Paris (AFP)

On August 26, 1944, Paris just released, AFP broadcasts a timeline of eleven days before the capitulation of the Germans, after four years of occupation of the capital.

Here is the day of August 22 narrated by AFP journalist Jean Le Quiller.

Paris, August 26, 1944 (AFP) - Tuesday, August 22 - The alleged truce continues; Thus, we exchange the prisoners FFI (French Forces of the interior, Resistance, ed) made in the town hall of Neuilly against the Germans taken at the City hall and the prefecture. But the mores are not everywhere so kind. Near the Gare de Lyon, two young men were shot by the Germans because one of them wore an FFI armband; at the corner of Lafayette Street and Cadet Street, the bearer of the "Tonight" newspaper, Verdière, is arrested, taken to the Bois de Boulogne and shot; Place St Augustin, every armband wearer went through the arms.

A certain number of assassinations are thus committed in Paris; near the Gare de Lyon, a member of the "Afrika Korps" (German detachment operating in North Africa, ed) is famous for its cruelty; where all these victims have fallen, there are now flowers and moving handwritten signs.

Moreover, there are not only individual acts to reproach the Germans: at 9am this morning, 3 tanks accompanied by grenadiers, left Luxembourg, went up the street Soufflot and attacked the police station of the Pantheon as well as the town hall of Vth; the FFIs repel them first, but at 10 am, a new attack forces them to withdraw; they leave, taking the Germans and the collaborators whom they kept prisoners.

Likewise, at the Hôtel de Ville, around 11 am, an engagement takes place; German trucks wanting to force the roadblocks are attacked and taken; their occupants are wounded or taken prisoner, tanks then occur, bomb the City Hall, but must soon withdraw.

Many public monuments are occupied: Ministry of Labor, Ministry of PTT. On the airwaves, you can pick up a station that starts broadcasting with the magic words "Ici, Libre Patrie". The "Popular" publishes its first issue, adorned with a large portrait of Leon Blum; in the streets around the town hall "Combat", "Franc-Tireur", "Defense of France", "Libération" are sold by the hawkers: "L'Humanité" knows a brilliant sale place Victor Hugo, in 16th district: we will have seen everything.

The general (Marie-Pierre) Koenig (general-in-chief of the FFI, ed) is named military governor of Paris; he makes an appeal to the public that the newspapers publish and which is posted.

At 3:20 pm, new fights break out rue de Seine and rue St André des Arts; decidedly, the truce is well observed. At 16h, it is officially broken; the situation is therefore much clearer.

The IFF General Staff prescribes a generalized action, advises not to concentrate in the monuments, but to make harassment actions with the help of mobile groups, establish dams and many small posts, scatter the war in sum. In the evening, he passes notes to the newspapers: they are recipes: "how to build a barricade"; "how to build anti-tank mines"; "how to make gas bottles" ... Parisians will read this tomorrow in their newspapers.

Violent battles unfold in the evening in the twentieth: 30 Germans killed. A German convoy is attacked quai de la Tournelle.

© 2019 AFP