A German Officer in Occupied Paris, by Ernst Jünger (foreword)

E RNST J Ü NG E R

A GERMAN OFFICER I N OCCU PI E D PARIS THE WAR JOURNALS, 1941-1945 FOREWORD BY ELLIOT NEAMAN

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In 1944 news of Allied armies conquering Italy and the Soviets pushing into Eastern Prussia and Poland confirmed his worst fears about Germany’s fate. He noted with deep sadness the destruction of German cities, of which he learned through letters from friends and saw firsthand during his travels by train from Paris back to Kirchhorst while on furlough.

THE RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES On 27 March 1944, Jünger was visited in Paris by Lieutenant Colonel Cäsar von Hofacker, a liaison between Carl Heinrich von Stülpnagel and the group of officers around Hofacker’s cousin, Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, who was the central figure in the failed assassination attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944. On that afternoon, Hofacker took a walk with Jünger on the Avenue Kléber and informed him that Stülpnagel was under observation and Jünger himself was viewed with suspicion. Hofacker suggested he leave Paris and go to Marseilles for a while. The young colonel also filled him in on many of the details of the plot, called Operation Valkyrie, and listed the main conspirators. On 20 July 1944, Stauffenberg brought a bomb in an attaché case into Hitler’s “Wolf ’s Lair” in East Prussia.

Stauffenberg left just before the explosion, which injured but did not kill Hitler, shielded as he was by a heavy concrete table.

Jünger had also came into contact with officers involved in the Rommel Plan to arrest and replace Hitler.37 In fact, Rommel had been given Jünger’s treatise The Peace through an intermediary, was impressed by the ideas, and may have been spurred to act by them.38 The Westlösung (or Western Solution) envisaged imprisoning Hitler sometime in May 1944, when he was inspecting the Atlantic Wall, an extensive system of fortifications built to defend against the expected Allied landing in the west. Inexplicably, Hitler continued to direct the war effort from Berchtesgaden, his outpost and home in the Bavarian Alps. After the invasion of Normandy, Hitler announced an unexpected visit for 19 June to Rommel’s headquarters at La Roche-Guyon, fifty-eight kilometers from Paris. Speidel and Rommel had an ideal opportunity to strike. But as so often in Hitler’s life, he was spared by a lucky intervention. The bombing of England with V-1 rockets had begun from French territory on 15 June. On 18 June, one of the rockets strayed off course and came down near Margival, nearly hitting the Führer’s headquarters Wolfschlucht II, where Hitler was meeting with General Rundstedt. Shaken by the near miss and depressed about the viability of his new wonder weapons, he returned abruptly to Bavaria.

The failed Rommel plan to arrest Hitler was now replaced by the Stauffenberg plot to kill the dictator. On the early evening of 20 July, Hofacker called Stülpnagel and reported that Hitler was dead.39 Thereupon Stülpnagel ordered the arrest of more than a thousand SS and Sicherheitsdienst agents. He had already set in motion plans to have them face mass executions. But at twenty to eight the same evening, the German radio reported that Hitler had survived. Chaos now reigned in the Hôtel Majestic. Jünger spent the day hunting butterflies in the forest around

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Saint Cloud40 and made only veiled references in the journals to the sense of heightened danger when he came back to headquarters.

The news from Berlin was contradictory. Was this a trick by Goebbels to buy time? The commanding general in the west, Hans Günter von Kluge, would have to make a decision without knowing the true state of affairs. Kluge had known about the plot through one of its instigators, Henning von Tresckow, but when it came time to act he decided that there could be no coup while Hitler was still possibly alive. General Rommel, the only military leader in Nazi Germany who could have led a rebellion against the living Führer, had been badly injured just three days before Operation Valkyrie. All of the prisoners were released, including the top SS commanders Carl-Albrecht Oberg and Helmut Knochen.

Jünger’s confidante Hofacker was arrested by the Gestapo in Paris on 26 July, brutally tortured. and eventually sentenced to death by the infamous People’s Court. Under torture, he revealed details about General Rommel’s involvement in the German Resistance, but he did not disclose the participation of Jünger and the officers around Stülpnagel in Paris.

Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, a servile mouthpiece of Hitler, ordered Stülpnagel to fly to Berlin. Stülpnagel sent Jünger regrets through his secretary for having to cancel a scheduled breakfast and then, instead of flying, ordered a driver to take him by car past the battlefields of Verdun where he had fought in the Great War. During a fierce rainstorm, Stülpnagel shot himself in the temple on the banks of the Meuse River. His driver rescued him from the water, still alive. He had blinded himself but was brought to an army hospital, guarded by the SS, and then taken to Plötzensee in Berlin, where he was tried by the notorious Peoples Court’s judge Roland Freisler on 30 August and hanged six weeks later. Kluge was replaced by General Walter Model on 17 August and ordered to report to Berlin. He took his own life with cyanide pills near Metz on 19 August.

Kluge’s representative in Paris, General Günther Blumentritt, may have saved the day for Jünger and others in the group that met at the Hotel George V. On the evening of 20 July, he sat down with Oberg and Knochen in the Salon Blue of the Hotel Raphael and, in a scene seemingly out of a tale by Rabelais, ordered several bottles of fine champagne to placate them. Blumentritt tried to frame the entire affair as a gross misunderstanding. Having been caught flatfooted by the plot that developed on their watch, it was in the SS commanders’ self-interest not to delve too deeply into the extent of the German Wehrmacht officers’ involvement in the botched coup.41 With Jünger having been so close to key members of the German Resistance, the question must be posed how he survived the brutal crackdown by the SS in Paris after 20 July. It is widely claimed that Hitler protected him, saying “Nothing happens to Jünger” (“Dem Jünger geschieht nichts”). There is only one source for this supposed utterance, namely Friedrich Hielscher, who heard it from Wolfram Sievers, an SS officer who was hanged after the war, in June 1948.42 (Hielscher and Jünger carried on an extensive correspondence for fifty-eight years).

The Hielscher-Severs source seems credible, but it is uncorroborated. According to one biographer, Jünger was to have been called before Roland Freisler’s

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Peoples’ Court in the spring of 1945. Only the chaos of the final months of the war saved him.43 Hitler is not known to have made compassionate exceptions, to say the least, even for war heroes. Erwin Rommel would be a good example.

The more likely explanation is that Jünger was inordinately careful. He burned his manuscripts and letters on sensitive matters, as noted above, and he was in fact opposed to any attempt to assassinate Hitler or work against the party dictatorship, as much as he disliked both. He expressed his opposition to assassinations of dictators several times in his journals. He argued from historical precedents in which the aftermath of such killings had produced greater tyranny. In the specific case of Germany, he feared that a successful elimination of Hitler would lead to a new Stab-in-the-Back Legend.44

LAST KNIGHTS OF THE MAJESTIC By early 1944, the liberation of Paris was imminent. Jünger noted that the Americans were in Renne on 5 August. He climbed up to the top of Sacré-Coeur to bid goodbye to his beloved Paris as the cobblestones baked in the hot sun. “Cities are feminine and only smile on the victor,” he noted enigmatically. On 10 August, he visited Florence Gould for the last time. Three days later he took a walk with Charmille on the banks of the Seine. The Paris journals end there. The next day, 14 August, the evacuation of the German army began, and Jünger was seated on one of the first military transports out of the city.

He received news of the liberation of Paris back home in Kirchhorst. On 17 August, the German army began placing explosives around the French capital, not only intending to hold off the Allied advance but also honoring Hitler’s orders to destroy Paris if necessary. Columns of German military vehicles were on the move everywhere in the metropolis. The French Resistance plastered the capital with posters calling for a general strike and mobilization against the Germans. The war journals are curiously silent about all this frenetic activity. On 20 August, he visited a cemetery and ruminated about short life spans. On 21 August, he joined some boys in a fishing expedition. Finally, on 23 August he noted that “the Americans have entered Paris” and then went off for a swim and sunbathing. Attacks on collaborators in Paris began at this time, and Jünger noted with bitterness how many of his Paris friends were arrested, beleaguered, or attacked by mobs. “They say Montherlant is being harassed. He was still caught up in the notion that chivalrous friendship is possible; now he is being disabused of that idea by louts.”45

ON PAIN On 25 October, before departing for the Italian front, Jünger’s son Ernstel visited Kirchhorst for the last time. On 27 October, Jünger was formally decommissioned from military service. He returned to his books and his garden, although constant Allied bombing made life difficult and dangerous even in rural areas in Germany.

praise for A German Officer in Occupied Paris

“Ernst Jünger’s record of German-occupied Paris and the battlefields of the Caucasus is a treasure trove for readers interested in the history of the Second World War. Even more, though, it is a literary accomplishment of the first order, a document of European modernism, in which this master stylist leaves traces of the violence of the age between the lines of his crystalline prose.”

RUSSE LL A. BE RMAN, Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University, and senior fellow, Hoover Institution

“Through these journals, we see Jünger consorting with resistors and collaborators, intellectuals and artists, drinking champagne, dining in sumptuous restaurants, and accompanying other officers to nightclubs, where naked women perform. Wandering around the city, he combs through antiquarian bookshops, stops in at galleries, discusses literature with friends, and acutely observes plants and flowers change with the seasons. He recounts in detail his dreams, nightmares, and musings on war. . . . A unique historical testimony.”

Kirkus Reviews

“Once read, these [journals] are never forgotten. They are surely the strangest literary production to come out of the Second World War, stranger by far than anything

by Céline or Malaparte. Jünger reduces his war to a sequence of hallucinatory prose poems in which things appear to breathe and people perform like automata or, at best, like insects.”

BRUCE CHATWI N, New York Review of Books (review of French edition)

E U ROPEAN PE RSPECTIVES: A SE RI ES I N SOCIAL THOUG HT AN D CU LTU RAL CRITICISM