A general who embodied the military case for defeat and armistice
On 22 June 1940, he signed the armistice for France in the Compiègne forest.
Charles Huntziger was a French Army general who built his career in the colonial infantry, on the Balkan front in the First World War, and in overseas commands and negotiations between the wars. Commanding the Second Army at Sedan in 1940, he failed to stop the German breakthrough, and his decisions remained part of the dispute over responsibility for France’s defeat. He judged that the capacity to continue fighting was nearing its limit and chaired Pétain’s delegation that signed the 22 June armistice. As Vichy’s Minister of War, he then helped reorganize the military of the collaborationist state until his death in a plane crash in 1941.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1900Graduated from Saint-Cyr, second lieutenant in the colonial infantry
- 1918Operations chief, Allied Army of the Orient, planner of the Vardar offensive
- 1924–1928Commander of French occupation troops in the Tianjin concession
- 1934–1938Commander-in-chief of French forces in the Levant
- 1939–1940Commander of the Second Army at Sedan
- 1940Commander of Fourth Army Group; chairman of France’s 22 June armistice delegation
- 1940–1941Vichy Minister of War and commander-in-chief of the Armistice Army
Related historical events
Head of the French delegation to the Wiesbaden Armistice Commission
Immediately after signing the armistice, Huntziger became head of the French delegation attached to the German Armistice Commission (WAKO). Created under Article 22 of the armistice, the commission regulated and supervised the implementation of its terms, and the French government was required to station a delegation to present French wishes and receive the German implementation orders. The commission met at the Hotel Nassauer Hof in Wiesbaden, while the French delegation was lodged at the Hotel Rose. From 26 June to 13 September 1940 Huntziger held this post, acting as liaison between Vichy and Wiesbaden.
He negotiated with the German side over matters such as demobilization and disarmament, the size and stationing of French forces, and the repatriation of prisoners of war. Structurally, however, Article 22 placed the French delegation not in a decision-making role but in the position of receiving and transmitting implementation orders, with little means of resisting the German side. In July he secured the return of the Gendarmerie to the occupied zone, but he failed to win the release of French soldiers still holding out along the Maginot Line or to reduce the exorbitant occupation costs demanded in August, and he also protested the de facto annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. When he was appointed Minister of War in the Vichy government on 6 September, the delegation's leadership passed to another general.
The Wiesbaden period also coincides with his record of complicity in anti-Jewish policy. While Minister of War, he was among the signatories of the law on the status of Jews on 3 October 1940, and in a letter to Weygand on 28 February 1941 he attributed the defeat of 1940 to "the Jewish soldiers" and demanded that all Jewish soldiers be removed from North African units. The measure took effect from March that year, with Jewish soldiers subsequently interned at the Bedeau camp south of Oran.