Onetime Vichy Official Surrenders on Eve of Trial

Looking frail and glum but making no secret of the fury in his heart, Maurice Papon, onetime official of the wartime Vichy regime, surrendered at a prison near Bordeaux on Tuesday on the eve of his trial for alleged involvement in World War II crimes.

In an angry communique made public by his attorneys, Papon, 87, denounced the imminent proceedings as a “prefabricated trial” and a “masquerade unworthy of a state of law.”

Papon, who from 1942 to 1944 was secretary-general of the prefecture, or regional government, in Bordeaux, is accused of complicity in the roundup and deportation of more than 1,500 Jews, most of whom perished in the death camps of Nazi Germany.

His keenly awaited trial, the first of a ranking official of the Vichy regime for alleged connivance in the Nazi “final solution,” has sparked enormous media interest in France. And it coincides with what seems to be a national rethinking of the wartime years, including the failings and misdeeds of many French institutions then.

The same day Papon turned himself in at Gradignan prison outside Bordeaux, the country’s largest police union, the National Union of Uniformed Police Officers, offered an extraordinary apology for the willingness of French police during World War II to take part in mass roundups of Jews.

“Current events send us back to the dark hours of our history and highlight the preponderant and harmful role of a good number of policemen who spontaneously put themselves at the service of the ‘French state’ [Vichy] and voluntarily acted in the Holocaust in organizing and implementing the roundups of the Jews of France,” the union said.

It was Vichy-era authorities who, in part to safeguard remaining slivers of French sovereignty, took charge of mass arrests of Jews here, including an infamous roundup of more than 13,000 men, women and children in Paris on July 16, 1942, in which 4,500 police participated. The detainees were eventually shipped to the concentration camps of Eastern Europe, where all but a few died.

On Tuesday night, members of the police union made a solemn pilgrimage to the Paris memorial to the Jewish martyrs of World War II, near Notre Dame cathedral, to lay a floral wreath and express “eternal regrets.”

In keeping with French legal custom, Papon was required to turn himself in on the day before his trial. His lawyers have said that when court begins today, their first motion will be to have the retired civil servant and former minister and member of parliament, who underwent a triple heart bypass operation last year, freed.

Customarily in France, a defendant in such a trial is kept in jail for its duration. Papon’s trial is expected to last 2 1/2 months. If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Papon left his home near Paris and traveled with his lawyers aboard a high-speed train to Bordeaux. Looking tired and worn, but managing a faint smile for one of the sympathizers who came to meet him, he was whisked under heavy police escort to the prison in a Bordeaux suburb.

In his communique, Papon claimed he is being victimized by media “fanaticism” and the determination of the powerful to make France shoulder a share of wartime guilt. His last hope, he said, was to appeal to “deepest France.”

“Public interest commands resistance, like before,” said Papon, who claims to have played a double game during World War II and to have covertly helped the Free French and Jewish refugees.