Hitler’s Plan to Destroy Paris: The Eiffel Tower’s Near Miss | WW2 Hitler Documentary pt. 1

In June 1940, France surrendered. The impact was global. Paris had fallen. It was declared an open city and was surrendered to the enemy with no defense to avoid its destruction. At dawn on the 14th of June, the Germans marched into the city and flew the swastika from the top of the Eiffel Tower. 21 years after the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles in 1918, Germany took its revenge. At the end of the month, Hitler came to admire his new conquest, Paris. A brief visit. In two and a half hours, the Führer went from monument to monument in a practically deserted city. Paris fascinated him, but what fate did he have in store for it? In Mein Kampf, he expresses hate and scorn for the French. The mortal enemy, he writes. Trivial, superficial, who showed that they were incapable of winning the war alone in 1918. In a word, the enemy who must be defeated. In Hitler's eyes, Paris could only be crushed or destroyed, and that is what he ordered four years later. To understand the myth of the declared destruction of Paris, we must first look at the memoirs of a German general. We are in August 1944. For the Nazis, the situation has changed a lot since Hitler's visit in June 1940. The Soviets have advanced west to the center of Poland. The Allies have landed in Normandy and are marching east. Hitler appoints an unknown general, the commander of the Festung Groß Paris division at the beginning of August. His name is Dietrich von Scholtitz. But who is this officer and where is he from? He is from a family of officers. His father was a colonel during the Great War. He is from a family of landowners. So he is a career officer in the infantry. Von Scholtitz was highly trusted by Hitler, and in early August 1944, this was important. Two weeks earlier, the Führer had escaped an attack organized by Wehrmacht officers who wanted to kill him and overthrow the Nazi regime. After that, he increasingly shut himself away and more than ever, kept a tight control over military operations. The cleansing which followed this attack left 5,000 dead. The general in Paris who was implicated in the plot would end up hanging from a butcher's hook. Dietrich von Scholtitz was appointed to replace him by Hitler in person. He wasn't involved in the plot against the Führer. He was a faithful and disciplined general. He was involved in the destruction of the Jews of Europe. And the regular army was largely involved in the implementation of this plot. There were not only SS soldiers who surrendered to the massacre and then to deportation. In reality, von Scholtitz wasn't quite the humanist that the legend claims him to be. He was entirely zealous and showed himself to be merciless. As a lieutenant colonel in 1940, he disregarded Holland's neutrality by attacking Rotterdam. He totally destroyed the city center after the Dutch had already surrendered. In 1942, at the siege of Sevastopol, he contributed towards the killing of tens of thousands of civilians and ordered the use of the Kalgerät, the largest piece of artillery ever built. He left nothing but ruins. This was the ruthless man to whom Hitler gave full control of the Festung Groß Paris division. It was his first experience of the capital. Von Scholtitz's mission was of utmost importance. Paris was a vital hub of communication. As far as Rouen, all the bridges over the Seine had been demolished by Allied bombings after D-Day. On the 9th of August, Von Scholtitz took up residence at Le Maurice, a luxury hotel located on Rue de Revoulis in front of the Tuileries garden. Upon his arrival, he noted that the atmosphere in the capital could complicate his mission. The summer of 1944 was the subject of other memoirs in addition to that of Von Scholtitz, like those left by a diplomat who was the Swedish consul in Paris at the time. Legend has it that he is the man who persuaded the general to spare the capital. Written just after the war but published in the 2000s, Raoul Nautling's memoirs lead us a few steps away from Le Maurice Hotel to the Cercle Suédois. As its president, the consul met anybody who was anybody in Paris there. The neutrality of his country and the world conflict gave Nautling a unique position and makes him a valuable witness. In his account, he reports on the Parisians' mood when the general arrived. On the one hand, there was an aspiration to freedom without a doubt, but there was also a concern that was to be, of course, liberated, but alive. And we know, we are here at the beginning of 1944, that cities were destroyed or razed and largely bombed in Normandy, and that the fate of Paris was not at all played out. The echoes of D-Day, the victories of the Allies in Normandy, mixed with the scarcity and fear of retaliation, gradually sows a spirit of revolt among the population. Chaos slowly breaks out. On the 19th of August, 10 days after von Teutet's arrival, the Gaullists and the Communist resistance sent out a call for rebellion. Seeing the French flag flying on the police headquarters opposite Notre Dame, Parisians understood that the situation had changed. It all escalated very quickly. Everywhere in the city, members of the resistance stormed public buildings. From then on, Parisians and Germans clashed. From roofs, porches, windows, and through apartment blocks, shots are heard and fighting breaks out. Danger is everywhere. In the streets, the number of barricades increases, erected by a determined population. The German army doesn't know how to react yet. There will be retaliation. But we will soon see that the balance of power remains unfavourable to the insurrection. The risk is real that von Scholzitz will give the order to retaliate massively against the population. In Normandy, the German army collapses in the face of the Allied offensive. Under pressure from the general staff of the resistance and General Leclerc, the US High Command agreed to change their plans and let the French 2nd Armoured Division move towards the capital. On hearing this news from France, Hitler enters one of his legendary rages. Von Scholzitz receives many telephone calls from the Führer's headquarters. He is commanded to restore order. It is said that on the 23rd of August at 11 o'clock in the morning, an encrypted telegram coming directly from the Führer's staff arrives at Le Maurice. It is an absolute and indisputable order. Paris must not fall into the hands of the enemy. And if it does, it should be nothing but ruins. If an original copy of this order still exists, we will need to look for it on the other side of the Rhine. The German military archives are kept in Freiburg in Breisgau in the southwest of Germany. Five buildings, 55 linear kilometers of archives conserving Prussian and German military history since the middle of the 19th century. The historian Bernhard Kroener will conduct this search for evidence among hundreds of thousands of reports, registers and maps indexed in the files. After a thorough search, Hitler's order is finally discovered. It shows the Führer's intentions unequivocally. Hitler's order to destroy the city or to hand it over as a rubble field is so far-fetched that it is actually the whole city or the largest parts of the city or the monuments, the central monuments of the city which, so to speak, make up the value, the meaning of Paris that these areas should be blown up, should be destroyed. This type of order is situated in a logic which is also that of the fascination of the Nazis for the destruction. To show that once we were leaving, that once the Nazi Germany was leaving, there was nothing left. Of crucial importance, and here Hitler leaves the military perspective, is the last sentence of his order. Here, an irrational, political-ideological perspective which shows that the Nazi regime had already begun to sink into agony in this phase. In his memoirs, von Choltitz writes, with a laudable zeal, the sections made the necessary preparations to be able, at zero hour, to blow everything up. Was he telling the truth? How can we know what in the capital was really set to blow? Were Paris bridges full of explosives? Had the Germans really set mines along the metal sides of the Eiffel Tower?