France Set to Face Its Vichy Past in Court

This painful reckoning with the past wasn’t supposed to happen. One French president admitted trying to postpone it. Most people with firsthand knowledge are dead. Some would like to see the central actor vanish as well.

But Maurice Papon, who turned 87 last month and is reportedly frail after a triple coronary bypass operation last year, is still alive. And this week, when the chilly, aloof retired civil servant is escorted by police into a packed courtroom here and put into a dock protected by a pane of thick glass, France, as it never has before, will be brought face to face with the most shameful, troubling page of its recent past: the wartime collaborationist regime of Vichy.

It all never would have come about, save for the chance discovery of files by a researcher who had meant to spend his winter vacation poring over records of Bordeaux’s celebrated wine industry, and for a daring rooftop escape by a Jewish teenager facing arrest more than 50 years ago.

Maurice Papon--hero, villain or both? That is the troubling question Bordeaux’s Assizes Court will be forced to answer. But simultaneously, it is Vichy, and how France has dealt with some of the darkest deeds ever committed by its citizens, that will be on trial.

For Papon, who has said he is nothing but a “designated victim” in a piece of stage-managed judicial theater, will be the first ranking official of the Vichy government made to account for French involvement in the Nazis’ persecution of and discrimination against Jews.

He specifically is charged with conniving in “crimes against humanity”--for having helped organize rail convoys that embarked 1,560 Jews, French and foreign, on a tragic odyssey from this port city in southwestern France that, for most, ended in the Nazi death camps of Eastern Europe.

On Aug. 26, 1942, Papon allegedly handed over to the Nazis for deportation at least 11 Jewish children whom he could have helped to escape.

“Papon wasn’t an executioner, he was a functionary,” said Michel Slitinsky, 72, a retired Bordeaux trucking company executive whose father died at Auschwitz. “But with a pen, he managed to do things even worse.”

Papon counters that, although an employee of the collaborationist regime, he was secretly and bravely helping the Allied cause--a claim buttressed by the findings of a “court of honor” of former Resistance heroes 16 years ago--and that he sabotaged the Vichy bureaucracy and watered down regulations to save at least 130 Jews or make the plight of deportees more humane--for instance, by requisitioning passenger cars instead of the cattle cars often used.

But the same panel found Papon’s actions in 1942-44 as secretary-general of the Bordeaux prefecture, in charge of governing a region of southwestern France, to have been clearly dishonorable. It decided he should have resigned rather than serve the “French state” headed by Marshal Philippe Petain.

Overdue Process

In a larger sense, it is the Vichy administration that will be forced to defend itself, for the first (and given the age of most of the people directly involved, probably the last) time. For, say many historians and observers, the French at large still have not undergone the process known in Germany by the ungainly term Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung--coming to grips with the past.

In the Vichy regime’s 1940-44 existence, one French historian calculates, it passed 163 anti-Jewish laws, decrees, circulars and other measures--compared with a score of similar ordinances from the Nazis. According to French experts on the Holocaust, four out of every five Jews arrested in France were taken away by French police, or gendarmes, and not Germans.

The “Free Zone” of southern France, which the Wehrmacht occupied only in November 1942--after the first Allied landings in North Africa--was the only region of Europe where local officials rounded up Jews on their own initiative.

“Historians know this,” said Father Jean Dujardin, secretary of a committee founded by the Roman Catholic bishops of France for bettering relations with French Jewry. “But when it comes to public opinion and the French way of thinking, I’m still not sure that people don’t believe this was all done under pressure of the Occupation. . . . Now, that doesn’t mean that the Germans weren’t the authors of the Holocaust. They were. But we French made things easier for them.”

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Last week, in an emotion-filled ceremony at the site of the former Drancy detention camp near Paris, French bishops begged forgiveness for the Catholic Church’s tacit support of the Vichy regime and wartime silence in the face of official policies of anti-Semitism.

It is the victors who write the history books, of course, and postwar France was no exception.

At the Liberation, Gen. Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French, propounded a version of events that went like this: Though a few treacherous French men and women collaborated with the Nazis, the nation as a whole bravely resisted and fought. The saga of la France Combattante meant the nation could hold its head high with other Allied powers.

“De Gaulle wanted to reunite a defeated and divided country, building on the myth of the Resistance and containing the Communist menace by making France into a victor nation,” said Shimon T. Samuels, Paris-based director of international liaison for the Simon Wiesenthal Center. “Most French Jews preferred to accept the myth that Frenchmen collaborated only with knives at their throats, as the shattered Jewish community began to painfully reestablish itself.”

Exactly what the Nazi-allied state set up at Vichy, a spa town of central France, did or intended to do may become the central issue of Papon’s trial. “It was a defensive battle. It’s never glorious, a defensive battle,” Francois Lehideux, the last living Vichy minister, has said, repeating the thesis that Petain served France as a “shield” against Adolf Hitler.

Mass Amnesia

At any rate, stirring accounts of the Resistance’s derring-do are put into perspective by arithmetic. De Gaulle’s Free French troops numbered only about 10,000; there were an estimated 50,000 Resistance fighters on home territory. The population of France at the time was about 40 million.

Once back on French soil, De Gaulle had to quickly reassert control over a devastated, demoralized country and counter the ambitions of the Communists, the most powerful single contingent within the Resistance. The Vichy bureaucracy, therefore, was left largely intact.

According to Francois Rouquet, author of a study of the post-Liberation purges, only 28,000 of Vichy’s 1.5 million government employees were “sanctioned”--by summary execution, imprisonment, loss of employment or some other punishment. Postwar France simply needed as many technocrats and administrators as it could find.

In this environment of deliberate mass amnesia, Papon, son of a notary from the greater Paris area and a graduate of the prestigious Lycee Louis-le-Grand in the capital, flourished. After the 1944 Liberation, the functionary with a taste for literature and tennis, who was then 34, continued his career with barely a hiccup. He went on to become prefect in Corsica and Algeria, head of the Paris police, mayor, a member of France’s legislature and a Cabinet minister. In 1961, he was awarded the red rosette of the Legion of Honor, the nation’s highest decoration, by a grateful republic.

“Brought up on the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, this man accomplished the worst in order to further his own career,” said Arno Klarsfeld, a Paris lawyer who will represent the families of 10 wartime Jewish victims at Papon’s trial. “So maybe he did it without hate. But he didn’t do it without results. And the results were tragic for the Jewish families that he arrested.”

Papon’s attorneys will counter that while at the Bordeaux prefecture, he had no direct responsibility for police matters, was a relative small fry and had no idea of the terrible fate that awaited Jewish deportees.

Some historians agree. In an interview last month with a sympathetic right-wing magazine, Papon himself protested that he was being dragged into a “trial of the Stalinist type” because of pressure from Communists, “leftist lobbies or the press and judiciary” and an “international pressure group.”

By 1978, the devoted, efficient Papon was a member of the National Assembly for his family’s ancestral village in central France and budget minister under President Valery Giscard d’Estaing. It was during Giscard’s reelection bid, in spring 1981, that Papon’s world began to unravel.

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Michel Berges, today a history professor at the University of Bordeaux, decided to spend a February vacation that year rooting through archives of the Bordeaux prefecture along with a colleague. He was looking for documents relating to the dealings of the region’s wine growers during the Nazi Occupation, when exports to Germany doubled.

As Berges remembers it, he selected at random one of about 50 bundles of papers wrapped in an orange-red binder--and found himself holding a document about extra trains laid on to deport Jews en masse from Bordeaux between July and October 1942. In a small, neat hand, the yellowing papers were signed “Papon.”

“It’s the same Papon who’s now Giscard’s minister,” the astonished Berges recalls his colleague saying.

Meanwhile, another Bordeaux man was on the trail. Michel Slitinsky, the son of an immigrant Ukrainian garment maker, was determined to find out who was responsible for the wrongs done to his family.

One night in October 1942, two French police had pounded on the shutters of the family shop. “We’re trapped like rats,” the elder Slitinsky said in Yiddish. He was arrested and deported and later perished in the Holocaust. The younger Slitinsky’s sister, Alice, was also bundled off but would be released three months later. It appears she was freed on Papon’s initiative--in one sign of how complicated his trial promises to be in weighing the good and evil of Vichy.

To escape from the police, Michel, then 17, pulled the fuses out of the fuse box, clubbed one man with a flatiron and, as officers groped for a light, hid in a crawl space under the stairs. He escaped through a window onto the rooftop, hid until curfew was over, kissed his bedridden mother goodbye and left on a bicycle. He joined the Resistance in central France.

Campaign Bombshell

Berges and Slitinsky have since fallen out over the extent of Papon’s responsibilities in the persecution of Bordeaux’s Jews. Berges says it was he who passed along copies of the documents bearing Papon’s signature to Slitinsky.

(The former Resistance member will say only that they came from “sources.”)

At any rate, Slitinsky sent them to an investigative and satirical weekly, Le Canard Enchaine. And, in the midst of the May 1981 presidential election, the paper dropped its bombshell, under the startling headline “When a minister of Giscard had Jews deported.” Giscard lost, and Francois Mitterrand, the Socialist challenger, won.

For Slitinsky and other Bordeaux residents whose families suffered under the Occupation, bringing Papon to account has been a 16-year grind, filled with frustrating halts and procedural meanderings that often seemed without any plausible explanation. But in 1994, then-President Mitterrand cast some light on the mystery by admitting that he had intervened to brake the trial of Papon and other wartime collaborators.

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“We cannot live forever on memories and bitterness,” said the president, who was himself a Vichy functionary before enrolling in the Resistance. To keep the “civil peace,” he said, one should avoid “reopening the old wounds.”

Mitterrand, in fact, had remained friends with Rene Bousquet, chief of Vichy’s dreaded police and organizer of its massive rafles, or roundups of Jews, until the mid-1980s. In 1993, Bousquet was killed by a publicity-hungry assassin, weeks before he was supposed to stand trial for crimes against humanity.

Bousquet’s assistant, Jean Leguay, was charged in 1979 but died 10 years later without being brought to trial.

One Frenchman who was brought to justice was Paul Touvier, chief of the Lyons detachment of the brutal pro-Nazi French militia. He was given a life sentence in 1994 and died last year at 81.

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To help determine Papon’s fate, and judge the regime he served, more than 115 witnesses have been called, ranging from eminent historians and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel to Giscard and two French prime ministers. The trial should last 2 1/2 months, with a verdict scheduled the day before Christmas Eve.

If found guilty, Papon could be sentenced to spend whatever years are left to him in prison.

In July 1995, President Jacques Chirac, though a Gaullist, became the first leader of France to turn his back on the old wartime myths by apologizing to French Jewry for the injustices committed by Vichy.

But on the eve of Papon’s trial, and more than half a century since the war, the French people evidently remain divided. A poll in the latest edition of L’Express news weekly found that 50% of the French now judge Vichy to have been a “shameful” episode in their history. But almost as many, 42%, called it a period “like any other.” For 4%, it was “glorious.”

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BACKGROUND

“Vichy France” is the familiar name of the French state established after the Nazi blitzkrieg of 1940 overran much of the country and Marshal Philippe Petain, a World War I hero who was then 84, asked Adolf Hitler for an armistice. Intended to preserve a maximum of French self-rule, Vichy in fact soon became a Nazi tool. Its proclaimed goal of a “national revolution”--and the native-bred hatred of Jews, Freemasons, foreigners and others seen by many on the French extreme right as the reason for the humiliating defeat--led Vichy’s rulers to begin imposing racist, discriminatory policies even before the occupying Germans demanded them. Its power and responsibilities increasingly chipped away by the Nazis, Vichy was little more than a puppet state by the time of the D-day landings of June 1944. Led by Petain, many Vichy leaders fled to Germany and were arrested at war’s end.