The German Occupation 1942-1944
When the United States entered WWII in December 1941, American institutions in Paris lost the tenuous ground of neutrality that had kept them from being occupied by German troops or administrators, as French institutions had been since June 1940. The American Hospital of Paris placed itself under the supervision of the French Red Cross, The American Library of Paris became a subsidiary of the French Information Center in New York, and The American Church on the Quai d’Orsay joined the French Protestant Consistory.
Holy Trinity, as part of the Anglican communion, had nowhere to go. The Rev. Frederick Beekman, Dean since 1918, had left for the United States in June 1940, leaving organist and lay reader Lawrence Whipp to provide pastoral care and conduct services for the twenty or so members of the parish still in Paris. Less than a week after the U.S. entry into the war in December 1941, he was arrested by German soldiers at the Cathedral and sent to the newly created American section of the internment camp at Compiègne. He would remain there for ten months.
Lutheran Pastor Rudolf Damrath, head army chaplain for all occupying troops in France, at the Cathedral.
On August 27th, 1942, the Germans seized the Cathedral itself, declaring it the Wehrmacht Protestant church (Deutsche Evangelisch Wehrmachtkirche). Lutheran Pastor Rudolf Damrath moved into the deanery, along with two assistant pastors, two organists, and a sexton. They allowed the French secretary and the sacristan to remain at their jobs, ordered repairs on broken roof tiles, and modernized the heating system from oil to coal. Damrath, who had served under General Erwin Rommel in the German Africa Corps, had been called to Paris by General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, commander of Greater Paris from February 1942. Stülpnagel had known Damrath as pastor of the Potsdam Garrison Church. In Paris, Damrath was named head army chaplain for all occupying troops in France.
As a man of deeply held Christian faith, Damrath wrote home of the anguish he felt in performing his duty. Called to accompany prisoners who were to be executed at Fresnes Prison, and afterward to give their funeral rites, he did what he could, writing home “again and again about the senselessness of this punishment by imprisonment and death,” his daughter, Maria Luise Damrath, wrote in a history of her father’s life, based on his diaries and more than 600 letters.
At Holy Trinity, Damrath began Bible study groups, choir practices, and regular pastoral care sessions. The deanery was open each evening for fellowship. “The pastoral care in this rectory was very much used as the people had a great many problems due to the separation from the family, the terrible atrocities of the German forces that they were witnessing and the horrible outcome of the war,” wrote Walter Bargatzky (1910-1998), who published a memoir of his time as a German officer in occupied Paris.[1]
Services sign at the occupied Cathedral.
Preaching was a careful exercise in metaphor; his congregations included members of the Gestapo, listening for any anti-Nazi nuances. But by 1944, Damrath seems to have taken off his gloves. On Holy Saturday (March 18th, 1944), he gave a sermon entitled “Jesus before the law courts” based on John 18-19, a copy of which was given to Cathedral archives. In it, he draws parallels between the trial of Christ and his death under religious and Roman authorities with the suffering of innocent persons in the war and the moral dilemma of soldiers who attempted to remain faithful Christians. He refers to the two trials as before the “ecclesiastical court” and the “state court,” implying that the historical Jesus stands judged by both the Nazi-dominated church and by the Nazi state with its anti-Christian rhetoric. Damrath wrote: “Pilate will have many successors. Pious and as well as godless successors. They will all do the same thing: protect the state’s interests from God, and to do their best to wash their hands of it. They will nail God to the cross and let Barabbas run free.”
In a sermon in April 1944, Damrath preached on Jesus as the good shepherd, defending against evil. There is but one true Führer, he said, and that was Jesus. Damrath was repeatedly warned by General von Stülpnagel that he was in the sights of the Gestapo. The well-known German writer Ernst Jünger, serving as an army captain in Paris, wrote: “There is the circle around Stülpnagel that is viewed with the greatest suspicion. As especially opaque and suspicious, as Hofacker said, are Pastor Damrath and I.”[2]
Damrath, Rommel, Stülpnagel, and Speidel
There is evidence that Damrath helped Stülpnagel and General Hans Speidel try to persuade General Rommel to join the Valkyrie conspiracy to assassinate Hitler in July 1944. Damrath officiated over the baptism of a child of a high-level German officer, a private event held May 15th, 1944 at the officer’s home in Marly-le-Roi, where the generals, summoned as godfathers, could speak without fear of Gestapo surveillance. After the assassination failed, Stülpnagel was arrested, attempted suicide, and was hanged after a show trial in August 1944. Rommel committed suicide, and German authorities executed more than 5,000 Germans suspected of supporting the attempt. Damrath, Speidel, Bargatzky and others escaped persecution, due to refusal of those captured to reveal the names of co-conspirators.
As the Allies approached Paris in mid-August 1944, the German general staff fled to Reims. Prior to his departure, Damrath and Lawrence Whipp walked through the Cathedral complex to determine that all was in good order before Damrath handed the Cathedral back over to Whipp. Damrath accompanied the general staff to Reims, but returned to the capital on August 24th to care for wounded German soldiers at Paris’ Hôpital de la Pitié. As the city came under Allied control, the wounded soldiers were turned over to the International Red Cross. Damrath was taken prisoner by the Americans, held at the now Allied camp at Compiègne, and became a founding member of the Comité Allemagne Libre pour l’Ouest (CALPO) chapter there.[3] He was repatriated to Germany in 1946. While in captivity, Damrath was interrogated at length by the OSS. The now declassified minutes of this interrogation have recently come to light confirming the details in the Cathedral and family records.
Lawrence Whipp memorial plaque in the Chapel of St. Paul the Traveler.
Lawrence Whipp, meanwhile, was released from the Compiègne camp in October 1942 and returned to help run the church. Whipp later reported on his initial conversation with Damrath: “He told me [in so many words] during this first meeting that he was and always had been an active anti-Nazi; anti-Hitler; anti-Gestapo” and “that his life was constantly in danger, menaced by the Gestapo.”[4]
Whipp attended mission meetings at the Quakers’ meeting house, and conducted thirty-two funerals and six baptisms during the Occupation, according to a report he provided Dean Beekman upon his return to Paris in 1945. Whipp was an extraordinarily talented organist, pianist, and composer, who previously had been an organist in his hometown of Denver, Colorado. With the liberation of Paris on August 25th, Whipp conducted the first service in English in the Cathedral since 1941. American Episcopal military chaplains then held services in the Cathedral until Dean Beekman returned shortly before Christmas. With Beekman back, Whipp resumed his role as organist-choirmaster.
On Sunday, February 11th, 1945, he played for the morning service, spoke briefly to Dean Beekman, joined friends for lunch, and then disappeared forever. His body was found in the Seine on April 17th, 1945. The mystery of his death has not been solved. The memory of his service to the Cathedral during the Occupation is honored in a plaque in the chapel of St. Paul the Traveler.
Written by The Venerable Walter Baer, Archdeacon of the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe
[1] Walter Bargatzky, Hotel Majestic ein Deutscher im besetzten Frankreich, Basel and Vienna: Herder, 1987, p.113.
[2] Ernst Jünger, Strahlungen II, München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1966, p.235.
[3] Gottfried Hamacher, Gegen Hitler. Deutsche in der Résistance, in den Streitkräftender Antihitlerkoalition und der Bewegung »Freies Deutschland« Kurzbiografien, (Reihe: Manuskripte/Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung; Bd. 53) Berlin: Dietz, 2005, p. 43.
[4] Whipp report. Cathedral Archives