Paris celebrated the US soldiers, French Resistance fighters and others who liberated the City of Light from Nazi occupation 75 years ago on Sunday, unleashing an eruption of kissing, dancing, tears and gratitude.
Firefighters unfurled a huge French flag from the Eiffel Tower, recreating the moment when a French tricolor stitched together from sheets was hoisted atop the monument 75 years ago to replace the swastika flag that had flown for four years.
Dozens of World War II-era jeeps, armored vehicles, motorcycles and trucks and people dressed in wartime uniforms and dresses paraded through southern Paris, retracing the entry of French and US tanks into the city on Aug. 25, 1944.
Photo: AP
Among those watching the parade was Roger Acher, 96, one of the few surviving veterans, who entered Paris with French general Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque’s 2nd Armored Division at about dawn that day.
Fighting was fierce as they moved toward the city, he said.
“I almost got killed,” Acher added.
A Dixieland band standing on an army truck played at the end of the parade, which wrapped up at the site of a new museum about the liberation and the French Resistance.
Long the jewel of European cities, Paris suffered relatively little damage in World War II, but its residents were humiliated, hungry and mistrustful after 50 months under the Nazis.
The liberation of Paris was both joyous and chaotic.
It was faster and easier for the Allies than their protracted battle through Normandy and its gun-filled hedgerows.
However, the fight for the French capital killed nearly 5,000 people, including Parisian civilians, German troops and members of the French Resistance whose sabotage and attacks had prepared the city for the liberation.
After invading in 1940, the Nazi hierarchy ensconced themselves in Paris’ luxury hotels, and hobnobbed at theaters and fine restaurants.
Collaborationist militias kept order and French police were complicit in the most dastardly act of the Occupation: the 1942 roundup of about 13,000 Jews at the Vel d’Hiv bicycle stadium before their eventual deportation to the Auschwitz death camp in German-occupied Poland.
The D-Day landings on June 6, 1944, helped change the tide of the war, allowing the Allies to push through Normandy and beyond to other German-occupied lands around Western Europe.
The message went out to the French Resistance in Paris that the Allies were advancing.
Resistance member Madeleine Riffaud, now 95, described to reporters killing a Nazi soldier on July 23, 1944, on a Paris bridge.
Riffaud was spotted as she escaped on her bicycle, arrested, tortured and jailed before being freed in a prisoner exchange days before the liberation of the city.
Seventy-five years later, she does not take the killing lightly.
“To carry out an action like that isn’t playing with dolls,” she said.
On Aug. 19, 1944, Paris police officers rebelled and took over police headquarters.
On the night of Aug. 24, the first Allied troops entered southern Paris.
The grand entrance of Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division followed by Allied forces would come the following day.
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