Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The Battle of France (French: bataille de France; 10 May – 25 June 1940), also known as the Western Campaign (German: Westfeldzug), the French Campaign (Frankreichfeldzug, campagne de France) and the Fall of France, during the Second World War was the German invasion of the Low Countries (Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands) and France.
18 June: Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met in Munich Germany. General de Gaulle told the people of France on a broadcast from London on the BBC to resist the Germans. 22 June: France signed an armistice with Germany. 23 June: Adolf Hitler toured captured Paris.
There were German reprisals against civilians in occupied countries; in France, the Nazis built an execution chamber in the cellars of the former Ministry of Aviation building in Paris. [31] Many Jews were victims of the Holocaust in France. Approximately 49 concentration camps were in use in France during the occupation, the largest of them at ...
Italy and Japan were viewed as being ideally situated to complement German control there, geopolitically shielding Germany's more insular position with their regional naval power. [17] In Mein Kampf, Hitler envisioned a shared league with Italy and Great Britain capable of allowing Germany to supplant France as a great power.
German soldiers parade on the Champs Élysées on 14 June 1940 (Bundesarchiv) The city of Paris started mobilizing for war in September 1939, when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union attacked Poland, but the war seemed far away until May 10th 1940, when the Germans attacked France and quickly defeated the French army.
German-occupied Europe (or Nazi-occupied Europe) refers to the sovereign countries of Europe which were wholly or partly militarily occupied and civil-occupied, including puppet governments, by the military forces and the government of Nazi Germany at various times between 1939 and 1945, during World War II, administered by the Nazi regime under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler.
Its commander was Joseph Darnand, a veteran of the Battle of France and volunteer brigade; he took an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler in October 1943 and received the rank of Sturmbannführer in the Waffen SS. By 1944, the Milice had over 35,000 members. [citation needed]
The French were also permitted to retain control of all of their non-European territories. Adolf Hitler deliberately chose Compiègne Forest as the site to sign the armistice because of its symbolic role as the site of the Armistice of 11 November 1918 that signaled the end of World War I with Germany's surrender.