Hitler

government at Vichy. Following the signing of the Italian-French armistice on 24 June, all fighting was declared to have ceased at 1.35 a.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. 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.
    He spent part of the next days sightseeing. Max Amann (head of the party’s publishing concerns) and Ernst Schmidt, two comrades from the First World War, joined his regular entourage for a nostalgic tour of the battlefields in Flanders, revisiting the places where they had been stationed. Then, on 28 June, before most Parisians were awake, Hitler paid his one and only visit to the occupied French capital. It lasted no more than three hours. Accompanied by the architects Hermann Giesler and Albert Speer, and his favourite sculptor Arno Breker, Hitler landed at Le Bourget airport at, for him, the extraordinarily early hour of half-past five in the morning. The whistle-stop sightseeing tour began at l’Opéra. Hitler was thrilled by its beauty. The tourists moved on. They drove past La Madeleine, whose classical form impressed Hitler, up the Champs Elysées, stopped at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier below the Arc de Triomphe, viewed the Eiffel Tower, and looked in silence on the tomb of Napoleon in Les Invalides. Hitler admired the dimensions of the Panthéon, but found its interior (as he later recalled) ‘a terrible disappointment’, and seemed indifferent to the medieval wonders of Paris,like the Sainte Chapelle. The tour ended, curiously, at the nineteenth-century testament to Catholic piety, the church of Sacré-Coeur. With a last look over the city from the heights of Montmartre, Hitler was gone. By mid-morning he was back in his field headquarters. Seeing Paris, he told Speer, had been the dream of his life. But to Goebbels, he said he had found a lot of Paris very disappointing. He had considered destroying it. However, he remarked, according to Speer, ‘when we’re finished in Berlin, Paris will only be a shadow. Why should we destroy it?’
    The reception awaiting Hitler in Berlin when his train pulled into the Anhalter-Bahnhof at three o’clock on 6 July surpassed even the homecomings after the great pre-war triumphs like the Anschluß. Many in the crowds had been standing for six hours as the dull morning gave way to the brilliant sunshine of the afternoon. The streets were strewn with flowers all the way from the station to the Reich Chancellery. Hundreds of thousands cheered themselves hoarse. Hitler, lauded by Keitel as ‘the greatest warlord of all time’, was called out time after time on to the balcony to soak up the wild adulation of the masses. ‘If an increase in feeling for Adolf Hitler was still possible, it has become reality with the day of the return to Berlin,’ commented one report from the provinces. In the face of such ‘greatness’, ran another, ‘all pettiness and grumbling are silenced’. Even opponents of the regime found it hard to resist the victory mood. Workers in the armaments factories pressed to be allowed to join the army. People thought final victory was around the corner. Only Britain stood in the way. For perhaps the only time during the Third Reich there was genuine war-fever among the population. Incited by incessant propaganda, hatred of Britain was now widespread. People were thirsting to see the high-and-mighty long-standing rival finally brought to its knees. But mingling with the aggression were still feelings of fear and anxiety. Whether triumphalist, or fearful, the wish to bring the war to a speedy end was almost universal.
    Hitler had meanwhile changed his mind about delivering his Reichstag speech on the Monday. On 3 July British ships had sunk a number of French warships moored at the naval base of Mers-el-Kébir, near Oran, in French Algeria, killing 1,250 French sailors in the process. Churchill’s move, a show of British determination, was to prevent the battle-fleet of his former allies falling into Hitler’s hands. For Hitler, this brought a new situation. He wanted to await developments. He was uncertain whether he ought to go ahead and appeal