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## The Fall of France
On May 10, 1940, Germany launched the invasion of France that the “Phoney War” had delayed but not prevented. The Wehrmacht moved through the Ardennes forest in a direction that bypassed the fortified Maginot Line and cut off Allied forces in Belgium. Within six weeks, France had capitulated. On June 22, 1940, the armistice was signed. The northern portion of France, including Paris, was under direct German occupation. The southern portion came under the authority of the Vichy government, a French administration that collaborated with Germany under the nominal leadership of World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain.
For the French Resistance and for the intelligence networks connected to Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces in London, the fall of France was catastrophic and clarifying. The question was no longer theoretical. France was occupied. Collaboration or resistance: those were the choices, and the costs of each were real.
Baker had already left Paris by the time the armistice was signed, having moved about 300 miles southwest as German forces approached the capital in June 1940. She settled at a chateau in the Dordogne region, where she sheltered refugees and members of the French Resistance. When German soldiers came to search the property — looking for evidence of Resistance activity — she received them with the confidence of a property owner who had every right to be there and nothing to hide. By her account and others’, she deflected them. The refugees and Resistance members hiding on the property were not found.