Towards the end of the first week in June, Hitler moved his headquarters to Bruly-de-Pesche, close to the Belgian-French border.78 The second stage of the German offensive was beginning. The French lines were rapidly overwhelmed. While the French had more guns and tanks than the Germans, they were hopelessly outmatched in air-power. Not just that: French weaponry and tactics were outdated, not attuned to the demands of modern, mechanized warfare. And, just as important, the French military leadership conveyed their sense of defeatism to the rank and file. Discipline collapsed along with morale. Taking their lead from their fighting men, civilians fled from the big cities in their thousands. Some looked to astrology. The faithful placed their trust in prayer and the intercession of St Genevieve. Neither would be enough.79
On
It was no wonder that Hitler felt on top of the world, slapping his thigh for joy — his usual expression of exultation — and laughing in relief, when he was brought the news at Bruly-de-Pesche on 17 June that Marshal Petain’s new French government had sued for peace.82 The end of the war seemed imminent. Britain would now surely give in. Total victory, Hitler imagined, was within his grasp.
Mussolini had brought Italy into the war a week earlier, hoping to cash in on the action just before it was all over, in time to win rich pickings and bask in the glory of a cheap victory.83 Hitler took no pleasure in greeting his new companion-in-arms when he flew to Munich to meet him on 18 June to discuss the French armistice request.84 He wanted lenient terms for the French, and swiftly dispelled Mussolini’s hopes of getting his hands on part of the French fleet. Hitler was anxious to avoid the French navy going over to the British — something which Churchill had already tried to engineer.85 ‘From all that he says it is clear that he wants to act quickly to end it,’ recorded Ciano. ‘Hitler is now the gambler who has made a big scoop and would like to get up from the table risking nothing more.’86 Ribbentrop confirmed to Ciano that Hitler wanted peace with Britain in preference to war. Again the German Dictator stated that he had no wish to demolish the British Empire, something he claimed to regard as ‘an important factor in world equilibrium’.87 A hint of what he meant by this last phrase can be gleaned from a remark a fortnight or so later to Goebbels, that, if the Empire were destroyed, its inheritance would fall not to Germany but to ‘foreign great powers’, by which he had the United States, Japan, and probably also the Soviet Union chiefly in mind.88 What Hitler’s apparent magnanimity about the Empire would amount to for Britain was clearly foreseen by Churchill. Britain would become, the British Prime Minister stated, ‘a vassal state of the Hitler empire’. ‘A pro-German government,’ he wrote to Roosevelt on 15 June, ‘would certainly be called into being to make peace and might present to a shattered or starving nation an almost irresistible case for entire submission to the Nazi will.’89
Having won his great victory without any help from the Italians, Hitler was determined that the embarrassed and disappointed Mussolini, now forced to swallow his role as junior partner in the Axis, should not participate in the armistice negotiations with the French.90 Already on 20 May, when German tanks had reached the French coast, Hitler had specified that the peace negotiations with France, at which the return of former German territory would be demanded, would be staged in the Forest of Compiegne, where the armistice of 1918 had taken place.91 He now gave orders to retrieve Marshal Foch’s railway carriage, preserved as a museum piece, in which the German generals had signed the ceasefire, and have it brought to the forest clearing. That defeat, and its consequences, had permanently seared Hitler’s consciousness. It would now be erased by repaying the humiliation. At quarter past three on the afternoon of 21 June, Hitler, accompanied by Goring, Raeder, Brauchitsch, Keitel, Ribbentrop, and He?, viewed the memorial recording the victory over the ‘criminal arrogance of the German Reich’, then took his place in the carriage, greeting in silence the French delegation. For ten minutes, he listened, again without a word though, as he later recounted, gripped by the feeling of revenge for the humiliation of November 1918.92 Keitel read out the preamble to the armistice terms. Hitler then left to return to his headquarters. The symbolic purging of the old debt was completed.93 ‘The disgrace is now extinguished. It’s a feeling of being born again,’ reported Goebbels after Hitler had told him of the dramatic events late that night on the telephone.94
France was to be divided — the north and western seaboard under German occupation, the centre and south to be left as a puppet state, headed by Petain, with its seat of government at Vichy.95 Following the signing of the Italian-French armistice on 24 June, all fighting was declared to have ceased at 1.35a.m. next morning. Hitler proclaimed the end of the war in the west and the ‘most glorious victory of all time’. He ordered bells to be rung in the Reich for a week, and flags to be flown for ten days.96 As the moment for the official conclusion of hostilities drew near, Hitler, sitting at the wooden table in his field headquarters, ordered the lights put out and the windows opened in order to hear, in the darkness, the trumpeter outside mark the historic moment.97
He spent part of the next days sightseeing. Max Amann (head of the Party’s publishing concerns) and Ernst Schmidt, two comrades from the First World War, joined his regular entourage for a nostalgic tour of the battlefields in Flanders, revisiting the places where they had been stationed.98 Then, on 28 June, before most Parisians were awake, Hitler paid his one and only visit to the occupied French capital.99 It lasted no more than three hours. And its purpose was cultural, not military. Accompanied by the architects Hermann Giesler and Albert Speer, and his favourite sculptor, Arno Breker, Hitler landed at Le Bourget airport at, for him, the extraordinarily early hour of half-past five in the morning. The whistlestop sightseeing tour began at L’Opera. All the lights were ablaze, as if for an evening gala performance, as the three large Mercedes pulled up. A white-haired French guide, deferential but reserved, took the small group through the empty building. Hitler was thrilled by its beauty. He had doubtless been reading up on the descriptions of the opera house during wakeful hours on the previous nights, and delighted in showing off his detailed knowledge. The guide refused the 50-Mark tip that Hitler had his adjutant attempt to proffer.100 The tourists moved on. They drove past La Madeleine, whose classical form impressed Hitler, up the Champs Elysees, stopped at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier below the Arc de Triomphe, viewed the Eiffel Tower, and looked in silence on the tomb of Napoleon in Les Invalides. Hitler admired the dimensions of the Pantheon, but found its interior (as he later recalled) ‘a terrible disappointment’,101 and seemed indifferent to the medieval wonders of Paris, like the Sainte Chapelle. The tour ended, curiously, at the nineteenth-century testament to Catholic piety, the church of Sacre- Coeur. With a last look over the city from the heights of Montmartre, Hitler was gone. By mid-morning he was back in his field headquarters. Seeing Paris, he told Speer, had been the dream of his life.102 But to Goebbels, he said he had found a lot of Paris very disappointing.103 He had considered destroying it. However, he remarked, according to Speer, ‘when we’re finished in Berlin, Paris will only be a shadow. Why should we destroy it?’104
On 2 July Goebbels visited the new Fuhrer Headquarters in the Black Forest to discuss arrangements for Hitler’s triumphal return to Berlin and plans for a Reichstag speech directed at another ‘peace offer’ to Britain. The return was scheduled for the 6th, a Saturday, the speech for the Monday following. The speech would be generously framed, a last chance for England. He was doubtful that it would be well received. Churchill, he knew, would not accept the bait. But he had some hopes, though not strong, in others who were known to be making overtures aimed at peace. If London did not accept the terms, Goebbels noted menacingly, then it had only itself to blame for the consequences. ‘They will be terrible,’ he added.105
The reception awaiting Hitler in Berlin when his train pulled into the Anhalter-Bahnhof at three o’clock on 6 July was astonishing. It surpassed even the homecomings after the great pre-war triumphs like the Anschlu?. Many in the crowds had been standing for six hours, as the dull morning gave way to the brilliant sunshine of the afternoon. The streets were strewn with flowers all the way from the station to the Reich Chancellery. Hundreds of thousands cheered themselves hoarse. Hitler, lauded by Keitel as ‘the greatest warlord of all time’, was called out time after time on to the balcony to soak up the wild adulation of the masses.106 ‘If an increase in feeling for Adolf Hitler is still possible, it had become reality with the day of the return to Berlin,’ commented one report from the provinces.107 In the face of such ‘greatness’, ran another, ‘all pettiness and grumbling are silenced’.108 Even opponents of the regime found it hard to resist the victory mood. Workers in the armaments factories pressed to be allowed to join the army. People thought final victory was around
