rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

VICTORY IN THE WEST 663THE COLLAPSE OF FRANCEThe determination of the British to fight on does not seem to have troubledHitler’s thoughts. He was sure they would see the light after he had finished offFrance, which he now proceeded to do. The morning after Dunkirk fell, on June5, the Germans launched a massive assault on the Somme and soon they wereattacking in overwhelming strength all along a 400-mile front that stretchedacross France from Abbeville to the Upper Rhine. The French were doomed.Against 143 German divisions, including ten armored, they could deploy only65 divisions, most of them second-rate, for the best units and most of the armorhad been expended in Belgium. Little was left of the weak French Air Force.The British could contribute but one infantry division, which had been in theSaar, and parts of an armored division. The R.A.F. could spare few planesfor this battle unless it were to leave the British Isles themselves defenseless.Finally, the French High Command, now dominated by Petain and Weygand,had become sodden with defeatism. Nevertheless some French units fought withgreat bravery and tenacity, temporarily stopping even the German armor hereand there, and standing up resolutely to the incessant pounding of the Luftwaffe.But it was an unequal struggle. In ”victorious confusion,” as Telford Taylorhas aptly put it, the German troops surged across France like a tidal wave, theconfusion coming because there were so many of them and they were moving sofast and often getting in each other’s way. 864 On June 10 the French governmenthastily departed Paris and on June 14 the great city, the glory of France, whichwas undefended, was occupied by General von Kuechler’s Eighteenth Army.The swastika was immediately hoisted on the Eiffel Tower. On June 16, PremierReynaud, whose government had fled to Bordeaux, resigned and was replaced byPetain, 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 consulthis ally, Mussolini. For this strutting warrior, after making sure that the Frencharmies were hopelessly beaten, had, like a jackal, hopped into the war on June10, to try to get in on the spoils.THE DUCE PLUNGES HIS SMALL DAGGER INTO FRANCE’S BACK∗ On this day, June 17, 1940, the exiled Kaiser sent from Doom, in occupied Holland, atelegram of congratulations to Hitler, whom he had for so long scorned as a vulgar upstart.It was found among the captured Nazi papers.Under the deeply moving impression of the capitulation of France I congratulateyou and the whole German Wehrmacht on the mighty victory granted by God,in the words of the Emperor Wilhelm the Great in 1870: ”What a turn of eventsbrought about by divine dispensation.”In all German hearts there echoes the Leuthen chorale sung by the victors ofLeuthen, the soldiers of the Great King: ”Now thank we all our God!”Hitler, who believed that the mighty victory was due more to himself than to God, drafteda restrained reply, but whether it was ever sent is not indicated in the documents. 865The Fuehrer had been furious a little earlier when he learned that a German unit whichoverran Doom had posted a guard of honor around the exiled Emperor’s residence. Hitlerordered the guard removed and Doom posted as out of bounds to all German soldiers. WilhelmII died at Doom on June 4, 1941, and was buried there. His death, Hassell noted in his diary(p. 200), ”went almost unnoticed” in Germany. Hitler and Goebbels saw to that.