French and German intelligence agents gather at a posh hotel in Geneva under orders from the highest levels of their governments.
Millions of dollars slosh across Europe, moving surreptitiously from mysterious bank accounts to dummy companies in the tax haven of Liechtenstein. Key executives vanish without a trace. It all sounds like pulp fiction rather than high diplomacy. Could this be the real story of how Europe's triumphal unity was sealed?
With the suddenness of a major earthquake, the investigation into financial irregularities by former Chancellor Helmut Kohl's Christian Democratic Union has rippled across Germany's borders to France and Switzerland, uncovering a widening trail of allegations about high-level influence peddling.
TIME Monday, Feb. 07, 2000
A new book revisits the trial of Philippe Pétain in 1945
When the old man in a khaki field uniform entered the courtroom, it fell silent. Pétain’s opening statement, writes Mr Jackson, was “a compilation of dubious assertions and half-truths, approximations and provocations”.
He had signed the armistice as an “act of salvation”, he insisted. It had spared France “the fate of Poland”, argued his defence lawyers. The marshal, they claimed, was not Pierre Laval, the Vichy prime minister, who actually sympathised with Nazi Germany
Pétain was sentenced to death, a decision that de Gaulle later commuted to life imprisonment. He was stripped of his military honours.
In 1945 the Paris court certainly judged him severely. But it was not until 1995 that a French president, Jacques Chirac, acknowledged his country’s responsibility for terrible acts carried out under occupation, referring specifically to the round-up of thousands of Jews at the Vel’ d’Hiv’ stadium in Paris in 1942 before they were sent to their deaths.
When speaking in 2017 of the Vel’ d’Hiv’ round-up, Emmanuel Macron, the current president, stated soberly: “Not a single German took part.”
The Economist 6 July 2023
General de Gaulle
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