As Trial Winds Down, Papon Lashes Out

Before his fate was put in a jury’s hands, former Vichy official Maurice Papon on Wednesday angrily denounced the “political trial” he claimed had been fabricated against him and likened himself to that legendary victim of French injustice, Capt. Alfred Dreyfus.

“I ask myself: Why me?” Papon, 87, said as he stood and addressed judges and jurors for the last time in a groundbreaking trial that has set a record for its duration, charges and the identity of the defendant. “Like Joseph K., the hero of Kafka’s ‘The Trial,’ I wonder why.”

With tears in his eyes and choking back sobs, the normally chilly Papon claimed that the marathon proceedings, “bit by bit,” killed his wife of 66 years, Paulette, who died last week of cancer. The “coup de grace,” he said, was the prosecutors’ request that he be sent to prison for 20 years if found guilty.

His voice strengthening, and sometimes etched with cold fury, Papon went on for almost 40 minutes to deny any responsibility for the acts he is accused of--helping organize eight rail convoys that deported 1,560 Jews from occupied Bordeaux between 1942 and 1944. The overwhelming majority of the deportees went on to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps.

“German boots still echo in my ears 56 years after having heard them,” said Papon, fixing all of the blame for wartime atrocities on Nazi Germany. “Listening to some of the courtroom arguments, I am led to ask: So what should have been done? No one today answers.”

He served Vichy, Papon asserted, because it was the “only rampart” protecting the people of occupied France against the Nazis.

Though President Jacques Chirac, in a watershed speech in July 1995, accused the collaborationist regime led by Marshal Henri Philippe Petain of having aided the Nazi occupiers in their “criminal folly,” Papon said that to find him guilty would be to sully the honor of France and of its administration.

“My fate is in your hands,” he told jurors. “Beyond my fate, which is little, take care that France is not harmed by your verdict. Too numerous are those beyond our borders who would delight in the humiliation inflicted on our fatherland, thus aligned with Nazi Germany in the indelible responsibility for Jewish genocide.”

Prosecutors and attorneys for wartime deportees or victims’ families paint an unflattering portrait of Papon as an ambitious, amoral bureaucrat, as keen to please his Vichy superiors as he was to please the governments of the fourth and fifth French republics that followed.

When, in 1981, the scandal broke about his alleged deeds as wartime secretary-general of the Bordeaux prefecture, he was an esteemed figure in the political establishment and budget minister under President Valery Giscard d’Estaing.

Papon was also chief of Paris police during the bloody repression of two demonstrations in 1961 and 1962 linked to the war in Algeria. Beyond its quest for accountability for Vichy’s acts, some of the French view Papon’s trial in a broader context: as enshrining the accountability of officialdom to ordinary people in a country where the high bureaucracy has traditionally behaved as a privileged caste.

“For me, the symbolic thing is that Maurice Papon has been forced to explain his actions,” said Rene Panaras, 64, who can enumerate more than 50 family members who were deported and died at Auschwitz.

In the trial, which opened Oct. 8, Papon is technically charged only with taking part in the arrests, deportations and murders of 72 victims who are represented by private counsel, and whose lawsuit was embraced by government prosecutors as the foundation for the criminal charges against him.

Only three of the jurors were born before or during the war whose events they have been called upon to judge. Of the four men and five women on the jury, all from this city in southwestern France or its environs, the oldest is a 63-year-old retired personnel director, the youngest a teacher’s aide of 26.

Under French criminal procedure, Presiding Judge Jean-Louis Castagnede and the two other professional magistrates attending the trial closeted themselves with jurors as deliberations began. If eight of the judges and jurors share an “intimate conviction” of Papon’s guilt, that is enough to convict.

The jury began work after lunch Wednesday. At 6 a.m. today, the panel was still locked in chambers, where French law requires that it remain until reaching a verdict. Relatives and friends of those deported slept during the night on the benches and floors of the courthouse or milled around.

Papon left the courtroom Wednesday after the jury received the case. He dined during the evening at an inn outside the city.

Papon, who in his statement to the jury expressed “pity” for the Jewish victims of World War II but maintained his customary aloofness, repeated a contention that some of the plaintiffs find outrageous: that he is a latter-day Dreyfus. In 1894, the Jewish captain in the French army was found guilty of trumped-up charges of espionage. Due to the anti-Semitism then rife in France and high-level government interference, it took years to reverse a court-martial’s verdict and recall Dreyfus from solitary confinement on Devil’s Island.