75 years ago to this month Adolf Hitler made his one and
only visit to Paris. Given that every facet of Adolf and the Third Reich appear
to have been exhaustively examined by authors and late night cable television programmers
the exact date of his day trip to France remains, bizarrely, a matter of
dispute among historians. A date consistently given for the visit is 23rd
June 1940, which was the day after the French formally conceded defeat at
Compiegne. An alternative date favoured by others is Friday June 28th 1940.
Albert Speer, Hitlers architect who accompanied him on the jolly states that it
was ‘three days after the beginning of the armistice’ which would make it the
28th as the surrender of France took full effect on the 25th.
Speer should know as he was there but then, as the Nuremburg Trials were to
show, he did have probably one of the most selective memories in judicial
history. [1]
That said a dawn visit on Sunday 23rd, a day after France had ignominiously
surrendered, looks entirely plausible from the fragmentary film of the event and accounts of it. There is a grainy clip of Hitler’s
entourage crossing the Place de Concorde en-route to the Champs Elysees and
passing only two startled gendarmes and a priest crossing the road. Nowhere is
it suggested that the streets have been cleared and a general curfew imposed to
afford Hitler a private view of his latest acquisition. It is simply an eerily empty,
stunned and silent city.
Nowadays it would probably take longer to get from Le
Bourget to the Eiffel Tower and back than Hitler spent in Paris that morning. By
Speer’s reckoning and other accounts they were in and out from the airport in 3
hours – 6am until 9am- which was the only time Hitler spent in Paris. The route
that he and his entourage took around the city was pretty much the bog standard
whistle stop ‘greatest hits’ that day visitors still take. That morning it went from le Bourget airport
to Opera Garnier, Madeleine, Place de Concorde, Champs Elysees, Arc de
Triomphe, Trocadera (group pose for picture with Eiffel Tower) Invalides,
Boulevard St Germain, Odeon, Luxembourg, Pantheon, Ile d Cite, The Marais,
Montmartre (pause for view of Paris) then back to the airport at le Bourget.
The tour has been well documented as regards the visits to
the major sites and much of that commentary relates to Hitlers fascination with
the monumental structures and vistas, his personal knowledge of the kitschier
bits – Garniers Opera House, Napoleons Tomb and Sacre Coeur- and his
disinterest in the Sainte Chapelle, Notre Dame and the Place des Vosges. The part
that has only recently come to my attention was that later detour through The
Marais which I found curiously shocking. The images of Hitler posing at the
Trocadero or driving up the Champs Elysees have become part of the familiar
iconography of WWII, the victor viewing the spoils. C’est la guerre etc. Finding
out that he drove down the rue des Francs Bourgeois past the flat I once called
home is a violation of space that seems strangely altogether more personal. It is an act of
trespass as offensive as his driving down the Old Road hill in Skewen or around
Penylan, Cardiff.
Down the rue des Francs-Bourgeois he went, amusingly
interpreted by Hemingway in ‘A Moveable Feast’ as ‘the street of the
opinionated middle classes’ which was, to some extent, what it eventually
became. However, in 1940 it must have been well gloomy and the antithesis of Hitlers preferred urban typology being pretty much end to end with ancient monuments and mediaeval in scale and form. It was not, by several accounts, the best part of his little outing and he didn't brighten up until they got back around to the Napoleonic colonnades of the rue Rivoli.
Even stranger is that The Marais was as
close as Paris got to having a Jewish ghetto in the area known as The Pletzl and an immediate point to ponder
on was how different things would have been if someone had got out of bed
earlier that day in 1940 and shot the twat on his way to the Place des Vosges.
That was just one of the places Hitler passed which had a major synagogue. The
other was the rue Pavee and its 1913 synagogue was by perhaps THE architect of
Parisian art nouveau, Hector Guimard. That was dynamited by French fascists the
following year along with other Paris synagogues. Less than two years later in
March 1942 deportations of Jews commenced from Drancy and Bobigny to ‘unknown destinations’
in Germany and Poland. Most of the occupants of the Marais sleeping that
morning would be rounded up by the French police to be corralled in the Velodrome
de Hiver in the Grand Rafle of July 1942 before being deported to concentration
camps. The Vel D’Hiver was finally torn down in 1959 only after the French
authorities had shown how even handed they were. It had been used as a
detention centre for anti-colonialist Algerians in 1958.
The high street of The Pletzl, the rue des Rosiers, runs parallel with Francs Bourgeois and
was in its day a dominantly Jewish thoroughfare. It was still having more than
its share of anti-semitic aggravation many years after Hitlers fleeting visit
and the attention of his Vichy chums. On 9 August 1982 two assailants threw a
grenade and fired machine guns into Jo Goldenberg’s restaurant. They killed six
people and injured 22 others. Several Jewish premises suffered less lethal attacks subsequently. In my time there many Jews were leaving Paris for
Israel where they felt a lot safer. I bought my flat from an Israeli architect who
was going ‘home’ and the trend seemed to increase after 9/11. Jo Goldenbergs
closed in 2006. It probably had more to do with the relentless gentrification of
the area rather than a falling demand for kosher cooking. Property values at
that end of the Marais were rising swiftly on a tide of Pink Pounds – sorry –
Euros- in the Noughties. The last time I minced up the rue de Rosiers it had
been hard landscaped to an inch of its life and the Hammam St Paul, The Sept Lezards
jazz club , the falafel and kosher pizza shops all been boutiqued. There was a
traditional baker still in operation and I wonder what Hitler would have thought
of the window display.
He only had the one apparently...................
A short film of Hitlers tour of Paris is at;
[1] Inside the Third Reich Albert Speer 1970 Weidenfield & Nicholson
pps 247-249
also
When Paris Went Dark Ronald Rossbottom 2014 John Murray pps 72-90
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