Because the factories and wharves on both sides of the Huangpu River continued to encroach on the river in later generations, the Huangpu River in the 40s was wider than it was 70 years later. For example, the famous section of the Bund is wide enough for a heavy cruiser of the rank of the "Prince Eugen" to turn around on the river.

Under the guidance of the Chinese pilots, three German warships and two transports flying British and French flags sailed into the Huangpu River in turn, and the last time this scene occurred, Wilhelm II was still the German emperor.

At that time, Germany also had a small gathering area in the Shanghai Public Concession, and the number of expatriates once reached more than 1,500, mainly engaged in printing and dyeing and pharmaceutical business, and the Ministry of Industry also reserved a seat on the board of directors for Germany, and the German flag on the coat of arms of the public concession was once placed together with Britain, the United States and France.

However, with the end of World War I, Germany, as a defeated country, was deprived of its seat on the board of directors of the Ministry of Industry, and the position of the German flag on the original coat of arms was also deleted into a blank, and the number of German expatriates quickly fell to three digits, and most of the rights and interests in the public concession were ceded to Japan. As mentioned earlier, one of Japan's seats in the Ministry of Industry was inherited from Germany.

However, after Hitler came to power, the number of German expatriates in Shanghai began to grow rapidly, mainly because of the Nazis' anti-Jewish policy.

Because of the unique characteristics of the Jewish people, many Jewish merchants have long been operating in the Far East, and with their racial talents, these people have a very prosperous life in Shanghai. Most of them had good education and skills, and could easily find work in Shanghai's factories and foreign firms, and many of them married and had children in Shanghai, and within two years a large and hierarchical Jewish community system was formed within the public concession in western Shanghai.

In order to infiltrate the management of the Ministry of Industry, the Jewish community began to fully support the Japanese, and they tried to use the power of the Japanese to speak for themselves in the management of the public concession.

As a group of taxpayers in the Public Concession, Jews held a large number of votes in the general election of the management of the Ministry of Works. So in the general election in April this year, the Jews voted all the votes for the Japanese candidate, and if it had not been for the British's early popularity, the Japanese would have almost succeeded this time. Because according to the Japanese plan, they put forward five candidates at the same time, and if all of them were selected, it would completely upset the balance of management.

Several Jews, dissatisfied with the Japanese, informed and betrayed their own people to the British, so the British immediately launched countermeasures to counter, they lowered the taxpayer standard, and a large number of Chinese in the public concession also gained the right to vote. As you can imagine, the final election ended in a landslide victory for the British and Americans, and the Japanese could only be counted as a group of schoolchildren who had not yet graduated.

Historically, Germany, Japan, and Italy had already signed an alliance at this time, so the situation of the Jews in the public concession became awkward, and the Japanese were notoriously unrecognizable. If it weren't for the fact that Japan was still wary of the international reaction at that time, and the Jews did give Japan a lot of benefits, the Japanese would not have been too embarrassed by these people in the Japanese-occupied area.

The Jews of German descent who had not yet learned that Germany's anti-Semitic policy had changed, and that the Nazis were planning to exterminate them by sending people to Shanghai. What makes this group even more desperate is that the countries of the world have so far refused to accept Jewish refugees, and they have nowhere to escape on this earth. A group of high-ranking Jews were deliberating whether they could scrape together some money to bribe the Ministry of Industry and the Bureau of Industry to hide the existence of the Jewish community in Shanghai from the German mission as much as possible.

This was a rare time for the Ministry of Industry and the Board of Directors to join forces to form a spectacular welcoming procession, the first time that a diplomatic mission had visited the city since it was reduced to an isolated island.

Even during the reign of the government, missions of this rank were uncommon, and they were usually greeted in person by senior officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However, Shanghai had been occupied by Japan, and all the government agencies had been withdrawn to the interior, and the current Wang puppet government had not been recognized by any European country.

Germany even had its consulate in Shanghai abolished, and the consul general went to Chongqing alone with a salute, and now Germany does not even have an agency in Shanghai.

Nanjing sent a diplomatic reception group that thought it was a heavyweight, and all of them were high-level traitors, led by Chen Gongbo, the puppet president of the Legislative Council, and Chu Minyi, the deputy, and the rest of the puppet Jiangsu Provincial Chairman Gao Guanwu, the puppet mayor of Shanghai, Zhou Fohai, as well as Li Shiqun, Ding Mocun and the like, plus a group of spies and thugs, and so on, there were almost more than 300 people.

Fearing that the Public Concession would interfere with it, they blended in with the welcoming procession of the Japanese organization. Originally, Wang Jingwei wanted to come in person, but he was worried that he might encounter cold eyes from the Germans, and he was also worried about his life in the concession, so he finally handed over the task to Chen Gongbo and asked this sworn friend to declare his existence.

The French Concession Board of Directors is very realistic, because the Consul General fully supports Petain, so it has long been explicitly ordered that no anti-German public opinion will be allowed in the concession, especially the large and small left-wing media in the French Concession, who dare to publish articles that hurt Franco-German friendship, will wait for the patrol to close the door and arrest people, and then throw them into the prison of Masinan Road for several months. In the eyes of the Consul General, Franco-German friendship is the most important national policy, and there is no human affection to talk about it.

The situation in the Public Concession is more complicated, although the British occupy the main voice in the Concession, but the expatriates in the Public Concession come from a variety of sources, and there are various European countries. In addition to the British and Americans, there were a large number of Dutch, Belgian, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Norwegian, and even quite a few Poles and Russians, in other words, the Germans almost all the countries in the public concession.

Denmark and Norway, for example, are still under German occupation, Belgium is even more semi-divided, and Poland is no longer even a state.

But the strength of the German Empire was evident to all, and these European expatriates did not dare to express themselves openly on such occasions, even if they were unhappy with the situation in their own country. Not only that, but they also had to watch their companions, especially the Poles and Danes, for fear that some of them would be happy for a while, but they would end up implicating their own country and causing unnecessary trouble to their relatives who were still in the country.

The rest were the Chinese residents of the two concessions, and the citizens of Shanghai were originally extremely curious, and they usually liked to gather in a circle on the street to watch the excitement, and they heard on the radio that a German mission had entered the Huangpu River on a warship today, and as a result, almost half of the idle people in the concession had rushed over.

At that time, the Bund did not have the kind of breakwater in later generations, and there was a row of iron chain fences along the coast.

At this moment, the crowd has replaced the tide, from the 16th shop to the Baidu Bridge, and there is a sea of people along the coast. According to the preliminary estimate of the patrol house of the Ministry of Industry Bureau, the section from Nanjing Road to the Bund Park alone has gathered more than 50,000 people.

The Prinz Eugen turned at the mouth of the Suzhou Creek, and the battleship hung a full flag to salute the city, and on the top of the heavy cruiser's mainmast, a black eagle cross flag with a snow-white background was raised, which was the flag of the German Navy during the Second Reich, heralding the return of the German Navy after a gap of 26 years.

The German fleet and the British, French, Japanese, and other warships parked on the Huangpu River sounded their whistles in greeting, and at the same time fired 12 gun salutes, which caused a burst of admiration and exclamation from the melon-eating masses on the shore, and the voices of tens of thousands of people gathered in one place, and even the bridge of the warship in the center of the river could be heard clearly.

The Prinz Eugen dropped anchor on the river directly opposite HSBC, a berth that had been prepared for her, and two German destroyers alternately anchored on either side of the cruiser.

The remaining two transports continued on their way, and finally docked at the pier of the 16th shop, where a group of heavily armed soldiers walked down the gangplank in a queue and landed at the pier.

A year ago, when the war broke out in Europe, in order to maintain order in the Southeast Asian colonies, Britain transferred two battalions of infantry originally stationed in the public concession. As a result, the Ministry of Industry and Bureau completely lost the confidence to confront head-on in the face of Japan's military threat. So this time, the British transferred a whole colonial infantry regiment directly from the Singapore base, and their task was to maintain the stability and law and order of the public concession for a period of time to come.

The French transport ship was also loaded with two battalions of the French Foreign Legion, and although the infantry was not as numerous as the British, they had half a battalion of armored units more than the British, a full fifteen Soma S-35 tanks, plus a company of Habecis anti-tank guns. This is the first regular tank force in the concession, and it can already be regarded as a strategic-level deterrent force in the magic capital.

Just as the French foreign infantry began to assemble and line up on the side of the road outside the dock, an uproar suddenly broke out in the crowd, and the startled patrolmen hurriedly looked up, only to see a group of infantry in gorgeous black uniforms, striding down the steel gangplank in a neat line.

The Chinese patrolmen immediately knew why the citizens were making a noise, they may not know the identity of the unit, but they could recognize the M35-style steel helmets worn by the foreign soldiers. Because just three years ago, on the bank of the Suzhou Creek not far from the Bund, the lone soldiers of the state government stationed in the Sixing Warehouse were wearing this kind of steel helmet and launched a bloody battle with the Japanese invaders.

PS: Thank you for your support, I ask for the monthly pass support again, please give me some more motivation, please. (To be continued.) )