When the 2nd Armored Division under General Philippe Leclerc entered Paris on August 25, 1944, the first tank into the city — named "The Maintenant" (Now) by its crew — was driven by Sergeant Fernand Buridant, a Frenchman from Alsace who had escaped German conscription in 1942. But the actual liberation ceremony at the Hôtel de Ville was complicated by a jurisdictional dispute: Free French forces under de Gaulle and the US 4th Infantry Division both claimed the right to conduct the formal surrender negotiation with General Dietrich von Choltitz. In the end, a French mayor's office clerk named André Tiki was the first to shake hands with an Allied soldier on the Champs-Élysées — a moment captured by a CBS cameraman but never broadcast because the film was destroyed in a fire at a New Jersey warehouse in 1946.