Men of Good Will

The story, like so many others of the mid-20th Century, came to its end in a courtroom. But its beginnings were more auspicious. It began, more or less, on that day in 1926 when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand and German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann. Putting aside the enmities of World War I, Briand and Stresemann had signed at Locarno a mutual security pact.

To support their diplomacy of good will, the two men encouraged Franco-German youth congresses, literary and scientific conventions, exchanged theater companies, formed a Franco-German Society. In Paris, Briand subsidized a newspaper edited by gifted Jean Luchaire.

Luchaire was well prepared as an advocate of French-German reconciliation. His father had served Briand at the League of Nations, his stepmother was Stresemann's secretary and biographer. Jean's wife waved the flag of rapprochement in her own way: she became Stresemann's mistress, took Jean's daughter Corinne to Germany with her. Little Corinne so charmed Stresemann's friend, Banker Kurt von Schroeder, that the rich old man took her into his home.

A Clean Passion. Outstanding on the other side of the reconciliation movement was a blond, blue & starry eyed young German drawing teacher, Otto Abetz. Under his leadership, the two countries exchanged students, published a Franco-German magazine at Stuttgart. Abetz attended a vacation camp in the Black Forest where French and German youths pledged themselves to pacifism and eternal friendship.

Otto Abetz met Luchaire, became his friend, married Luchaire's secretary, Suzanne de Brouckere. In those days, Abetz loved France with a clean passion. The passion endured even while, on both sides of the Rhine, the foundations of rapprochement were crumbling. Hitler, backed by money from Banker von Schroeder and others, had come to power.

Suzanne bore Otto a son. To famed French Novelist Jules Remains, visiting Abetz' shabby Berlin apartment in 1934, the child seemed "touching, born as he was, not of a chance meeting between two people, but of an ideal which had drawn them together."

Obsessed with his ideal, Abetz convinced himself that the "reasonable and peaceful elements" in Naziism would help him realize it. Eagerly, he went back to Paris. This time he had 350,000 francs a month expense money from the Nazis. He used it to subsidize pro-German writers, to make himself the intimate acquaintance of powerful French politicians and industrialists. He paved the way for Munich and the failure of French arms.

Criminality & Corruption. Jean Luchaire shared Abetz' feelings, helped him mightily. As "men of good will" under Briand and Stresemann, the two had failed to bind France and Germany together in peace and prosperity. In the Nazi era, they forged a lethal link between German criminality and French corruption.

Now a piquant and beautiful film actress, Corinne Luchaire had grown up among the "respectable" Nazis that frequented Banker von Schroeder's mansion. There, too, she had met Otto Abetz. Politically, Otto was faithless to France; personally, he was faithless to his wife Suzanne and the son that symbolized their pre-Nazi ideal. Before he was expelled from France in 1939, Otto Abetz made 17-year-old Corinne Luchaire his mistress.

In triumph and a uniform designed for him by Hitler, Abetz returned to Paris in 1941 as German high commissioner of occupied France and ambassador to Vichy.

Jean Luchaire became the "fiihrer" of the French collaborationist press, sent his son into the German army, his brother into the SS. For Corinne's affections, there existed no national (and scarcely any numerical) boundary. She gave birth to the daughter of a Luftwaffe captain. Abetz turned to other mistresses. With the last of them, a tall, dressy French art student, he was arrested in October 1945 in occupied Germany.

Chamber 13. Early in 1946, a firing squad shot grim, contemptuous Jean Luchaire for treason. Several months later, Corinne, racked by dissipation and tuberculosis, was condemned to ten years' "national indignity." Last week in Paris, Otto Abetz was on trial for crimes he committed during the German occupation: com plicity in maltreatment of Jews and French officers, looting French art treasures.

The heat in tiny, suffocating Chamber 13 of the Palais de Justice matted the 46-year-old defendant's white mane, wreathed his wrinkled face in perspiration. Four years after the war, the narrative of Nazi evil retold in the courtroom roused no passion, fell back into forgetfulness. During his deft defense, Abetz mechanically professed Nazi theory, just as mechanically pleaded that he had always tried to mitigate Nazi practice. The sentence: 20 years at hard labor.

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