In Europe

their opponents the
coup de grâce
? What are we to think of this order?
    First of all: Dunkirk was crucial for the British, but for the Germans it was only secondary. The eyes of the entire German staff were turned on Paris. After the debacle of 1914, it was that city which they wanted to seize as quickly as possible. Other reasons lay in the military strategy: Guderian's 19th Armoured Division simply moved too fast, there was too little to cover its flanks, provisions became a problem, a brief pause was needed. Furthermore – as shown by survey maps found later – the German high command mistakenly assumed that the area around Dunkirk was extremely swampy, and that their tanks would become hopelessly bogged down there. Hitler was highly susceptible to such warnings: after all, during the First World War he had seen with his own eyes how entire divisions had become stuck in the mud in this part of Europe.
    According to some historians, there was another, psychological explanation for Hitler's actions: he may have consciously wished to allow the British to escape, because in this first phase of the war he was still hoping to strike a compromise with Britain. The British were to get off the continent, no matter what that took, but they were to be allowed their own independence and their empire. He considered a destroyed, disintegrating United Kingdom to be a far greater risk. The evacuation of British troopsat Dunkirk, as Runstedt and others concluded, was therefore not Hitler's mistake, but, deep in his heart, his desire.
    What remained was the crushing French defeat, a catastrophe in every way. Hitler's success seduced Mussolini into committing Italian troops to the Second World War as well. (Spain and Portugal remained neutral.) For many Germans, the victory was the definitive confirmation of Hitler's ‘genius’.
    For the French, the debacle meant the fall of the Third Republic and the establishment of a collaborationist government in Vichy. For decades this defeat would determine British and American attitudes towards France. And ruin the French self-image, full of ‘glory’ and ‘honour’ and ‘the fatherland’.

Chapter TWENTY-SEVEN
Chartwell
    NOËL COWARD ‘S PLAY
PEACE IN OUR TIME
WAS FIRST STAGED IN LONDON more than half a century ago, in summer 1947. It was a kind of historical science fiction. It was set in a pub in Kensington in the period between November 1940, right after the German conquest of Great Britain, and May 1945, after the Allies had liberated the island once more. It told the story of the English resistance, the English collaboration and the role of the German occupiers in England – funny, and frighteningly close to the mark.
    The play itself is long forgotten. Today, at the end of the twentieth century, we cherish the story of the ultimate happy ending, of the demonic Hitler who plunged Europe into war, of the grisly struggle between good and evil which he, of course, was doomed to lose.
    There is some sense to that, but at the same time it is too easy. Hitler, in fact, was not at all doomed to lose the war. In summer 1940, peace reigned in Europe. The greatest European conflict, that between Germany and France, had already been settled, and only the British were still fighting a rearguard action against German supremacy. What is more, in 1940 Hitler was still riding on an enormous groundswell of goodwill.
    ‘The fall of France,’ wrote the American journalist Rosie Waldeck from Bucharest in 1940, ‘formed a climax to twenty years of failure of the promises of democracy to handle unemployment, inflation, deflations, labour unrest, party egoism and whatnot. Europe, tired of herself and doubtful of the principles she had been living by, felt almost relieved to have everything settled – not satisfactorily, but in such a way that it absolved her of all responsibility.’
    Countess Rosie Waldeck was the American equivalent of Bella Fromm.The pen name of Rosie Goldschmidt-Graefenberg-Ullstein, she was a Jewish banker's daughter who, after a number of divorces, ended up writing society columns and moving effortlessly in the most select circles, and who beneath all her charm was possessed of clear judgement and great discernment. She committed her European experiences to paper in 1942 under the title
Athene Palace
, the name then of today's Bucharest Hilton, where she lived and worked for seven months.
    For years Rumania had had its own violent fascist movement, the Iron Guard. From