Climax of Vichy Official’s Trial Nears in France

It has been one of the lengthiest trials in French history, twice as long as the prosecution of Joan of Arc for heresy and witchcraft. Today, or in the early hours of Thursday, the judicial ordeal should finally grind to a halt, with the defendant--frail, weary but unbent and clamoring his innocence at age 87--rising to hear his fate.

Over the past half-year, France has excruciatingly been reliving the most checkered chapter of its modern history through the trial of Maurice Papon, a former mid-level functionary in the World War II Vichy government. Papon, who went on to an illustrious career in government and politics, is charged with complicity in “crimes against humanity” for having rubber-stamped the organization of rail convoys that deported more than 1,500 Jews, hundreds of them children, who perished in Nazi death camps between 1942 and 1944.

Though thousands of collaborators were tried after the Liberation, never before has an erstwhile Vichy official been brought into court on specific charges of having aided or abetted the Nazis in their war against the Jews.

Last Oct. 8, when court convened in the honey-colored stone Palace of Justice in the heart of southwestern France’s celebrated wine country, l’affaire Papon was trumpeted as the nation’s best, or even final, chance to come to terms with the evil deeds of Vichy and the fact, long denied in official history and myth, that Frenchmen, not the German occupiers alone, committed atrocities.

Almost six months later, with a verdict now in the offing, some hold the ballyhooed “trial of the century” to have been a semi-success and no more.

A poll printed last week by the Paris-based newspaper Liberation indicated that, though most of the French followed news reports of the trial, it had not wrought any sea change in opinion; 82% of respondents said they had learned “little” about the 1940-44 Nazi occupation of France, and 62% said that the trial had failed to establish Papon’s precise responsibilities. More than half of those polled said that the legal marathon in Bordeaux had not been “useful.”

“It’s not Papon there is difficulty in judging, but four years of France’s history,” said Sorj Chalandon, a writer for the left-wing daily.

Even if convicted, Papon, who says he was a covert worker in the Resistance who risked his life to save Jews, will be able to walk out of the Bordeaux courtroom a free man until his appeal is heard, a process that could take years and that might still be in full swing at the time of his death.

Also, though he is accused of the gravest charge in the French criminal code, the sole crime for which the statute of limitations is waived, public prosecutors have asked for only a 20-year prison sentence.

Papon, wartime secretary-general in the Bordeaux prefecture, or regional government, “was an indispensable cog who had an essential role, but he was not the instigator, he was not the only accomplice,” Prosecutor General Henri Desclaux has told the court.

To family members of wartime deportees, or the few survivors who made it back from Auschwitz and the other Nazi concentration camps, anything other than a life term would seem to profane the memory of the victims.

“If a child killer warrants a life term, what should be the penalty for Papon, who was an accomplice in the murder of 200 children?” asked Maurice-David Matisson, 72, who lost eight members of his family at Auschwitz.

Gerard Boulanger, a Bordeaux lawyer who, in 1981, brought the first lawsuit against Papon on behalf of Matisson and other Jewish families--an action that ultimately resulted in the trial--added: “Without all the Papons, Hitler wouldn’t have been able to do what he did.”

It took 16 years for court proceedings to begin against a VIP defendant who had been prefect of the Paris police in the 1960s, occupied a seat in the National Assembly and served as Prime Minister Raymond Barre’s budget minister. “This is a man who killed with the ink of his pen,” Boulanger said. “It’s difficult to mobilize people against a crime that is not visible, not violent.”

A verdict had been scheduled last Dec. 23 so everyone could be home for Christmas. But 5 1/2 weeks of delays, including three suspensions on account of the health problems of Papon, who underwent triple heart-bypass surgery in 1996, helped string the trial out.

By comparison, it took only eight weeks to try Lyons Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie in 1987 and six weeks to try Paul Touvier, a member of the wartime pro-Nazi militia, in 1994. Both those trials ended with convictions and life sentences. Even the trial of Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, the head of the Vichy state, lasted a mere three weeks in 1945.

In fact, last week, officials of the Judicial Press Assn. in Paris said the Papon trial had become the longest criminal proceeding in French history.

It broke the record set in 1431 by the three months of ecclesiastical hearings held to examine Joan of Arc--the maiden from Lorraine, a champion of the French national cause in the face of English invaders--before she was burned at the stake.

Last week, yet another delay was caused by the death from cancer of Papon’s wife, Paulette. A grim Papon went back to his home in the greater Paris area to bury his wife of 65 years. When he returned to court Monday, he appeared gaunt, pale and weary; he wore a black mourning suit and a bit of black ribbon in his buttonhole.

The text of the formal charges against Papon runs 170 pages, and the evidence fills 42 volumes piled on the horseshoe-shaped bench where the three judges and nine citizen jurors sit. A total of 135 witnesses have trooped to the high desk covered with a red blotter in the courtroom’s center to testify.

Papon is accused of organizing 10 convoys that shipped French and foreign Jews, usually in cattle cars, to the detention camp at Drancy north of Paris and to what Papon himself acknowledged at trial was a “cruel fate.”

However, proving a criminal case more than half a century later has proved daunting, since, as in most such cases, there are no eyewitnesses and tangible proof is scant.

Lawyers for victims and their families, who have been able to participate in the trial under customary French procedure, point to Papon’s authority over the Bordeaux Bureau of Jewish Questions, a branch of the Vichy state, as, in itself, proof of his guilt.

“Between Vichy’s persecution of the Jews and their extermination by the Nazis, what was there? There was a train. And who put them in the train?” attorney Alain Jakubowicz asked.

On Tuesday, in a painfully slow and detailed rebuttal, Jean-Marc Varaut, Papon’s lead counsel, claimed that his client had worked covertly to blunt Nazi and Vichy campaigns against Jews and had engaged in “humanitarian complicity, not criminal complicity.”

Varaut said that Papon, who is to address the court himself today before judges and jurors retire to begin deliberations, had no real power of his own over the police and that the documents said to prove his client’s guilt were routine paperwork that Papon, a sort of super-clerk, drew up after the fact.

Varaut also challenged the French government’s decision to try Papon for involvement in “crimes against humanity,” a charge he said requires that the accused both knew and approved of the Final Solution. “Maurice Papon never engaged himself in the [German] policy of extermination, whose organized plans he never knew about,” Varaut said.

Though admitting that Papon may have been unaware of specifics of Adolf Hitler’s blueprint for exterminating European Jewry, prosecutors have contended that the defendant must have been aware that deportees were being sent off to suffer, perhaps to die.

“Reality was there, in front of his eyes, naked inhumanity,” Desclaux said.

About $2 million has been expended to put Papon on trial, and the proceedings are being videotaped. More than 20,000 people, a fifth of them schoolchildren, have attended, on some days standing in line for up to six hours.

“This trial will serve the coming generations to prevent such things from happening again in the future,” predicted Michel Slitinsky, 72, whose father, a tailor, was deported from Bordeaux and died at Auschwitz.

Alain Finkielkraut, a prominent intellectual, noted that, in the highly polarized French society, the trial has become not only a search for historical truth but a sort of parable about modern French politics.

This month, the readiness of five provincial barons of center-right parties to accept support from Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, an extreme-right grouping that embraces the “family, fatherland, work” credo of Vichy, triggered alarm and panic in many political circles.

Last weekend, more than 100,000 people, many from parties of the left, marched in Paris and other cities to protest what some denounced as a latter-day equivalent of Vichy’s collaboration with the Third Reich.

“If ever he [Papon] is acquitted, we will have riots in France,” predicted Finkielkraut. “Stupid riots, because this is a matter of judging a man, not a regime. But because of Le Pen, it will be interpreted like a rehabilitation of Vichy, and we will have fighters in the streets.”