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In triumph and a uniform designed for him by Hitler, Abetz returned to Paris in 1941 as German high commissioner of occupied France and ambassador to Vichy.
Jean Luchaire became the "fiihrer" of the French collaborationist press, sent his son into the German army, his brother into the SS. For Corinne's affections, there existed no national (and scarcely any numerical) boundary. She gave birth to the daughter of a Luftwaffe captain. Abetz turned to other mistresses. With the last of them, a tall, dressy French art student, he was arrested in October 1945 in occupied Germany.
Chamber 13. Early in 1946, a firing squad shot grim, contemptuous Jean Luchaire for treason. Several months later, Corinne, racked by dissipation and tuberculosis, was condemned to ten years' "national indignity." Last week in Paris, Otto Abetz was on trial for crimes he committed during the German occupation: com plicity in maltreatment of Jews and French officers, looting French art treasures.
The heat in tiny, suffocating Chamber 13 of the Palais de Justice matted the 46-year-old defendant's white mane, wreathed his wrinkled face in perspiration. Four years after the war, the narrative of Nazi evil retold in the courtroom roused no passion, fell back into forgetfulness. During his deft defense, Abetz mechanically professed Nazi theory, just as mechanically pleaded that he had always tried to mitigate Nazi practice. The sentence: 20 years at hard labor.