The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (148 page)

The Germans had been annoyed that the French delegation had arrived without authority to conclude an armistice except with the express agreement of the government at
Bordeaux
. By a miracle of engineering and perhaps with some luck they succeeded in setting up a telephone connection from the old sleeping car right through the battle lines, where the fighting still continued, to Bordeaux. The French delegates were authorized to use it to transmit the text of the armistice terms and to discuss it with their government. Dr. Schmidt, who served as interpreter, was directed to listen in on the tapped conversations from an Army communications van a few yards away behind a clump of trees. The next day I myself contrived to hear the German recording of part of the conversation between Huntziger and General Weygand.

To the credit of the latter, who bears a grave responsibility for French defeatism and the final surrender and the break with Britain, it must be recorded that he at least strenuously objected to many of the German demands. One of the most odious of them obligated the French to turn over to the Reich all anti-Nazi German refugees in France and in her territories. Weygand called this dishonorable in view of the French tradition of the right of asylum, but when it was discussed the next day the arrogant Keitel would not listen to its being deleted. “The German émigrés,” he shouted, were “the greatest warmongers.” They had “betrayed their own people.” They must be handed over “at all costs.” The French made no protest against a clause which stated that all their nationals caught fighting with another country against Germany would be treated as “francs-tireurs”—that is, immediately shot. This was aimed against De Gaulle, who was already trying to organize a Free French force in Britain, and both Weygand and Keitel knew it was a crude violation of the primitive rules of war. Nor did the French question a paragraph which provided for all
prisoners of war
to remain in captivity until the conclusion of peace. Weygand was sure the British would be conquered within three weeks and the French POWs thereafter released. Thus he condemned a million and a half Frenchmen to war prison camps for five years.

The crux of the armistice treaty was the disposal of the French Navy. Churchill, as France tottered, had offered to release her from her pledge not to make a separate peace if the French Navy were directed to sail for British ports. Hitler was determined that this should not take place; he
fully realized, as he told Mussolini on June 18, that it would immeasurably strengthen Britain. With so much at stake he had to make a concession, or at least a promise, to the beaten foe. The armistice agreement stipulated that the French fleet would be demobilized and disarmed and the ships laid up in their home ports. In return for this

Like almost all of Hitler’s promises, this one too would be broken.

Finally, Hitler left the French government an unoccupied zone in the south and southeast in which it ostensibly was free to govern. This was an astute move. It would not only divide France itself geographically and administratively; it would make difficult if not impossible the formation of a French government-in-exile and quash any plans of the politicians in Bordeaux to move the seat of government to French North Africa—a design which almost succeeded, being defeated in the end not by the Germans but by the French defeatists: Pétain, Weygand, Laval and their supporters. Moreover, Hitler knew that the men who had now seized control of the French government at Bordeaux were enemies of French democracy and might be expected to be co-operative in helping him set up the Nazi New Order in Europe.

Yet on the second day of the armistice negotiations at Compiègne the French delegates continued to bicker and delay. One reason for the delay was that Huntziger insisted that Weygand give him not an authorization to sign but an order—no one in France wanted to take the responsibility. Finally, at 6:30
P.M
. Keitel issued an ultimatum. The French must accept or reject the German armistice terms within an hour. Within the hour the French government capitulated. At 6:50
P.M
. on June 22, 1940, Huntziger and Keitel signed the armistice treaty.
*

I listened to the last scene as it was picked up by the hidden microphones in the
wagon-lit
. Just before he signed, the French General, his voice quivering, said he wished to make a personal statement. I took it down in French, as he spoke.

Those negotiations—for a peace treaty—would never take place, but the spirit which the Nazi Third Reich would have shown, if they had, soon became evident as the occupation became harsher and the pressure on the servile Pétain regime increased. France was now destined to become a German vassal, as Pétain, Weygand and Laval apparently believed—and accepted.

A light rain began to fall as the delegates left the armistice car and drove away. Down the road through the woods you could see an unbroken line of refugees making their way home on weary feet, on bicycles, on carts, a few fortunate ones on old trucks. I walked out to the clearing. A gang of German Army engineers, shouting lustily, had already started to move the old
wagon-lit
.

“Where to?” I asked.

“To Berlin,” they said.
*

   The Franco–Italian armistice was signed in
Rome
two days later. Mussolini was able to occupy only what his troops had conquered, which meant a few hundred yards of French territory, and to impose a fifty-mile demilitarized zone opposite him in France and
Tunisia
. The armistice was signed at 7:35
P.M
. on June 24. Six hours later the guns in France lapsed into silence.

France, which had held out unbeaten for four years the last time, was out of the war after six weeks. German troops stood guard over most of Europe, from the North Cape above the Arctic Circle to Bordeaux, from the English Channel to the River Bug in eastern Poland. Adolf Hitler had reached the pinnacle. The former Austrian waif, who had been the first to unite the Germans in a truly national State, this corporal of the First World War, had now become the greatest of German conquerors. All that stood between him and the establishment of German hegemony in Europe under his dictatorship was one indomitable Englishman, Winston Churchill, and the determined people Churchill led, who did not recognize defeat when it stared them in the face and who now stood alone, virtually unarmed, their island home besieged by the mightiest military machine the world had ever seen.

Ten days after the German onslaught on the West began, on the evening German tanks reached
Abbeville
, General Jodl, after describing in his diary how the Fuehrer was “beside himself with joy,” added: “… is working on the peace treaty … Britain can get a separate peace any time after restitution of the colonies.” That was May 20. For several weeks thereafter Hitler seems to have had no doubts that, with France
knocked out, Britain would be anxious to make peace. His terms, from the German point of view, seemed most generous, considering the beating the British had taken
in Norway
and in France. He had expounded them to General von Rundstedt on May 24, expressing his admiration of the
British Empire
and stressing the “necessity” for its existence. All he wanted from London, he said, was a free hand on the Continent.

So certain was he that the British would agree to this that even after the fall of France he made no plans for continuing the war against Britain, and the vaunted General Staff, which supposedly planned with Prussian thoroughness for every contingency far in advance, did not bother to furnish him any. Halder, the Chief of the General Staff, made no mention of the subject at this time in his voluminous diary entries. He was more disturbed about Russian threats in the
Balkans
and the Baltic than about the British.

Indeed, why should Great Britain fight on alone against helpless odds? Especially when it could get a peace that would leave it, unlike France, Poland and all the other defeated lands, unscathed, intact and free? This was a question asked everywhere except in Downing Street, where, as Churchill later revealed, it was never even discussed, because the answer was taken for granted.
²⁸
But the German dictator did not know this, and when Churchill began to state it publicly—that Britain was not quitting—Hitler apparently did not believe it. Not even when on June 4, after the evacuation from Dunkirk, the Prime Minister had made his resounding speech about fighting on in the hills and on the beaches; not even when on June 18, after Pétain had asked for an armistice, Churchill reiterated in the Commons Britain’s “inflexible resolve to continue the war” and in another one of his eloquent and memorable perorations concluded:

These could be merely soaring words from a gifted orator, and so Hitler, a dazzling orator himself, must have thought. He must have been encouraged too by soundings in neutral capitals and by the appeals for ending the war that now emanated from them. On June 28 a confidential message arrived for Hitler from the Pope—analogous communications were addressed to Mussolini and Churchill—offering his mediation for “a just and honorable peace” and declaring that before initiating this step he wished to ascertain confidentially how it would be received.
²⁹
The King of
Sweden
was also active in proposing peace to both London and Berlin.

In the United States the German Embassy, under the direction of Hans Thomsen, the chargé d’affaires, was spending every dollar it could lay its hands on to support the isolationists in keeping America out of the war and thus discourage Britain from continuing it. The captured German
Foreign Office documents are full of messages from Thomsen reporting on the embassy’s efforts to sway American public opinion in Hitler’s favor. The party conventions were being held that summer and Thomsen was bending every effort to influence their foreign-policy planks, especially that of the Republicans.

On June 12, for example, he cabled Berlin in code “most urgent, top secret” that a “well-known Republican Congressman,” who was working “closely” with the German Embassy, had offered, for $3,000, to invite fifty isolationist Republican Congressmen to the Republican convention “so that they may work on the delegates in favor of an isolationist foreign policy.” The same individual, Thomsen reported, wanted $30,000 to help pay for full-page advertisements in the American newspapers, to be headed “Keep America Out of the War!”
*
³⁰

The next day Thomsen was wiring Berlin about a new project he said he was negotiating through an American literary agent to have five well-known American writers write books “from which I await great results.” For this project he needed $20,000, a sum Ribbentrop okayed a few days later.
†
³¹

One of Hitler’s first public utterances about his hopes for peace with Britain had been given Karl von Wiegand, a Hearst correspondent, and published in the New York
Journal-American
on June 14. A fortnight later Thomsen informed the German Foreign Office that he had printed 100,000 extra copies of the interview and that

The Nazi Embassy in Washington grasped at every straw. At one point during the summer its press attaché was forwarding what he said was a suggestion of Fulton Lewis, Jr., the radio commentator, whom he
described as an admirer of “Germany and the Fuehrer and a highly respected American journalist.”

Adolf Hitler did not take Mr. Lewis’ purported advice, but the Foreign Office in Berlin cabled to ask how important the radio commentator was in America. Thomsen replied that Lewis had “enjoyed a particular success of late … [but that] on the other hand, in contrast to some leading American commentators, no political importance is to be attached to L.”
*
³⁵

Churchill himself, as he related later in his memoirs, was somewhat troubled by the peace feelers emanating through
Sweden
, the
United States
and the
Vatican
and, convinced that Hitler was trying to make the most of them, took stern measures to counter them. Informed that the German chargé in Washington, Thomsen, had been attempting to talk with the British ambassador there, he cabled that “Lord Lothian should be told on no account to make any reply to the German Chargé d’Affaires’ message.”
³⁶