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My name is Roland Nosek.

I'm 32 years old.

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.BZ

My family is Austrian, but I live in Germany.

I joined the SS at the very beginning of 1940.

I am a spy for the SD, the Nazi intelligence service.

I speak fluent French and English without an accent.

I've been to Paris before the war.

That's why I was sent there.

They call me the most Parisian of Germans.

This is my story.

End of summer 1945, the Second World War is over.

In a French interrogation centre in the Black Forest, the services of the

counter-espionage services debrief a former SS spy and ask him to write

a report on his four years of infiltration of Paris.

The SS is Roland Nosek.

We know that Nosek joined the SD in 1938.

We are certain that he is a national socialist.

He's a Hitler supporter, that's for sure.

He's not a fanatic.

He's quite a pragmatic person and he's sincerely Francophile.

It's thanks to his Francophilia that his superiors send him underground.

to the French capital in the wake of German troops.

I arrived in Paris in June 1940, on the 17th to be exact.

Three days before, on 14 June, our Wehrmacht entered Paris.

10 May 1940.

After eight months of a phoney war, the Germans launch an offensive.

and crushed the French and British troops,

driving them back to the Dunkirk pocket, back to the North Sea.

Five days later, the Germans charge towards the capital.

It's the debacle, the defeat, the exodus.

On the evening of 13 June, the Germans are at the gates of Paris.

The American ambassador William Bullitt will negotiate on behalf of France.

the arrival of the occupying forces.

Paul Reynaud, who is President of the Council, calls Bullitt and tells him that he

is authorised to warn the Germans that Paris has been declared an open city

and to try to ensure as little destruction as possible.

So Bullitt is driving around Paris with his car and his American banner.

totally empty.

He asks, for reasons of safety of the entry into Paris, that the Germans

to wait until the 14th.

The occupant enters.

He is coming from the north.

It's a kind of fog in Paris, chemical fog, we don't know

why.

And the occupier, in half a day, settles in Paris.

Four o'clock in the morning.

The first German soldier crosses the Place Voltaire on a motorbike.

A group of soldiers storms the East and North railway stations.

At eight o'clock another group moves into the Hotel de Crillon.

The Germans move into the Crillon which is the former seat of the delegation.

American delegation for the Versailles treaty negotiations.

They're playing with symbols because the Crillon is closed.

The police commissioner from the eighth floor arrives and tries to open the door.

There are chains, he can't get in.

We tell him: "Either you open in 20 minutes or you don't".

At 8:30 a.m., motorbikes go up the Champs-Élysées.

At 9 o'clock, at the Invalides, people demand the return of the banners.

of 14-18 and the first swastika is raised.

The staff is in the centre.

On the left bank is the Luftwaffe headquarters.

So, in the Senate.

On the right bank, we have the staff of the Wehrmacht, the army,

who stay at the Raphaël and work at the Majestic.

The troupe is in the suburbs and what's fascinating is that at noon,

everyone is in their place.

The Nazis are installed.

The clocks go back to German time.

There's nobody in the streets.

No more cars.

Silence everywhere.

Paris is almost empty.

Nearly a million inhabitants have fled, barely 800,000 Parisians are still here.

Only the poorest remain, who watch the troops pass by with curiosity.

Those who remain are the concierge of a building, the herringwoman of Les Halles.

Everyone has fled.

On 17 June, Himmler sends a commando of 20 SS dressed as military policemen.

Roland Nosek is one of them.

There is a very small core of the SS which is called the Sipo SD.

The Gestapo is often used for everything.

The Gestapo is just a branch of the Sipo SD, the intelligence service.

It's not a police organization, it's an organization that is responsible in

to monitor political opponents of the National Socialist regime.

and, more generally, to provide political intelligence,

that is, to try to take the pulse of public opinion and to anticipate

political developments in the country.

Until June 42, this commando of the Sipo SD, its essential functions,

in principle are simply intelligence and surveillance of the enemies of the

Reich, i.e. the Jews, the Communists, but also the churches.

All those who are the designated enemies of the Nazi regime.

We had to work unofficially in the beginning to occupy the field

against the Wehrmacht.

The SS were all housed at the Hotel du Louvre and then at the Hotel Scribe.

My team and I stayed at the Hotel Boccador near the Champs-Élysées.

It's in the Parisian palaces that the maintenance services are set up

in Paris.

The military high command moves to the Majestic on Avenue Kléber,

today the Peninsula.

The Majestic Hotel will be the headquarters for the entire Occupation,

of the German military command in France.

There are two staffs here.

There is a military staff that deals with security issues in the broadest sense,

and an administrative staff which is supposed to look after the supervision of

the French administration and the economic exploitation of the country.

The Abwehr, the military secret service, invests the Lutetia.

The Nazis requisition the hotels on avenue Foch or the Lutetia.

flats on boulevard Lannes and in the 16th arrondissement.

If the swastika is everywhere, every department, sometimes a competitor,

has its own codes.

We could look at the Occupation and the Collaboration from the point of view of colour.

The Gestapo is in black, the Order in black; the militia will be in black;

the Brown Shirts are black shirts.

You see someone dressed in black, you know very well what department he belongs.

At the beginning, the Gestapo is in the minority.

The Wehrmacht is in charge and in command.

They are in verdigris, a kind of not very nice green by the way,

the green of the army.

Around October 1940, we moved to 11 boulevard Flandrin.

My mission was to penetrate all French circles and recruit

agents who would provide us with regular information concerning the

daily life and political circles in Paris.

In just a few days, Paris is put to the test and becomes operational for the

Germans.

How is it that tens of thousands of occupants arrived

so easily?

It was all planned a long time ago.

But the important thing is that it was planned at least three years ago.

The war was prepared from 1935 onwards on the German side.

The big question in June 1940 is: Who can come to France?

Who is going to settle there?

The plans for the Paris land registry were on sale freely and anyone could

buy the plans.

I don't think the secret service would have missed it.

What's very interesting is that the requisitioned dwellings are not

of course not by chance.

The occupant has a taste for luxury.

He likes Haussmann buildings, private mansions,

but especially a fire escape.

The more important the person: two emergency exits.

For Nazi Germany, occupying Paris is also synonymous with symbolic crushing.

of France, the hereditary enemy.

It's a shock for the whole world.

It's a real worldwide emotion.

The world press sees the end of the City of Light.

A Chilean newspaper says: "The Nazis have turned out the light of

civilization by taking Paris, but the City of Light will be reborn one day."

You have to see what a shock it was for the world and a humiliation for

the French.

It was a huge trauma for the French and it still is,

I think.

But for the world.

France was almost wiped off the map politically.

There is a state of shock at seeing Germans in the street,

Nazi flags and signs.

The country no longer exists.

You have to imagine what it's like, it's unheard of as a psychological shock.

It's revenge.

And revenge is a feeling that Hitler knows well.

He too has long dreamed of coming to Paris.

All of a sudden, someone arranges a whirlwind visit for him from Belgium.

A visit whose date has often been debated.

On 28 June, on the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles?

Now everything fits.

We know it was on the 23rd.

On a Sunday morning, a beautiful summer day, Hitler arrives at Le Bourget.

He is in a private plane with his close guard.

Paris - and it was clear to Hitler -, was an impressive city,

as a symbol of the rich past of the West.

And Paris represented, from his point of view, much more than Warsaw,

Leningrad or any other city in the East.

He is no longer held back by joy.

It's a symbol and the consecration of victory.

He's in his open car, that famous armoured Mercedes-Benz,

and he's not going unnoticed.

He asks for a tour of the most grand monuments, asks to see the Opera House.

There's this famous news photo where we see the swallows - we used to call them

the policemen with their big swallow-like skulls - which

the military salute.

He goes of course to the Invalides to pay his respects for a moment in front of Napoleon's tomb.

He goes to the Pantheon and walks down Boulevard Saint-Michel.

He gets caught again at the bottom.

At a quarter past eight, he has finished his visit and leaves.

The photo of Hitler in front of the Eiffel Tower will go around the world.

This news will spread like wildfire.

Eva Braun had a picture of her Hitler with the tower on her bedside table.

Eiffel Tower at the back.

Hitler's whirlwind visit was not primarily for propaganda purposes.

Hitler was very interested in the history of the Parisian heritage that he knew.

quite well.

There was a serious ulterior motive behind this.

In fact, after the war he wanted to rebuild Berlin into a city again.

more prestigious and more pompous than Paris was at that time.

Hitler spent the happiest day of his life as a tourist in Paris.

He never came back.

In the summer of 1940, the Parisians who stayed or came back were no longer

more or less resigned.

Daily life is slowly returning to more or less normal,

except that everywhere we go, we see soldiers in uniform.

It was a conscript army that represented a fairly accurate picture of

German society in all its diversity and all its age groups.

The type of soldier still present in 1943 and 1944 is quite different from the one

who arrives in 1940.

By 1943-1944, they're not at all the athletic, pleasant young soldiers.

to look at from 40.

They're quite old, sometimes wounded, and they're men sent here because

they can't be used at the front any more.

The Russian front was extremely difficult for the soldiers.

It was rather nice to have a permission to Paris.

There was even this formula: "For everyone, at least once in Paris".

They were arriving in an incredibly interesting city that they would never have seen before.

from a German point of view,

in a city that was not at war.

In my department, I recruited Germans who lived in France,

Luxembourgers, one or two Frenchmen.

The typists or translators were from Germany.

No one wore a uniform and all spoke French without an accent.

In the beginning, I didn't have any specific guidelines.

I took the opportunity to start finding my first personal contacts.

For Roland Nosek, Paris becomes the playground for civilian intelligence.

The status of the city wanted by Hitler, as opposed to that of a garrison town,

makes it easier to infiltrate.

Everything is done on the German side to join forces with the Parisians.

The instructions given to the army were to behave properly.

Paris is going to be the City of Light, the city of pleasure.

It's going to be a showcase.

A tourist showcase, but not a centre of power.

For Germans, wherever they are in the war, think of Paris,

is the promise of a week of military tourism.

It's the place to be.

It's the symbol of an art of living and of the gentle French way of life.

We have this German expression: "Glücklich wie Gott in Frankreich",

happy as God in France.

And a place of pleasure, of course.

That's what we're thinking about.

The Parisian brothel.

A staple of the German collective imagination.

With the Occupation, Paris became the rst destination for sex tourism

in history, where vice takes precedence over virtue.

There were also cities in Germany for sexual escapades.

Berlin in the 20s, it can be compared to Paris.

But the Berlin of the 30s, especially from 1933 on,

it's not like that anymore.

Although there are still some opportunities for original sexual adventures,

nothing to compare with what we found in Paris.

Like here, rue Blondel, in the second arrondissement.

Aux Belles Poules.

A brothel, symbol of the fantasy of war.

During the war, German officers had a whole panel of young women

who were made available to them.

They were sitting on red banquettes all around the room.

It's in this place, in this living room,

that they were choosing the girls they liked best.

Of the 180 brothels in Paris in 1940, 40 were requisitioned for the Wehrmacht.

Five or six exclusively for officers, SS cadres, and French collaborators.

It was a very social place, we didn't just do sexual services.

We come here for drinks and dinner.

In the end, the girls' performances are just incidental to the evening.

Of course, those who frequented the brothels back home in Germany,

party cadres or senior officers had never seen that.

The SS goes to Chabanais instead, Göring is at Chabanais,

there is the Sphinx...

There are a lot of brothels.

They're big meeting places for Franco-German and French Gestapo.

The Belles Poules' speciality was tableaux vivants.

The women put themselves on stage like in famous paintings.

With the mirrors, it allowed the customers to see them

from every angle, so they could go upstairs and do the services.

much more sexual.

Anybody going into a house close has to fill out a card with the name,

his name, the name of the prostitute, the date of the report and is given

a condom called ein Pariser, a Parisian.

There was nothing erotic about it any more.

There was nothing left but pure bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy.

The most effective German weapon for administering France and bringing it under control.

not with the complicity of a part of the French and its elites.

After the armistice was signed on 22 June 1940, on 10 July,

the Vichy regime, headed by Marshal Pétain and Pierre Laval,

opted for collaboration.

The Germans install loudspeakers in every square in Paris.

People are not surprised that they have asked for an armistice,

but very shocked that they didn't announce that they were going to Africa

or England as the Dutch and British

governments said.

France is the only defeated country to sign the armistice.

The other countries have signed capitulations.

For the Nazis, the choice of Pétain is a godsend.

Pétain is the winner of Verdun.

Are you more French than he is?

That's the best formula.

That's Vichy for Hitler, that allows him to occupy France more cheaply.

That's what Hitler explained to Mussolini on 18 June 1940.

He demands Nice, Savoy, an occupation and Hitler says :

"No, not at all.

You haven't understood a thing.

What I need is Marshal Pétain.

I want a real regime accepted by the French, admired by the French so that I

can govern without problems".

On the German side, collaboration, is to make war,

to better exploit a country and not to have to maintain order since

it's the French who do it.

We need a government on the spot that takes care of the tasks that are negative to the eyes

of the population.

They bear the responsibility and not us.

We're the ones who impose them, they're the ones who do it, and the people

turn to their government.

For some French business and political circles, this collaboration

is a gamble for the future.

Pierre Laval made a diagnosis: Europe is definitively Nazi and

you have to get along with the Nazis, then perhaps soften all

that we can't stand in Nazism.

Civilize them a bit.

If we cooperate, we are no longer defeated.

If we cooperate, we may be able to obtain a favourable peace treaty in the future,

once all of Europe is Nazi.

It aspires to one thing only, to become the best province of a

Nazi Europe.

Meanwhile, Roland Nosek, the SS spy, is advancing his pawns and recruiting.

My network has grown thanks to the Frenchmen who have been working for us since

the first day.

One of my informants introduced me to a few people, including some

French air force officers.

In particular to an aviator, Albert Gaveau.

He gives me information about a resistance group.

The headquarters is at the Musée de l'Homme and a certain Weil-Curiel was my first contact.

track.

This whole thing started on 11 November 1940, the first 11 November

of the Occupation.

All patriotic demonstrations are forbidden.

Yet 5,000 people are coming to demonstrate.

Most of them are students, universities and teachers.

The rallying point, the Arc de Triomphe.

At dawn, two young lawyers, Léon-Maurice Nordmann and André Weil-Curiel,

laid a wreath at the foot of the statue of Clemenceau and a large map,

as if General de Gaulle had laid it, saying: "General de Gaulle,

to the father of victory".

In homage to Clemenceau, so a reference to victory.

It begins as a beautiful demonstration of solidarity and refusal,

in any case, to submit to the order of the occupier.

It still ends in violence.

There are stops, arrests and injuries.

It turns out that André Weil-Curiel, one of the leaders of the demonstration,

is friends with intellectuals who work at the Musée de l'Homme.

Heading for the ethnographic museum at the Trocadero.

It was here, among other places, that in 1940 in Paris, women and men decided

to do something and entered the resistance.

This was the birthplace of an organization which after the war would be called the network

of the Musée de l'Homme.

We're in one of the exhibition galleries at the museum.

This is a museum that was inaugurated in 1938, a museum at the cutting edge of modernity,

and which quite clearly affirms a certain number of values from the outset that go,

for example, completely contrary to National Socialist science and

of the idea of a hierarchy of races, immutable, and so on.

This is a much more progressive view.

At the end of the 30s, ethnologists, anthropologists and linguists

work together at the museum.

What they have in common is a very early commitment to anti-fascism and to

the left of the Popular Front.

The beginnings of the Resistance, you shouldn't imagine

extremely spectacular actions.

We're not in an armed resistance and we're not derailing trains,

that's not it at all.

The first question the pioneers of the Resistance ask themselves is :

What can we do?

What can we do?

The peculiarity of the organization that is being created at the Musée de l'Homme,

is the major presence of women.

Germaine Tillion, who belongs to another group, but who comes to prepare

her thesis at the museum.

Agnès Humbert working in another museum.

Yvonne Oddon, central pivot, who reigns over the library.

Yvonne Oddon is the librarian of the Musée de l'Homme.

She works here.

Very soon people who had been mobilized will return to the Museum of Man.

In particular, two people who need to be talked about immediately,

Boris Vildé who is a linguist, and another very important character

who is Anatole Levitsky.

These three, this trio, got together again in the summer of 1940 and would meet often

in the library.

The library is going to become a sort of centre of these emerging activities

of the Resistance.

Yvonne Oddon, she's the one who receives people, who refers and who collects a certain amount of information.

information that will be centralized here.

It's around this core that things are created.

Obviously, the library plays a very important role.

At the beginning, it's little things, inscriptions, butterflies.

Then, leaflets that already require more thought and more resources.

Of course, at the end of the chain, the first underground sheets,

that is to say, to have a voice heard that is not the voice of propaganda

or Vichy propaganda.

From autumn 1940 onwards, a sort of...

Instead of the term network, I prefer the term Vildé sector.

That is, several groups that are related to each other

and who have in common that they work with Boris Vildé and with the people of the

Musée de l'Homme.

The first steps of this group in the nascent Resistance are necessarily

awkward.

It's Boris Vildé, with the ardour of his amateur commitment, who's about to make a mistake.

a fatal mistake.

He becomes infatuated with Albert Gaveau, the aviator who works for Nosek.

Boris Vildé finds him very resourceful and makes him one of his liaison officers,

which is obviously dramatic because a liaison officer, by definition,

is someone who makes contact with the different groups.

Boris Vildé has absolute confidence in himself, he's the one in charge.

In reality, he is a double agent working for the SD.

He's going to be behind the successive blows of the net that will decimate the

groups around the Musée de l'Homme and in the heart of the Musée de l'Homme.

Gaveau gave us the main indications and played a big role.

in the dismantling of this group.

But, when I realized that this affair was not within the competence

the Gestapo, who dealt with it successfully.

this case in collaboration with the GFP, the military secret police.

Gaveau continued to work regularly with the Gestapo.

The arrests took place in the spring of 1941.

January 42, trial before the German military court in Paris.

Trial and conviction.

Extremely heavy sentence, death sentence for men

and for women, women whose punishments are going to be commuted into punishments

deportation.

Yvonne Oddon, for example, Germaine Tillion deported to Ravensbrück

and Agnès Humbert is going to be deported.

The men are going to be shot on Mont Valérien, which you can see from the terrace.

of the Musée de l'Homme.

Located in Suresnes, six kilometres from Paris, le mont Valérien is a military fort.

This is where the prisoners sentenced to death from their Parisian prisons were held,

for the executions.

It's about concentrating that, both for these executions to be

massive and sufficiently dissuasive, and at the same time so as not to

not spread them all over the territory.

They have to be monitored places, that can be monitored all the time

so that they don't become places of martyrs.

The seven members of the Musée de l'Homme group are part of the more than 1

000 men who were shot at Mont Valérien during the Nazi occupation between

1941 and 1944.

If Nosek's service pulls off big coups, it's because he's managed to infiltrate

Parisian political and artistic elites.

This is the heart of worldly collaboration embodied by the unavoidable figure,

the queen of Paris, Josée Laval, daughter of Pierre Laval, number two

of the regime.

She is her father's showcase, her father's smile and elegance

that her father unfortunately doesn't have.

She creates a political image.

Josée Laval is crazy about her father.

She adores her father, he's her hero.

His daughter was a pawn who served him.

She was getting into circles where he didn't want to go and couldn't go.

She was there to carry his image, his presence, and then reap a reward.

information.

While Parisians are short of everything, Josée Laval and her friends are occupying their

time between the racecourse and choosing the cocktail dress for the evening.

All day long, it's receptions, cocktails, elegance and parties.

As a neighbour, Josée Laval frequents the place that symbolizes this collaboration.

chic and carefree.

This is the German embassy at 78 rue de Lille.

The German embassy is the most important social centre during the Occupation.

The credits are almost unlimited and the buffets are splendid.

This is what we now call the after party, i.e. the second half of the evening.

I think it was a place to see and be seen.

I know very few people who have refused to go to the big parties

at the German embassy.

Otto Abetz, the ambassador, thanks to his French friendships in the 1930s,

becomes the organizer of this Franco-German collaboration that looks like a

reunion.

Otto Abetz has a solid reputation as a Francophile.

He is married to a Frenchwoman, he loves culture and everything that goes with it.

And then, a certain sincerity that we attribute to him as far as

Franco-German understanding is concerned.

The French are going to bet a lot on the character.

These are real friendships.

That's the paradox and that's what bothers us most.

It wasn't just opportunism.

Something was created between these people because they're going to meet again afterwards

the war.

They're among themselves.

It was their pre-war friends because we really campaigned for it

a Franco-German rapprochement, which was immediately infiltrated by

the Nazis as soon as the Nazis came to power.

It's a great instrument of cultural penetration of a country that we wanted,

perhaps not to conquer, but in any case to subjugate.

Worldly collaboration, it was also to get to know these circles well,

to try to influence them and give a good image of Germany.

There is also an image policy.

Many German agents want to make sure that this image of the German

and the German world of '40 could perdurate in '41, even in '42,

even in 43.

I met Ambassador Otto Abetz immediately after my arrival in Paris.

in June 40.

I got the impression that he was to be regarded as an idealist who wanted to

Franco-German cooperation.

His biggest flaw was his friends, a real clique of sell-outs

of the French people.

His friends also frequent Josée Laval's cocktails .

For me, she represents the extraordinary and sick figure of power.

I think she didn't realize.

At the same time, there's a frivolity that goes with very well-off people.

That's what power brings.

Power is sick and no longer legitimate.

I think it's part of the illusion that there's a certain legitimacy.

normality of life that goes on.

For them, the Germans are a kind of lifeline and protection.

They say to themselves: "Better the Germans than the communists".

This off-the-ground society, living in Paris as if nothing or almost nothing had happened,

goes out a lot to the theatre and to concerts, for the paradox of occupied Paris is

to have known an exceptional cultural production.

One reason for this: the instrumentalization of art and culture.

It was important for the German occupiers not to appear as a troupe

of uncultivated barbarians who had come from the East and destroyed a great

civilization.

On the contrary, they wanted to import German culture and show the

what Germany had to offer.

In the summer of 1941, Mozart Week was organized.

There are free concerts.

It's hard to believe, but in France they didn't play Mozart,

we didn't give Mozart, we didn't listen to Mozart.

Music would be like a third language that would be neither French nor English.

or German.

You make a considerable artistic moment which can be very beautiful,

but at the same time, among the audience, you have the German officers.

You get people used, at least the elites, to this German presence that becomes

very acceptable, because in the end they give you pleasure.

It was at the theatre that Josée Laval met her great friend during the war,

Arletty.

At the time, she was one of the most famous actresses in France and the symbol of her country.

of an ambiguous social collaboration.

If she did not make films for the Nazis, her passionate love affair with

Hans Jürgen Soehring will be much talked about.

Soehring is in Paris during the Occupation, but we don't really know what he's doing.

He's around Laval's daughter, we don't really know, he's circling.

And then he meets Arletty, which keeps him going.

But what does he do all day?

He's not just courting Arletty!

As if the German government had sent some warmongers to seduce a certain Arletty.

number of these ladies.

He's trying to find representatives of good society, he's doing something else.

Does he organize looting?

If you know a certain number of members of the elite, you know very well

where the treasures are and you are useful to the great chief,

that is, Field Marshal Goering.

For his part, Nosek, the Nazi spy, is delighted to be with all these people

of the show.

It was through Leandri, a Corsican who was a bit of a crook, that I got to know a few film stars.

and French theatre.

He was a close friend of Tino Rossi, whom I saw regularly, but who

never asked me anything.

Leandri did ask me to do Danielle Darrieux a favour.

Nosek is intoxicated by this Parisian life which gives him access to celebrities,

actresses, writers and film people he would never have had access to

would normally have met.

He's going to take on the role of the good German, i.e. the nice, open guy

you can go to if you're in trouble and he'll fix you up.

And Nosek will arrange a lot of hits.

Danielle Darrieux came to boulevard Flandrin to beg me instantly.

to release her fiancé, a diplomat from Saint-Domingue,

Mr Rubirosa.

I couldn't do anything for her.

So she went to Berlin with other French artists to get

her release.

The train of shame on 19 March 1942.

We see artists like Danielle Darrieux taking the train to Berlin,

Suzy Delair, etc.

She doesn't consider herself a collaborator and was very affected by this film.

This film showed what was true.

Somehow there was this worldly collaboration.

In a way, Danielle Darrieux was part of this social collaboration.

What the film doesn't show, is that Danielle Darrieux,

if she goes to Germany, it's not necessarily

on the same wavelength as other artists.

It's part of a deal where she wants to try to save her fiancé.

And indeed, thanks to this trip, her fiancé, to Germany,

is freed.

Everyone has their motivations.

Leandri also asked me to look after Maurice Chevalier.

At the time, he was having great trouble with his mistress, Nita Raya.

This girl was a dancer at the Casino de Paris and she was Jewish.

Chevalier asked me to protect her and I did it without asking anything in return.

back.

Maurice Chevalier went into hiding at the Liberation.

This is an illustration of French ambiguity and ambivalence.

He recorded the broadcasts on Radio Paris, the Nazi propaganda radio.

But on the other hand, he goes to Germany to sing in a prison camp.

and manages to free some of them.

In 44, a tribunal in Algiers sentenced him to death in absentia.

for collaboration.

He will eventually be cleared.

Nosek's friends, including the famous Leandri, also frequent the Montmartre hoodlums.

We came to have fun in the cabarets which never stopped opening.

The customers have changed.

You can find everything here that you can't find in Germany anymore.

Drugs, alcohol, prostitutes.

Montmartre and Place Pigalle are a compendium of clichés of Paris.

in Germany.

If Paris is the city of love and desire, then Montmartre truly is.

the heart of it, and you know that very quickly.

Montmartre is also a place where drug dealers and informers meet,

SS officers and spies.

It's especially the reign of the underworld and Corsican mobsters.

The Montmartre underworld is more like the lower-class black market.

The occupant theoretically has no right to do business directly.

with the occupied country, so there are a lot of intermediaries who show up.

It's a world where what was forbidden has become allowed.

Everyone has a nickname and is called by first names.

I think it's a time when everything the world has gone a bit crazy.

Everyone is meeting at Alexis's place on rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette,

a Corsican.

Alexis Pierre (Lovisi) was the owner of a small, well-known restaurant in

Montmartre even before the war.

I met him towards the end of 1940.

I liked his little restaurant.

We ate well there and met a lot of people, artists of all kinds.

categories, men of the middle, politicians.

It's an interesting place for him.

At Alexis's, you find all the people who count in Paris, former ministers

and former members of parliament.

It's at Alexis' that he's going to meet Jacques Doriot, the head of the PPF.

I met Jacques Doriot in the autumn of 1940.

I tried to use his party, the PPF, to get information.

information.

I think he's the only party leader collaborationist with anything

solid behind him and I subsidized right away.

Doriot is a politician.

He was number two in the Communist Party and later founded his own party

on a fascist line, the PPF.

He turns completely to the extreme right and becomes, I would say, pro-Nazi.

What Doriot and the Parti populaire français want is civil war.

Settling scores with the Communist Party.

Jacques Doriot will always demand a place in the government.

He will also quite often profess his loyalty to the Marshal for

the better to attack the government, especially Pierre Laval, to demand

replacement and aspire to a place at the head of a French government.

Doriot has supporters, thousands of supporters and tens of thousands

supporters.

He has people in all walks of life, Doriot supporters in the army.

There are some in the police, in the press, in industry.

It's absolutely everywhere and there are some all over France.

There are even in North Africa.

All these people, if you frame them, can provide intelligence and

work usefully for the SD.

But Roland Nosek's financial support is not disinterested.

Himmler wants to obtain as much political information as possible from his SS in Paris.

and police information for his Gestapo as part of his relentless fight against the

enemies of the Reich.

He pays dearly and wants results, but the PPF men are not at

and Nosek is annoyed at the amateurism of Doriot's spies.

In the end I only received two kinds of reports from Doriot and his PPF.

Insignificant police tips, arms caches or stories

communists.

I passed it on to the Gestapo and quite often, the feedback was that either it wasn't

not precise, or it was completely made up.

Real ineffectiveness or a manoeuvre to clear Doriot and his men after the event?

In any case, the support will last until the end of the war and death

of the head of the PPF in 44 in Germany.

The happy days of the collaborationists would not last until the famous

year 1944.

For their Nazi partners, things have been going seriously wrong since

the defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943.

By the end of the year, Hitler and his Wehrmacht generals knew that he had to get out of the war.

Paris would have to be evacuated.

It's out of the question for them to leave the compromised French politicians behind

them.

In '44, the liberation of Paris becomes an issue on all sides.

On the French side, someone has to be found for the post-Vichy period.

Why not, in a last chance manoeuvre, reunite the Assembly?

and take up the Third Republic where we left off?

Pierre Laval understands, perhaps belatedly, that Hitler is going to lose the war.

Not only is he going to lose the war, but that very soon the Allies and

resistance fighters will be in Paris.

He's trying to save his skin.

What Laval wants, at some point, is to hand over power.

He doesn't want to hand it over to de Gaulle because it's impossible.

If you find someone who hasn't been compromised, you'll give it to him.

and then they'll work it out.

But he will have done his job to the end.

That's what he really thinks.

Édouard Herriot was the President of the Chamber of Deputies.

Why not have Herriot be head of the welcoming government?

the Americans?

Of course, in Laval's mind, Herriot might be a shield for

- all those who had made mistakes - dare I say it?

camp.

Édouard Herriot is the only one who can constitutionally - as if one

the Assembly.

He's in pretty bad shape, under house arrest in a clinic

clinic near Nancy.

It was decided that President Laval should leave for Nancy to bring back

Herriot back to Paris and that I should escort him.

A car with SS men was to accompany us.

When we arrived in Nancy, I saw that Herriot and his wife were very happy to see us.

to go to Paris.

On 13 August, Herriot with Madame and the dog were installed at the prefecture

of the Seine.

He was extremely clever, Herriot.

He let Laval speak and didn't really accept anything.

He left some distance.

He found an argument.

He said it would take the reunion of what was called under the Third

Republic the National Assembly, i.e. both chambers,

the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.

Now, it is the President of the Senate, Jules Jeanneney, who is the President

of the National Assembly when the two meet.

Jeanneney is the one to talk to.

Jeanneney is nowhere to be found.

Obviously, he's suspicious.

He's realised that he's more of a hostage than a...

It's actually illegal.

Everything that may seem like an incredible masquerade today is an attempt

to renew the threads of the ordinary.

On 16 August, Laval and Ambassador Abetz attempt to convince Herriot,

to return to his clinic.

Which he will do before being deported to Potsdam, Germany, where he will stay for the rest of his life.

until the end of the war.

A few days later, the arrival of the Americans in Paris is

and the insurrection led by the Resistance is in full swing.

It is only at the moment of the breakthrough of the Allied forces on Normandy at Avranches

that things started to get dramatic in Paris.

Especially for troop transport and fuel supplies.

We saw people in a state of fever who would do anything to do

something.

You could see the Sully bridge and the FFI running across the bridge, bent in half and armed.

In our neighbourhood, militiamen were shooting from the rooftops.

When we passed through the streets, we stayed along a wall because at least,

you avoided the roof opposite.

There was still fear.

German civilians and many services have already left.

The troops are left.

On 9 August, a new general is sent to Paris to resist at all costs.

This is his last mission.

His name is von Choltitz.

On 20 August, Hitler sent the order to defend Paris without considering for

possible destruction of the capital.

But three days later, Hitler changes his mind.

On the 23rd, he orders that Paris will only fall to the enemy in a state of total destruction.

field of ruin.

If all is lost, if we are the last sacrificial victims and if

- the German Reich is to be destroyed - which he had no doubt it would be,

nothing else admirable must survive in Europe.

We're going to destroy everything with us.

It's the idea of collective collapse.

Yes, there is a great enigma about the destruction of Paris.

It was planned to destroy Paris like other cities have been destroyed before.

and there would be nothing left of the former great French power.

We destroy France before we leave.

Von Choltitz doesn't feel like doing anything, but he doesn't want to

surrender without a fight.

Around August 23, all roads in Paris were blocked

and fire was coming from all sides.

The bells of Notre-Dame announced the arrival of the Americans.

This is where it was learned that von Choltitz would deal with the FFI about a

surrender.

Von Choltitz undermines bridges and other major monuments with the means at his disposal.

but he can't do more than that.

Not enough to blow up Paris.

Night bombing is impossible, it would kill people

the remaining German soldiers.

The general simply cannot technically obey Hitler's order.

and he doesn't see the strategic military point of it.

We don't know what this guy thinks.

It's quite clear that von Choltitz never had any intention of doing so.

to do that.

Not because he loves Paris, but because he knew it was a

war crime and that there had already been first trials with convictions

war criminals to death by Allied courts.

Von Choltitz realizes above all that he does not have the means to destroy Paris,

he saves Paris more out of impotence than will .

But then he uses it to save himself.

We have to save his image once he's a prisoner.

Paris was liberated and didn't burn as Hitler demanded,

but Von Choltitz had nothing to do with it.

Paris was saved neither by the FFI alone, nor by Nordling alone, nor by Von Choltitz

nor by the 2nd armoured division alone.

It's all four together.

Obviously, American troops, that's important.

The balance of power is very important.

There was a bombing raid on Paris on 26 August, the day after the surrender.

of the Germans.

Nobody ever talks about it.

It was during the last bombing of Paris, at the time of the Liberation,

when the Germans were bombing in all directions, and we knew that they were

would do that anywhere.

In other cases, you'd think if it was the Americans or the Allies,

generally speaking, they would target and try to spare some of the

of the population.

There, we knew it might be a massacre.

When we came up from the cellar, we were in Place des Vosges and the sky

was completely red.

Pure Luftwaffe revenge.

120 aircraft departed from Belgium, more than 700 injured, hundreds of

and the southern districts of Paris devastated.

The chaos of the Liberation precipitates the fate of the last Nazis in Paris.

They are taken prisoner or flee as best they can.

All our services collapsed in August 1944.

The retreat was to the east of France, then to Germany.

I stayed in Belfort for a few days and went home,

in Constance.

But, around March 1945, Nosek will go back on duty.

His reputation, in inverted commas, as a good German and a guy who makes

services is known, obviously.

In 1945, when General de Gaulle's niece was interned in a

concentration camp and her life was feared, the French intelligence services

contact Nosek.

It is Nosek who will act as intermediary and allow Geneviève to be freed.

de Gaulle.

On the strength of his successful mission, Roland Nosek wants to surrender to the French,

but only to secret service officers.

It was he who in turn requested these officers.

He told them: "The war is over and lost for Germany.

I'm a Francophile, I don't consider myself a war criminal.

I did my duty for my country and I wish to work for France".

It is therefore quite likely

that he worked for the French intelligence services.

We don't have an answer to that today.

The answer is in the DGSE archives, so maybe we'll get it one day.

After the 60s, nobody knows what became of him.