The German Stranglehold

The Germans requisitioned more than a thousand Parisian apartment buildings, as well as the grandest neighborhoods and the finest hotels to house their military headquarters--the Ritz, the Crillon, the Meurice, the George V, the Majestic, the Lutetia, in addition to large private homes. Paris, the German capital in France and the headquarters of German military bureaucracy, including the SS and the Gestapo, extended from the Opera to the Avenue Foch and from the Place Vendôme to the Avenue Henri-Martin. But other districts were densely occupied as well. In the Eastern part of the city, this primarily involved the requisitioning of collective locations such as schools, military barracks, stadiums, and small factories.
In appropriating these spaces, the occupying forces were attempting to conquer minds and spirits. The Germans banned the sale of works by a thousand authors, financed and supervised the Parisian press, which they provided with artificially ordinary-seeming photographs, and covered the walls with their propaganda posters, colonizing the French language.