Papon Verdict Eases Pain for Victims’ Families

For Maurice-David Matisson, a soft-spoken Jewish veteran of the French Resistance, the quest for justice for eight family members who perished in World War II took 17 long, frustrating years. But his persistence bore fruit at 9:12 Thursday morning.

After a trial initiated because of the legal complaints filed by Matisson and aggrieved families of other victims, Maurice Papon, 87, a midlevel functionary in the wartime puppet state of Vichy, was found guilty of having served as an accomplice in “crimes against humanity” and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

The punctilious civil servant, the court ruled, had helped to organize and implement some of the “arbitrary” arrests and detentions of 1,560 Jews in the Bordeaux area. These were the first steps for the Jews in a sorrowful journey by rail cattle cars to a holding camp in northern France and near-certain death in the concentration camps of the Third Reich.

Some of the unwilling passengers were children, some only a year old; others were aged and infirm.

In a moving scene, family members, some sobbing, kissed and embraced each other and their lawyers in a hall outside the courtroom after the verdict was read Thursday morning.

Though there were objections that the 10-year sentence was too light and that Papon had been exonerated of actual responsibility in the deaths of deportees, there was great relief and satisfaction that the jury pronounced him guilty.

“I think now we are going to finally be able to live our grief,” said Matisson, 72, a bald, bespectacled psychoanalyst who attended every session of the trial since it opened in October. “Now we can think about our dead in a serene way.”

Rene Panaras, 63, whose mother’s parents were arrested in 1942 and died at Auschwitz, observed of the verdict: “It’s a deliverance. I think about my grandparents and about all my family. We have made them live again a bit during this trial.”

The conviction of Papon--the former No. 2 official in the Bordeaux prefecture, or regional government--marked the first time a functionary of the Vichy state was brought to account specifically for the wartime French leaders’ collaboration or connivance in Nazi policies of anti-Semitism.

Former President Francois Mitterrand once admitted to having intervened to brake the prosecution of Papon, saying he was against trying old men for war crimes.

After the Liberation, Papon went on to serve as prefect of Paris police and then as a Cabinet minister from 1978 to 1981.

By finding him guilty, the Bordeaux jury also may have sent a message to present and future French officials that they are not above the law or dictates of morality, lawyers attending the trial said.

Pale and raptly attentive, Papon listened to the verdict as he sat in the defendant’s box and laughed bitterly when he heard it included a 10-year ban on voting and running for elective office and the revocation of his red ribbon of the Legion of Honor. He quickly wrote out a request for an appeal.

Chief defense counsel Jean-Marc Varaut, who said his client had tried to protect Jews and others in France from the occupying Nazis, denounced the verdict as “condemnable” and said he would appeal the decision.

After meeting through the night, the court disappointed many family members of victims, including Matisson, by not implicating Papon in the actual deaths of deportees. In deliberations that took 19 hours, judges and jurors evidently decided that the defendant could have known nothing of the vast and lethal machine assembled by Nazi Germany that killed 12 million people, including 6 million European Jews.

But according to historians, more Jews in France were arrested by French police than by the Germans. Gerard Boulanger, a lawyer who in December 1981 filed the first complaint on Matisson’s behalf, said the jury’s decision “means the exact role of Vichy has not been recognized. So there is a taste of something not complete.”

Government prosecutors had sought a prison sentence twice the length of the one Papon received. But Serge Klarsfeld, a celebrated Nazi hunter at odds with Boulanger and other attorneys for civil plaintiffs who wanted life imprisonment, contended that 10 years was fully in keeping with Papon’s limited responsibilities and actions.

Papon, who spent two nights in jail at the trial’s start but was released Oct. 10 on orders of Presiding Judge Jean-Louis Castagnede, returned home Thursday to the Greater Paris area and may never see the inside of a cell again. The appeals process could take years, legal experts predicted, and Papon might die before it is over.

“We have a new battle to fight, that for his incarceration,” said Richard Sabban, member of an organization that assists wartime deportees and their families.

Papon was found guilty of being an accomplice in arrests and detentions involving four rail convoys of Jewish deportees between July 1942 and January 1944. He was declared not guilty in four other incidents in which documents could not be found to prove his involvement.