Word: hitlers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Hubert Cole's Laval is neither traitor nor hero. Instead he is a complex, unprepossessing peasant, skillful but overwhelmed by pride, brilliant but narrow, who gambled his life (plus what was left of his country's honor) in the hope of horse trading with Hitler to ease the pangs of the occupation in France. "If I succeed," Laval said prophetically in the dark days of 1942, "there won't be enough stones in this country to raise statues to me. If I fail, T will be shot...
Laval's chain was never totally forged, in part because the British helped drive Mussolini into Hitler's arms during the Abyssinia crisis, in part because disputatious Deputies back in Paris sabotaged his efforts. Laval never forgave either. Ironically, France's No. 1 traitor-to-be fell into views that precisely paralleled those of hero-to-be De Gaulle. He despised the French Parliament, thought France needed a new constitution, and was convinced that he alone could bring all this about...
...question, of course, is Laval's motive for official collaboration with the Germans, which he never denied. And what, if anything, he accomplished for France. Laval, to the last, insisted that he made the occupation easier-by keeping Hitler from planting a terrorist German regime in France as he did in Holland, by dragging his feet in dispatching conscript French workers to Germany, by getting prisoners of war repatriated, by fighting to protect French Jews. "You don't save France," he reproached the Gaullists, "by quitting her soil...
...sent to Germany? He concludes, however, that Laval tried honestly to do what he claims, though he did not succeed any too well. Laval was a skilled bargainer. "You ask Laval for a chicken," grumbled German Ambassador Otto Abetz, "and he gives you an egg and a smile." But Hitler was in a position to get pretty much what he wanted and eventually...
...Character. For all his crimes, Messkirch is a sympathetic character. Not so the chief character of The Birthday King, by British Novelist Gabriel Fielding. Ruprecht Weidmann is the scion of a wealthy manufacturing family that has a slight admixture of Jewish blood and is trying desperately to get into Hitler's good graces. A cold opportunist, Ruprecht commits his anti-Nazi brother to a concentration camp, drowns a companion, betrays a business associate who is plotting against Hitler, sends off a dozen of his factory workers to serve as medical guinea pigs. Ruprecht is a kind of lago beyond...