How Germany defeated France in six weeks: the 1940 Western campaign

After the invasion of Poland, France and Britain declared war on the German Reich on 3 September 1939. Yet along the border between the Maginot Line and the West Wall, all remained quiet for months – the “Phoney War”. On 10 May 1940 the Wehrmacht attacked the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. The decisive blow, however, came further south: under the “Sickle Cut” plan drawn up by Erich von Manstein, armoured forces advanced through the Ardennes, crossed the Meuse at Sedan on 13 May and reached the Channel at Abbeville on 20 May. The Allied troops in Belgium and northern France were encircled, and Belgium capitulated on 28 May.

On 24 May Hitler halted the panzers outside Dunkirk. By 4 June, some 338,000 British and French soldiers were able to escape across the Channel to Britain. On 5 June the attack on the rest of France began with “Case Red”, and on 14 June Paris was occupied without a fight. Marshal Philippe Pétain took over the government and sought an armistice, while Charles de Gaulle called for resistance from exile in London. On 22 June Generals Wilhelm Keitel and Charles Huntziger signed the armistice in the Forest of Compiègne – on Hitler's orders in the same railway carriage in which the First World War armistice had been signed in 1918.

The animated documentary traces the campaign day by day on the map and also shows how France was divided into an occupied zone and the Vichy state. According to the German Historical Museum, around 27,000 German and around 92,000 French soldiers were killed, and 1.9 million Allied soldiers were taken prisoner. The German Federal Archives also point to war crimes, such as massacres of prisoners of war by the Waffen-SS at Le Paradis and Wormhoudt. The video is in German.