3-023-370 - British Pathe Ltd/Heritage Images

Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering and Two German Officers Looking Out to Sea, 1940. Second World War. 'The forest of Compiègne. Here, a place hallowed to all Frenchmen, the supreme commander of the allied armies of 1918, Marshall Foch, received the beaten German enemy...and concluded an armistice. But when in 1940 the Germans came to Compiègne it was in a very different mood. Now it was they who were the conquerors, having beaten France flat in a matter of weeks. Now, with his sense of the melodramatic, Adolf Hitler was forcing his terms on a stricken enemy, under the identical conditions as the German surrender of 22 years before. To the little Gast-Korporal of that First World War this was indeed turning the wheel full circle'. From "Time To Remember - Standing Alone", 1940 ( Reel 1); documentary film about events of later months of 1940.