Paris Occupied: France's Capital Surrenders to Germany

German forces entered Paris unopposed on June 14, 1940, after the French government declared it an "open city" to spare it from aerial bombardment and artillery fire. Wehrmacht troops marched through empty boulevards as roughly two million Parisians had already fled south in what became known as l'exode, the largest mass displacement in French history. A massive swastika banner was hung from the Arc de Triomphe within hours. The fall of Paris came just five weeks after Germany launched its Western offensive on May 10. The Wehrmacht's blitzkrieg through the Ardennes forest, considered impassable by French military planners, had outflanked the Maginot Line and split Allied forces in two. British and French troops were evacuated from Dunkirk between May 26 and June 4, and German forces then turned south. French resistance collapsed with shocking speed. The army that had fought Germany to a bloody standstill for four years in World War I lasted barely six weeks in the second. General Fedor von Bock led the German troops into the capital. French military governor General Henri Dentz, left behind to ensure an orderly handover, surrendered the city formally. The next day, June 15, German officers breakfasted at the Ritz and went shopping on the Champs-Elysees. Marshal Philippe Petain, who had replaced Paul Reynaud as head of government on June 16, requested armistice terms on June 17. The armistice, signed on June 22 in the same railway car where Germany had surrendered in 1918, divided France into an occupied northern zone under German military control and a nominally autonomous southern zone governed by Petain's Vichy regime. Paris remained under occupation for over four years, until its liberation by Free French and American forces on August 25, 1944.