Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [191]
The jubilation along the boulevard Saint-Michel came too soon. The German units leaving Paris were on their way to engage the Allies north and west of the city. Paris remained a German fortress, and its inhabitants were still prisoners.
Neuilly-sur-Seine was one of the quietest suburbs of Paris. Unlike the working-class districts north of the city, the bourgeois western region lacked communist partisans. Few of its citizens attacked German troops. The American Hospital in Neuilly had been unmolested by the German garrison at its Kommandatur headquarters facing the hospital’s main gate in the avenue Victor Hugo. The area commander, an Austrian colonel named Bernhuber, had at his disposal a thousand combat troops with six large and twelve small cannon, five tanks and about eighty trucks. In addition, he told General de Chambrun, his men had machine guns and an unlimited supply of ammunition. The tanks were usually stationed at the traffic roundabouts to command the wide boulevards. Their strength was sufficient, the Germans believed, to keep order in tranquil Neuilly.
Violence had come in the late spring and early summer, when the Allies bombed Neuilly’s Renault factory. The plant, not far from the American Hospital, was manufacturing military vehicles for the German army. No bombs touched the hospital with its large Red Cross on the roof. When Germans parked their military vehicles near the hospital’s main gate for protection, General de Chambrun went to Colonel Bernhuber and said, officer to officer, ‘I ask you to consider that the flag of the Red Cross protects the hospital, not the cars of the Wehrmacht.’ Colonel Bernhuber immediately ordered the vehicles moved away from the hospital.
On the morning of 19 August, about sixty-five résistants of the communist Francs Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) disrupted Neuilly’s complacency. They captured two German soldiers in a café, dragged them to the town hall and raised the French flag to proclaim the liberation. Barricading themselves inside with the municipality’s staff, the partisans wrapped cloths saying Vivre libre ou mourir (Live free or die) around their arms. They did not wait long for the Germans. A truck carrying a Wehrmacht officer and six soldiers roared up to the entrance. The officer ordered the partisans to surrender. The FTP’s local commander, 65-year-old André Caillette, responded, ‘Surrender yourself. This is the army of Liberation.’ Shooting erupted. When it ended, all seven Germans lay dead. They were quickly replaced by a larger detachment with three tanks. Machine guns blasted, and tank shells pierced the building. In the midst of the combat, someone telephoned the town hall with the joyous news that the Americans had just liberated the cathedral city of Chartres. The partisans stopped firing long enough to sing La Marseillaise, quickly joined by residents of the surrounding houses. For three more hours, fighting could be heard at the American Hospital and in the rest of Neuilly. The résistants lost a dozen men. Another forty fighters and town hall employees were wounded. Most of the survivors escaped through a sewer that led from the town hall basement. Those left behind were taken to Mont Valerian prison, notorious for its executions of more than 4,000 French hostages and résistants.
The Germans erected a large Stüztpunkt on Neuilly’s avenue de Madrid to guard access to the town hall, the Kommandatur and the American Hospital. The bunker was ‘a fortress capable of withstanding a siege,’ René de Chambrun wrote, based on his father’s reminiscences: ‘This strongpoint was under the command of a fanatic officer, Major