The story, like so many others of the mid-20th Century, came to its end in a courtroom. But its beginnings were more auspicious. It began, more or less, on that day in 1926 when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand and German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann. Putting aside the enmities of World War I, Briand and Stresemann had signed at Locarno a mutual security pact.
To support their diplomacy of good will, the two men encouraged Franco-German youth congresses, literary and scientific conventions, exchanged theater companies, formed a Franco-German Society. In Paris, Briand subsidized a newspaper edited by gifted Jean Luchaire.
Luchaire was well prepared as an advocate of French-German reconciliation. His father had served Briand at the League of Nations, his stepmother was Stresemann's secretary and biographer. Jean's wife waved the flag of rapprochement in her own way: she became Stresemann's mistress, took Jean's daughter Corinne to Germany with her. Little Corinne so charmed Stresemann's friend, Banker Kurt von Schroeder, that the rich old man took her into his home.
A Clean Passion. Outstanding on the other side of the reconciliation movement was a blond, blue & starry eyed young German drawing teacher, Otto Abetz. Under his leadership, the two countries exchanged students, published a Franco-German magazine at Stuttgart. Abetz attended a vacation camp in the Black Forest where French and German youths pledged themselves to pacifism and eternal friendship.
Otto Abetz met Luchaire, became his friend, married Luchaire's secretary, Suzanne de Brouckere. In those days, Abetz loved France with a clean passion. The passion endured even while, on both sides of the Rhine, the foundations of rapprochement were crumbling. Hitler, backed by money from Banker von Schroeder and others, had come to power.
Suzanne bore Otto a son. To famed French Novelist Jules Remains, visiting Abetz' shabby Berlin apartment in 1934, the child seemed "touching, born as he was, not of a chance meeting between two people, but of an ideal which had drawn them together."
Obsessed with his ideal, Abetz convinced himself that the "reasonable and peaceful elements" in Naziism would help him realize it. Eagerly, he went back to Paris. This time he had 350,000 francs a month expense money from the Nazis. He used it to subsidize pro-German writers, to make himself the intimate acquaintance of powerful French politicians and industrialists. He paved the way for Munich and the failure of French arms.
Criminality & Corruption. Jean Luchaire shared Abetz' feelings, helped him mightily. As "men of good will" under Briand and Stresemann, the two had failed to bind France and Germany together in peace and prosperity. In the Nazi era, they forged a lethal link between German criminality and French corruption.
Now a piquant and beautiful film actress, Corinne Luchaire had grown up among the "respectable" Nazis that frequented Banker von Schroeder's mansion. There, too, she had met Otto Abetz. Politically, Otto was faithless to France; personally, he was faithless to his wife Suzanne and the son that symbolized their pre-Nazi ideal. Before he was expelled from France in 1939, Otto Abetz made 17-year-old Corinne Luchaire his mistress.