June 22, 1940—Following a blitzkrieg whose speed shocked a nation with still-fresh memories of trench warfare from a generation before, the demoralized French political and military leadership were forced by a vengeful Adolf Hitler to sign an armistice with the Third Reich—in the exact same railway car where Germany capitulated to Marshal Ferdinand Foch in November 1918.
In a preamble to the agreement, Hitler claimed he had not chosen the mode of surrender for vengeance. Few if any people believed him—not a German nation delighted at reversing the results of World War I; not a French government that, in the last seven years, had yielded to one of his demands after another, in no small measure due to guilt over the draconian Treaty of Versailles; and not reporters such as William L. Shirer, who observed, through an open window, that Hitler had chosen not only the same railway car but the same table and even the same seat used by Foch.
Shirer rendered the scene vividly both in Berlin Diary (1941) and his later account of the catastrophic fall of France, The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969). As Der Fuehrer arrived at the little clearing in the forest of Compiegne, then stopped to read the commemorative plaque marking the scene of the previous surrender, the reporter saw Hitler’s “face light up, successively, with hate, scorn, [and] revenge.”
Hitler didn’t bother to hide his contempt as he signaled to General William Keitel of the German High Command to read aloud the terms. What Keitel read directly refuted Hitler’s claim that the site had not been chosen for its symbolism: the Germans would “efface once and for all by an act of reparative justice a memory which was not for France a glorious page in her history and which was resented by the German people as the greatest shame of all time.”
At this point, many in France were too weary to think they could effect a reversal of fortune. At least some of those ready to continue the fighting were already choosing a misplaced target. "If we had even two-thirds of Germany's planes, we should have won the war," one French aviator complained to war correspondent Sonia Tamara five days before the surrender. "Why did America not send them in time?" The understandably frustrated airman, however, might have looked to the flawed leadership of his nation and Britain's first--especially at this moment. The key to France now lay in the hands of the octogenarian Marshal Petain, the hero of the Battle of Verdun in World War I, who had decided that the only way to save his country now was to capitulate to Hitler and hope for the best. It was a tragically wrong decision that began four years of a collaborationist regime that permitted the Nazis to wreak havoc on the nation’s sovereignty--and inspire hypocrisy among those of its acquiescent citizens who did not join the Resistance.
One particular incident at the armistice signing ended up being used by the West to make Hitler look not merely arrogant, but even ridiculous. At one point, the dictator raised his leg awkwardly high while stepping backward. Documentarian John Grierson, director of the Canadian information and propaganda departments, discovered that, by looping the odd movement repeatedly, he could make Hitler's odd movement look like an impromptu jig.
As propaganda, this is not quite the black art of the trade as practiced by Joseph Goebbels—but it was one of the few things happening at this point to make Hitler look like anything less than an all-conquering hero. It would take an extremely tall, comparatively unknown 50-year-old soldier, Charles DeGaulle--with the help (at least until he tired of his arrogance) of William Churchill--to maintain the will of the Free French movement. Four years after the French pilot's complaint, Americans would arrive to save France again, as they had done a quarter century before.
In a preamble to the agreement, Hitler claimed he had not chosen the mode of surrender for vengeance. Few if any people believed him—not a German nation delighted at reversing the results of World War I; not a French government that, in the last seven years, had yielded to one of his demands after another, in no small measure due to guilt over the draconian Treaty of Versailles; and not reporters such as William L. Shirer, who observed, through an open window, that Hitler had chosen not only the same railway car but the same table and even the same seat used by Foch.
Shirer rendered the scene vividly both in Berlin Diary (1941) and his later account of the catastrophic fall of France, The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969). As Der Fuehrer arrived at the little clearing in the forest of Compiegne, then stopped to read the commemorative plaque marking the scene of the previous surrender, the reporter saw Hitler’s “face light up, successively, with hate, scorn, [and] revenge.”
Hitler didn’t bother to hide his contempt as he signaled to General William Keitel of the German High Command to read aloud the terms. What Keitel read directly refuted Hitler’s claim that the site had not been chosen for its symbolism: the Germans would “efface once and for all by an act of reparative justice a memory which was not for France a glorious page in her history and which was resented by the German people as the greatest shame of all time.”
At this point, many in France were too weary to think they could effect a reversal of fortune. At least some of those ready to continue the fighting were already choosing a misplaced target. "If we had even two-thirds of Germany's planes, we should have won the war," one French aviator complained to war correspondent Sonia Tamara five days before the surrender. "Why did America not send them in time?" The understandably frustrated airman, however, might have looked to the flawed leadership of his nation and Britain's first--especially at this moment. The key to France now lay in the hands of the octogenarian Marshal Petain, the hero of the Battle of Verdun in World War I, who had decided that the only way to save his country now was to capitulate to Hitler and hope for the best. It was a tragically wrong decision that began four years of a collaborationist regime that permitted the Nazis to wreak havoc on the nation’s sovereignty--and inspire hypocrisy among those of its acquiescent citizens who did not join the Resistance.
One particular incident at the armistice signing ended up being used by the West to make Hitler look not merely arrogant, but even ridiculous. At one point, the dictator raised his leg awkwardly high while stepping backward. Documentarian John Grierson, director of the Canadian information and propaganda departments, discovered that, by looping the odd movement repeatedly, he could make Hitler's odd movement look like an impromptu jig.
As propaganda, this is not quite the black art of the trade as practiced by Joseph Goebbels—but it was one of the few things happening at this point to make Hitler look like anything less than an all-conquering hero. It would take an extremely tall, comparatively unknown 50-year-old soldier, Charles DeGaulle--with the help (at least until he tired of his arrogance) of William Churchill--to maintain the will of the Free French movement. Four years after the French pilot's complaint, Americans would arrive to save France again, as they had done a quarter century before.
No comments:
Post a Comment