Today, August 25 2014, is the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation. On June 10, we reached the same anniversary of a less heartwarming event of the Second World War, the vile act of mass slaughter by a German Waffen-SS unit in the village of Oradour, 411km to the south of the capital.
Amid the films repeated on TV, the old footage reproduced for the smart phone age and all the column inches of newsprint, I thought of two Germans. One I interviewed, the other I came across when he was interviewed by Paris-Match.
Ten years ago, when we were contemplating the 60th anniversary of Paris being seized back from the horrors and humiliation of odious foreign dominance, I was The Daily Telegraph's correspondent in Paris. In fact, I'd only just begun in that role, late as it was in my journalistic career.
It occurred to me to contact the son of General Dietrich von Choltitz, the German commander credited with ignoring Hitler's orders to make Paris burn with inhabitants slaughtered and the grand old buildings and bridges destroyed.
This was the Telegraph article that resulted:
Parisians celebrating the 60th anniversary of their liberation from the Nazis have been urged to remember the role of a German general who, convinced that Hitler had become mad as well as evil, disobeyed orders to destroy the French capital.
Many historians are sceptical about film and book portrayals of Gen Dietrich von Choltitz, the Germans' Greater Paris commander during the final days of enemy occupation, as the "saviour of Paris".
But if the German army was, by late August 1944, incapable of flattening the capital as it had Warsaw, it is clear that Gen von Choltitz could have ordered mass killings and the blowing up of historic buildings.
"If he saved only Notre Dame, that would be enough reason for the French to be grateful," the general's son, Timo, 60, told The Telegraph yesterday. "But he could have done a lot more.
"France officially refuses to this day to accept it and insists that the Resistance liberated Paris with 2,000 guns against the German army. To official France, my father was swine, but every educated French person knows what he did for them. I am very proud of his memory."
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His view won important support yesterday from Henri Froment-Meurice, an eminent French diplomat whose career included a spell as ambassador to Germany.
Writing in the French newspaper Le Figaro, he called on his countrymen, "and everyone in the world who loves Paris", not to forget the German officer.
Gen von Choltitz took command in Paris on Aug 8, 1944, after witnessing his troops suffer dreadful casualties in Normandy.
At a meeting in Germany the day before, Hitler told him to be prepared to leave no religious building or historic monument standing. He confirmed the order by cable, telling Gen von Choltitz to turn the city into a "pile of rubble".
On the eve of the capital's liberation, Hitler was still demanding: "Is Paris burning?"
"My father was a professional soldier," said the general's son. "But he was no Nazi. He hated Hitler and, when they met, realised he had gone crazy."
The general evidently judged that Hitler's deranged state entitled him to disregard his duty to obey orders. After formally surrendering 60 years ago tomorrow, he was held by the Americans until 1947. He died in 1966, aged 71.
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Paris-Match clearly had a similar idea back in June. They contacted Rainer Adolf Deikmann - how he must, and does, hate his middle name - and put to him a series of questions about his dad. Not just any dad, but the man who masterminded one of the more grotesque acts of barbarism of the Second World War: the killing of 642 residents of the village of Oradour-sur-Glane.
The mere numerical details convey some notion, but not quite all, of the carnage and - for Germany - utter disgrace. For the men of Oradour were shot, legs first to ensure a slow and painful death, while the women and children were herded into a church which was then set on fire. Victims who tried to escape were machine-gunned.
And so to Rainer Diekmann. The poor sod was 26 before he realised he was the son of one of the devil's earthly representatives.
"When I was a medical student in Munich," he told Paris-Match, "my wife and I were invited to dinner [by a photographer, Karl Breyer]. He said he was leaving next day for Oradour to cover the 25th anniversary of the massacre for the magazine Quick. The name Oradour had been engraved in my mind since childhood.
"When I was eight, my maternal grandfather's second wife had told me my father had done something very serious during the war. It was just after court proceedings in France, in 1953, and she wanted to speak to us, my younger brother and me, about the affair.
"Alas, we were too young understand. Afterwards, I never heard Oradour mentioned again in the family. It was taboo ... but even at eight, I understood all the same that my father had been involved in something very bad. So I asked Karl Breyer: 'did my father have something to do with it?'.
"Karl - we were friends, but knowing each other then only by our first names - asked my surname. 'Diekmann,' I replied. 'Then your father was the man principally responsible for the massacre'. He was horrified, When he returned [from Oradour] a few days later, he told me the full story."
The young Diekmann was suitably disgusted, "sick to the stomach". He said he had never travelled to Oradour - German leaders and, to the extent they survive, former combatants have been familiar visitors to French soil for the various war commemorations - because he was "ashamed to be the son of such a man".
It is obviously absurd and unfair to hold the Germans of 2014 to account for what father and grandfathers did in 1939-1945. But is also important to remember, if only in the forlorn hope - are the equally evil barbarians of IS listening? - that man will one day see the importance of not practising inhumanity to fellow man.
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