Word: germanic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...story, like so many others of the mid-20th Century, came to its end in a courtroom. But its beginnings were more auspicious. It began, more or less, on that day in 1926 when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand and German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann. Putting aside the enmities of World War I, Briand and Stresemann had signed at Locarno a mutual security pact...
...support their diplomacy of good will, the two men encouraged Franco-German youth congresses, literary and scientific conventions, exchanged theater companies, formed a Franco-German Society. In Paris, Briand subsidized a newspaper edited by gifted Jean Luchaire...
Luchaire was well prepared as an advocate of French-German reconciliation. His father had served Briand at the League of Nations, his stepmother was Stresemann's secretary and biographer. Jean's wife waved the flag of rapprochement in her own way: she became Stresemann's mistress, took Jean's daughter Corinne to Germany with her. Little Corinne so charmed Stresemann's friend, Banker Kurt von Schroeder, that the rich old man took her into his home...
...Clean Passion. Outstanding on the other side of the reconciliation movement was a blond, blue & starry eyed young German drawing teacher, Otto Abetz. Under his leadership, the two countries exchanged students, published a Franco-German magazine at Stuttgart. Abetz attended a vacation camp in the Black Forest where French and German youths pledged themselves to pacifism and eternal friendship...
Obsessed with his ideal, Abetz convinced himself that the "reasonable and peaceful elements" in Naziism would help him realize it. Eagerly, he went back to Paris. This time he had 350,000 francs a month expense money from the Nazis. He used it to subsidize pro-German writers, to make himself the intimate acquaintance of powerful French politicians and industrialists. He paved the way for Munich and the failure of French arms...