Adolf Hitler leaned forward to read the inscription on the Alsace-Lorraine monument. 'Here on the eleventh of November 1918 succumbed the criminal pride of the German empire,' the inscription read, 'vanquished by the free peoples which it tried to enslave.'
His face blazed with contempt and rage. The monument depicted a German Imperial Eagle impaled on the point of a sword. It had been constructed in 1927 and placed in a memorial park in a forest near the city of Compiègne along with a statue of the French Marshal Ferdinand Foch and the railway carriage in which the Germans had signed their surrender on the 11th of November 1918.
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