Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
It's June the 21st, 1940. We're in Compiègne, in northeast France. In a forest clearing stands a railway carriage. It's ornate, an old dining car. It's had quite a life. Once it formed part of the famous Orient Express. During the First World War it was commandeered by the French army. In fact, on November the 11th, 1918, the peace terms were signed here, bringing an end to the bloodiest conflict known to man.
Since then, the Compiègne wagon, as it's known, has sat here in the Glade of the Armistice, a museum piece, an historic monument. But today, in 1940, this old railway car is about to take center stage once again. Fifty yards away is a group of journalists, corralled by German soldiers. One of the reporters is Bill Shira, an American correspondent for CBS Radio News, as their man in Berlin,
Shira is in a unique position. He's able to describe daily life in the Third Reich for listeners across the English-speaking world. In the midsummer sunshine, amid the oak, cypress and pine trees, he and the others wait. At 18 minutes past three, as Shira records it, Adolf Hitler's personal standard is run up the flagpole. And then here he comes, the Fuhrer, walking slowly and deliberately down the path.
He is accompanied by his entourage: Göring, Ribbentrop, Hess, Admiral Ryder, generals Keitel and Brauschitsch. Hitler pauses for a moment before a granite block and reads its inscription. It commemorates the spot where the Great War ended and, to Nazi minds, where the humiliation of the fatherland began. Scheirer studies Hitler through his binoculars. "I see him as though he were directly in front of me," he reports.
He glances slowly around the clearing, and now, as his eyes meet ours, you grasp the depth of his hatred. Hitler steps up into the carriage. Army engineers have knocked down a wall and rolled it a few yards along a short piece of track. It's now in the exact position it occupied in 1918. At 3:30, the French delegation arrives. Their plane has flown up from Bordeaux, the new seat of government, now that France has thrown in the towel. To a man, they're broken.
Dejected, on seeing the train carriage they look dazed. They had no idea of the grim joke that the Führer is about to play. There are no handshakes. Inside they are met with Nazi salutes. When all are seated, photographers are ushered forward to take pictures through the dusty windows. Then at a green baize table they get down to business, negotiating the terms of the French surrender. Hitler says nothing. After just 12 minutes he gets up and walks out.
While lackeys scuttle after their Fuhrer, the talks continue without him. They will spill over into tomorrow. Hitler stomps to his Mercedes. The German military band strikes up the national anthem. Then the Horst Wessel song, the Nazi hymn. As Schirer tells his listeners, the whole ceremony in which Hitler has reached a new pinnacle in his meteoric career and Germany avenged the 1918 defeat is over in a quarter of an hour. Three days later,
Hitler will have the sight blown up. From Neuser, this is the story of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. And this is Real Dictators. By the autumn of 1939, Hitler has passed the point of no return. He's dismantled Czechoslovakia. His unholy alliance with the Soviet Union has shocked the world. And he's invaded Poland. Europe is again plunged into the abyss. The opening months of the conflict are often referred to as the Phony War.
For many in Britain and France, the conflict feels remote. For now at least. There are blackouts, air raid drills, gas masks, sandbags. Schoolchildren are evacuated. But the war itself is surreal, even quaint. On one occasion, the RAF proposes to bomb a timber forest in southwest Germany. The British Air Minister Kingsley Wood objects. "Are they not aware it's private property?" Professor Thomas Weber,
We often think about the period between the end of the campaign against Poland and the spring of 1940 as something where nothing is happening much. But I think this is really kind of an illusion. It's an illusion because, in fact, there is war in the air, there is war in the sea, there is the targeting of Atlantic convoys.
So we should really see this less as a moment of a phony war, but rather of very frantic and busy preparations for war on both sides. It is the calm before the storm. In the South Atlantic, the Royal Navy gets its revenge on the Kriegsmarine in the Battle of the River Plate. The pocket battleship Graf Spee is sunk off the coast of Uruguay. And as for Poland, war there was never phony.
The Poles are about to find themselves in a living hell. Sixteen days after the German invasion, Soviet troops march in from the east. They divide the country between them under the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Russians also bag Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The two armies meet at Brest-Litovsk. Yet more symbolism for Hitler. This was where Lenin's Russia capitulated to Germany after the revolution of 1917.
In the field, the Polish army folds pretty quickly. The city of Warsaw bravely holds out for another three weeks, its public radio defiantly playing the national anthem, until the Luftwaffe and artillery pulverize it. Hitler has moved up with the army to oversee proceedings. He's beside himself with joy. The second act of this drama, as he promised the Reichstag, is being written.
But it is a marked change in direction. The conquests thus far – Austria, the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia – have been achieved without meeting resistance. Hitler was a bloodless general. Not anymore. There are 200,000 civilian dead in Poland by October. And behind the German army, a new unit is moving in.
the Waffen-SS. They are hyper-sadistic. Their ranks include the Death's Head Divisions, the detachments who run the concentration camps. Their mission is to round up resistance fighters, political dissidents, and, especially, Jews. There are 3.5 million Jews in Poland, 10% of the population. They had a hard enough time under the authoritarian Polish regime. Under the Nazis, the horrors will become unimaginable. Dr. Chris Dillon,
The existing concentration camps in Germany and Austria, the Greater German Reich, fill up very rapidly with the outbreak of the Second World War and the arrival of Polish prisoners in particular. Tens of thousands of Polish prisoners are arrested
During the first year of the war, five new concentration camps are built either at home or in occupied territories. So Auschwitz opens officially in June 1940 with the task of crushing Polish resistance, both real and imagined. Ultimately, Poland is just the launch pad. Acquiring Russian territory is Hitler's endgame.
But the Fuhrer understands that conquering the vast Soviet Union will take serious logistical planning and enormous military strength. The time is not yet right, and it's something he can't entertain with a war on two fronts. For the moment, Stalin is neutralized, dazzled by the fraudulent non-aggression pact. More inconvenient foes are looming: Britain and France. Britain and Ireland will be a trickier proposition to defeat.
There is hope yet that old man Chamberlain can be persuaded to conclude a separate peace. But what better way to focus attention than with a lightning war, a blitzkrieg. In the second week of September, French troops had actually advanced three miles into German territory, an action known as the Saar Offensive. It was a muddled operation. After nine days twiddling their thumbs, the soldiers turned around and went home. Hitler has drawn encouragement from the apparent indecision.
While the Luftwaffe is bombing Warsaw, he sets a date for the invasion of France. X-Day, November 12, 1939. Striking while the iron is hot is one thing, and Hitler's impatience is legendary, but this gives barely two months' preparation. Whatever happened in the Saarland, France still has a world-class army. Poland, by comparison, is a walk in the park. Dr. John Curatola
During the 1920s and 30s, the French army, as it remakes itself, is looked upon by a number of armies as the standard bearer of modern militaries. Even the Americans, we read a lot of their manuals, like, well, maybe this is the way to go. But Hitler presses on. The key obstacle for the Wehrmacht is a string of high-tech border fortifications, the Maginot Line. It's capped with massive gun emplacements.
Its concrete bunkers are linked by underground tunnels and railways for the deployment of munitions and half a million troops. The wide River Meuse flows behind it. This shield of France seems impregnable, but it has a fatal flaw. The Maginot Line covers only the immediate border with Germany. It doesn't yet extend all the way to the English Channel. In 1914, the Germans had advanced through Belgium, through Flanders.
To circumvent the Maginot Line, military planners once again advocate trampling on the neutral low countries. Violating their sovereignty? What does it matter? As Hitler puts it, nobody will question it when we've won. Hitler had been scarred by his experiences in the First World War and the experiences of a protracted war of attrition.
Therefore, what he was trying to accomplish was a quick knockout strike against France. In many ways, what he was trying to do in 1940 was not so very different from what the Germans had tried in 1914 with the Schlieffen Plan or with the Spring Offensive of 1918 to throw everything that they had at the Western Front and to break through with lightning speed. But in both cases, things had failed.
1940 was different for two reasons, really. It was different in the sense that technology had advanced since then. The German armed forces in particular had made use of these new opportunities. And in addition to that, Hitler was also, I suppose, willing to be more daring, even more daring than in 1914. To Hitler's generals, there is a thin line between daring and recklessness.
But just getting in to see the Fuhrer is becoming increasingly difficult. He's surrounded by his court of yes-men. Hitler has little time for formal meetings, agenda, minutes. Even his official headquarters in Berlin. Plans are concocted at his alpine retreat, the Berghof. All access is controlled by his pitbull private secretary, Martin Bormann.
The Nazis at the national level, they're a mess. And here's why. It's because all power emanates from one guy, Adolf Hitler. And access to Hitler is what gets you power. So when you think about running a war, running a nation, domestic policy, all these things that good governance requires…
It all revolves around one guy. And if you don't have that access, you don't have any power. And so what you see is those individuals who maybe are counter to the strategy, don't think this is going to work. Hey, boss, you don't want to do this. They're easily sidelined by those sycophants that are within the German general staff or in the higher ups that will acquiesce to whatever Hitler's aims are.
Already there are those in the German High Command, the OKW, who are beginning to have grave concerns over Hitler's methods, even his sanity. One of them is Colonel Hans Oster. He is a senior member of the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Oster has sources who have contacts in the Vatican. Could they perhaps persuade the Pope to act as peacemaker? But this would not solve the Hitler problem, as well they know.
Reconciliation with the West will never happen while the fanatical Fuhrer is still in the picture. Even leading officers feared that an invasion of France in November would be doomed to failure. Generals von Brauschich and Franz Halder are two such people. Their group will be known as the "Sossen Conspirators" after the OKW's headquarters. At the very least, they see the need to overthrow Hitler, possibly do away with him altogether. Brauschich is the first to test the waters.
When Hitler brings forward the invasion date to Sunday, November 5, Vrauschitsch objects to the haste. He also expresses a fear of mass insubordination. "Insubordination?" rages Hitler. He demands to know whether any offenders have been executed. He rants and raves, calling the army cowards. It is Hermann Göring who offers the most practical reason for postponing the attack. The winter weather will hamper Germany's air campaign.
But Goering is suspicious of Brauschich and Halder, he's got their cards marked. And the corpulent Luftwaffe chief is not the only one sensing some bad vibes. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, is a devotee of the supernatural. He's been using the services of an astrologer. He warns Hitler that an assassination plot will be launched between the 7th and 10th of November. Hitler is not one for personal security,
He trusts in Providence. As he puts it: "I believe very deeply that destiny has selected me for the German nation." The Sossen gang had one particular problem. They, like all members of the armed forces, have pledged their allegiance not to the fatherland, as was traditional, but to Adolf Hitler personally. This was a clever move, one of the first changes the Fuhrer made when taking power. Professor Helen Rosch,
Nazism is almost styling itself as an alternative to Christianity, encouraging a sacral devotion to Hitler. The swearing of oaths, as officers had to, it instilled this kind of, almost like a blood debt,
As the war continued, you know, it was only when the situation seemed to be incredibly hopeless that they were even prepared to begin thinking, these officers around Hitler, about, oh, well, maybe we should perhaps try and get rid of him. But until that point, to break the oath would have seemed unforgivable and unthinkable. For the moment, the move to depose Hitler will be left to individuals.
Georg Elser, aged 36, is a skilled craftsman. He is a proficient clockmaker, an expert carpenter. He works assembling bomber aircraft at a factory in Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance, near the borders of Austria and Switzerland. Elser has flirted with communism, but is not driven necessarily by ideology. He just detests the Nazis. On the factory floor, he's witnessed the military machine going into overdrive.
He contrives to bump off the accursed Adolf Hitler once and for all. Elsa knows that every November 9th, Hitler is in Munich for the annual commemoration of the 1923 Putsch. Crucially, the night before, Hitler always turns up at the beer hall to give a speech. The hall, the Bürgerbräukeller, is huge, a cavernous arena. With its long trestle tables, it can seat 3,000 bawdy drinkers.
It was here where the whole Nazi revolution kicked off. This, determines Elze, will be the place to strike. In November 1938, he attends the Beer Hall. He watches Hitler speak. He scribbles notes and even sneaks in a camera. The next summer, in 1939, Elze frequents the Bürgerbräukeller again. There's a wooden pillar directly behind the speaking platform, he notes. That would be the ideal spot to place a bomb.
Through the start of November, Elsa turns up daily. With beer flowing, people coming and going, he finds the security to be incredibly lax. At night, when they lock up, Elsa hides in a storeroom. When the coast is clear, he comes out to work on the pillar. Each morning when they open the doors, he sneaks out the back. Through his nightly subterfuge, he manages to chisel out a panel with a concealed pull-down flap. And there's a bonus.
This year, he learns, Hitler will be joined on stage by his whole gang. Himmler, Heydrich, Hess, Goering. He can take them all out in one fell swoop. Elsa rents a room in a local boarding house. Here he assembles his homemade bomb. The night before Hitler's speech, he stays behind again to insert his device into the pillar. Hitler is due to speak at 8:30 PM. Having detailed the Fuhrer's habitual lateness, Elsa sets the charge for 9:20.
He should be in full flow by then. But, as ever, Hitler lives a charmed existence. On November 8th, he actually starts half an hour early. Then he cuts his rant short. He leaves the stage at 9:07, escaping 100 pounds of gunpowder by 13 minutes. Hitler is already heading for the railway station when the bomb goes off. It kills eight people and injures 62 more. By this time, Elsa is well away.
trying to cross the Swiss border. He's been methodical in everything else, but here he's careless. He has incriminating gear on him and a postcard from the Bürgerbräukeller. He's later identified as someone who bought a brass plate from a Munich hardware store. It had formed part of the bomb's mechanism, and some Beer Hall staff do remember him. At the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, Elsa claims his assassination attempt was a solo mission,
But just as it was with the Reichstag fire, the Nazis do not like this lone wolf theory. Hitler thrives on victimhood to be seen as the target of organized enemies. The next day, SS commandos sneak over the Dutch border in a sting operation literally feet from the frontier post. They snatch two British intelligence agents who have been operating out of Holland. No link to Elsa is ever proven.
But the arrest of Captain Best and Major Stevens, known as the Vendlo incident, fits a better narrative. The alleged conspiracy between the three will be used by Hitler to crank up antagonism towards the Netherlands when the time comes. Elsa, battered half to death, will be held in custody for the duration of the war. He will be murdered at Dachau in 1945, as Allied troops are poised to liberate it.
Mystery still surrounds that night. Rumors persist that the Nazis staged the bombing themselves to boost Hitler's perceived invincibility. In one photograph it said, "An SS man can clearly be seen on stage, eyes glued to a stopwatch." Others claim Elsa was the dupe of rogue Nazis, furious at Hitler's pact with Stalin. One of those wounded at the Bürgerbräukeller is Eva Braun's father.
Another casualty by association of a romantic attachment to Hitler. If you recall, while involved with Brown, Hitler had also struck up a close friendship with a young woman named Unity Mitford. A British citizen, so distraught is Mitford at the outbreak of war between Britain and Germany that the 25-year-old shoots herself in the head. The suicide attempt is unsuccessful. She is admitted to hospital with a bullet lodged in her brain. Professor Nicholas of Shaughnessy
I mean, he was literally the kiss of death to women. Although many women were, hundreds of thousands of women were fascinated by him. And every day, great sheaths of letters would arrive in Berlin begging him to father their babies. Hitler, privately, pays Mitford's medical bills. He arranges a secret transfer to a clinic in Switzerland. Unable to walk, and with the mental age of a 10-year-old, she will be moved back to Britain a few months later.
She will die in 1948. While Hitler is planning his assault on the Low Countries, a spanner is thrown into the works. On November 30th, Stalin invades Finland. This ushers in what would be known as the Winter War. Finnish ski troops will prove remarkably adept at holding back the Red Army. Stalin had made no secret of his designs on the country, but the attack has come with no consultation. Mussolini too is unhappy.
He never much cared for the Nazi-Soviet pact. He has become marginalized. And as for this rush to invade France, Mussolini has already warned Hitler that Italian forces won't be at full strength until 1943. None of this helps Hitler. With a severe winter setting in, the worst in half a century, Hitler postpones his attack on the West till the spring. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain claims that Hitler has missed the bus.
But it makes no difference, Goebbels reassures his Fuhrer. The average little French soldier only wanted a good bed, a woman and a warm room. Along the border, German troops mount huge speakers and play the French lullabies. There is a tentative promise of support by Britain and France for plucky Finland, but they are no more likely to come to its aid than they were Poland's.
That said, the shift in focus to the Nordic region does open up the possibility of taking the war to Hitler. Germany's war machine is dependent on imported raw materials. 70% of its iron ore comes from Sweden. In the winter, when the Baltic is frozen, it's exported through Norway's northern port of Narvik.
After Germany had managed to invade and occupy Poland much faster than expected, Britain and France really faced a major challenge, which was how are you now going to check Germany? What are you going to do against Germany? And they finally see an opening in Scandinavia, both in terms of cutting the Germans off from natural resources, but also by potentially moving onto Germany from the north.
And this really then creates a kind of mad rush between Britain and Germany to occupy Norway. The Allies make a decision. They will mine Norwegian waters. And if they can land troops in the far north, they could shut off Germany's supply altogether. But Hitler is one step ahead. On March the 1st, he issues an order for the peaceful occupation, as he puts it, of Norway and Denmark.
In secret, Colonel Oster, the anti-Hitler intelligence officer, passes the message on. He informs the Dutch military attaché of the impending operation, but nobody does anything. On the morning of April 7, a Sunday, a German naval flotilla puts to sea, destined for Norway's northern ports. Merchant vessels are already in situ, with soldiers hidden in their holds. On Tuesday morning, Narvik is seized by Wehrmacht mountain troops.
By noon, Stavanger, Bergen and Trondheim have fallen. Key airfields are captured. Further south, troops disembark in Copenhagen. It's all over in six hours and at the cost of just 20 German casualties. One of the shortest military campaigns in history. The King of Denmark even compliments the Wehrmacht on their magnificent work. In rugged Norway, things are a little different.
The picturesque Norwegian towns pay dearly for their resistance. As the Germans advance, King Haakon VII and his government move north by train, taking the country's gold reserves with them. They establish a provisional capital in the Arctic city of Tromso. Back in Oslo, a Nazi stooge is installed as a puppet leader. The infamous Vidkin Quisling. His name will become a byword for traitor.
But for the first time, things are not going all Germany's way. A British naval group starts sinking German shipping. The Kriegsmarine's losses are heavy. Ten destroyers, three cruisers, two of its pocket battleships badly damaged. Hitler is a poor military strategic thinker.
Sea lines of communication, which Great Britain has controlled for centuries up to the First World War, it's what made Great Britain great. Its ability to trade and to power project across an entire globe is what built the British Empire. And what you see is that the Germans are completely oblivious to this. They are a land power. They got a navy. But what they do is they embrace a strategy of basically merchant raiding.
with the U-boats and with the few pocket battleships that they build. And so Great Britain can easily bottle up the North Sea. As far as projecting power, the Germans just don't have it. On land, however, things swing in Hitler's favor. An Anglo-French task force supported by Polish units lands 25,000 men near Narvik and Trondheim, but they are ill-equipped for snow or mountain warfare.
With insufficient air cover, their operation fails. On April 28th, an evacuation begins. By early June, the Allies will have pulled out of Norway altogether, taking the King and government into exile. Finally, distractions over, Hitler can focus on the task at hand. In terms of taking France, Hitler is sure his military strategists are being far too conservative.
He backs instead a more daring scheme devised by General Erich von Manstein. The French, their lesson from the First World War is that firepower kills. Artillery is the biggest killer in the First World War. And so as a result, in order to prevent Germany from doing this again, we'll build the Maginot Line. We're going to build fortified positions, whereas the Germans are going to build something on speed and mobility. Mobile firepower, use of air power. And that's an important thing, too, to remember Germany.
The First World War, airplanes are kind of funny things. We're not quite sure what we're supposed to do with these things. And what we see is the rise of what we would call today close air support. The Manchtein plan will entail an audacious surprise attack through the thickly wooded Ardennes forest. As the Allied armies move to confront the German advance in Belgium, this Ardennes thrust will cut them off in the rear.
Hitler decrees that Case Yellow, the invasion, must go into action on Friday, May 10. No ifs, no buts. Remarkably, the plans for Case Yellow have already fallen into Allied hands. In January, a German plane crash-landed in a field in Belgium. The major on board had the documents in his briefcase. But again, nothing is done. Oster calls his colleague, the Dutch attaché, and warns him once more.
He even tells him that Hitler has moved to his military bunker, the Felsen Nest, near the Belgian border. The swine has gone to the Western Front, he says. The attack will begin at dawn. Sure enough, next morning, two and a half thousand aircraft darken the skies. Troops pour across into Belgium and Luxembourg. In a new method of warfare, parachute troops descend over Holland. And then, in France, blindsiding everyone.
the panzers come out of the woods. This is a purposeful ploy on the part of the Germans by going through Holland, they're going to suck up the British expeditionary force and all those French armies are going to come up north. And what that allows is for the Germans called the Sickleschnitt or the Sickle Cut as they come through the Ardennes and they cut those forces off as they pull northward. And what people don't realize is
There is a lot of turmoil within the French establishment, the government itself, the military, who's in charge, what are our goals and objectives. Britain and France are caught napping. Despite the tip-offs, despite the decoding of German messages, no one has done a damned thing. For Neville Chamberlain, it's too much. At Westminster, harangued in the House of Commons, the British Prime Minister loses a vote of confidence.
No one doubts that he did his best, but in these new circumstances, he is patently the wrong man for the job. The new cross-party national government prefers a hawk, an old warrior, a man who, as first Lord of the Admiralty, is one of the few who can demonstrate any military success. The same day as Hitler's invasion of France, Winston Churchill, aged 65, becomes Prime Minister.
I mean, I think it was Enoch Powell of all people who said all political careers end in failure, and they do. But Chamberlain's was complete carnage, complete wreckage. Ever since coming to power, Hitler had hoped that there would be some kind of accommodation with Britain.
And even after war breaks out, Goering keeps channels open with Britain. Hitler hopes that somehow things will change and that ultimately a more pro-German government will come. But then...
In May of 1940, the exact opposite is happening. The government falls and is being replaced by Winston Churchill, by the kind of, from Hitler's perspective, arch anti-German. So this is really an absolute disaster for Hitler. It's difficult to overestimate the importance of Winston Churchill becoming prime minister on May 10th of 1940. Churchill's appointment has little impact for the moment.
Germany's shock advance is slicing through northern France like a hot knife through butter. Part of the army pushes on to Paris. Another races to the Channel to cut off the British expeditionary force. The Low Country's valuable ports will also provide a springboard should Hitler need to invade Britain. Both Belgium and the Netherlands are officially neutral, but their even-handedness is counted for nothing. A stiff, if brief, fight back results in the firebombing of Rotterdam.
800 civilians die. Thousands are injured. In France, meanwhile, German panzers have punched through to the sea. The British Expeditionary Force and a chunk of the French army are bottled up at Dunkirk. By the morning of May 19th, the Germans are poised to deliver the coup de grace. Hitler insists that they teach the British a lesson they won't easily forget. But he has his ear bent by Hermann Göring.
Göring dismisses the German army as too gentlemanly. He demands that it withdraw. The honour of finishing off the British should be left to his Luftwaffe. The generals protest, but Hitler agrees. Tank commanders on the outskirts of Dunkirk, with the enemy at their mercy, are left flummoxed. Militarily, the decision will prove disastrous. The Luftwaffe's Stuka dive bombers
with their screaming sirens, a fine for terrorizing civilians, but for precision hits against armed troops and moving ships, it's a different matter. Plus, their bombs don't detonate when thudding into the soft sand dunes. And the RAF have a new pair of fighters that can pick them off: the Hurricane and the Spitfire.
What you see here with Dunkirk, Hitler does kind of take his foot off the gas because Goring sticks his foot in and says, hey, you know, the Luftwaffe can do these things and we're going to annihilate them, you know, through our use of air power. The Luftwaffe doesn't have it. It doesn't have that ability. It's a tactical air force at best. And it really just can't close the gap around Calais and Dunkirk itself. And the French army is able to hold it. And of course, we know the British army is successfully withdrawn from that position.
Only on May 26th does Hitler finally relent. The tanks move in, but by then it's too late. It's a key part of Britain's national story. 900 civilian craft, the little ships, are assembled to evacuate the troops from the beaches. The Dunkirk perimeter will hold until June 4th, by which time Operation Dynamo will have ferried 340,000 troops, a third of them French, back across the Channel.
It's really still a great puzzle as to why Hitler allows British forces to escape from Dunkirk. Why did he not jump at this golden opportunity to knock out the remnants of the British armed forces? The most likely answer is that Hitler thought that even doing so would not create a total knockout of Britain.
Churchill has already made it clear that in defeat, Britain would simply restart the fight from Canada. He would have thought that in the long term, the Anglo-American world is still there and it will be one of the super empires of the future. So therefore, what you really want to do is find some kind of accommodation. With Belgium surrendering and the British out of the picture for now, France is on her own. Only four days into the invasion,
Prime Minister Reynaud had phoned Churchill to inform him it was as good as over. 143 German divisions descend on the remnants of the French army. Now, at only half strength, there are 12 million refugees cramming the roads. With political infighting at the top, the French spirit is broken. Soldiers start surrendering in their thousands. A quick victory will result in the Germans withdrawing, they assume. Everything will soon get back to normal.
In desperation, Churchill flies to Paris. He makes an intriguing offer: to merge Britain and France into a single political entity. Anything to encourage fight back, but the proposal is refused. And so you have a France which has this vast global empire. It's an extraordinarily proud country and feels itself to be the cultural capital of the world, decimated by these barbarians.
utter humiliation, utter humiliation, but it sits upon something very specific to France, and that is what we call nowadays the culture war. France was a nation house divided against itself.
It was not quite in the stage of civil war, but there was such hatred within that society among the various factions. There was a very powerful right, Action Francaise and so forth. There was a huge communist movement. And indeed, when you had the Hitler-Stalin pact, the communists were busy sabotaging weapons being built in the factories.
This was a real, real problem. And so you have a rising out of this, the very sad rituals of the ending of France, which include, of course, Churchill's offer of union with Britain, which was an extraordinary piece of history. As ever, Mussolini is about to enter the picture. Having ruled himself out of the invasion, he now wants in.
In his bunker, Hitler rages about the Italians. First they were too cowardly to take part, now they're in a hurry so they can share in the spoils. But he grits his teeth and permits Il Duce to roll into southeast France. The Italians invade on June 10th. As President Roosevelt puts it, "The hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of his neighbor." Edging along the French Riviera, they make heavy weather of what should have been an easy advance.
The same day the French government is evacuated to Bordeaux. To prevent another Warsaw, another Rotterdam, Paris is declared an open city. On June the 14th, a massive German victory parade takes place, marching around the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs-Élysées. Hitler is twisting the knife.
The parade follows the exact same route that the victorious French army took in 1918. He even acts the tourist, posing for photographs at all the key attractions. Hitler famously makes that trip to Paris in the early morning. There's the story, of course, of the old lady flinging open her shutters as Hitler rides past through a village and she screams, "Oh my God, it's the devil!"
Now, Hitler's humor is, I think we'll agree, a complex thing, but he found that hilarious. And then he appears famously before the Eiffel Tower in his long leather coat, and at his side is actually his court sculpture, Arno Brecker.
It's not the head of the Gestapo, it's a sculptor. And he's making a point that we're looking at what Paris offers, what France is culturally, and we're going to make a right which is greater than this. And to give you an example of the crazy world of the 20th century, Brecker later emerges as the recipient of a commission by Andy Warhol, and yet he's the same man standing at Hitler's side at the collapse of France.
But Hitler was making a point and you have this famous footage of him in the early morning, no one's around, the policemen look startled in their capets and their coats. Down in Bordeaux, Prime Minister Reynaud does not last long. A new administration is formed with an old war hero, Marshal Philippe Petain, aged 84 at its head. At 12.30pm on June 17th, Petain broadcasts to the nation
"It is with a heavy heart that I tell you today that we must stop fighting." When word comes in that the French are requesting an armistice, Hitler slaps his thigh. It is beyond anything he could have imagined in his wildest fantasies. He orders church bells to ring across Germany for three days. General Keitel calls him the greatest military commander of all time.
In just two months of the spring of 1940, two months, he has conquered half of Scandinavia, the Low Countries, kicked the British out of mainland Europe, and the pièce de résistance, forced the surrender of his old foe, France. The First World War had seen the Allied and German armies scrap for four years to advance over mere miles of territory, at the cost on the Western Front of seven and a half million casualties.
Hitler has subjugated the whole of France in five weeks with a comparatively paltry 27,000 German dead. In the streets, French veterans of the Great War weep openly at the futility of their generation's sacrifice.
Hitler moves right into France in a matter of weeks. And this is within one generation. And that is what is a significant emotional event because, oh my God, they did it in a month. Four weeks where it took four years and we didn't get anywhere. And so that's where the shock value of Hitler and the Wehrmacht comes into play here in 1940. Broadcasts are made from London. Churchill urges his citizens to fight them on the beaches.
The upstart French officer Charles de Gaulle insists that the flame of resistance cannot go out. But to Hitler, this is just background noise. The French campaign continues to take many historians by surprise. And the fact that it was unexpected helps to kind of create this ever greater hubris
amongst Hitler and the Nazi leadership, that they are, after all, favored by fate and that this is providence. It certainly creates this sense of momentum and this sense of being favored by a sort of greater metaphysical force that the Nazis, you know, like to imagine lay behind the historic mission of the German race. He heads back to Munich for a meeting with Mussolini. So giddy with success as the Fuhrer, he lets Il Duce share the glory. It's quite obvious that he could have done it all on his own.
Mussolini is a liability, he'll figure out how to deal with him later. Three days later Hitler goes to Compiègne and the railway carriage for his supreme piece of political theatre. At the railway car his entourage gloat and preen. General Brausich, one of the secret Zossin gang, seems happy enough now to go along with the Führer. Victory, it seems, is a powerful drug for everybody.
Everything seeming to go very quickly in Germany's favour. People think, oh, well, actually, we can get behind this. It's going to be fine.
The looting as well that soldiers in the Wehrmacht were, you know, just sending things back home to their families. I think that also had an effect on morale and just thinking, oh, well, we're taking over the continent. Actually, that's probably fine. And it's only when the tide turns and people in Germany begin to have to suffer. You know, they weren't being rationed until much later on, as opposed to, say, the case in the U.K.,
It is Keitel who does the Fuhrer's bidding in the talks at Compiègne. After vague mentions of an honorable peace, he turns the screws. Keitel gives his counterparts an ultimatum: Sign by 6pm or the talks are off. The French do so with 10 minutes to spare. In this very moment, Germany has been avenged, the result of the Great War overturned. By the hand of Adolf Hitler, history has been rewritten. In the next episode,
A collaborationist regime takes shape in France. Churchill will respond by bombarding the French fleet. Hitler plots a seaborne invasion of Britain, while the Luftwaffe launches the Blitz. And the Nazis extend their network of allies, seeking to bring the Spanish and the Japanese to the table. That's next time.