major battles in their attempt to take the city. Still, the Germans were a bit abashed at
their new responsibility as occupiers: “The German generals, of whom many had fought in the First World War, had psychological difficulty in realizing the depth, and especially the rapidity of their victory [over the French Army].” One young lieutenant wrote home: “My thoughts are turning in on themselves. My mind truly wants to understand. We are the victors. But our heart is not yet ready to seize the immensity of this fact, all the grandeur of these events, the full significance of our victory. We talk about it amongst ourselves, we try to understand it, but without success.”
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The fact of their victory was in effect more intimidating than had been the armed forces of their enemy.

There had been almost no French military defense of Paris, so there had been no excuse for the Wehrmacht to hesitate in driving right into the prize. But an awkward lull had briefly prevailed. Waiting outside the city on June 13, a day before his army would formally enter it, one young lieutenant was impatient. Asked to make plans for his battalion’s quarters when they entered the capital, he borrowed a BMW motorcycle, and using the Byzantine dome of the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur as his guide, drove straight into Montmartre, on the city’s northern edge. The streets, he felt, were strangely empty, but when he stopped in the neighborhood’s most famous plaza, the Place du Tertre, a crowd instantly gathered. They were looking at their first German soldier—who suddenly lost his earlier exuberance. Turning around, he sped back behind his lines to safety.

Because French authorities had devised few sensible plans about how to protect against the military capture of Paris, they had been forced to resort at the last minute to the open-city strategy. Had Parisians fought to defend their capital street by street, at least for a while, the sense of helplessness, despair, and humiliation that they would feel for years might have been somewhat mitigated. Many of the eyewitness accounts we have from the first Germans to enter the city underline both their surprise at the ease of occupying the world’s best-known capital and their pleasure at being able to enjoy its advantages from day one.

Not one shot had been fired in the city’s defense. Now Teutons were riding brazenly through the streets of the City of Light for the first time since 1870, with plans to stay much longer. Their own curiosity
was manifest in every action they took: How should we treat the occupants of a city that had not lifted a finger against us? Later in the day, when regular army formations began to roll more confidently down the city’s grand boulevards, Wehrmacht soldiers expressed consternation, even derision, at the many smiling, waving French: Don’t they have any pride? But the French were amazed—and relieved—at the handsome, “correct,” and well-behaved German ranks. To some, they almost seemed to have deserved victory over the poorly led and poorly trained French army.

That first morning, Roger Langeron’s assistant informed him that two official German army automobiles had driven up to the Préfecture. Four officers had gotten out and walked calmly into the reception area, where they made a polite request to speak with the police chief. Langeron had been waiting for some sort of official communiqué since news had reached him earlier that German patrols had entered the city proper. They had taken up positions throughout Paris, but no official contact between his administration and the conquering army had yet occurred. When the young German officers arrived in his office, they were almost deferential, he thought, too young to have fought in the Great War and thus too green to understand the enormous symbolism of their victory over the French. The present German army was filled with men born during the last war or right after—youth who had been brought up on hatred for the way the French had treated their fathers in defeat and anger at the occupation of the Rhineland in the 1920s. Langeron also wondered if these officers might be from the German provinces rather than from a large city, for they seemed uncomfortable in the nerve center of Paris. The Germans politely requested that Langeron appear at the Hôtel de Crillon, their temporary headquarters on the Place de la Concorde, at 11:00 that morning to meet the general in command of the army that was supervising the Occupation. Finally, Langeron thought, he would receive instructions on protocol and his legal responsibilities. The Germans would tell him what the French military command of Paris could—or would—not do.

Reports had continued to arrive at the Préfecture that German
troops and vehicles, both logistical and armed, were entering Paris from the north and northeast. Strangely enough, horses and mules pulled much of the materiel. The wagons had pneumatic tires, but Parisian observers were startled and not a little amused by the disjunction between the reputation of the highly mechanized Wehrmacht, with its notorious panzer divisions, and this nineteenth-century mode of transport. The city remained quiescent; the citizens who had not left stayed inside, shutters closed. German foot and motorcycle patrols were traversing the city, from the Boulevard Saint-Michel on the Left Bank to the Avenue des Champs-Élysées on the Right Bank. Advance units of Germans were lowering French flags from official buildings and replacing them with a striking red flag bearing a black swastika inside a white circle. (Purported French sabotage of the Eiffel Tower’s elevators meant that the Nazi flag had to be carried up the one-thousand-foot monument on booted feet.) German cars fitted with loudspeakers circulated, demanding the surrender of private arms and threatening with the death penalty any hostile acts against the Occupation authorities. Germans were putting up signs in their language to help direct the new, massive military traffic. Nevertheless, Paris remained calm, almost somnolent. Even passive resistance was minimal, if it occurred at all. The Wehrmacht was able to move into the city with alacrity and precision and to establish firm control. Langeron took pride in maintaining order during this awkward period and in the fact that so few of his officers had left with the exodus. The French police maintained what remained of general traffic, occasionally with the polite assistance of their German counterparts. Were the police collaborating with a new authority, or were they protecting their city from the whims of a nervous occupier? The question would persist for years, and Langeron himself would be investigated for collaboration after the war.

Unbeknownst to those who had breathed a sigh of relief at the polite invasion of their city by the Wehrmacht, the Gestapo had followed on the army’s heels.
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Langeron, in his diary, presents a vignette that must
have been repeated throughout the city in those early days. He was in his private apartment, in the Préfecture de police, when he was informed that a high Nazi official wished to see him downstairs in his office. The police chief took his time to get dressed and had to be called once again. Finally he showed up to confront an exasperated representative of the Occupation authorities, this time a civilian, not an army officer.

Langeron surmised that his guest must be from the Gestapo. Sitting down at his desk, the chief watched as the smug bureaucrat, whom he had left standing, grew more and more agitated at this lack of respect. Finally the German sat down and asked if Langeron still believed himself to be under the orders of that “Jew Mandel.” The man added, “We know you are anti-German, Monsieur Langeron.” Earlier, in September of 1939, when the German diplomatic delegation was leaving Paris for Berlin at the beginning of hostilities, the head of the legation had offered his hand to the Parisian police chief, who had refused to take it. That minor sign of resistance had been noted in the Gestapo’s files. Langeron was amused at the pettiness of his new bosses, but then the German asked a much more serious question: “Where are the police files?” Langeron wrote that his heart beat faster with pleasure, for he had outsmarted this pompous secret policeman and his cohort. A few days before, the French police had loaded onto two barges, docked at the Quai des Orfèvres, right alongside the Préfecture, a large consignment of the police files; on one boat were those of foreigners, on another those dealing with delicate matters of espionage and politics. The barges had proceeded downstream, loaded with explosives in case of capture. He told the agent that the police files had been evacuated with other official dossiers when the government decamped to Tours and Bordeaux, and he had no idea of their whereabouts. Red-faced and blustering, the agent demanded to see Langeron’s department heads. Brought in, they repeated the same story. When the German official left, in more than a huff, Langeron was quite delighted at his initial effort at resistance but also sadly aware that the tone of the Occupation would change inexorably from one of genteel accommodation to one of mutual suspicion.

As the refugees began returning or through Paris in late June and early July, they were surprised to see a city more relaxed than the one they had so quickly left behind. After two or three weeks on the crowded roads south of Paris, they were exhausted and fearful. Yet everything seemed to be as it had been, except for the gray-green uniforms of thousands of foreign soldiers. The swastika was indeed flying from the Eiffel Tower, and the German language was everywhere. One American, married to a prominent Frenchman, was especially offended by the plethora of red, white, and black German standards: “The horrible and hideous symbols of German domination made the city I loved hateful. They did not float over the housetops and towers like the flags of civilized nations so that one had to raise the eye to see them, but hung in the direct line of vision, suspended like huge carpets waiting to be beaten.”
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Swastika banners were everywhere.
(Musée de la Résistance nationale)

But while there was no doubt that the Germans were there, none of the anticipated destruction or panic or shortages were manifest. This would be one of the major contradictions that would define the early Occupation. The newsreels of the German army’s advance through Europe that Parisians had watched for months in movie houses had not prepared them for a “correct” invasion. Once again, they felt separated from a government that had persistently lied to them. Perhaps it would not be so bad to have the Germans here after all. At least now there was order, precision, and predictability.

For the next four months or so, until October of 1940, Langeron juggled three important responsibilities: maintaining distance between his police and the Occupation authorities; keeping the newly instituted État français (Vichy) government at arm’s length; and establishing a sort of “secular” order in a bewildered city. The return of the thousands of Parisians who had fled, though a welcome sight, placed increased and complex demands on the police forces. Once again, he had to worry about whether this new influx would be carrying a dangerous animus toward the Germans that could ignite an urban revolt. Working out an agreement with a novice and nervous Occupation force about how to reassimilate this enormous population demanded Langeron’s most subtle diplomatic skills. And the repopulation of the weary city proceeded with only minor disruptions.