TMOGV, Chapter 20c: Germany invades France through the Low Countries. The Phony War Ends

On June 22, 1940, France signed an armistice with Germany. After all that France had done to Germany since Germany’s defeat in 1918, Hitler was in a mood to humiliate the French as pay back. He insisted that the armistice be signed in the same railway car in a forest in Compiegne, in which Germany had surrendered to France in 1918 to end World War I. The terms of the 1940 armistice divided France into an occupied and an unoccupied zone, with a rigid boundary line between the two. The Germans would directly control two thirds of the country, an area that included northern and western France and the entire Atlantic coast, while the remaining part of the country would be administered by the French government at Vichy under Marshal Petain.