"The Nazi troops who came marching through the wide boulevards of Europe's most beautiful city found a dead city. Of its 3,000,000 inhabitants, an estimated 2,000,000 had left, and those who remained stayed discreetly indoors. Not a business house functioned, not a café was open for business. Only the police roamed the streets and they had been disarmed to constitute a purely civilian force. Of the capital's diplomatic corps, only U.S. Ambassador William C. Bullitt (1891 - 1967) and a small part of his staff remained."
That day was a suitable time to recall what Raymond Poincaré (1860 – 1934) had remarked about the Germans in 1923:
"We have known the Germans for nineteen hundred years, and we have never been able to notice much change in them. Whether they call themselves Germans, Ostrogoths, or Visigoths; whether they enroll themselves beside the Huns in the armies of Attila or put themselves under the leadership of the Prussians; whether they trick us Leipzig; whether they are defeated at Ligny or [are among] the conquerors at Waterloo; whether they surround us at Sedan or are crushed along the Marne; whether they falsify the Ems telegram in 1870 or violate Belgian neutrality in 1914, they are a people for whom war is for all time their national industry and for whom peace is only an armistice between wars..."
- Time Magazine, May 19, 1923, p. 11
Click here to read about the German concept of Blitzkrieg.
Click here to read about Hitler's plan to visit the fallen capital...
Click here to read about the 1944 liberation of Paris.
Click here to read about the 1944 fall of Rome.
More primary source articles about W.W. II France can be read here...
What the Heck was PM? Click here and find out...
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