Compiegne

Compiègne in the Oise department of Picardy in northern France, is fifty miles north of Paris, 50 minutes by train from the Gare du Nord.The city is located along the Oise River. Its inhabitants are called Compiégnois.

 Of Roman origin, it was referred to in 557 as Compendium, a name derived from a word meaning “short cut” (between Beauvais and Soissons). The town flourished in the Middle Ages and was the site of assemblies and councils under the Merovingian kings.

Compiegne, with its historic old quarter, is a lively town. A statue of Joan of Arc, who was captured in 1430 during the Hundred Years War by the Burgundians as she tried to free Compiegne, before she was turned over to the English, stands in the town square. The fifty square mile forest, with its beech groves, shady avenues, valleys and rivulets, offers some of the best walking, cycling and fishing anywhere in France.

In the forest is a woodland clearing, once a railway siding, which is known as the Clairière de l'Armistice. It was here in a railway coach that the Germans signed the Armistice on November 11th, 1918, ending World War I.

When Adolf Hitler heard from the French Government that they wanted an armistice, he chose Compiègne Forest as the site for the negotiations. Hitler saw this location as a supreme revenge for Germany over France. On June 22 1940, he used the same railway carriage where the Germans had signed the first armistice in 1918.

Hitler sat in the same chair in which Marshal Ferdinand Foch had sat in 1918 when he faced the defeated German representatives. After listening to the reading of the preamble, Hitler – in a calculated gesture of disdain to the French delegates – left the carriage, leaving the negotiations to his General Wilhelm Keitel.

The Armistice site was demolished by the Germans on Hitler's orders three days later. The carriage itself was taken to Berlin as a trophy of war, along with pieces of a large stone tablet which bore the inscription (in French):

HERE ON THE ELEVENTH OF NOVEMBER 1918 SUCCUMBED THE CRIMINAL PRIDE OF THE GERMAN REICH. VANQUISHED BY THE FREE PEOPLES WHICH IT TRIED TO ENSLAVE.

The Alsace-Lorraine Monument (depicting a German eagle impaled by a sword) was destroyed and all evidence of the site was obliterated, with the notable exception of the statue of Marshal Foch: Hitler intentionally ordered it to be left intact so that it would be honouring only a wasteland. The railway carriage itself was taken to Crawinkel in Thuringia in 1945, where it was destroyed by SS troops and the remains buried.

Between 1944 and 1950, the clearing was restored. The stone tablet's pieces were recovered and reassembled, and a replica of the railway carriage placed at the restored site. The Alsace-Lorraine monument was rebuilt from scratch. After the reunification of Germany in 1989, those who witnessed the destruction of the original carriage dug up and came forward with earlier relics, which were returned to the French in 1992. On 5 May 1994 a small oak commemorating the "hope for peace" was dug up from the destruction site in Crawinkel and transplanted to Compiègne.

 One can today visit the carriage and the museum, which depicts scenes of the First World War and displays documents from the signing of the Armistice and the relics recovered from the original carriage.