Read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany Online
Authors: William L. Shirer
But it was an unequal struggle. In “victorious confusion,” as Telford Taylor has aptly put it, the German troops surged across France like a tidal wave, the confusion coming because there were so many of them and they were moving so fast and often getting in each other’s way.
20
On June 10 the French government hastily departed
Paris
and on June 14 the great city, the glory of France, which was undefended, was occupied by General von
Kuechler
’s
Eighteenth
Army. The swastika was immediately hoisted on the Eiffel Tower. On June 16, Premier Reynaud, Whose government had fled to
Bordeaux
, resigned and was replaced by Pétain, who the next day asked the Germans, through the Spanish ambassador, for an armistice.
*
Hitler replied the same day that he would first have to consult
his ally, Mussolini. For this strutting warrior, after making sure that the French armies were hopelessly beaten, had, like a jackal, hopped into the war on June 10, to try to get in on the spoils.
Despite his preoccupation with the unfolding of the Battle of the West, Hitler had found time to write Mussolini at surprisingly frequent intervals, keeping him informed of the mounting German victories.
After the first letter on May 7, apprising the Duce that he was attacking Belgium and Holland “to ensure their neutrality” and saying he would keep his friend informed of his progress so that the Duce could make his own decisions in time, there were further ones on May 13, 18 and 25, each more detailed and enthusiastic than the other.
22
Though the generals, as Halder’s diary confirms, couldn’t have cared less what Italy did—whether it came into the war or not—the Fuehrer for some reason attached importance to Italian intervention. As soon as the Netherlands and Belgium had surrendered and the Anglo–French northern armies had been smashed and the surviving British troops began taking to the boats at Dunkirk, Mussolini decided to slither into the war. He informed Hitler by letter On May 30 that the date would be June 5. Hitler replied immediately that he was “most profoundly moved.”
If there could still be anything which could strengthen my unshakable belief in the victorious outcome of this war [Hitler wrote on May 31] it was your statement … The mere fact of your entering the war is an element calculated to deal the front of our enemies a staggering blow.
The Fuehrer asked his ally, however, to postpone his date for three days—he wanted to knock out the rest of the French Air Force first, he said—and Mussolini obliged by setting it back five days, to June 10. Hostilities, the Duce said, would begin the following day.
They did not amount to much. By June 18, when Hitler summoned his junior partner to Munich to discuss an armistice with France, some thirty-two Italian divisions, after a week of “fighting,” had been unable to budge a scanty French force of six divisions on the Alpine front and farther south along the Riviera, though the defenders were now threatened by assault in the rear from the Germans sweeping down the
Rhone Valley
.
*
On June 21
Ciano
noted in his diary:
Mussolini is quite humiliated because our troops have not moved a step forward. Even today they have not succeeded in advancing and have halted in front of the first French fortification which put up some resistance.
23
The hollowness of Mussolini’s boasted military might was exposed at the very beginning and this put the deflated Italian dictator in a dour mood as he and Ciano set out by train on the evening of June 17 to confer with Hitler about the armistice with France.
Mussolini dissatisfied [Ciano wrote in his diary]. This sudden peace disquiets him. During the trip we speak at length in order to clarify conditions under which the armistice is to be granted to the French. The Duce … would like to go so far as the total occupation of French territory and demands the surrender of the French fleet. But he is aware that his opinion has only a consultative value. The war has been won by Hitler without any active military participation on the part of Italy, and it is Hitler who will have the last word. This naturally disturbs and saddens Mussolini.
The mildness of the Fuehrer’s “last word” came as a distinct shock to the Italians when they conferred with the Nazi warlord at the Fuehrerhaus at Munich where Chamberlain and Daladier had been so accommodating to the two dictators regarding Czechoslovakia less than two years before. The secret German memorandum of the meeting
24
makes clear that Hitler was determined above all not to allow the French fleet to fall into the hands of the British. He was also concerned lest the French government flee to
North Africa
or to London and continue the war. For that reason the armistice terms—the final terms of peace might be something else—would have to be moderate, designed to keep “a French government functioning on French soil” and “the French fleet neutralized.” He abruptly dismissed Mussolini’s demands for the Italian occupation of the Rhone Valley, including
Toulon
(the great French Mediterranean naval base, where most of the fleet was concentrated) and
Marseilles
, and the disarmament of
Corsica
,
Tunisia
and Djibouti. The last town, the
gateway to Italian-held Ethiopia, was thrown in by Ciano, the German notes say, “in an undertone.”
Even the bellicose Ribbentrop, Ciano found, was “exceptionally moderate and calm, and in favor of peace.” The warrior Mussolini was “very much embarrassed,” his son-in-law noted.
He feels that his role is secondary … In truth, the Duce fears that the hour of peace is growing near and sees fading once again that unattainable dream of his life: glory on the field of battle.
25
Mussolini was unable even to get Hitler to agree to joint
armistice
negotiations with the French. The Fuehrer was not going to share his triumph at a very historic spot (he declined to name it to his friend) with this Johnny-come-lately. But he promised the Duce that his armistice with France would not come into effect until the French had also signed one with Italy.
Mussolini left Munich bitter and frustrated, but Ciano had been very favorably impressed by a side of Hitler which his diaries make clear he had not previously seen or suspected.
From all that he [Hitler] says [he wrote in his diary as they returned to Rome] it is clear that he wants to act quickly to end it all. Hitler is now the gambler, who has made a big scoop and would like to get up from the table, risking nothing more. Today he speaks with a reserve and a perspicacity which, after such a victory, are really astonishing. I cannot be accused of excessive tenderness toward him, but today I truly admire him.
26
I followed the German Army into
Paris
that June, always the loveliest of months in the majestic capital, which was now stricken, and on June 19 got wind of where Hitler was going to lay down his terms for the armistice which Pétain had requested two days before. It was to be on the same spot where the German Empire had capitulated to France and her allies on November 11, 1918: in the little clearing in the woods at Compiègne. There the Nazi warlord would get his revenge, and the place itself would add to the sweetness of it for him. On May 20, a bare ten days after the great offensive in the West had started and on the day the German tanks reached
Abbeville
, the idea had come to him. Jodl noted it in his diary that day: “Fuehrer is working on the peace treaty … First negotiations in the Forest of Compiègne.” Late on the afternoon of June 19 I drove out there and found German Army engineers demolishing the wall of the museum where the old
wagon-lit
of Marshal Foch, in which the 1918 armistice was signed, had been preserved. By the time I left, the engineers,
working with pneumatic drills, had torn the wall down and were pulling the car out to the tracks in the center of the clearing on the exact spot, they said, where it had stood at 5
A.M
. on November 11,1918, when at the dictation of Foch the German emissaries put their signatures to the armistice.
And so it was that on the afternoon of June 21 I stood by the edge of the forest
at Compiègne
to observe the latest and greatest of Hitler’s triumphs, of which, in the course of my work, I had seen so many over the last turbulent years. It was one of the loveliest summer days I ever remember in France. A warm June sun beat down on the stately trees—elms, oaks, cypresses and pines—casting pleasant shadows on the wooded avenues leading to the little circular clearing. At 3:15
P.M
. precisely, Hitler arrived in his big Mercedes, accompanied by Goering, Brauchitsch, Keitel, Raeder, Ribbentrop and
Hess
, all in their various uniforms, and Goering, the lone Field Marshal of the Reich, fiddling with his field marshal’s baton. They alighted from their automobiles some two hundred yards away, in front of the
Alsace-Lorraine
statue, which was draped with German war flags so that the Fuehrer could not see (though I remembered from previous visits in happier days) the large sword, the sword of the victorious Allies of 1918, sticking through a limp eagle representing the German Empire of the Hohenzollerns. Hitler glanced at the monument and strode on.
I observed his face [I wrote in my diary]. It was grave, solemn, yet brimming with revenge. There was also in it, as in his springy step, a note of the triumphant conqueror, the defier of the world. There was something else … a sort of scornful, inner joy at being present at this great reversal of fate—a reversal he himself had wrought.
When he reached the little opening in the forest and his personal standard had been run up in the center of it, his attention was attracted by a great granite block which stood some three feet above the ground.
Hitler, followed by the others, walks slowly over to it [I am quoting my diary], steps up, and reads the inscription engraved (in French) in great high letters:
“HERE ON THE ELEVENTH OF NOVEMBER
1918
SUCCUMBED THE CRIMINAL
PRIDE OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE—VANQUISHED BY THE FREE PEOPLES WHICH IT
TRIED TO ENSLAVE.”
Hitler reads it and Goering reads it. They all read it, standing there in the June sun and the silence. I look for the expression in Hitler’s face. I am but fifty yards from him and see him through my glasses as though he were directly in front of me. I have seen that face many times at the great moments of his life. But today! It is afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph.
He steps off the monument and contrives to make even this gesture a master-piece
of contempt. He glances back at it, contemptuous, angry—angry, you almost feel, because he cannot wipe out the awful, provoking lettering with one sweep of his high Prussian boot.
*
He glances slowly around the clearing, and now, as his eyes meet ours, you grasp the depth of his hatred. But there is triumph there too—revengeful, triumphant hate. Suddenly, as though his face were not giving quite complete expression to his feelings, he throws his whole body into harmony with his mood. He swiftly snaps his hands on his hips, arches his shoulders, plants his feet wide apart. It is a magnificent gesture of defiance, of burning contempt for this place now and all that it has stood for in the twenty-two years since it witnessed the humbling of the German Empire.
Hitler and his party then entered the armistice railway car, the Fuehrer seating himself in the chair occupied by Foch in 1918. Five minutes later the French delegation arrived, headed by General Charles
Huntziger
, commander of the Second Army at Sedan, and made up of an admiral, an Air Force general and one civilian, Léon Noël, the former ambassador to Poland, who was now witnessing his second debacle wrought by German arms. They looked shattered, but retained a tragic dignity. They had not been told that they would be led to this proud French shrine to undergo such a humiliation, and the shock was no doubt just what Hitler had calculated. As Halder wrote in his diary that evening after being given an eyewitness account by Brauchitsch:
The French had no warning that they would be handed the terms at the very site of the negotiations in 1918. They were apparently shaken by this arrangement and at first inclined to be sullen.
Perhaps it was natural, even for a German so cultivated as Halder, or Brauchitsch, to mistake solemn dignity for sullenness. The French, one saw at once, were certainly dazed. Yet, contrary to the reports at the time, they tried, as we now know from the official German minutes of the meetings found among the captured Nazi secret papers,
27
to soften the harsher portions of the Fuehrer’s terms and to eliminate those which they thought were dishonorable. But they tried in vain.
Hitler and his entourage left the
wagon-lit
as soon as General Keitel had read the preamble of the armistice terms to the French, leaving the negotiations in the hands of his OKW Chief, but allowing him no leeway in departing from the conditions which he himself had laid down.
Huntziger told the Germans at once, as soon as he had read them, that they were “hard and merciless,” much worse than those which France had handed Germany here in 1918. Moreover, if “another country beyond the Alps, which had not defeated France (Huntziger was too contemptuous of Italy even to name her), advanced similar demands France would in no circumstances submit. She would fight to the bitter end …
It was therefore impossible for him to put his signature to the German armistice agreement …”
General Jodl, the Number Two officer at OKW, who presided temporarily at this moment, had not expected such defiant words from a hopelessly beaten foe and replied that though he could not help express his “understanding” for what Huntziger had said about the Italians nevertheless he had no power to change the Fuehrer’s terms. All he could do, he said, was “to give explanations and clear up obscure points.” The French would have to take the armistice document or leave it, as it was.