Posted on 04/15/2023 7:01:25 AM PDT by CheshireTheCat
On this date in 1947, former Vichy Secretary of State Comte Fernand de Brinon was shot in the Paris suburb of Montrouge for war crimes.
A lawyer and journalist who met future Nazi luminary Joachim von Ribbentrop in 1919, Brinon and his socialite wife Lisette were the toast of right-wing high society in the 1930’s. He even scored a scoop interview with the Fuhrer himself, shortly after Hitler became chancellor.
Germany’s rout of France in 1940 vindicated to many of the French right their critiques of France’s decadence; for Brinon, the natural step was support for collaboration, a career-enhancing philosophy that saw him to the third-ranking position of the Vichy government.
There he struck a post-partisan, consensus-oriented pose vis-a-vis picking sides between the new overlord and the erstwhile ally it was bombing:
To collaborate loyally with our opponents of yesterday in no way signifies in the mind of any man of good sense becoming the enemies of our allies of yesterday. (New York Times)
Men of good sense also knew the Bolsheviks were the real threat to world peace; hence, this Vichy-era newsreel of today’s victim reviewing French troops on the Eastern front....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
Brinon was the French equivalent of Edward VIII or Lloyd George in Britain, or for that matter Joseph Kennedy Sr. in the US, people who saw the “good side” of Hitler in the midst of the Depression.
Brinon had the bad luck of actually being able to act on his national-socialist leanings, while Ed & Lloyd faded away, and FDR got Joe to go anti-Hitler the old fashioned way, by giving him opportunities to make even more grift, and also to get his sons into politics.
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