On This Day: Paris liberated by Allies after four years of Nazi occupation

AUGUST 25, 1944: Paris was liberated after four years of Nazi occupation on this day in 1944.

German military governor Dietrich von Cholitz surrendered the French capital after disobeying Adolf Hitler’s order to fight until it lay in rubble.

A British Pathé newsreel shows Parisians joyfully welcoming the 2nd French Armored Division leading the advance the day before.

They were followed by the larger force of the 4th U.S. Infantry Division, who had done the bulk of the fighting and were angry that an attack was made at all.

American General Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, did not want to risk destroying Paris and dragging forces away from the race to Berlin.

But, instead of helping to end the war as soon as possible by seizing the Nazi capital, French General Charles de Gaulle was determined to liberate his own City of Light.

With France having been shamed by its government collaborating with Hitler, the exiled leader of the Free French forces wanted to redeem her honour.

The Résistance, who had been renamed the French Forces of the Interior after the June 6 D-Day invasion, began an uprising on August 19, following a general strike.

Luckily, with Allied troops entering Paris five days later, Von Cholitz refused to entertain Hitler’s ‘insane’ demand to let the culturally-important city be laid to waste.

Fighting in France continued for another month before the Germans were pushed back to Belgium.

Following their liberation, collaborators, including the leader of the Vichy regime, Marshal Philippe Petain, were rounded up and often publicly humiliated.

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Yet many were never charged as it would have exposed the scale of support for the Nazi puppet and debunked the comforting myth of a massed resistance movement.

Fuelling the French government’s desire not to go into exile like those of every other occupied country except Denmark’s, was a belief that Britain could not win alone.

With France falling after six weeks in June 1940, most people believed that Britain, which had been forced to evacuate 300,000 troops at Dunkirk, would be defeated equally quickly.

Also, many Frenchmen thought liberal France’s weaknesses had been exposed and that if it followed Germany, it too could be a muscular, disciplined nation.

The new Vichy government itself fostered this belief and thousands joined right-wing organisations like the Milice paramilitary militia that supported the Nazis.

During this period, French police in both the Vichy and occupied zones assisted their German ‘allies’ by rounding up and deporting Jews to the East, where 90,000 died.

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Also enabling French support for the Nazis was increasing anti-British anger.

This was partly fuelled by Britain’s attack on the French fleet in North Africa, which killed almost 1,300 sailors, in a bid to stop her ships being used by the Germans.

However, as German occupation spread to the Vichy zone in 1942 and became harsher, the French Resistance became more active.

Also, following Nazi failure in the Battle of Britain in September 1940 and the British victory in North Africa in November 1942, many Frenchmen realised that Germany could be beaten.

In December 1942, America finally joined the war on Britain’s side and – with the Soviet Union now pushing the Nazis back– the war looked winnable for the Allies.

The resistance and Free French forces grew in strength and a small contingent of these men were among the 130,000 Allied men who stormed the beaches at Normandy.

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De Gaulle also ensured that France was one of the four Allied Powers to govern Germany after the war.

This was despite the surrendering German Field Marshal, Wilhelm Keitel seeing the list of official victors and scoffing: ‘We also lost to the French?!’