The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  After regrouping, repairing and recovering, the Germans began advancing south with 50 infantry divisions and 10 admittedly somewhat depleted panzer divisions. Forty French infantry divisions and the remnants of three armoured divisions stood in their way. On 6 June 1940 German forces crossed the Somme. Three days later they were in Rouen. The French government had been evacuated to a series of chaˆteaux dotted around the countryside south of Paris, where communications were difficult, working telephones rare, and travel made almost impossible by the endless columns of refugees now clogging the highways. On 12 June 1940, at their first meeting since leaving Paris, the shocked ministers were told by Weygand that further resistance was useless and it was time to request an armistice. In Weygand’s view, the British would not be able to hold out against a German invasion of the United Kingdom, so evacuating the French government to London was pointless. Moreover, like an increasing number of other generals, Weygand was beginning to think that it was the civilian politicians who were to blame for the debacle. So it was the army’s duty to make an honourable peace with the enemy. Only in this way would it be possible to prevent anarchy and revolution breaking out in France as it had after the previous defeat by the Germans, in 1870, and spearhead the moral regeneration of the country. The hero of the Battle of Verdun in the First World War, the aged Marshal Philippe P’tain, had been brought in as a military figurehead by Reynaud, and he now backed this idea. ‘I will not abandon the soil of France,’ he declared, ‘and will accept the suffering which will be imposed on the fatherland and its children. The French renaissance will be the fruit of this suffering . . . The armistice is in my eyes the necessary condition of the durability of eternal France.’43

  On 16 June 1940, after the government had reconvened in Bordeaux, Reynaud, isolated in his opposition to an armistice, resigned as Prime Minister. He was replaced by Pe’tain himself. On 17 June 1940 the new French leader announced on public radio that it was time to stop the fighting and sue for peace. Some 120,000 French soldiers had been killed or been reported missing in the conflict (along with 10,500 Dutch and Belgian, and 5,000 British), showing that many did fight and belying claims that French national pride had been destroyed by the politics of the 1930s. But after Pe’tain’s announcement, many gave up. Half of the 1.5 million French troops taken prisoner by the Germans surrendered after this point. Soldiers who wanted to fight on were often physically attacked by civilians. Conservatives like P’tain who abhorred the democratic institutions of the Third Republic did not see in the end why they should fight to the death to defend them. Many of them admired Hitler and wanted to take the opportunity of defeat to re-create France in Germany’s image. They were soon to be given the opportunity to do so.44

  V

  Meanwhile France was descending into almost total chaos. A vast exodus of refugees swept southwards across the country. An ’migr’ Russian writer, Irène N’mirovsky, who had fled the Bolshevik Revolution to go to France in 1917 at the age of fourteen with her Jewish businessman father, vividly described ‘the chaotic multitude trudging through the dust’, the luckiest pushing ‘wheelbarrows, a pram, a cart fashioned of four planks of wood set on top of crudely fashioned wheels, bowing down under the weight of bags, tattered clothes, sleeping children’. 45 Cars tried to move along the clogged roads, ‘full to bursting with baggage and furniture, prams and birdcages, packing cases and baskets of clothes, each with a mattress tied firmly to the roof’, looking like ‘mountains of fragile scaffolding’. ‘An endless, slow-moving river flowed from Paris: cars, trucks, carts, bicycles, along with the horse-drawn traps of farmers who had abandoned their land’.46 The speed and scale of the German invasion meant there were no official plans for evacuation. Memories of German atrocities in 1914 and rumours of the terrifying effect of bombing created mass hysteria. Whole towns were deserted: the population of Lille is thought to have fallen from 200,000 to 20,000 in a few days, that of Chartres from 23,000 to 800. Looters broke into shops and other premises and took what they wanted. In the south, places of safety were swollen to bursting with refugees. Bordeaux, usually home to 300,000 inhabitants, doubled in population within a few weeks, while 150,000 people crammed into Pau, which normally housed only 30,000. Altogether it is thought that between 6 and 8 million people fled their homes during the invasion. Social structures buckled and collapsed under the sheer weight of numbers. Only gradually did people begin to return to their homes. The demoralization had a devastating effect on the French political system, which, as we have seen, fell apart under the strain.47

  When the Germans entered Paris on 14 June 1940, therefore, they found large parts of it deserted. Instead of the usual cacophony of car horns, all that could be heard was the lowing of a herd of cattle, abandoned in the city centre by refugees passing through from the countryside further north. Everywhere they went in France, German troops looted the deserted towns and villages. ‘Everything’s on offer here, just like in a big department store, but for nothing,’ reported Hans Meier-Welcker from Elbeuf on 12 June 1940:

  The soldiers are searching through everything and taking anything that pleases them, if they are able to move it. They are pulling whole sacks of coffee off lorries. Shirts, stockings, blankets, boots and innumerable other things are lying around to choose from. Things that you would otherwise have to save up carefully for can be picked up here on the streets and the ground. The troops are also getting hold of transport for themselves right away. Everywhere you can hear the humming of engines newly turned on by drivers who still have to become familiar with them.48

  The French humiliation seemed complete. Yet there was worse to come. On Hitler’s personal orders, the private railway carriage of the French commander in the First World War, Marshal Foch, in which the Armistice of 11 November 1918 had been signed, was tracked down to a museum, and, after the museum walls had been broken down by a German demolition team, it was moved out and towed back to the spot it had occupied in the forest of Compiègne on the signing of the Armistice. As the Germans arrived, William L. Shirer noted Hitler’s face ‘brimming with revenge’, mingled with the triumph observable in his

  ‘springy step’. Taking the very same seat occupied by Foch in 1918, Hitler posed for photographs, then departed, contemptuously leaving the rest of the delegation, including Hess, G̈ring, Ribbentrop and the military leaders, to read out the terms and receive the signatures of the dejected French.49 In accordance with this agreement, all fighting ceased on the morning of 24 June 1940. France was divided into two, an occupied zone in the north and west, with a nominally autonomous state in the south and east, run from the spa town of Vichy by the existing government under Marshal P’tain, whose laws and decrees were given validity throughout the whole of the country.50

  German forces had performed the greatest military encirclement in history. No subsequent victories were to be as great, or as cheap in terms of German lives, of which fewer than 50,000 were lost (killed or missing). More prisoners, almost a million and a half, were taken than in any other single military action of the war. The success persuaded Hitler and the leading generals that similar tactics would bring dividends in future actions, notably, the following year, in the invasion of the Soviet Union.51 Germany’s hereditary enemy had been humiliated. Versailles had been avenged. Hitler was beside himself with elation. Before dawn on the morning of 28 June 1940, he flew secretly to Paris with his architect Albert Speer and the sculptor Arno Breker on a brief, entirely personal sight-seeing trip. They visited the Ope’ra, specially illuminated for his benefit, the Eiffel Tower, which formed the backdrop for an informal photo of the three men taken at first light, the Invalides and the artistic quarter of Montmartre. ‘It was the dream of my life to see Paris,’ Hitler told Speer. ‘I cannot say how happy I am to have that dream fulfilled today.’ Pleased with the visit, he revealed to the architect that he had often thought of having the city razed to the ground. After the two men’s grandiose building plans for the German capital had turned it from Berlin into
the new world city of Germania, however, he said later, ‘Paris will only be a shadow. So why should we destroy it?’52

  Hitler never returned to the French capital. The victory parade was to take place at home. On 6 July 1940 vast, cheering crowds lined Berlin’s streets, upon which people had strewn thousands of bouquets of flowers along the route to be taken by the Leader from the station to the Chancellery. Upon arriving there, he was repeatedly called out onto the balcony to receive the plaudits of the thousands gathered below. There had, as William L. Shirer noted, been little excitement when the news of the invasion of France had been announced. No crowds had gathered before the Chancellery, as usually happened when big events occurred. ‘Most Germans I’ve seen,’ he noted on 11 May 1940, ‘are sunk deep in depression at the news.’53 As in previous foreign crises, there had been widespread anxiety about the outcome, underpinned by a general fear at the possibility of Allied bombing raids on German cities. But as on previous occasions too, relief at the ease with which Hitler had achieved his objective flowed together with feelings of national pride into a wave of euphoria. This time it was far greater than ever before. Not untypical was the reaction of the middle-class history student Lore Walb, born in 1919 in the Rhineland and now at Munich University. ‘Isn’t that tremendously great?’ she asked rhetorically as she recorded the victories in her diary on 21 May 1940. She put it all down, as many did, to Hitler: ‘It’s really only now that we can truly estimate our Leader’s greatness. He has proved his genius as a statesman but his genius is no less as a military commander . . . With this Leader, the war cannot end for us in anything except victory! Everyone’s firmly convinced of it.’54

  7. The Partition of France, 1940

  ‘Admiration for the achievements of the German troops is boundless,’ reported the SS Security Service on 23 May 1940, ‘and is now felt even by people who retained a certain distance and scepticism at the beginning of the campaign.’55 The capitulation of Belgium, the reports continued, ‘prompted the greatest enthusiasm everywhere’, and the entry of German troops into Paris ‘caused enthusiasm amongst the population in all parts of the Reich to a degree that has not so far been seen. There were loud demonstrations of j oy and emotional scenes of enthusiasm in many town squares and on many streets.’56 ‘The recent enthusiasm,’ it was reported on 20 June 1940, ‘gives the impression every time that no greater enthusiasm is possible, and yet with every fresh event, the population gives its joy an even more intense expression.’ Pe’tain’s announcement that the French were throwing in the towel was greeted by spontaneous demonstrations on the squares of numerous German towns. Veterans of the First World War were amazed at the speed of the victory. Even those opposed to the regime confessed to a feeling of pride, and reported that the general atmosphere of j ubilation made it impossible to continue their underground resistance activities, such as they were.57 The Catholic officer Wilm Hosenfeld, who had been so critical of German policy in Poland that he had written to his wife that ‘I have sometimes been ashamed to be a German soldier’,58 was swept away by the news: ‘Boy oh boy,’ he wrote to his son on 11 June 1940, ‘who wouldn’t have been happy to have taken part in it!’59 In Hamburg, the conservative schoolteacher Luise Solmitz shared in the general euphoria: ‘A grand, grand day for the German people,’ she wrote in her diary on 17 June 1940 on hearing the announcement that P’tain was suing for peace. ‘We were all exhilarated by happiness and enthusiasm.’ The victory was

  ‘an unbelievably great national change of fortune, the fulfilment of long-held nationalist dreams’. In comparison with this, the daily cares of wartime, which had dominated her diary up to this point, faded into the background. Only when she remembered the persecution to which she and her Jewish husband Friedrich were subject, despite living in what was classified as a ‘privileged mixed marriage’, did she pause for thought: ‘The successes are so tremendous that the shadow cast by this light is becoming ever darker and more threatening.’60

  VI

  The conquest of France marked the highest point of Hitler’s popularity in Germany between 1933 and 1945. People confidently expected that Britain would now sue for peace, and that the war would be over by the end of the summer. Yet the problem of what to do next was not a simple one. Moreover, Hitler’s attitude to the British was fundamentally ambivalent. On the one hand, he admired the British Empire, which in the 1930s and 1940s was the world’s largest, still covering an enormous area of the globe; and he regarded the English as ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cousins of the Germans, who in the end would be impelled by the logic of racial destiny to make common cause with them. On the other hand, he realized that there were powerful forces in British politics that regarded Germany under his leadership as a profound threat to the Empire that had to be stopped at all costs. The previous September, these forces had prodded the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain into declaring war on Germany immediately after the invasion of Poland. Hitler was aware of the fact that a number of leading figures in the Conservative Party, notably the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, still hankered after a peaceful solution to the conflict and hoped that he could somehow persuade them to start negotiating a peace settlement. For most of the first months of the war Hitler’s policy towards Britain vacillated between aggression and conciliation. Even after Churchill’s appointment as Prime Minister made a separate peace much less likely, Hitler continued to hope for one, while preparing invasion plans in case he was unsuccessful.61

  Foreign Minister Ribbentrop was all in favour of an invasion. After Britain had been invaded and conquered, he envisaged the restoration of the former King Edward VIII, who had been forced to abdicate in 1936 in favour of his younger brother, after declaring his intention of marrying an American divorce’e and, gone into exile with the title Duke of Windsor. The Duke had visited Germany not long after renouncing the throne, and was said to have greeted officials with a modified version of the Nazi salute. On more than one occasion he had made it clear that he appreciated what he thought the Nazis were trying to do in Germany. By 1940 he was telling anyone who would listen that Britain had virtually lost the war and it was time to make peace with the Nazis. In the early summer of 1940, the Duke and his wife were residing in Portugal, and Ribbentrop commissioned Walter Schellenberg, the SS intelligence officer who had already made his mark in the Venlo affair, to kidnap them and bring them to Germany via Spain. Pursuing his own agenda, Ribbentrop also thought that kidnapping the Duke of Windsor would make a separate peace with Britain more difficult. The Nazi plot depended on persuading the couple that they were in danger of being kidnapped and perhaps assassinated by British secret agents to stop them falling into German hands. Spanish fascists were recruited behind the back of the neutralist Franco government, which would have been appalled by the damage done to relations with Britain, to spirit the Windsors away once they crossed the border. Inevitably, however, the plot became entangled in the webs of internal Nazi power politics, and neither Schellenberg nor anyone else tried too hard to make it succeed, in case it delivered a major triumph to the hated Ribbentrop. The Duke and Duchess finally sank the plot by acceding to Churchill’s suggestion that the Duke should go to the Bahamas as Governor-General of the islands. This put himself and his wife thousands of miles away from intrigues of this kind. Schellenberg’s superior, Reinhard Heydrich, congratulated the young intelligence officer on handling his commission from Ribbentrop with just the right mixture of apparent enthusiasm and practical incompetence.62

  In the meantime, Hitler had been consulting with his army and navy chiefs about the practicalities of an invasion. The German fleet had sustained heavy losses in the Norwegian campaign. Three cruisers and ten destroyers had been sunk, and two heavy cruisers and one battleship had been severely damaged and so were out of action. In the summer of 1940 Admiral Raeder had only one heavy and two light cruisers and four destroyers at his command. This was a woefully inadequate force with which to attempt to win command of an English Channel protected by five Royal Na
vy battleships, eleven cruisers and thirty destroyers, backed by another major naval force that could sail from Gibraltar at a moment’s notice.63 Moreover, the Germans had failed to add the French fleet to their own naval strength after the capitulation of France. On 3 July 1940, in a bold move that further outraged French opinion, British ships attacked the French naval base at Mers-el-K’bir, near Oran, in French-controlled Algeria, damaging a number of warships and killing 1,250 French sailors, in order to stop the French navy falling into German hands. Raeder was thus left with far too few warships at his disposal. So it would be necessary as a minimum to gain complete air superiority over the English Channel by destroying the Royal Air Force. Only in this way could the potential obstacle posed by British naval dominance be more or less neutralized.64

  After much deliberation, Hitler signed a directive on 16 July for an invasion, but only ‘in case of necessity’, and three days later, at an elaborately stage-managed occasion in the Reichstag, he renewed his earlier offer of peace to the British. So vague were the terms in which it was cast, however, that it was rejected by Churchill’s government within the hour. Listening to the news of the British rejection of the offer on the radio with a group of military and civilian officials, William L. Shirer was struck by the consternation the announcement produced. The officials, he noted, ‘could not believe their ears. One of them shouted at me: “Can you make it out? Can you understand those British fools? To turn down peace now?” ’ ‘The Germans I talk to,’ Shirer commented the following day, ‘simply cannot understand it. They want peace. They don’t want another winter like the last one. They have nothing against Britain . . . They think they can lick Britain too, if it comes to a show-down. But they would prefer peace.’65 Amongst some Germans, the British refusal to sue for peace unleashed bitter feelings of hatred and revenge, born of disappointment that the war was evidently not coming to an end after all. ‘I have never had terrible feelings of hatred,’ wrote the student Lore Walb in her diary on 17 June 1940, ‘ - but one thing I do want: this time, the Leader must not be so humane, and he should teach the English a real lesson - for they alone are responsible for all the misfortune and misery into which so many peoples have been plunged.’66