Confronting Vichy--After More Than 50 Years

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — Most painful memories fade, some are sustained by liturgy, still others return almost on their own, compelling attention and judgments many would prefer not to render. The current trial of Maurice Papon, pensioned French civil servant charged with helping send Jews to their deaths in occupied France, is one of the occasions for intrusive recall.

A year ago, the trial in Rome of Erich Priebke, an SS officer charged for his role in the shooting of hostages, many of them Jews, prodded Italian self-scrutiny. Swiss bankers hoping to minimize the issue of the bank deposits they accepted from abroad--victims’ gold? perpetrators’ gold?--have seen their long-accepted self-exculpations blow up in their faces. In a world of media saturation, Holocaust memories return with unabated force. But why now?

The answer must be sought among those summoning back the memories rather than among the surviving, elderly perpetrators. Frenchmen have known for a long time that many of their own wartime civil servants helped the German occupiers of France deport about 75,000 Jews--some recent immigrants from an inhospitable Eastern Europe, others from families resident for centuries in a country that had long guaranteed their civic rights. The Jews were rounded up from Paris, from provincial cities, such as Bordeaux, and from country villages where many had sought to go underground. They were sent to Drancy, a gritty suburban transit stop that travelers pass through when taking the train into town from Charles de Gaulle Airport, and thence to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. They were part of that great European rail migration to murder that the SS planners, German and local police, German and local railroad authorities, and so many civil servants were organizing to perfection that summer.

Today, one 87-year-old Frenchman, Papon, then a single-minded, mid-level regional administrator near Bordeaux, has finally come to trial for his zeal in helping to carry out this French ethnic cleansing. Did he know the final fate in store for the Jews he helped ship east? Would he have cared? His superiors in the French wartime government were busy undoing the civic guarantees of 150 years, working out a Jewish statute that mimicked the Nuremberg laws. They undid naturalization, confiscated property, restricted livelihoods and domiciles, imposed the wearing of yellow stars and, in general, anticipated the Nazi project for France with their own collaborative zeal.

At first, they claimed to surrender only recently arrived Jews to protect native-born French Jews, though some in France went on to argue that Jewishness and Frenchness had never been compatible. As so many compliant officials claimed to relearn throughout occupied Europe, Jews were a people apart. In the end, the occupying authorities grew impatient with the residues of French national guarantees and rounded up the Jews they could, sometimes with de facto French police assistance.

Why does this shabby, melancholy and ultimately murderous story re-intrude with such insistence now, more than half a century later? Previous efforts to bring Papon to trial foundered on the influence of friends the conscientious civil servant had cultivated in the postwar era, when with incredible baldness he claimed to be a resister and continued an influential administrative career. Postwar political leaders, claiming their own places in the proud French state apparatus, had an interest in protecting the reputation of the Republic and attributing unpleasant wartime transgressions to a few opportunists who had already been punished. President Francois Mitterrand, who himself had briefly accepted Vichy preferment, saw no need to scrutinize the past.

Besides Mitterrand’s disappearance from the scene, what has changed to allow a full-scale examination? What, too, has led spokesmen for the French Catholic Church to apologize to the Jewish community for the church’s acceptance, if not endorsement, of Vichy policies? Why are so many earlier transactions with Nazi policies, such as those of Swiss bankers, that were left unexamined as necessary compromises now revisited in shame?

One impression must be resisted: Amnesia has not reigned unchallenged in the last half century. This is not the first time France has attempted to examine its past behavior. The 1971 Marcel Ophuls film, “The Sorrow and the Pity,” helped open a debate on wartime choices. It was shown to a wide audience on television a decade later. But at each revelation, the French claimed that collaborators were few and exceptional.

In contrast, Germans, a good number at any rate, have long had to come to terms with inhumane actions of their parents and grandparents. Most did so unwillingly at first, then hesitantly, then as part of a generational confrontation, as a prerequisite to rebuilding a decent democracy. Still, revelations, most recently about some notable postwar historians who were enthusiasts for “resettlement” in Poland, periodically roil their professional heirs.

It has been harder for those societies whose peoples played an auxiliary role to deal with their complicity. Austrians fell back on their image as early victims, rather than as enthusiastic joiners of the Third Reich, to postpone any serious self-reckoning. Postwar leaders of German-occupied countries who had taken part in the resistance movements put some of the collaborators on trial in the first postwar years. But after an initial wave of purge trials, doing justice became more complicated. The cases began to fall into that gray area where defendants claimed only to have yielded to what had been imposed or to have acted to prevent even worse cruelty. Papon will defend himself by citing the orders he received or his ignorance of the Final Solution, but his zeal seems well-established. He could have resigned. Some spokesmen for the Swiss banking community will claim, and not without some justification, that as a small country with a history of neutrality, they had to offer their commercial services to all.

But the point is that the behavior now being condemned is not just that of bowing to superior force. It involved endorsing with adapted zeal the policies of the Germans, then manufacturing alibis and excuses in the postwar period. A French civil servant could have helped throw sand into the administrative machinery, delayed arrests, allowed Jews to hide. Swiss banks did not really prolong the war, but they could have opened their transactions after May 1945. And the Swiss have not yet really thrashed out the closing of their frontiers to many of those fleeing Papon’s zealous Vichy colleagues in the summer of 1942.

Though wartime collaboration has been periodically examined, painful contests over collective memory now seem to form a theme of many nations’ civic life.

The most obvious cause is the generational transition. It was evident in the outpouring of emotion that marked the great 50th anniversary commemorations of D-day and the end of World War II. This was a last chance for the young soldiers who fought the war to be present in substantial numbers. It now seems a last chance to get at those collaborators still around. It is a last chance for aged victims to press their claims for retribution and compensation. At the same time, half a century finally provides psychological distance enough to confront shameful national behavior, to be able to overcome the reticence a silent majority has maintained to protect its own unease.

A second reason may be that the great drama is no longer a partisan political one. For almost 50 years, the European left, above all, the French, Italian and East European communist parties, claimed the legacy of the Resistance and sought to use the demand for “purges” to justify their own political role. History was oversimplified, justice was exploited for the sake of influence and power. Now these trials can take place without having implicitly to support a political scenario that was itself misleading. The Resistance is no longer the organizing trope of the postwar left.

The third reason is the most complicated and reflects less the history of past atrocities than the new constituencies of contemporary political society. Along with North Americans and South Africans, and indeed so many nations, Europeans now have to confront multicultural diversity. Their societies have become crowded again with immigrants, often from lands once their colonies. Arguing about the rights of residency or citizenship raises echoes of wartime issues.

Civic culture rests on the demand for group recognition, recognition not just that new groups want to be French, but that they also wish to remain distinct. What is more, the group assertiveness that marks multicultural politics have so far tended to encourage claims of victimization. For better or worse, societies validate group recognition by selectively honoring those claims, sometimes through monuments and public rituals, sometimes through monetary settlements, sometimes by agreeing that no matter how delayed, justice be meted out to those who refused recognition earlier.

Of course, at this belated stage, justice cannot fully be done nor could it ever have been really done. Bringing a perpetrator to justice only follows a far more massive injustice in which many usually acquiesced. At best, doing justice today involves setting the record straight, as in South Africa; or perhaps, as in the Swiss case, winning some reparation, or perhaps, as in the Papon case, finally extracting some retribution. Justice delayed is justice denied, but less totally denied than if never sought.

Perhaps, too, justice in these cases means insisting that civic tolerance must continue to prevail This time around, perhaps the last time around, the trials look forward as well as back.