A Dixieland band played at the end of the parade which wrapped up at the site of a new museum about liberation and the resistance.
Long the jewel of European cities, Paris suffered relatively little damage in World War II, but its citizens were humiliated, hungry and mistrustful by the 50 months of German occupation.
The liberation of Paris was both joyous and chaotic. It was faster and easier than the protracted battle through Normandy after D-Day, with its gun-filled hedgerows. But the fight for the French capital killed nearly 5,000 people, including Parisian civilians, German troops and members of the French Resistance whose sabotage and attacks had prepared the city for liberation.
After invading in 1940, the Nazi hierarchy ensconced themselves in Paris' luxury hotels and hobnobbed at theaters and fine restaurants. Collaborationist militias kept order, and French police were complicit in te most dastardly act of the Occupation: the 1942 roundup of around 13,000 Jews at the Vel d'Hiv bicycle stadium before their eventual deportation to the Auschwitz death camp in German-occupied Poland.
--GreGen
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