When France fell in June 1940, many surrendered on the battlefield — but others surrendered for profit. Pierre Pucheu, a successful steel magnate and director of the Cartel d’Acier, saw opportunity in defeat. He had built his fortune linking French industry with the Ruhr and the Škoda works in Czechoslovakia, and under the Vichy regime he used those same networks to serve Nazi Germany.

As Minister of Industrial Production and later Minister of the Interior, Pucheu ensured that French factories supplied the German war machine and that political opponents were silenced. His bureaucratic efficiency helped channel resources, labour, and obedience to the occupiers. Yet when the tide turned, the man who once prepared execution lists for the Nazis faced his own reckoning. Arrested by the Free French and tried in Algiers, Pierre Pucheu was executed in 1944 — a symbol of how ambition and business with the enemy became treason against a nation.