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Your
"Taste Tells"
Eyes!! Consult
Elliott & Elliott
Johnston's SAUSAGES
Opticians
and
Piccadilly Arcade,
FRANKFURTS
Perth Tel. B7988 PERTH, THURSDAY, JULY 30, 1942.
NO. 3,034,
PRICE THREEPENCE
SIXTY-NINTH YEAR.
By LOUIS VALLARD
oes ;Coal embody the idea of the
HRV LE q Career of Otto Abetz intermediary between Vichy and Berlin
s-LN-Fir?
Fundamentally the Policy of France is and Must be . . . Wait
and See
How he secured the French Press in favour of collaborationism profit from the regulated and compulsory labour of the proletariat. Many French and German industrialists have for years wanted to extend the cartel arrangements and market control to cover control of labour as well, The who supported Hitler in his rise to power soon discovered that he had a different and more bureaucratic conception of the Servile State, with the Party Leaders and not private industrialists the main beneficiaries. The Hermann Goering works were a sign and a symbol. But to the "Comite des Forges," the contrast between the disciplined and hardworking Germans under the Nazi regime and the growing indiscipline of France in the 'thirties made a very strong argument for collaboration. Before 1939 many Frenchmen thought the British alliance was being bought at too high a price, because it encouraged the French Left to ignore the special adCOMBATTANT. vantages of wealth and geography After nearly two years, the economy which enabled the British to dispense with conscription and to talk all the of France, in both occupied and unoccupied territory, has been effectively time about working less and enduring harnessed to the German war require- less and less control. It was, they ments. But something more is requir. judged, a dangerous path for Britain, ed, and that, the Germans hope, Laval but a fatal path for France. can give, The pressure that is irresLaval is immensely opportunist, He istible in central Europe is heavy in was ready enough in 1934 to push on France, and it has compelled Marshal the Russian alliance, in 1935 to woo Petain to call back Laval. There is Italy, after 1936 to woo Germany. And little doubt that Hitler's calculations to -day he returns to a measure of power in June, 1940, have badly miscarried. of which the Battle of Britain and the His French advisers assured him that, ambition of Darlan together deprived even if Britain did not make peace or him in 1940. "The Anglo-Saxon demosuccumb, it would prove quite feasible cratic ideology is, he maintains, poison to turn French opinion round and to to France, which must be united and organise it behind a policy of collabora- hard-working, if it is meat to Britain tion, The apostle of this collaboration and America, His own preference, as was Pierre Laval, who believed it to be a rich man, is for a new order of disthe only possible policy for France cipline for the many and profits for long before 1939. Laval had a pro- the ruling few, He has been able to found and accurate knowledge of stage a partial return because the GovFrench weakness. His own weakernment of Marshal Petain, which is ness was that he had neither a Party always buying time, has over -traded on nor any popular backing, He em- Germany's weaker position since the bodies, more than any other man in Russian campaign miscarried and the the public life of France, the idea of United States entered the war. The the Servile State. In the thirty years British disappointment in North Afsince that expression was put into cir- rica has been highly important toculation by Hilaire Belloc, in 1912, its gether with the Japanese successes, to meaning has been confused and it is strengthen Laval's hand. For some often used to denote totalitarianism or time now the Vichy Radio services State Socialism. What it was coined have been increasingly anti-British, but to express was the regime by which in the eyes of the Paris collaborationthe authority of the State was put be- ists the whole of Vichy is filled with a hind the big industries, so that a small base "attentisme," with officials preclass of personal owners drew great occupied with guessing how the cat
For Value and Service
will jump, and over -awed by the wealth of the United States. This Paris estimate is in the main correct. Fundamentally, the policy of Frenchmen must be, and is, to play for time, to wait and see whether Brit-
ain and the United States are capable of translating potential into genuine superiority, but at the same time to he sufficiently amenable and promising to the temporary masters of Europe to avoid any avoidable suffering in the necessary interval. The re-introductnon of Laval is a shuffling gesture. and how much or how little profit it will bring to the Germans will depend on the estimate Vichy forms of the war situation as a whole, Like Mussolini, the Vichy politicians can calculate that a moment will come when they will have a value for the Allies which will, perhaps, enable them to save themselves by hastening the defeat of the main enemy. It was so that the Central Powers crumbled in 1918, beginning with Bulgaria and Turkey. To check these calculations, and to extract the utmost collaboration now, Otto Abetz continues to act as Ribbentrop's representative in Paris. He is the man through whom the pressure on Vichy is applied. The return of Laval is something of a personal triumph for him, after a discouraging year. Otto Abetz who is still a young man, first became known just after the last war at the age of twenty, because he was parading everywhere the most militant Communist views; he was, ostensibly at any rate, expelled as such from Germany by the Republic of Weimar. He arrived in Paris in 1924, and, having joined the Communist Party, became one of Doriot's friends and incidentally met and became attached to Doriot's secretary, Suzanne de Bruquere, an ardent Communist from Lille, A practical young man, Otto soon realised that these associations, though valuable in themselves could be made profitable to German interests and his own. He accordingly paid a few visits to Germany and, having convinced his employers that different tactics were advisable, returned to France, not only with a new programme, but with ample funds to carry it out. Abetz had understood that Communists, like other politicians, have their price. And it was largely his work that a number of Communists
by Doriot, broke away from ;heir party in 1934, to form the "Parti Populaire Francais." By the nineteen -thirties, Abetz had become a prominent figure in Parisian ,ociety. Always elegantly dressed and well versed in the superficial accomplishments of a man about town, he posed as a warm friend of France, while surreptitiously preparing for German infiltration. Using every material and intellectual weapon-including corruption-for enlisting support, he gradually created a large circle of men and women who advocated a rapprochement with the Reich, He became a close friend of Jean Luchaire, son of Julien Luchaire, director of the Institute of Intellectual Cooperation. Jean had for years been an ardent advocate of an entente with Germany, and to -day he controls one of the chief collaborationist papers in Paris, "Temps Nouveau," He was then the director of a small literary daily called "Notre Temps," whose aims were electric but whose existence was precarious. Abetz, through his friends in Berlin, ensured that the paper obtained sound financial backing, From that moment its sales increased, especially in Germany, "Notre Temps," being radical in tendency, received a small monthly subsidy from. (Continued on Page 12.)
COLLABORATEUR,
Murray St.,
Guilfoyle s Hotel Australia Registered at the G.P.O., Perth, for transmission by post as a newspaper.
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