Congratulations

But it was not entirely a right-wing government. There were two Socialists sitting alongside the marshal. The French Communists, their party outlawed since war began, openly supported the Germans. UHumanite, a clandestine Communist paper, so pleased the German military commander that he gave it permission to publish openly.

In Soviet Russia, the Communists had been similarly cooperative with the Nazis. On 31 October 1939, Vyacheslav Molotov, the Russian Foreign Minister, showing an uncharacteristic respect for both democracy and Nazism, proclaimed, “It is criminal to take part in a war which, disguised as a war for the preservation of democracy, is nothing but a war for the destruction of National Socialism.” Communist parties everywhere were ordered by Moscow to condemn the war as an imperialist war. German propaganda units had been de Lighted to translate this speech into French and English. In leaflets it had been dropped by the thousands over the French front lines.

Now that France was crushed, the Russians did not hide their pleasure. The German ambassador in Moscow wired Berlin to tell them, “Molotov summoned me this evening to his office and expressed the warmest congratulations of the Soviet government on the splendid success of the German armed forces.”

The French Communists, who had done so much to undermine France in its opposition to Nazi Germany, who during the German attack were circulating a tract, UHumanite du soldat, which claimed that it was a war on behalf of Anglo-French financiers, now began to blame the collapse of France on the same people who had done so much to avoid the war. Thus emerged the Communist slogan, “The traitors of Munich opened France to invasion.”