LAVAL AS A WITNESS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 80, 7 August 1945, Page 4

LAVAL AS A WITNESS

WHY did Pierre Laval fly Irom Spain to an American zone o£ occupied Germany, there to be arrested and brought to Paris? One impelling motive was that the alternative was trial in absentia and a probable verdict o£ guilty on a capital charge. Another potent and related reason was that, by intervening in the Petain trial as a witness, he discerned an opportunity for at least partially clearing himself and thus possibly softening the wrath to come. Certainly he did riot deliver himself into the hands of the French with the idea of making it easier for a noose to be run round his neck or for him to be presented to a firing squad. The spectacle of Laval in the witness-box at the Petain trial, opzing self-assurance almost to the point of impudence, is no more edifying than any of the other occasions when this evil genius has appeared in the limelight- He is still the “dishonest broker” of the disreputable Vichy era, trying to confuse the issue and mask his own guilt with what may be a tissue of lies, even if his version of diplomatic negotiations during the time of the Hoare-Laval pact and after contains grains of truth. He has found it impossible to deny or explain away his oft-repeated hope in a German victory. Though he himself is not yet on trial his main defence of Viehy’s act of betrayal is that subservience to the Germans saved France from a still harsher fate. Great wrongs to the Allied cause and to Frenchmen are condoned by saying that the men of Vichy were not free agents and were forced to do many distasteful things against their will, Laval in his evidence represents himself almost as a French patriot in collaborator’s clothing, taking the long view and seeking to act as a buffer between the German tyrants and the oppressed French by cushioning some of the blows which otherwise would have falleh more heavily upon them. It is an explanation which the world, with Laval's record still comparatively fresh in mind, will find it hard to accept.