Word: darlan
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...character portraits of soldiers who go to war are more than likely to be drawn quite differently before and after the fact. Prior to the fall of France, very little was made known about Admiral Darlan to the Allied press save that he was colorless but competent. The archives of London and Washington now reveal France's No. 1 sailor as quite a different personality...
Fifty-nine-year-old Jean Francois Darlan is a spruce, magnetic little figure from his flattish bald head, edged with grey hair, to his impeccably polished shoes. He has the eyes of an amused gambler and his career, as now presented, exhibits him as having the principles of a cat. Two centuries of Darlan merchant mariners (supposedly English long ago) preceded the Admiral's father, who, the Admiral says, "went wrong and became a Minister of Justice." The Admiral was born in the grey old town of Nérac, Gascony, where Darlan père was once Mayor...
These were vague voices of propagandist explanation. No public announcement was made as to exactly what Adolf Hitler and Admiral Darlan had agreed on. Presumably there were many details left to work out. But the consensus of rumor held that: > The line of demarcation between Occupied and Unoccupied France would be opened for the passage of goods, money, mail. > The French daily payment of 400,000,000 francs for maintaining Germany's occupying Army would be cut as much as 25%. > Some 250,000 of the 1,800,000 French war prisoners in Germany would be sent home...
...Laval, whose program differed from the Marshal's only in its outspokenness, it was widely interpreted as an anti-Nazi gesture. It was also commonly said that the Marshal had ousted the only French emissary with whom the Nazis would deal. But in Vice Premier Admiral Jean Frangois Darlan the old Marshal picked a successor to Laval who has made himself superbly persona grata at Berchtesgaden and who is, in addition, much less unpopular in France than the scheming M. Laval...
This week Admiral Darlan was received by the Führer himself. And from Zurich it was reported that Adolf Hitler had bestowed on Darlan and his predecessor Pierre Laval the Kriegsverdienstkreuz, second class-a Nazi military decoration for war services rendered outside of military-action...