Hitler's Paris

Paris fell to the German army on June 14, 1940, and on that day a Nazi band followed by a battalion of foot soldiers circled the Arc de Triomphe and marched down the Champs Elysees to the Place de la Concorde. Each noon, until the city was liberated more than four years later, the same procession took place, and the French were reminded of their great shame.

Hitler's occupation was an ordeal with many levels of suffering. In the broadest sense, the German dictator subjugated the city and the nation it represents to demonstrate the superiority of German culture. The French had many pretty paintings to amuse vacationing Wehrmacht officers, but in the end, Paris would have become little more than a war trophy, gutted of its treasures and transformed into a provincial Nazi capital. Denied his wishes by Allied strength, Hitler wanted the city destroyed before his troops retreated.

Living with the German presence, the people of Paris faced problems more immediate than Hitler's plans for the 1000-year Reich. As a civic entity and as individuals, they had to make choices--between collaboration and resistance, between survival and honor. These choices, along with the grander cultural confrontation between German and Frenchman, are the subjects of Paris in the Third Reich, by David Pryce-Jones. The book combines a selective narrative history of the years 1940-1944, a section of interviews with characters who saw the occupation from widely differing perspectives, and a collection of photographs of everyday life in that period.

It is, unabashedly, a coffee-table volume, one that will be used more often as a cocktail-party coaster than as a reference. Glossy and overpriced, it conceals choppy, unimaginative writing behind a startling cover. Perfect for Uncle Sid and Aunt Selma. Despite its shortcomings, however, the book offers revealing first-person descriptions of the fear war can bring without gunshots and the dull evil of obedience without purpose.

Pryce-Jones spends pages describing the structure and leading personalities of the Nazis' puppet government in Vichy. Although Henri Philippe Petain and the other chief collaborators spent much of their time outside of Paris, their influence and the attractiveness of their arguments were felt throughout the crippled capital. "It is with honor and in order to maintain French unity, a unity that has lasted ten centuries, and in the framework of the constructive activity of the new European order, that today I am embarking on the path of collaboration," Marshal Petain told Hitler in October 1940. Not only did the nation's most honored military leader sanction cooperation, but common sense seemed to dictate it--instead of provoking the Germans into demolishing France, why not muddle through and hope for the best under the seemingly inevitable Nazi domination?

With plodding thoroughness, the author reveals the hypocrisy of submission and the personal deceit practiced by Petain and his ilk. Once the Jewish extermination program was in place in 1942, the Vichy leaders had increasing difficulty explaining that concern for France justified an alliance with Hitler. Picking through conversations between Pierre Laval and Wehrmacht representatives, Pryce-Jones proves that Vichy cooperation went beyond facilitating the deportation of Jews. Laval knew that there were no "labor" camps at the end of the German train lines, but that did not concern him. His only thought was to use the twisted German racial ideology as a bargaining chip. In the author's words: "If the Germans wanted the Jews so badly...they could have them, but at the price of conceding something (Laval) might want.

The 116 photographs compiled for Pryce-Jones by Michael Rand, art director of the London Sunday Times, include few dead bodies or bleeding babies. What you see are storm troopers touring the Eiffel Tower, young couples flirting in the streets of Mesnilmontant, and an old woman, who wears a yellow star, hurrying down the rue de Rivoli. People lived, some very normally, through all of those years. Most, like that old woman, probably never conceived of battles on the Eastern front, or Auschwitz. It is with Rand's pictures and a group of excerpted interviews that the author paints his truest protrait of wartime Paris.

A German envoy, Achenbach, speaks blandly of relations with French officials, concerned, even now, with bureaucracy and results rather than responsibility. A collaborator, Combelle, recalls without guilt his admiration for German fascism-"I did not believe in natural equality, but that the best should win...What did the Germans mean to a man like me? I won't make myself ridiculous by telling you that the army was correct, but it was."

In contrast, there were those who chose to fight, knowing the danger of their actions, and others who really had no choice. Pryce-Jones buries his own description of the resistance movement and the Jewish community under a mountain of detail. He is unfortunately fascinated by the various underground groups and their foes in the German and Vichy hierarchy. But the heroes speak well enough for themselves.

A Communist activist, Daix, describes his decision early in 1940 to oppose Nazism, despite directions from Moscow to cooperate with Germans. He was 18 years old at the time and remembers the lonely battle: "We were obliged to improvise lodgings, arms, everything. When it turns out badly, we said, the Communist Party will do something for us, until they did nothing at all.

A Jew, Rosenblum, remembers the policemen who went out of their way to assist in round-ups and deportations. Compared to the often-courageous public figures in smaller French cities and towns, who in many cases saved thousands of Jews with clever paperwork and bravado, the Paris officials were almost uniformly willing to carry out Nazi orders. Says Rosenblum: "We were driven to the Velodrome d'Hiver, a big arena for bicycling races, and here we remained in the most atrocious conditions. There were a few Red Cross helpers, but we were under the French police...People screamed all night long. Women threw themselves off the top of the stands. I still hear the screams. I can see the scenes today. We stayed there eight days. The conditions were dreadful--the lavatories were the worst, blocked, and the smells and filth were pestilential. There was no room; we were cramped together." Her entire family, save one sister, was exterminated.

If you have $25 to throw around you could better spend it on this book than on pizza and beer. The stories Pryce-Jones and Rand reproduce are clearly valuable. Someone could learn something from them at a boring cocktail party. But the same has been told better by others, and ultimately, Paris in the Third Reich bears the flaw of its genre; it sacrifices unity for the specific.