Word: laval
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...Pierre Laval had promised Adolf Hitler 350,000 skilled workers. Last week only some 50,000 French workers had arrived in Germany. Of these, a mere 15,000 were skilled. Germany needed men. Pierre Laval needed time-time to anesthetize France for Hitler's surgery...
...Hitler was mad as hell. The six million foreign workers already in Germany were not enough. He needed more, and he wanted those Frenchmen who were not willing slaves: they could be exchanged for Naziphile prisoners, and France's best blood thus diluted by its worst. Laval did his best to oblige. He yelled for more workers. He sent foreign and French Jews by the thousands to Nazi labor camps in Poland and Silesia. He ordered 1,600 factories in Unoccupied France shut down. He warned France that lack of raw materials would soon increase the number. He told...
France seethed with indignation. The Laval-Pétain duet was conking out. Its collaborationists' burbling was drowned by the rattle of machine guns outside hostage camps. Laval fired arch-collaborationist Jacques Benoist-Mechin from his job as Secretary of State, on the ground that Naziphile Benoist-Méchin had conspired against him. In the next breath Laval told newspapermen that his "Government was based on "solid foundations," remarked that rumors of its fall were "laughable...
Copies of the eloquent pastoral letter (TIME, Sept. 21) of Archbishop Jules Geraud Saliège of Toulouse passed from pocket to pocket. In Lyon, Pierre Cardinal Gerlier repeatedly protested mass deportations, and a "Christian Amity" group preached tolerance for all. Laval ordered Father Chaillet, leader of the group, interned in a fixed residence at Privas...
...take no lessons in humanitarianism from any country," snorted Laval. But by week's end he had learned one lesson: even the once reactionary, fascist Croix de Feu (Cross of Fire) was disgusted with him. Charles Vallin, the order's vice president, withdrew his support of the Pétain-Laval "national revolution" and fled to England. With Vallin went Pierre Brossolette, Socialist editor, long active in the French underground. Once bitter political enemies, both men were mentioned in dispatches during the battle of France; now they were pledged to work side by side with General Charles...