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| Maurice Papon |
Maurice Papon was a French civil servant, leading the police in major prefectures and in Paris during the Nazi Occupation of France and into the 1960s. Forced to resign because of allegations of abuses, he became an industrial leader and Gaullist politician. In 1998 he was convicted of crimes against humanity for his participation in the deportation of more than 1600Jews to concentration camps during World War IIwhen he was secretary general for police in Bordeaux.
Papon was known to have tortured insurgent prisoners (1954–62) as prefect of the Constantinoisdepartment during the Algerian War. He was namedchief of the Paris police in 1958. On October 17, 1961 he ordered the severe repression of a peaceful pro-National Liberation Front (FLN) demonstration against a curfew which he had imposed. What became known as the Paris massacre of 1961 left between one hundred and three hundred dead at the hands of the police, with many more wounded.That same year, Papon was personally awarded theLegion of Honour by French President Charles de Gaulle, whose government was struggling to retain the French colony.
Papon Trial
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| Papon was incarcerated at the La Santé Prison in Paris |
Evidence of his responsibility in the Holocaust emerged in 1981, and throughout the 1980s he fought a string of legal battles.
Le Canard enchaîné newspaper published an article titled "Papon, aide de camps. Quand un ministre de Giscard faisait déporter des juifs" (Papon, Aide-de-camp: When one of Giscard's ministers deported the Jews) on May 6, 1981, just before the presidential election opposing Socialist candidate François Mitterrand and right-wing candidate Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. (Mitterrand won, defeating incumbent president Giscard.) The newspaper showed documents signed by Papon which demonstrated his responsibility in the deportation of 1,690 Jews of Bordeaux to Drancy from 1942 to 1944 These documents had been provided to the satirical newspaper by one of the survivors of Papon's raid, Michel Slitinsky (1925 - 2012), in the spring of 1981. He had received them from historian Michel Bergès, who had discovered them in February 1981 in the departmental archives.
Famous Nazi hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeldhelped bring him to trial, where Serge and his sonArno Klarsfeld represented the families of the victims. Other important collaborators, such asRené Bousquet, head of the French police under Vichy, did not undergo trials. (Bousquet was assassinated in 1993, shortly before his trial was to start. His adjunct, Jean Leguay, committed suicide in 1989 10 years after he was indicted for crimes against humanity for his role in the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup of July 1942, but before he went to trial. In 1995, President Jacques Chirac recognized that the French state was responsible for the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup.
Papon had begun writing his memoirs before his death; he criticized Chirac's official recognition of the involvement of the French state in theHolocaust.
Charges of crimes against humanity, complicity of assassination and abuse of authority were first brought against Papon in January 1983. Three months later, Papon sued the families of the victims for defamation, but eventually lost. The slow investigation was canceled in 1987 because of legal technicalities (a mistake by the investigating magistrate). New charges were laid in 1988, in October 1990, and in June 1992. The investigation was finished in July 1995. In December 1995, Papon was sent to the Cour d'Assises, accused of organizing four deportation trains (later increased to eight trains). The French press contrasted Papon, the Bordeaux official who was "just following orders" in the commission of murder, to Aristides de Sousa Mendes, another Bordeaux official from the same period who defied orders in order to save lives.
Papon finally went to trial on October 8, 1997, after 14 years of bitter legal wrangling. The trial was the longest in French history, finishing on April 2, 1998. Papon was accused of ordering the arrest and deportation of 1,560 Jews, including children and the elderly, between 1942 and 1944.
As in Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem 30 years before, one of the issues of the trial was to determine to what extent an individual should be held responsible in a chain of responsibility. But the most important issue was France's responsibility for the realisation of the Holocaust, as the Vichy regime had willfully collaborated with Nazi Germany.
Papon's lawyers argued that he was a mid-level official, not the person making decisions about whom to deport. His lawyers argued that he did the most good he could, given the circumstances, and ensured that those to be deported were treated well while in his custody. However, the prosecution argued that the defence of following orders was not sufficient, and that Papon bore at least some of the responsibility for the deportations. Calling on assistance from the best historians of the period, they dismantled his arguments of having tried to "humanize" the conditions of deportations of the Jews. While Papon claimed that he had worked to grant humane conditions of transport to the camp of Mérignac, historians testified that his concerns were motivated by efficiency. Although Papon claimed that he had used ordinary trains, and not livestock trains as used by the SNCF in numerous other transfers, the historians asserted that he was trying to prevent any demonstration of sympathy toward the Jews from the local population.
Leading historians of the period who testified as "experts" during the trial included Jean-Pierre Azéma, André Kaspi, Marc-Olivier Baruch, Henry Rousso, Denis Peschanski, Maurice Rajsfus, René Rémond, Jacques Delarue, Henri Amouroux, Michel Bergès, as well as US historian Robert Paxton and Swiss historian Philippe Burin. The defense tried to exclude Paxton's testimony, claiming that the international and national context was irrelevant; the magistrate dismissed their argument. He said that crimes against "humanity" necessarily imply a larger context.
Paxton, an expert in Vichy history, dismissed the "preconceived ideas" according to which Vichy had "hoped to protect French Jews" by handing "foreign Jews" over to the Germans. "From the start, at the summit, it was known that their departure [of the French Jews] was unavoidable." He said, "Italians had protected the Jews. And the French authorities complained about it to the Germans." Paxton concluded, "The French state, itself, has participated in the politics of extermination of the Jews."
In his 36-minute final speech to the jury, Papon rarely evoked those killed during the Holocaust. He portrayed himself as a victim of "the saddest chapter in French legal history." He denounced a "Moscow Trial", and compared his status to that ofAlfred Dreyfus in the nineteenth century.
Having proved that Papon had organized eight "death trains", the plaintiffs' lawyers recommended that he be given a 20-year prison term, as opposed to the sentence of life imprisonment, which is usually the norm for such crimes. Papon was convicted in 1998 and was given a 10-year prison term.
His lawyers filed an appeal in the Court of Cassation, but Papon fled to Switzerland under the name of Robert de La Rochefoucauld, in violation of French law which requires one to report to prison before the beginning of the appeal hearing. The real Robert de La Rochefoucauld, a well-known hero of the French resistance, who maintained that Papon had in fact worked for the resistance, had given Papon his passport to enable him to escape. Papon's appeal, scheduled for 21 October 1999, was automatically denied by the Court because of his flight. France issued an international arrest warrant, and he was quickly caught by Swiss police and extradited. Beginning on October 22, 1999, Papon served time at the La Santé Prison in Paris. Papon was stripped of all his decorations; under French law, people convicted of severe crimes cannot be members of the Legion of Honour.
SOURCES:
- The important dates of the Papon Affair, Le Figaro, February 17, 2007 (French)
- French official quoted in Drowning by Bullets(2001) documentary, directed by Philip Brooks & Alan Hayling
- Maurice Papon, une carrière française, Le Monde, September 19, 2002 (French)
- Les dates clefs de la vie de Maurice Papon, Le Figaro, February 12, 2007 (French)
- "Les grandes dates de sa carrière", Le Nouvel Observateur, February 17, 2007 (French)
- Éric Roussel, Charles de Gaulle, éd. Gallimard, 2002, p. 460 (French)
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