D-Day. The Battle for Normandy

simple supper, Choltitz, Boineburg and the chief of staff, Oberst von Unger, went off for a quiet talk, which lasted over two hours. Choltitz told them of Hitler’s instructions: ‘His order was brief: to destroy Paris if the enemy advanced, and defend it from the ruins.’ But Boineburg and Unger, both members of the army resistance, managed to persuade him that to destroy Paris served no useful military purpose. When the three men emerged, it was ‘clear that Boineburg and Unger were on the very best of terms with Choltitz’. Late that night, Arnim accompanied Choltitz to the headquarters of Gross-Paris in the Hôtel Meurice. Choltitz asked him to stay on his staff instead of transferring to a panzer division as he had requested. Arnim, finding that they had many friends in common, agreed.
    The Parisian region had several headquarters. The Supreme Command West was at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, while Generalfeldmarschall Sperrle’s Luftwaffe headquarters were in the Palais Bourbon. There was also Admiral Krancke’s Marinekommando West, as well as various SS and Gestapo staffs, Otto Abetz’s embassy and numerous other German state and Nazi Party establishments. Hitler had told Choltitz to send the non-combatants back and form all rear troops into fighting units. Boineburg was returning to Berlin to take up another post. As the officer who had arrested the SS in Paris on 20 July, following Stülpnagel’s orders, his survival was nothing short of miraculous. He had a farewell dinner with Unger and Arnim. They tried to forget the disastrous course of the war and Hitler’s terrible revenge on the plotters by talking of their families, hunting and horses. Boineburg departed the next day from the Hôtel Majestic on the Avenue de Jéna in an armed convoy.
    So far, there had been few attacks on German troops in Paris, but German military intelligence warned that an uprising was bound to come as the Allies approached. On 14 August, the day before he had been trapped in the Falaise pocket, Generalfeldmarschall von Kluge had called a conference at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, with Luftwaffe, Kriegsmarine and army officers, to discuss the defence of Paris. The next day, Choltitz organized a display of force, including seventeen Panther tanks, to rumble through Paris in the hope of discouraging the Resistance. In theory, he had some 25,000 soldiers, but soon afterwards, many of the troops and most of the tanks were taken from him and sent to strengthen positions against Patton’s spearheads.
    Choltitz claims he was left with a security regiment of old soldiers, four tanks, two companies mounted on bicycles, some anti-aircraft detachments and a battalion with seventeen elderly French armoured cars. Whatever the exact number of troops remaining, they were of low quality. They included an ‘interpreter battalion’ which, perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘did not show much fighting spirit’, and another unit of ‘frequently ill people who were only fit for office work’. Some were German civilians working in Paris, who had been called up at the last moment.
    An outer ring of defence, strengthened with Luftwaffe flak batteries, was later put under the command of Generalmajor Hubertus von Aulock (the brother of the commander at Saint-Malo). Aulock, a hard-liner, believed that ‘capitulation means treason’. Choltitz, however, felt that all he could do was to hold the western and southern suburbs as a route of withdrawal for the German troops still west of the Seine. Generalleutnant Bayerlein of the Panzer Lehr Division encountered him in civilian clothes on the Champs-Elysées. Choltitz immediately complained to him that he had no troops for the defence of Paris.
     
    The insurrection, of which Choltitz had been warned, began to gather pace that week. Colonel Rol-Tanguy, the Communist commanding the FFI in the Parisian region and the Ile de France, had already issued an order to cut cables to German positions in the capital.
    On 12 August, the railway workers went on strike. Three days later, the Parisian police force of 15,000 men, whom the Germans were attempting to disarm, refused to put on uniform. On that day of the landings in southern France, the Communist Party newspaper, L’Humanité , called for an ‘ insurrection populaire ’. The next day, 16 August, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, the Gaullist national military delegate, arrived from London. He had gone to England to warn General Koenig that an uprising was inevitable. Koenig