Finally, in 1991, with the fall of the Soviet Union, discussion of the “Holocaust” and access to the massive Soviet archives were finally allowed. Reference to the victims of the Holocaust as “Jews” in the monument for Babi Yar was made for the first time. The monument had not even been constructed until 1976, well after Yevgenii Yevtushenko’s poem “Babi Yar” brought the world’s attention to the massacre (its opening words were: “No monument stands over Babi Yar”).
We noted above how the plaque installed in 2000 at the Kharkov Theater noting the trial makes no mention of Jews as victims. However, in 2002 a memorial was dedicated in the presence of Ukraine’s president, Leonid Kuchma, at Drobitsky Yar. A nine-foot-tall menorah stands beside the highway at Drobitsky Yar: “To one side, a tree-lined road winds to a massive white arch with the years ‘1941–1942’ framed in a circle on the outside and bright blue Stars of David within. Below the arch is a sculpture depicting the tablets of the Ten Commandments. ‘Thou Shall Not Kill’ [is] engraved in several languages, including Yiddish and Ukrainian.”88
And in 1996, the Kharkov Holocaust Museum opened in Kharkov. It contains an exhibit devoted to the murder campaign against the Jews and the trial at Kharkov in 1943, including photos, a documentary of the trials, and other archival materials. The museum remains “the only public Holocaust museum in Ukraine.”89
Prime Minister Pierre Laval meeting with Reich Marshal Hermann Göring. Photo Archive, Yad Vashem.
2
The Trial of Pierre Laval
Criminal Collaborator or Patriot?
Once Germany began its conquest of Europe, the only European countries that could stop the German military onslaught were the other regional military powers: France, Britain, and the Soviet Union. Nazi Germany never succeeded in conquering Britain and the Soviet Union. It conquered France in just thirty-three days.1 What came afterwards remains one of the most shameful periods in French history.
Approximately 75,000 Jews were deported from French transit camps to their deaths in occupied Poland between 1942 and the end of German occupation, in December 1944. Almost a third of these were French citizens, and over 8,000 were children under thirteen. The roundup of the Jews was conducted by the French police and pursuant to laws enacted by French authorities. It took over forty years for France to finally acknowledge its role in the Holocaust. In 1995, President Jacques Chirac spoke for the first time about France’s responsibility for the deportation of Jews: “The folly of the occupiers was seconded by the French, by the French state,”2 he said.
President Chirac’s statement referred not only the ignoble role France played in the Holocaust, but also the larger shame that a large portion of the French population collaborated with the German occupiers.3 And this collaboration included much of the French political class. One of those was a major political figure in prewar France: Pierre Laval.
Laval was born in 1883 in Châteldon, a small town in the central Auvergne region of France.4 His early political affiliations were socialist but, as he commented at the end of his life, he was not a doctrinal socialist but more a socialist of the heart. Laval was first elected to the French National Assembly at age thirty and simultaneously elected as mayor of Aubervilliers, a working-class suburb of Paris. He held this latter position for over twenty years until he was removed from it in 1944 by the provisional French government of Charles de Gaulle. In addition to success as a politician, Laval was a successful lawyer, representing mainly workers and frequently attaining favorable results. Trials would mark both the beginning and the end of his professional life.
Laval’s political career witnessed more electoral wins than losses and, as he moved upward in the French governmental structure, he also drifted to the right. In the 1920s, he occupied subcabinet and cabinet positions in various center-right governments, leading to his selection twice as prime minister of France in the 1930s: from January 1931 to February 1932, and then again from June 1935 to February 1936.
As a government minister, Laval had to deal with many of the issues that arose in the last ten years of the French Third Republic. It appears that Laval’s views on Germany and on international relations in general were formulated during this period. These came to shape his conduct as a leading figure in the Vichy regime, which followed the military defeat and collapse of France in 1940, the armistice with Nazi Germany, and the end of the Third Republic.
In his prewar tenures as prime minister, Laval’s principal concern with Germany–pre-Hitler Germany–dealt with reparations owed by the Weimar Republic to France, France’s debt to the United States, and the burden the international economic crisis imposed on these financial obligations. Laval’s efforts in this area resulted in a 1931 trip to the United States, when he met President Herbert Hoover and other leading American political figures. All seemed to have been impressed with his practicality and intelligence.5 The seven months of Laval’s tenure as Vichy France’s prime minister, four years later, were in an entirely different world—rendering the financial issues he dealt with in 1931 almost inconsequential, if not even quaint.
Hitler had written in 1925 in Mein Kampf that France and Germany were intractable enemies. Once he became Germany’s chancellor in 1933, his public message changed. In a 1934 speech to the Reichstag, Hitler announced that there was no reason for France and Germany to remain foes. To demonstrate the absence of tensions between Germany and France, Hitler renounced any claim to Alsace and Lorraine and stated that the only issue between the two countries was the status of the Saar, where a plebiscite was to be held to determine whether it would be French or German territory. That plebiscite, held in 1935, resulted in the Saar reverting to Germany, a result that France and the rest of Europe accepted. Unfortunately, Hitler’s statements in Mein Kampf presented a far more accurate depiction of his objectives than those in the conciliatory speech before the Reichstag.
Laval’s approach to Germany also envisaged cooperation between the two continental powers. His underlying philosophy was that France and Germany, as powerful neighbors, would clash on the battlefield every twenty years unless they reached some long-term accommodation. To keep its belligerent neighbor at bay, Laval sought to isolate Germany from other European powers. Clearly, an alliance between Hitler and the United Kingdom was not realistic. Thus Laval tried to work out an alliance between France and Italy. The latter was an especial focus of his foreign policy, an objective complicated both by Italy’s colonial ambitions in North Africa, which conflicted with French interests there, and Italy’s expansive policies in Abyssinia (Ethiopia), which generally came in conflict with the position of Western liberal democracies. Nevertheless, Laval felt that a union of France and Italy, coupled perhaps with Nationalist Spain, would preclude Germany from implementing any aggressive objectives. Laval saw himself as a friend to Italy and was convinced that he had an almost unique ability to resolve issues with it, an ability that had to lie dormant during the critical years between his tenure as prime minister, which ended in 1936, and the beginning of the Second World War. There was a certain delusional quality to Laval’s conception of himself as a unique facilitator of Italian issues.6 With or without Laval, during this period Italy drifted inexorably into a military alliance with Germany.
The last part of the 1930s saw increased belligerence and expansionism on the part of Germany. The notion that all Germany wanted was to regain the Saar was quickly shown to be nonsense. In addition to defaulting on its post–First World War reparations obligations, Germany also remilitarized the Rhineland in direct defiance of the Versailles Treaty. This was followed by (1) the annexation of Austria