London, England · May 19, 1940 Following Britain and France’s declaration of war on Germany on September 3, 1939, neither of the Allies committed to launching a significant land offensive against Adolf Hitler’s Germany as punishment for the invasion of its eastern neighbor, Poland. The most the British were prepared to do was deploy a 315,000‑man…
Rotterdam, Netherlands · May 14, 1940 On this date in 1940 in Holland, the German Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam’s medieval city center, killing nearly 1,000 people and leaving 85,000 homeless. Rather than endure more bombings—leaflets dropped on Utrecht indicated it was next Dutch city in German crosshairs—the Dutch army surrendered the next day. The German offensive against the…
Slapton Sands, Devonshire Coast, Southwest England · April 28, 1944 Shortly after midnight on this date in 1944 German torpedo boats (E-boats, or Schnellboote in German) on a routine patrol out of Cherbourg in occupied France suddenly found themselves in the middle of Operation (or Exercise) Tiger (codenamed T‑4), a convoy of eight American LSTs…
London, England · April 13, 1939 Following the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland in October 1938 and the invasion and incorporation of the rest of Czechoslovakia into the Reich in mid-March 1939, Great Britain, France, Poland, Greece, and Romania entered into mutual assistance pacts in case of a military invasion by “a European power,”…
Brenner Pass, Austria · March 18, 1940 On this date in 1940 on the Austro-Italian border, German leader Adolf Hitler and Italian strongman Benito Mussolini met for their fifth face-to-face meeting. Hitler had requested the summit in order to force Il Duce (Italian, “the leader”) to take sides within the framework of the so-called Pact…
London, England · January 15, 1944 On this date in 1944 Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower assumed command of the Allied Expeditionary Force preparing to liberate France from the stranglehold of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. A month earlier President Franklin D. Roosevelt had designated the 53‑year‑old army general Supreme Allied Commander for Operation Overlord, the invasion of…
Saarbruecken, Saarland, Germany · January 13, 1935 On this date in 1935 Germans held a plebiscite in the only part of Germany that remained under foreign occupation following their country’s defeat in World War I—the Saar region, or Saarland in German. The wealth of its coal deposits and their large-scale industrial exploitation, coupled with its location…
Berlin, Germany · January 5, 1939 On this date in 1939, eight months before the armed forces of Nazi Germany surged over Polish borders to launch World War II in Europe, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler told Poland’s visiting Foreign Minister Józef Beck that Germany would guarantee his country’s frontiers were a “final settlement” reached over the…
CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE 2009
“…an essential book. It provides precise facts and figures for many issues that have heretofore been presented in impressionistic terms.” · The International History Review
Basing his extensive research into hitherto unexploited archival documentation on both sides of the Rhine, Allan Mitchell has uncovered the inner workings of the German military regime from the Wehrmacht’s triumphal entry into Paris in June 1940 to its ignominious withdrawal in August 1944. Although mindful of the French experience and the fundamental issue of collaboration, the author concentrates on the complex problems of occupying a foreign territory after a surprisingly swift conquest. By exploring in detail such topics as the regulation of public comportment, economic policy, forced labor, culture and propaganda, police activity, persecution and deportation of Jews, assassinations, executions, and torture, this study supersedes earlier attempts to investigate the German domination and exploitation of wartime France. In doing so, these findings provide an invaluable complement to the work of scholars who have viewed those dark years exclusively or mainly from the French perspective.