Vichy Figure Reportedly Flees France

Convicted Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon, who vanished from his home a week ago and was supposed to surrender to prison authorities Wednesday, announced through his lawyers that he has fled into exile at age 89.

Found guilty last year of complicity in crimes against humanity for helping deport about 1,500 Jews during World War II, the former police official of the wartime Vichy regime said in a communique that he will return to France “only when republican legality is restored.”

“I did not resist Nazi violence to beg for liberty before a court,” Papon said in a separate letter published by a Bordeaux newspaper. He was sentenced last year to 10 years in prison but was free while awaiting his appeal.

Jean-Marc Varaut, his lead lawyer, refused to divulge Papon’s whereabouts.

News of Papon’s flight aroused dismay and outrage among families of the wartime deportees and their representatives, and the French government vowed that no effort will be spared to bring Papon to prison.

After the longest criminal trial in French history, a Bordeaux court on April 2, 1998, found Papon guilty of organizing the roundup and deportation of Jews by the trainload from southwestern France. Many of the deportees later died in Nazi concentration camps.

In his defense, Papon asserted that he had done everything he could to assist Jews and cited his covert enrollment in the wartime Resistance.

The six-month proceedings, which came after 16 years of legal skirmishes and maneuvers, captivated France and led to a painful reexamination of the national myth that most of the wartime French bravely resisted German occupation.

Papon was supposed to surrender to police Wednesday and spend at least one night in prison before his appeal was to be heard today by a tribunal in Paris. Labeling himself the victim of a show trial and a “media manhunt,” Papon said in his letter that he had decided to leave the country.

“There is only one honorable response to this final challenge--exile, no matter how painful it is for a man going into his 90th year,” Papon said in the communique released by his lawyers. He likened himself to Charles de Gaulle, who fled to Britain in 1940 to organize French resistance against the Germans.

Papon’s flight provoked anger among survivors, deportees’ relatives and their attorneys, who had hoped that the verdict and sentence marked an end to their long, often frustrated efforts to achieve justice.

“‘He has cheated all his life,” lawyer Gerard Boulanger said. “This is his latest escape act, his latest trickery.”

“Is he in London, has he rejoined De Gaulle 57 years late?” Michel Slitinsky, whose father was arrested on Papon’s orders and later died in Auschwitz, asked sarcastically. He said he would keep pressing for Papon’s imprisonment.

The wartime regime that Papon served as deputy police prefect in the Bordeaux region governed southern France after German forces invaded the country in 1940. Before the Nazis overran the south in 1942, emasculating Vichy’s authority, the regime instituted its own brutal and anti-Semitic policies.

Arno Klarsfeld, a Paris lawyer who represents families of survivors and their offspring, said the fact that Papon had been freed from detention since the third day of the original trial in Bordeaux and was allowed to retain his passport was an enormous judicial blunder.

“This is a sad symbol for French justice,” Klarsfeld said. “Now, when France asks for prosecution of war criminals in Kosovo or East Timor, public opinion will laugh, because we let our own war criminals go.”

Faced with a development that seemed to make a mockery of France’s judicial system, since Papon’s disappearance had been in the news for days, government spokesman Daniel Vaillant vowed Wednesday that the former Vichy official “will be searched for, arrested wherever he is and taken to the prison where he must serve his sentence.”

Elisabeth Guigou, the justice minister, told Parliament that if prosecutors do not find Papon at his home in Gretz-Armainvilliers, about 20 miles southeast of Paris, where he hasn’t been seen for the past week, France will begin a nationwide manhunt and ask other countries to look for him as well.

Shimon Samuels, the Paris-based international liaison director for the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles, called on Interpol to issue an international arrest warrant quickly so Papon can be “detained in whatever country of his destination . . . [and] returned to France under armed escort.”

Speaking in an interview on France Info radio, Varaut would not disclose his client’s whereabouts but suggested Papon might be on Guernsey, the Channel Island where 19th century romantic writer Victor Hugo spent 15 years in exile. A photograph published with Papon’s letter in Sud-Ouest, a Bordeaux newspaper, showing Papon with a recent Spanish magazine indicated that he might have escaped south across the Pyrenees.

“He is not leaving the country to escape from prison,” Varaut maintained. “He is distancing himself momentarily so that justice is not dishonored.”

In particular, the Paris lawyer said, Papon objects to the requirement that he surrender and be imprisoned on the eve of the appeal hearing. The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, has condemned the French government three times for the practice and for canceling appeals proceedings for defendants who do not surrender for the hearings.

Varaut said Papon was convinced that the appellate session was rigged against him.