Memoirs of General Dietrich von Choltitz

For our contemporaries, Dietrich Von Choltitz has the features of Niels Arestrup, who portrayed him masterfully in Volker Schlöndorff's film "Diplomatie", staging his fateful face-to-face with Swedish consul Raoul Nordling, played by André Dussollier. At the conclusion of their discussions, the military commander of Paris agrees not to carry out Hitler's order to destroy the City of Light, saving the capital from planned destruction.

This celebrated story rests on a forgotten text: the general's memoirs, published in 1964 under the title "Un soldat parmi les soldats". While he devotes some fifty pages to his Parisian mission, Von Choltitz also recounts in fluid prose the history of the Wehrmacht and the campaigns in which he took part: the invasion of Poland, the Netherlands and Belgium (1939–1940); the Russian campaigns between 1941 and 1943 (Barbarossa, the siege of Sevastopol, the retreat after Stalingrad, Kursk…), and the Italian campaign.

This is followed by a breathless account of the murderous Battle of Normandy, consequent to the landings, before the general entered the grand stage of history after being directly appointed by Hitler as military governor of Paris in early August 1944 (his portrait of the ageing dictator is revealing). While Von Choltitz's account is of capital importance, it is no less deserving of critical scrutiny and contextualisation. Like most German generals of the era, he presents himself as a man of honour, the embodiment of a heroic Wehrmacht opposed to Hitler.

The reality proves considerably more complex, as Jean-Charles Foucrier demonstrates in his substantial preface and the exhaustive critical apparatus with which he equips the text.