Three hundred thousand Wehrmacht soldiers crossed the Seine and rolled down the Champs-Élysées on June 14, 1940, as the French government fled south to Bordeaux and left the capital an open city. General Maximilian von Weichs's armored columns met no resistance; Parisians woke to swastika flags draped from the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. The Fall of France had taken just 46 days, a speed that stunned even Hitler's own generals. That same morning, the SS opened the first block of a new camp in occupied Poland called Auschwitz, receiving 728 Polish political prisoners. France's humiliation forced a fateful fork: General Charles de Gaulle broadcast his defiant refusal to surrender from London two days later, while Marshal Philippe Pétain signed an armistice that handed three-fifths of France to German occupation and spawned the collaborationist Vichy regime. The rapid fall shattered the myth of French military invincibility, pulled Britain into fighting alone, and set the moral terms, resistance versus collaboration, that still define how Europe remembers its darkest chapter.