The Hotel de Ville shootout occurred in 1944 when the French Resistance fighter Sean Devlin rescued Maria Kessler, daughter of the German scientist Klaus Kessler, from the Gestapo headquarters at Paris' Hôtel de Ville during World War II.
Dr. Kessler defected to the British in 1943, but he refused to help the British sabotage the Nazis' nuclear weapons program unless they could recover his daughter from Nazi captivity. The Resistance member Yosef Bryman was able to track her down to the Hotel de Ville, which was heavily guarded. The city hall was guarded by a German special forces unit, the "terror squad," who had made a bloody reputation on the Eastern Front and was under Kurt Dierker's command. Resistance member Sean Devlin stormed the city hall through the front gate, shooting his way through the courtyard and into the library, where a secret passage led to the holding cells. Activating the passage through a bookshelf device, Devlin battled dozens of Gestapo agents and Waffen-SS soldiers before freeing a captive Resistance fighter. On learning that Kessler was being held in another room, Devlin was forced to dynamite the city hall's boiler, setting the whole building on fire. Devlin fought his way through dozens more SS, Gestapo, and terror squad soldiers as he emerged from the basement and headed upstairs, rescuing Maria and escaping the building. The two of them escaped to the Resistance's La Villette slaughterhouse base, where Maria was kept safe as the Resistance plotted the assassination of Paris' high military command.