Ex-Vichy Official Convicted of War Crimes

Maurice Papon, onetime prominent government minister and esteemed figure of the French establishment, was found guilty here today of collaborating in wartime crimes against Jews and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

The verdict was announced at 9 a.m. to a hushed courtroom after the judges and jurors deliberated for 19 hours.

The sentence, only half the length prosecutors had requested, was nevertheless groundbreaking because it marked the first time that an official of France’s Vichy regime was tried and convicted for French collaborators’ connivance in the Nazis’ genocide against Jews during World War II.

Papon, 87, drummed his fingers as Presiding Judge Jean-Louis Castagnede read out the more than 700 charges against him. Papon laughed when the judge added that the verdict meant he could not vote or run for office for the next 10 years.

Despite the sentence, which followed what experts say was the longest criminal trial in French history, Papon was entitled to leave the courtroom a free man pending his appeal. Because of his advanced age, he could die before the appellate process is exhausted.

Castagnede read out the mixed result of the jury’s findings. Papon was found guilty for the arrests and internments of some Jewish deportees, but not guilty for others.

The sentence, relatively light compared to the life term that the law permits for “crimes against humanity,” was certain to dissatisfy some families of victims. They had fought a 17-year battle in French courts to bring Papon to justice. But others have noted that, due to his age, a 10-year term might be tantamount to life.

The verdict represented another milestone in French efforts to come to terms with the checkered legacy of the Vichy state that the Germans allowed to rule portions of France. Until relatively recently, the regime was viewed by many of the French as having been a shield against Nazi tyranny instead of its helpmate.

Papon was accused of helping to 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.

However, Papon was 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.

Before his fate was put in a jury’s hands Wednesday, the former Vichy official had angrily denounced the “political trial” he claimed had been fabricated against him.

“I ask myself: Why me?” Papon said as he stood and addressed judges and jurors.

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.

His voice strengthening, and sometimes etched with cold fury, Papon went on for almost 40 minutes to deny any responsibility for the acts of which he was accused.

“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.”

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

Prosecutors and attorneys for wartime deportees or victims’ families painted 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 deeds as wartime secretary-general of the Bordeaux prefecture, he was 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 have viewed 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, close and distant, who were deported and died at Auschwitz.

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.