The Reluctant Prussian

IS PARIS BURNING? by Larry Collins & Dominique Lapierre. 376 pages. Simon & Schuster. $6.95.

Hitler's orders were blunt: if Paris could not be defended against the onrushing Allied armies, it was to be destroyed. The bridges of the Seine, Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre, even the Eiffel Tower, were to be blasted to oblivion. The conquerors were to find that, in its dying gasp, the Thousand-Year Reich had leveled a thousand years of Western history's most treasured monuments, leaving Paris, in Hitler's words, "nothing but a blackened field of ruins."

Even Hitler knew he would need an exceptionally loyal man to carry out his orders. He was sure he had found that man in General Dietrich von Choltitz. The stubby, impassive Prussian had led the blitzkrieg on Rotterdam, and later, on the Eastern front, had earned the reputation of a "smasher of cities," starting with Sevastopol which he had leveled for Hitler on Hitler's orders. He was the scion of a Prussian family that in three generations as officers had never disobeyed an order. On Aug. 7, 1944, Hitler summoned Von Choltitz, put him in command of the Paris area and told him what he had to do.

Gift to Humanity. Is Paris Burning? is the extraordinary story of what happened in the next 19 days before Paris was taken by the Allies. The authors, an American and a French journalist, spent three years in research and in interviewing the participants, both major (notably Von Choltitz himself) and minor, a score of whose private stories are recounted in detail. But above all, it is the absorbing story of Von Choltitz' lonely drama of decision.

On the one hand there were the Fuehrer's orders to raze Paris, cabled and telephoned with increasing frequency, culminating in Hitler's furious two-word query: "Brennt Paris?--Is Paris burning?" On the other was the eloquent plea of the Vichy mayor of Paris, Pierre Taittinger, as the two stood on the balcony of the Hotel Meurice looking out across Paris shortly after the general had arrived. "Often it is given to a general to destroy, rarely to preserve," said Taittinger. "Imagine that one day it may be given to you to stand on this balcony again, as a tourist, to look once more on these monuments to our joys, our sufferings, and to be able to say, 'One day I could have destroyed all this, and I preserved it as a gift for humanity.' General, is not that worth all a conqueror's glory?"

Act of Treason. At that point, Von Choltitz still intended to do his duty, and he said so. "You are a good advocate of Paris, Mr. Taittinger. You have done your duty well. And likewise I, as a German general, must do mine." But there were other things that weighed on him. The one interview he had with Hitler in his life--the one assigning him to Paris--had been unsettling. He went expecting to be inspired; he came away convinced that Hitler was mad. Finally, it became clear that the war was lost, that the destruction of the City of Light would serve not the slightest military purpose. By then, explosives had been carefully planted under every symbol of Paris. To ignite them, Von Choltitz realized, would mean that his family's name would be forever dishonored in history. In the end, the Prussian reluctantly went beyond doing nothing: using the Swedish consul as his liaison, he secretly invited the Allies to enter Paris in order to save the city.

By his own lifelong military code, it was an act of treason beyond measure. By any other measure, it was one of the few luminous deeds to come out of the darkness of Nazi Germany.

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