The Allies landed at Normandy on June 6, 1944, and two months later broke the German lines and began to advance toward and around Paris. German control over Paris was already breaking down. One hundred thousand Parisians had turned out on July 14 for a prohibited celebration of Bastille Day. German soldiers fired into the air, but the French police did nothing. On August 10, half of the eighty thousand railroad workers in the Paris region went on strike, stopping all railroad traffic. On August 15, the new German commander of Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz, ordered that three thousand resistance members held in Paris jails be transferred out of the city. They were loaded into trains, 170 persons in each cattle car, and sent to the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Ravensbrück. Only twenty-seven returned. On the same day, the Paris police learned that policemen in the suburbs were being disarmed by the Germans; they immediately went on strike. In Paris, most of the electricity and gas were cut off, there was little food available, and the metro had stopped running.