Word: laval
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...Pierre Laval was not only "the shrewdest, most forceful personality in Vichy," but an intensely patriotic Frenchman whose tragic flaw was not :hat he sympathized with Hitler but that ie had "astonishing ignorance about the Germans and supreme confidence in his ability to outsmart them...
...year-old electrical-equipment giant called ASEA (pronounced ah-say-ah), which is Sweden's equivalent of General Electric. ASEA not only produces a long list of products that range from giant generators to locomotives, but controls 26 subsidiaries that include Electrolux (vacuum cleaners) and STAL-LAVAL (steam and gas turbines). Sweden's biggest private employer with 32,500 workers, the ASEA group last year had sales of $336 million and earnings of $11.5 million...
Caught Eye. The son of a government forestry worker, Nicolin started his career as an engineer for STAL 18 years ago, before it merged with LAVAL. By the time he was 32, he had won recognition as head of the team that developed Sweden's first jet engine and commercial gas-turbine. He became STAL president in 1955, did such a good job of making the company cost-minded that he caught the eye of Marcus Wallenberg. ASEA was tops technologically, but its organization had become fat and unwieldy. The Wallenbergs moved Nicolin in to remake the firm...
Assessing Laval, Cole measures him mainly from a practical point of view -as a peasant trader who was out of his league and should have known it. Yet the verdict on Laval must ultimately be moral. Again and again, to preserve its identity as a government of France, Vichy had to order Frenchmen to imprison and deport other Frenchmen in order to keep the Germans from moving in and imposing even harsher demands. Does the hope of saving five men justify the death of one? Did France have a right to salvage what it could from the 1940 debacle...
Defeat by a ruthless foreign power imposes impossible dilemmas upon those who try to negotiate with the enemy. Laval could have safely sat out the war as a private citizen in Auvergne. However history may finally judge him, it is difficult to argue that in doing what he did, he chose the easiest...