Word: pucheu
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...tiny, jampacked chamber of Algiers' Palais de Justice, ex-Vichyite Pierre Pucheu fought for life and honor. He was on trial for treason against France, the first high Vichyite brought to bar for trafficking with Germany. But the courtroom mirrored more than one man's struggle. All week long, before a military tribunal headed by Judge Léon Verin, impassioned Frenchmen of the Left, Center and Right denounced and defended Vichy's tangled, tortuous policy of collaboration...
Tall Pierre Pucheu had made many an enemy in his career as steel cartelist, Fascist fellow traveler and Vichy Minister of Interior (1941-42). Now, he was on trial for his life, charged with defeatism, lèse-patrie, the murder of French resisters, the hounding of French workers at the behest of the Nazi Reich. His accusers said that the Council of Resistance in the homeland had long ago condemned Pierre Pucheu to death. They cited repressive Vichy measures bearing Pierre Pucheu's signature. Presumably their most telling evidence was presented in camera, lest unknown Frenchmen in France...
...Pierre Pucheu's friends hurled back the accusations. They called the trial a Communist plot, decried the lack of documentary facts. General Henri Giraud raised his high, thin voice in a plea that judgment be postponed until France was free again. Gaullists testified to Pierre Pucheu's change of heart toward the Allies just before the landing in North Africa; to support their point they cited documents from General de Gaulle's office...
...Profited? When the steam of passion and prejudice ran low, the court called for summations. Declaimed Special Prosecutor Major General Pierre Weiss: "Yes or no, has [Pucheu] favored the Germans? Yes or no, has he served the Allies? ... We must ask ourselves . . . who has profited by his actions? . . . I think you must [answer]: 'The enemy...
...blacked-out street in suburban Puteaux a steel cable, taut from curb to curb, overturned a car full of Nazi soldiers, injuring several. While Parisians waited tensely for Schaumburg to make good his threat, in Vichy Marshal Petain's Minister of the Interior Pierre Pucheu lashed out furiously at the underground Communist Party in both zones of France. Warned he: "[We] will not permit a political group that was most bellicose before the war, but defeatist throughout the war, now to wrap itself in the Tricolor and provoke incidents between the people and occupation troops on the pretext...