The Ritz Hotel in Paris is a battlefield of champagne-soaked liberation and the ghost of a plundering Reichsmarschall, as American forces and French resistance fighters clash with die-hard German troops in the streets outside. At the center of this chaos, a renegade band of jeeps has just stormed the Place Vendôme, led by a heavily armed Ernest Hemingway, who is not here to negotiate but to reclaim his favorite bar from the clutches of the Nazi elite who have used it as their personal playground for four years.
The 25th of August 1944 has descended into a maelstrom of confusion and gunfire. While the world watches the battle for Paris unfold, German troops stubbornly hold key positions in the city center, turning the liberation of the “City of Light” into a brutal street-level war. French and American tanks rumble through the boulevards, trading fire with snipers perched on rooftops, yet miraculously, the architectural jewel of Europe has largely escaped the devastating destruction that many feared.
The fighting is intense, but the city’s iconic landmarks stand resilient, a testament to the swiftness of the Allied advance and the desperation of the German rearguard.
Into this dangerous confusion rolls a small column of jeeps, an unlikely convoy mounting an even more unlikely group of liberators. In the passenger seat of the leading vehicle, a submachine gun resting on his lap, sits the towering figure of Ernest Hemingway. At 45, overweight and a superstar of American letters, the pre-war Paris resident is a walking contradiction of the Geneva Convention.
He leads his own unofficial unit, a motley crew of war correspondents, resistance fighters, hangers-on, and OSS officers, all dressed in a strange assemblage of military and civilian clothing, armed to the teeth with a hodgepodge of American, British, and French weapons. He is breaking every rule of war journalism, but Hemingway is not here to record history; he is here to make it, determined to take an active part in the liberation of the city he loves.
Hemingway’s little band had driven into Paris at noon, crossing the Pont de Sèvres and heading straight for the Arc de Triomphe, dodging German sniper fire with reckless abandon. Near the Bois de Boulogne, heavy German fire forced them to abandon their jeeps and seek cover, pinned down until Free French troops neutralized the enemy position. Undeterred, the writer and his men remounted their vehicles and drove on, but Hemingway had a specific target in mind: the liberation of his favorite hotel, the one that contained his favorite bar.
The destination was the Ritz, arguably the most famous hotel in the world, and Hemingway intended to be the first to storm its gilded halls.
Powering down the deserted Champs-Élysées, the convoy stopped briefly at the Travellers Club, a private members’ club in a large city mansion, where Hemingway and his crew helped themselves to champagne, toasting their own advance. Pushing on through the empty Place de l’Opéra, past the magnificent Opera Garnier, they stopped again at another of Hemingway’s pre-war watering holes, the fashionable Café de la Paix, part of the Grand Hotel, where international film stars and writers had once gathered. Chugging back more champagne, the by-now well-oiled Hemingway and his companions drove on down Rue Cambon to the back entrance of the Ritz.
Clutching a pistol in one hand, Hemingway pushed through the doors, expecting a firefight. Instead, he was met by the hotel’s manager, Claude Auzello, who knew him from earlier times. There was no battle to be fought.
Instead of fighting his way in against die-hard Germans, Hemingway was greeted respectfully and asked politely to deposit his weapons before he and his men were shown into the bar. A riotous champagne and wine-fueled party followed in his pre-war haunt. The hotel’s main bar has since been named in his honor, fittingly called the “Bar Hemingway,” a tribute to the nights he and F.
Scott Fitzgerald drank there in the 20s and 30s alongside the other famous expats who called Paris home.
But as the liberators began to explore the Ritz, the management revealed a darker history. The hotel had also been home to another large and larger-than-life character during the war years: Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. The corpulent and flamboyant head of the Luftwaffe, and from 1941 Deputy Führer of Nazi Germany, had come to Paris not to liberate it, but to rob it of its treasures.
When Paris was occupied by the Germans on the 14th of June 1940, the various parts of the German military and security forces descended on the city to claim French government buildings and luxury hotels for their own use. The Hotel Meurice, opposite the Tuileries Gardens, became headquarters of the German military command. The Hotel Lutetia became Abwehr military intelligence headquarters.
The Grand Hotel was taken over by the German Army, and the Hotel L’Élysée by Goebbels’ propaganda ministry.
But Göring snatched the prize: the Ritz. One wing of the hotel was requisitioned for use by the Luftwaffe High Command in France, while the rest of the hotel continued to house paying guests, such as the famous fashion designer Coco Chanel. The occupiers shared the hotel’s restaurants and bars with the civilian guests, and it became a rule that German officers would surrender their sidearms upon entering the hotel.
Due to Göring’s frequent visits, the Luftwaffe took over the most luxurious and largest suite in the Ritz for the Reichsmarschall: the Imperial Suite. This luxury suite measures over 200 square meters, consisting of a living room and two bedrooms, each with its own bathroom and dressing room, plus a private dining room and kitchen, all overlooking the Place Vendôme.
Göring lived in the Imperial Suite in the manner of a Roman Emperor, and a rather dissolute Emperor at that. In the privacy of his rooms, the Reichsmarschall flounced about in ermine and mink-trimmed gowns instead of his powder-blue uniforms. He wore diamond earrings, makeup, and exotic perfumes, and kept a crystal bowl filled with morphine tablets on a table beside an armchair, alongside another bowl filled with precious stones—emeralds, black pearls, opals, garnets, and rubies.
He held private dinner and dance parties at which Göring danced with both men and women, according to a member of the Ritz staff who witnessed this behavior firsthand. But Göring wasn’t in Paris for pleasure alone; he was there for hard-nosed business, masterminding one of the greatest thefts in history, the effects of which are still felt in 2025, 81 years after his last visit.
Göring was a collector. He collected clothes, uniforms, medals, decorations, titles, positions, and weapons with equal alacrity. He collected exotic jewels and exotic animals, and above all, fine art.
In 1936, he had ordered the complete reconstruction of his hunting lodge outside Berlin into a vast country house he named Carinhall, after his first wife, a Swedish woman named Carin. As part of the rebuild, Göring had a 34-meter-long hall built, called the Grand Gallery, where he displayed his many fine collections of artworks, paintings, sculptures, furniture, and tapestries. Initially purchased legally, they were later obtained by more underhanded methods.
But once France was under Nazi control, Göring’s avarice went into overdrive.
France contained some of the finest art collections in the world, much of it owned by prominent Jewish families such as the Rothschilds. A special unit had already been created by another senior Nazi, Alfred Rosenberg, tasked to collect archives, books, and related materials to be studied by anti-Jewish academics. With the fall of France, the ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg) went to work confiscating material from Jews and Freemasons.
In summer 1940, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop also had his own art looting unit, ordering the seizure of art collections of prominent French Jews. However, Göring soon decided to stick his fat fingers into the pie. In October 1940, using his considerable influence, he had the ERR take over most of the art, antique furniture, carpets, tapestries, and other antiques, determined to enrich his own private collections.
Using his own Luftwaffe to provide manpower and transports on a massive scale, the ERR set up a processing station for this loot at the Jeu de Paume gallery in the Tuileries Gardens, near the Hotel Meurice.
In this manner, the contents of 200 extremely important collections were processed through the Jeu de Paume. Göring made over 20 individual trips to Paris between 1940 and 1944, ostensibly on military business, but his primary interest was in making selections of art at the Jeu de Paume for two purposes. First, art to be sent to Hitler for later exhibition in a so-called Führer Museum to be built in Linz, Austria, postwar.
This material was actually sent for storage at the famous Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria. Second, the selection of art for Göring’s own collection at Carinhall. The figures speak for themselves: between 1941 and 1944, Göring sent 56 individual items to Hitler’s collection, while Göring obtained 875 for himself.
A further 500 or so paintings, many by artists such as Picasso and Salvador Dalí, were labeled as “degenerate art” and hundreds were burned outside the Jeu de Paume on huge bonfires, whilst others were never seen again, simply disappearing into the black market of stolen art.
A lot of the art looted and sent to Hitler ended up at Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany, where much of it was recovered in 1945 by the Monuments Men, the special unit of art historians and other specialists that did so much to save the culture of Europe from destruction. A lot more, particularly paintings, ended up moved for safekeeping to the giant Altaussee salt mine in nearby Austria, where the future Führer Museum collection was recovered by US troops at the end of the war. Göring’s huge stash went to Carinhall, and in April 1945, when his home was threatened by the advancing Red Army, the Reichsmarschall ordered it all packed aboard goods trains and moved south to Berchtesgaden, where Göring maintained another country house in the mountains above the Bavarian town.
After paying his respects at the bombed-out Reich Chancellery in Berlin on the occasion of Hitler’s 56th and final birthday on the 20th of April 1945, Göring made himself scarce and boarded his private luxury train, similarly packed with treasures and personal possessions, and headed for Berchtesgaden. A few days later, he was officially disgraced and fell from power and influence, placed under house arrest by the SS and moved to Austria to his castle at Mauterndorf. His personal possessions and his huge art collections were left aboard three trains at Berchtesgaden station, where it was eventually captured by US troops—or some of it was captured.
In the chaos before the arrival of US troops, locals looted Göring’s trains, looking mostly for food, alcohol, and clothing, and much of the art has never been seen again. What was recovered has largely been restored to its rightful owners, though many museums even today hold art looted by Göring that remains in legal limbo.
One interesting aside to the story of Göring at the Ritz Hotel is that shortly after the war, Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth’s heiress, stayed at the Imperial Suite for a few days. She complained to the management that the bed had a large crater in the middle, the result of 20-plus visits by the Reichsmarschall during the war years. As Hemingway’s party raged downstairs in the bar that now bears his name, the ghosts of Göring’s decadence and plunder lingered in the gilded corridors above, a stark reminder of the dual nature of the Ritz’s wartime history—one of liberation and one of unparalleled theft.
