Is Paris Burning?

359 Pages·2013·1.31 MB·English

by  Larry Collins

IS PARIS BURNING?

- ADOLF HITLER
August 25, 1944

LARRY COLLINS
and
DOMINIQUE LAPIERRE
Published in collaboration with Renaissance Literary & Talent Post Office
Box 17379 Beverly Hills, CA 90209
www.renaissancemgmt.net
Originally published in the US by Simon & Schuster
Original Copyright © 1965 by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre
Copyright © 2012 by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall
not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise
circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published
and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser.

Cover artwork designed by Judy Bullard
www.customebookcovers.com
CONTENTS
PART ONE
THE MENACE

PART TWO
THE STRUGGLE

PART THREE
THE DELIVERANCE

TABLE OF COMPARATIVE MILITARY RANKS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

SOURCES
Geh. Kommandosache Chefsache Nur durch Offizier KR Blitz
O.B. West Ia Okdo d. H. Gr. B. Ia A.O.K. 1
Pz. A.O.K. 5
A.O.K. 15
The defense of the Paris bridgehead is of capital importance from both a
military and political standpoint. The loss of the city would lead to the loss of the
entire coastal plain north of the Seine and would deprive us of our rocket-
launching sites for the long-distance war against England.
In all history, the loss of Paris has inevitably brought with it the loss of all
France.
The Führer therefore categorically reaffirms his order: Paris must at all
costs be defended by locking the city inside a strong position. He reminds the
Commander in Chief of the West that reinforcements have been designated for
this purpose.
In the city itself, the most energetic tactics, such as the razing of entire city
blocks, the public execution of ringleaders, the forced evacuation of any quarter
of the city which appears menacing, must be used to smash the first signs of an
uprising; this is the only way to prevent such movements from spreading.
The destruction of the city's Seine bridges will be prepared.
Paris must not fall into the hands of the enemy, or, if it does, he must find
there nothing but a field of ruins.
O.K.W./W.F.St./Op. (H) Nr. 772989/44
23.8.44
11.00 Uhr
PART ONE
THE MENACE
1

He was never late. Each evening when the German arrived with his old
Mauser, his frayed leather binocular case and his dinner pail, the inhabitants of
the village of May-en-Multien knew it was six o'clock. As he walked across the
cobbled town square, the first notes of the evening Angelus invariably rang out
from the Romanesque belfry of the little twelfth-century church of Notre-Dame-
de-l'Assomption looking down on May-en-Multien's gray slate roofs from its
perch on a ridge over the River Ourcq, 37 miles northeast of Paris.
The German, a graying Luftwaffe sergeant, always marched straight toward
that peaceful sound. At the door of the church, he tugged off his cloth cap and
walked inside. With a slow step, he climbed up the narrow, circular staircase to
the top of the belfry. There at its summit were a table, a gas burner, and a chair
requisitioned from the church below. Carefully laid out on the table were a
German General Staff map, a notebook, a calendar, and a gray-green field
telephone. The belfry of Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption was a Luftwaffe
observation post.
Here, with his binoculars, the German could survey the whole region. From
the spires of the cathedral of Meaux to the south, to the medieval stone walls of
the Château de la Ferté-Milon in the north, his gaze swept over 13 miles past a
graceful arc of the Marne River, the terra-cotta walls of the town of Lizy-sur-
Ourcq and back, finally, to the poplar-studded banks of the Ourcq dropping
away below his eyes.
In a few hours, night would fall over that peaceful scene spread out under
the sergeant's binoculars. Scanning the horizon, peering into the shadows around
him, he would then begin another night's vigil, his fifty-eighth since the
invasion. In the first light of dawn, he would pick up his field telephone and
report to Luftwaffe regional headquarters in Soissons. Since the last full moon,
twelve days earlier, the sergeant's reports had invariably been the same:
"Nothing to report for my sector."
The German knew the Allies always made their parachute drops to the
French Resistance in the light of a full moon. The moon would not be full again,
the calendar on his table showed him, for sixteen more nights, not until the
evening of August 18.
Nothing, the German was sure, would happen that night in this tiny pocket
of occupied France entrusted to his care. That night of August 2, 1944, the
of occupied France entrusted to his care. That night of August 2, 1944, the
sergeant felt certain that he could doze in safety on the shaky table before him.
The German was wrong.
While he slept, two miles away in a wet field of shocked wheat, two men
and a woman staked themselves out into the triangular pattern that marked a
Resistance drop zone. Each clutched a flashlight wrapped in a tin sleeve. Pointed
overhead, these shrouded flashlights could send out a thin pillar of light visible
only from above. The trio waited. Shortly after midnight they heard the sound
they were waiting for. It was the low drone of the throttled-down motors of a
Halifax bomber sweeping softly over the valley of the Ourcq. They switched on
their lights. Staring down into the blacked-out river valley, the pilot of the plane
above sighted their blinking triangle. He pressed a button on the panel before
him. In the fuselage of his bomber a glowing light switched from red to green.
As it did, a man grasped the sides of the plane's open hatch and flung himself
into the night.
As he drifted silently home to French soil, young medical student Alain
Perpezat could feel at his waist the tug of a money belt containing five million
francs. But it was not to deliver that impressive sum that he had plummeted into
this dark August night.
Fitted into the sole of Alain Perpezat's left shoe was a gossamer-thin strip of
silk. It contained eighteen blocks of coded figures. So important and so urgent
did his superiors in London consider the message stamped on it that, against all
their rules, they had sent Alain Perpezat plunging into this moonless night to
deliver it.
Perpezat did not know what was in the message he carried. All he knew
was that he was to deliver it as quickly as possible to the head of the British
Intelligence Service in France, whose code name was "Jade Amicol." His
headquarters were in Paris.
It was seven o'clock the next morning when Perpezat shook off the last
slivers of hay from the haystack in which he had hidden for the night. To get to
Paris, the young medical student chose the quickest means open to him. He
decided to hitchhike.
The first truck that rolled past him on France's Route 3 stopped. It belonged
to the Luftwaffe. Four helmeted German soldiers hanging to the wooden slats of
its open van stared down at him.
Perpezat watched the door of the truck open. The driver beckoned to him. It
seemed to Perpezat at that instant that his bulky money belt weighed a hundred
pounds. The German studied him. "Nach Paris?" he said. Perpezat nodded and
numbly slid onto the warm seat beside him. Then the German shifted gears, and,
from the cab of the Luftwaffe truck, the young agent with his message for the
head of British intelligence for France watched the road to Paris begin to slide
past.
Kneeling in the cool shadows of their chapel, the nine sisters of the order of
the Passion of our Blessed Lord were reciting their third rosary of the day when
the three long and one short rings jabbed through the stillness of their convent.
Immediately two of them got up, blessed themselves, and left. To Sister Jean, the
mother superior, and Sister Jean-Marie Vianney, her assistant, three long and
one short rings of the old doorbell of their convent at 127 rue de la Santé meant
"an important visit."
For four years the Gestapo had searched desperately for a man this convent
concealed. There, behind the sitting room of this scabrous old building built at
the juncture of a vacant lot and the high stone walls of the insane asylum of
Sainte-Anne, was the headquarters of "Jade Amicol," the head of British
intelligence for occupied France. Protected by these old stones and the tranquil
courage of a handful of nuns, his headquarters had survived all the Gestapo's
relentless hunts. * (In 1943, the convent was even the site of a secret meeting between Admiral
Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence, who was taken there blindfolded,
and the chief of the intelligence service in France. Canaris wanted to find out from Churchill what might be
the terms of an eventual peace treaty between the Allies and a Germany free of Hitler. Fifteen days later, the
answer came back from Churchill. It was "unconditional surrender." Eighteen months later, Canaris was
executed for his role in the plot against Hitler.)
Sister Jean opened the judas window cut into the convent's heavy oak door,
and saw outside the face of a young man.
"My name is Alain," he said. "I have a message for the colonel."
Sister Jean unbolted the door and stepped out onto the doorstep herself to
make sure the young man was alone and that he had not been followed. Then she
beckoned him inside.
In the sitting room, under an austere portrait of the unknown Lazarite priest
who had founded the order of the Passion of our Blessed Lord, Alain Perpezat
took off his left shoe. With a knife Sister Jean handed him, Perpezat pried apart
its sole and slipped out the scrap of silk for which he had just risked his life. He
handed it to the balding giant with blue eyes sitting in the armchair next to him.
Colonel Claude Ollivier-"Jade Amicol"-glanced at the black letters stamped
on it, and asked Sister Jean to bring him the grid with which he decoded his
messages. It was printed on a razor-thin handkerchief made of a digestible fabric
that would dissolve on his tongue in seconds if he had to swallow it. Sister Jean
kept it hidden in the chapel, below the altar stone under the tabernacle of the
altar of the Good Thief.
Ollivier fitted the grid to the message Perpezat had brought him. The Allied
Command, it said, was determined to "bypass Paris and to delay its liberation as
long as possible." Nothing, it added, could be allowed to change those plans. It
long as possible." Nothing, it added, could be allowed to change those plans. It
was signed "General," the code name for the head of the intelligence service, a
signature reserved for messages of extreme importance.
The colonel looked up at Perpezat.
"My God!" he said. "This is a catastrophe!"