General Dietrich von Choltitz didn’t look like a hero. He was a chubby little Prussian from Silesia (now southwestern Poland) who joined the military because all the men in his family were soldiers. He had no sense of humor or charisma and his career advanced mostly due to his rigid habit of never questioning his orders. He also had a reputation for destroying cities.
In the summer of 1940, he ordered the Luftwaffe to bomb Rotterdam when it failed to promptly surrender. The bombing killed hundreds of civilians and trashed the city. In 1941-42, Choltitz commanded troops that continuously bombarded Sevastopol in the Crimea, devastating the city and its civilians.
So in August 1944, Hitler thought he had found a reliable man who would blindly follow orders to destroy Paris. Paris was a mess at the time. The Allies were getting closer and the French Resistance inside the city planned an uprising to coincide with the Allied assault on the city.
The threat from the Allies and French Resistance was nothing compared to the mess at the top of the German military command in Paris. Most of the officers in Paris participated in the July 20, 1944 plot to kill Hitler. The ones not already dead or under arrest spent their days looking for a bolt hole to escape Gestapo torture and murder. Into this mess came Hitler’s hand-picked man, Choltitz.
Choltitz arrived in Paris around August 7th or 8th and set up his headquarters at the Hotel Meurice (now a 5-star hotel). He immediately began a round of briefings with the local Wehrmacht commanders. He learned they had a limited scorched earth plan which involved installing explosives in factories and important city buildings, including museums like the Louvre.
Although they had a plan, everyone briefing Choltitz urged him not to implement it. Paris was simply too beautiful, too important to the history of Europe and the world to be destroyed on the orders of a delusional nut like Hitler. But Choltitz did what he always did; he followed orders to prepare for the destruction of Paris.
On August 9, 1944, Choltitz received a top secret order directly from Adolf Hitler that said, “I give the order for the neutralizations and destructions envisaged for Paris”. The scorched earth order was now in the hands of Choltitz.
Paris influences people in unexpected ways, even humorless little Prussians. While Choltitz fought the Resistance, he seemed increasingly disenchanted with his orders to raze the city. By August 20th, he was willing to listen to Swedish Consul General Raoul Nordling who suggested a temporary ceasefire so that the Resistance and the Germans could retrieve their dead and wounded. Choltitz agreed and then tried to hide the information from his superiors since the ceasefire was contrary to his scorched earth orders.
Soon after, four SS men appeared in Choltitz’ office. At first Choltitz thought they had come to arrest him for agreeing to the temporary truce. Instead they explained that Heinrich Himmler had sent them to grab the Bayeux Tapestry to save it from the Allies. A relieved Choltitz explained that the museum was held by fanatic French Resistance fighters. He invited them to go get the tapestry. The SS men left and Choltitz never saw them again.
After the temporary ceasefire, the street fighting resumed. Periodically a phone call or telex would come through from Berlin demanding to know if Paris was burning as Hitler had ordered. Eventually, the fighting advanced to the Hotel Meurice. Surrounded and almost out of ammo, Choltitz surrendered Paris on August 25, 1944 without carrying out the scorched earth order.
When Choltitz disobeyed orders to destroy Paris, his wife and children were in Baden-Baden, Germany. Choltitz knew that his wife could be arrested by the Gestapo and shot or sent to a concentration camp and his children could be thrown into an orphanage. He disobeyed orders anyway. He told his captors that he didn’t want to be known to history as the man who destroyed Paris. That makes Dietrich von Choltitz the unlikely hero who saved Paris.
Read more about Choltitz and Paris in Is Paris Burning? by Larry Collins and Dominque LaPierre (1965). The book is notable for having interviewed many surviving participants in the August 1944 liberation of Paris.
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