In the bitter settlement of accounts after World War II, French justice gave short shrift to the men who had run the Vichy government for the Nazis. By the records, 8,348 collaborators were executed without benefit of trial and another 1,325 were sent to their death by kangaroo courts. In a trial that many Frenchmen would like to forget, the top collaborator of them all, Vichy Chief of Government Pierre Laval, drew his death sentence from a "High Court of Justice" that included resistance veterans who yelled curses at the defendant. When Laval...
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