Far from the battlefield, in a sun-drenched clearing in the forest of Compiègne, 21 June saw the final humiliation of the French Government. Hitler had chosen to present its plenipotentiaries with the armistice terms in the same railway coach in which the Germans had signed the surrender at the end of the First World War […]. Until being brought to Compiègne, from Bordeaux, the French negotiators had had no inkling of where the negotiations were to be held. Now, at half past three on the afternoon of June 21, they found themselves confronted, in the railway coach itself, by a triumphant, silent Hitler, as General Keitel read out to them the preamble to the German armistice terms. […] A sixth nation had succumbed to Germany in less than nine months.
From: Martin Gilbert, The Second World War, A Complete History, Herry Holt and Company, Inc., New York, 1989, pp. 100, 101.
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