Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation Read Online Free PDF Page B

bloodshot from loss of sleep. He tried to smile, but he couldn’t. He said, ‘Oh, there’s hope of course–the morale of the French–we can deliver 1,000 planes a month soon.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘don’t talk morale and economics, talk WAR. What do you think?’ He said so wearily, ‘I don’t want to think any more, I want to use my heart. You see, I want them to win so much, so very much,’ he said. ‘I fought with them at Chateau-Thierry in the last war–and oh, they’ve been Goddamn dumb, but dear Christ I love them.’
    Back in his office at the chancellery, Murphy saw German soldiers climbing over the embassy gate: ‘They were running a telephone wire across our courtyard to the Crillon Hotel.’ To Murphy’s shock, the embassy’s ‘picturesque colored doorman’, George Washington Mitchell of North Carolina, was helping them. Mitchell had come to Paris before the Great War as a rider in a cowboy and Indian show. Murphy, who knew Mitchell was married to a German woman and spoke German, demanded to know why he had disobeyed orders not to allow German troops onto embassy premises. Mitchell said the soldiers were from Hamburg, where he knew people, and were ‘nice fellas’. Bullitt reacted with fury, not at George Mitchell, but at the Germans. He sent word to von Studnitz to remove the telephone cable at once. Henceforth, any German soldier breaking into the embassy grounds would be shot. The Germans removed the wire, but they posted a sign in front of the embassy that said, ‘ Amerikanische Botschaft ’, ‘American Embassy’. It was one of hundreds of signs the Germans affixed all over Paris for their troops and the German civilians, both administrators and tourists, who would arrive in their wake.
    Von Studnitz, recalled Hillenkoetter, came to the embassy on time at 1.30 p.m. and spoke with Bullitt for about ten minutes ‘of correctness’. An hour later, Hillenkoetter and Fuller accompanied Bullitt for a similar, formal session at the Crillon. At 3.30, as promised, the two uniformed American attachés met General von Studnitz in the Place de la Concorde. With Nazi newsreel cameramen poised to record the military march-past, von Studnitz invited them to join him on the reviewing stand. ‘Both Fuller and I could easily see how that would look in newsreels, photos, etc.–two American officers taking a review with a German general. So we hastily, but firmly, declined, saying that we didn’t feel worthy to share the General’s honor; that it was his division and his glory; and that it would be a shame to deprive him of even a share of the glory.’ Fuller and Hillenkoetter diplomatically disappeared into the crowd. Robert Murphy, however, stood uncomfortably beside the German generals as the Green Heart Division goose-stepped across the great square to thumping martial music. When the parade ended and Murphy was walking back to the embassy, he complained to New York Herald Tribune correspondent Walter Kerr, ‘The general wanted the ambassador, and the ambassador told me to take his place.’ From an upper window of the embassy, a young diplomat hired locally in Paris, Keeler Faus, surreptitiously took photographs of the German troops in the Place de la Concorde.
    Associated Press correspondent Philip W. Whitcomb, a graduate of Washburn University in Kansas and of Oxford, watched the same parade from the pavement and detected a bizarre normality:
    On that day the garbage-men cleaned the streets alongside of German troops as they marched up the Friedland and Wagram Avenues or across the Place de la Concorde. The underground railway men ran their trains, though some carried only Germans on their way through Paris. The telephones worked. The police, under instructions to obey German orders, were all on duty, though on June 14th they were little more than members of the silent throng lining the streets through which the Germans moved.
    The triumphalism of the military parades offended even a few