When Vichy Comes To America
Your history professor probably didn’t teach you the true story of how France fell to the Nazis — and that’s a shame.
Contrary to the Blitzkrieg Myth that was spawned in the aftermath of the debacle to explain the shock defeat, the Nazis were never favored to win until they did.
Before the Battle of France began in 1940, the smartest minds around the world held it to be a simple fact that Germany was doomed. It couldn’t possibly win a war against the two biggest European empires still standing. Before people came to see Hitler as a maniacal genius, the rebirth of Napoleon and Caesar and Alexander all in one similarly bigoted package, he was still nothing more than a tin-pot dictator whose Make Germany Great Again schtick was hitting an economic dead end.
After spending nearly a decade boosting its military using shady financial means, the German economy was in serious trouble. And the war in Poland had not gone nearly as well as planned, the Soviet Union’s alliance with Hitler under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact more responsible for the thing ending in six weeks than German military might.
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