Tanks Break Through!

A German Soldier’s Account of War in the Low Countries and France, 1940

There are many eye-witness accounts of the military disaster that led to the fall of France, 1940, from the Allied point of view. For a look at the experiences of the common German soldier, there is no better source than Tanks Break Through! written by Alfred-Ingemar Berndt, a journalist and close associate of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. When the 1940 attack was in the offing, Berndt joined the Wehrmacht and afterward published his recollections. Berndt's memoir is a tale of German military prowess, valor and violent death, a Teutonic Iliad. His gruesome descriptions of battle are morbidly fascinating. Hitler sensed French weakness and unwillingness to fight. Berndt writes of the formidable foe the French faced.