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1 1 Dilemma A small railway car stands in a clearing in the woods. Representatives of the defeated nation arrive after an arduous journey, dazed, weary, in despair and humiliation. They wait despondently for the armistice terms to be read to them by the victors, terms that will reduce their oncemighty nation to a position akin to vassalage. It is a somber scene, made more shocking by the seeming incomprehensibility of the military collapse that preceded it. A familiar image, but it is not November 1918, and the victors are not the French; it is, instead, a warm summer day, 21 June 1940, some twenty-two years after the German defeat in World War I. Observing the scene, the American correspondent William L. Shirer watched as Adolf Hitler strode slowly toward the clearing in the woods. His face, Shirer noted, was “grave, solemn, yet brimming with revenge. . . . There was something else, difficult to describe, in his expression, a sort of scornful inner joy at being present at this great reversal of fate— a reversal he himself had wrought.” Hitler and his delegation paused as they reached the great granite block erected to commemorate the earlier French triumph and read the inscription: “HERE ON THE ELEVENTH OF NOVEMBER 1918 SUCCUMBED THE CRIMINAL PRIDE OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE . . . V ANQUISHED BY THE FREE PEOPLES WHICH IT TRIED TO ENSLA VE.” Shirer, some fifty yards away, intently studied Hitler’s face through binoculars. “I have seen that face many times at the great moments of his life,” he remarked. “But today! It is afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph. . . . He glances slowly around the clearing, and now, as his eyes meet ours, you grasp the depth of his hatred. . . . He swiftly snaps his hands on his hips, arches his shoulders, plants his feet wide apart. It is a magnificent gesture of defiance, of burning contempt for this place.” Somewhat anticlimactically , Hitler proceeded to the rail carriage, where he received the French delegation in silence, then left, again without saying a word, 2  OSTKRIEG after ten minutes. The open wound, however, had been healed. “The humiliation is obliterated. One has a feeling of being reborn,” Joseph Goebbels exulted, after Hitler had informed him of the proceedings in a late-night telephone call.1 Despite the relatively restrained performance by Hitler at Compi ègne, these had been momentous weeks that marked an extraordinary personal triumph for the Führer. Twenty years earlier an obscure political agitator in Munich, and even a decade ago merely one of many aspirants to power in a Germany torn by political chaos and economic distress, Hitler stood at the pinnacle of his fame and popularity. He had undone the shame of November 1918, as he had vowed to do, had humiliated Germany’s two tormentors from the Great War, had destroyed the hated Treaty of Versailles, and had made Germany master of a European bloc that in economic power compared favorably with the British Empire and the United States. Although outwardly unmoved, Hitler appeared to be deeply affected by the events of May and June 1940. On 1 June, even as the battle for France was still raging, he made two visits of a deeply symbolic character . In the early afternoon he visited the German cemetery at Langemarck to pay homage to the young soldiers, now elevated to mythical status in Nazi lore, killed in the legendary “Children’s Slaughter” (Kindermord ) in November 1914, deaths that had now been redeemed by the victories of May 1940. Later that afternoon he made a more personal journey, one that took him back to the battlefields of World War I where he had experienced so much, including the temporary loss of his eyesight after a British gas attack in October 1918. Standing alone, absorbed in his thoughts, the impact of what had been and what had just happened must have been overwhelming. The Great War had shaped Hitler and many others of his generation, their personal traumas leaving deep wounds that never fully healed. Goebbels provided a glimpse of this deep emotion, noting in his diary, “The Führer himself was at the old battlefields , in his old trenches. He gave me a moving description of it.” The sufferings of the past, however, would now be redeemed. “What great times!” Goebbels also exulted. “What happiness to be allowed to work in such times.” Ominously, however, a few sentences later the means of that salvation became clearer, Goebbels threatening, “We will quickly finish...

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