General Philippe Leclerc's 2nd Armored Division, backed by American troops and the French Resistance, secured Paris as German commander Dietrich von Choltitz surrendered rather than obey Hitler's order to demolish the city. Crowds flooded the streets, church bells rang across the capital, and Charles de Gaulle led a triumphant march down the Champs-Élysées the next day, restoring French sovereignty after four years of occupation.
Adolf Hitler had ordered General Dietrich von Choltitz to burn Paris to the ground rather than surrender it intact, going so far as to demand the city's bridges and landmarks be mined. Von Choltitz, weighing the military futility of holding a city surrounded by Allied forces and Resistance fighters, quietly ignored the order and instead negotiated a surrender, sparing Notre-Dame, the Louvre, and the Eiffel Tower from destruction.
The liberation came after a week of uprising by the French Resistance, whose barricades and skirmishes in the streets had already made parts of the city ungovernable for German forces. When Leclerc's division rolled in on August 24 and 25, Parisians who had endured blackout curtains, food rationing, and Gestapo raids poured into the streets, climbing onto tanks and kissing soldiers.
General von Choltitz formally signed the surrender document at the Hôtel Meurice on the afternoon of the 25th. That evening, church bells that had been silent for years rang out across Paris, and General de Gaulle arrived to declare, in a speech at the Hôtel de Ville, that Paris had liberated itself—a carefully calculated statement meant to bolster French pride and downplay Allied dependence.