Hitler ordered Paris burned to the ground. His general ignored him — and the first troops to enter weren't French, but Spanish Republican refugees fighting under the French flag.
As Allied forces closed on Paris in August 1944, Adolf Hitler issued direct orders to the German military governor, General Dietrich von Choltitz: destroy the city. Blow the bridges, mine the major buildings, level it if necessary. Von Choltitz had a reputation as an officer who followed orders. This time, he didn't.
A French Resistance uprising began on August 19, as police and Parisian civilians fought German forces across the city. For six days, Parisians battled with whatever weapons they could find, erecting barricades from cobblestones while waiting for liberating armies racing to reach them.
The first Allied unit to enter Paris was not American or British — it was the 9th Company of the French 2nd Armored Division, composed almost entirely of Spanish Republican refugees who had fled Franco's dictatorship. Their half-tracks bore names of Spanish battle sites: Guernica, Teruel, Brunete. Spanish exiles liberated Paris while Spain sat out the war.
General de Gaulle insisted that French forces enter Paris first — a decision driven entirely by politics. He needed the liberation to be French to legitimize his provisional government's authority and prevent the Allies from administering France as an occupied territory, as they were already planning to do.
On August 26, de Gaulle led a procession down the Champs-Élysées before an estimated 2 million Parisians. Sniper fire broke out during the march. De Gaulle kept walking without flinching, and the footage became one of the defining images of the war — a performance of courage as much as an act of it.
Von Choltitz surrendered to French officers on August 25, claiming he had spared Paris deliberately out of love for the city and because he knew the war was lost. Historians debate how much credit he deserves — Swedish diplomat Raoul Nordling had been negotiating with him for days, and the advancing Allied armies made large-scale demolition increasingly impractical regardless.