It was no wonder that Hitler felt on top of the world, slapping his thigh for joy — his usual expression of exultation — and laughing in relief, when he was brought the news at Brûly-de-Pesche on 17 June that Marshal Pétain’s new French government had sued for peace.82 The end of the war seemed imminent. Britain would now surely give in. Total victory, Hitler imagined, was within his grasp.
Mussolini had brought Italy into the war a week earlier, hoping to cash in on the action just before it was all over, in time to win rich pickings and bask in the glory of a cheap victory.83 Hitler took no pleasure in greeting his new companion-in-arms when he flew to Munich to meet him on 18 June to discuss the French armistice request.84 He wanted lenient terms for the French, and swiftly dispelled Mussolini’s hopes of getting his hands on part of the French fleet. Hitler was anxious to avoid the French navy going over to the British — something which Churchill had already tried to engineer.85 ‘From all that he says it is clear that he wants to act quickly to end it,’ recorded Ciano. ‘Hitler is now the gambler who has made a big scoop and would like to get up from the table risking nothing more.’86 Ribbentrop confirmed to Ciano that Hitler wanted peace with Britain in preference to war. Again the German Dictator stated that he had no wish to demolish the British Empire, something he claimed to regard as ‘an important factor in world equilibrium’.87 A hint of what he meant by this last phrase can be gleaned from a remark a fortnight or so later to Goebbels, that, if the Empire were destroyed, its inheritance would fall not to Germany but to ‘foreign great powers’, by which he had the United States, Japan, and probably also the Soviet Union chiefly in mind.88 What Hitler’s apparent magnanimity about the Empire would amount to for Britain was clearly foreseen by Churchill. Britain would become, the British Prime Minister stated, ‘a vassal state of the Hitler empire’. ‘A pro-German government,’ he wrote to Roosevelt on 15 June, ‘would certainly be called into being to make peace and might present to a shattered or starving nation an almost irresistible case for entire submission to the Nazi will.’89
Having won his great victory without any help from the Italians, Hitler was determined that the embarrassed and disappointed Mussolini, now forced to swallow his role as junior partner in the Axis, should not participate in the armistice negotiations with the French.90 Already on 20 May, when German tanks had reached the French coast, Hitler had specified that the peace negotiations with France, at which the return of former German territory would be demanded, would be staged in the Forest of Compiègne, where the armistice of 1918 had taken place.91 He now gave orders to retrieve Marshal Foch’s railway carriage, preserved as a museum piece, in which the German generals had signed the ceasefire, and have it brought to the forest clearing. That defeat, and its consequences, had permanently seared Hitler’s consciousness. It would now be erased by repaying the humiliation. At quarter past three on the afternoon of 21 June, Hitler, accompanied by Göring, Raeder, Brauchitsch, Keitel, Ribbentrop, and Heß, viewed the memorial recording the victory over the ‘criminal arrogance of the German Reich’, then took his place in the carriage, greeting in silence the French delegation. For ten minutes, he listened, again without a word though, as he later recounted, gripped by the feeling of revenge for the humiliation of November 1918.92 Keitel read out the preamble to the armistice terms. Hitler then left to return to his headquarters. The symbolic purging of the old debt was completed.93 ‘The disgrace is now extinguished. It’s a feeling of being born again,’ reported Goebbels after Hitler had told him of the dramatic events late that night on the telephone.94
France was to be divided — the north and western seaboard under German occupation, the centre and south to be left as a puppet state, headed by Pétain, with its seat of government at Vichy.95 Following the signing of the Italian-French armistice on 24 June, all fighting was declared to have ceased at 1.35a.m. next morning. Hitler proclaimed the end of the war in the west and the ‘most glorious victory of all time’. He ordered bells to be rung in the Reich for a week, and flags to be flown for ten days.96 As the moment for the official conclusion of hostilities drew near, Hitler, sitting at the wooden table in his field headquarters, ordered the lights put out and the windows opened in order to hear, in the darkness, the trumpeter outside mark the historic moment.97
