Maurice Papon, a prominent French functionary convicted in 1998 of complicity in Nazi crimes against humanity during the German occupation in World War II, died yesterday at a private clinic near Paris. He was 96.
He underwent heart surgery related to his pacemaker on Tuesday, and died in his sleep, said his lawyer, Francis Vuilleman, The Associated Press reported.
In the end, Mr. Papon served less than three years of his 10-year sentence for deporting hundreds of Jews to their deaths in German concentration camps from southwestern France, where he was an official of the Vichy government, which collaborated with the Germans. He always protested that he had done only what the Germans had made him do.
He appealed after his trial ended in April 1998, but fled to Switzerland the next year rather than go to jail, where French law required him to be before his appeal could be heard.
Soon caught and bundled back to France, where his attempted escape had invalidated his appeal, he started serving his sentence in October 1999. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2002 that the French law on appeals had violated his civil rights, but he stayed in the Santé Prison in Paris until that September, when a French court agreed with a new appeal that heart trouble and advanced age should spare him further jail time.
Continue reading the main story“I have no objection to putting Vichy on trial,” he had said before facing charges. “I just don’t want the trial to take place on my back.”
Vichy did go on trial with him, and the verdict seemed to confirm, as President Jacques Chirac had first acknowledged in 1995, that France bore criminal responsibility for what officials like Mr. Papon had done in collaborating with the Germans. Mr. Chirac and many others who believed this were later disappointed by his success in evading punishment.
“Obviously,” observed Michel Slitinsky, a Holocaust survivor who hunted down some of the documentation of Mr. Papon’s collaboration, “there is a double standard when it comes to justice in France.”
Tall and self-assured, Mr. Papon looked the model French elite civil servant, and for 50 years he seemed to be one, overcoming the taint of collaboration after the war to be taken under the wing of the hero of the Resistance, Charles de Gaulle. Mr. Papon became a powerful police official and eventually a Gaullist government minister before his past finally caught up with him in his old age, which then abbreviated the punishment that survivors of his victims believed he deserved.
He was assigned to the civil administration in Bordeaux by the collaborationist government in Vichy, but as the tide of war turned, he developed contacts with Resistance leaders who vouched for him after the Liberation.
After the war, Mr. Papon rose through the bureaucracy. He became prefect of police in Paris, one of the country’s top security posts, in 1958, when divisions over how to deal with Algeria’s war for independence threatened to bring on civil war in France. After de Gaulle agreed to take power under a new French Constitution, he confirmed Mr. Papon in the key police position.
In Paris Mr. Papon again presided over police actions that would not be fully exposed until decades later, when it became clear that the forces of order had taken the law into their own hands, beating up and killing scores of Algerians in the riot-torn year of 1962, just before the colony achieved its independence.
A career in Gaullist politics followed his retirement from the civil service in 1967.
It was not until 1981, when he was France’s budget minister, that he was confronted with his past. Mr. Slitinsky, whose father died in Auschwitz after being arrested by the French police in Bordeaux in 1942, had found documents showing that Mr. Papon had signed the transport order, and many more besides.
It took until 1983 for French judicial authorities to investigate and indict him, and 14 more years to bring him to trial.
By then, France was ready to confront the dark side of its wartime past in a way it had not since sentencing Vichy leaders to death for treason immediately after the war.
Mr. Papon was only the second French citizen to be tried on charges of crimes against humanity for actions during the war. Paul Touvier, the chief of the wartime paramilitary militia in Lyon, was sentenced to life in prison in 1994 after being convicted of ordering the execution of seven Jews. He died in prison.
Mr. Papon’s trial in Bordeaux was a six-month lesson in French collaboration for a new generation, but his lawyers argued successfully that the Nazis had kept even the Vichy government in the dark about their larger scheme. He was found guilty only of the deportations, not of having knowingly taken part in systematic Nazi plans to kill millions of Jews.
Maurice Arthur Jean Papon was born in Gretz, a town east of Paris in the Seine-et-Marne district, on Sept. 3, 1910. He was the third child of a local notable who saw to it that his only son went to good schools in Paris, the Lycée Montaigne and later the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.
After graduating in 1929, he studied law, psychology and sociology in Paris until 1932, when he joined the army as a reserve officer. That year, he married Paulette Asso, who died at age 88 a week before the end of his trial in 1998. They had three children: Aline, born in 1934; Alain, born in 1945; and Muriel, born in 1948. All three survive him, The A.P. reported.
In 1935, after finishing his studies in public law and economics at the University of Paris, he took the civil service examinations and joined the Ministry of the Interior. He was drafted to work in the Foreign Ministry, where in 1937 and 1938 Mr. Papon helped form policy toward Morocco, Tunisia and the Middle East.
In 1939, with war nearing, Mr. Papon was called back to active army duty and sent to Syria. He was there when France was overrun. Mr. Papon, like most other French civil servants, decided not to follow de Gaulle to London. Instead, he went to Vichy after the collaborationist government was set up there, and Maurice Sabatier, in charge of administration, took Mr. Papon under his wing.
In 1942, when Prime Minister Pierre Laval asked Mr. Sabatier to head the French regional administration in Aquitaine, Mr. Sabatier offered his young protégé the job of secretary general in the Gironde prefecture, in Bordeaux.
Unlike Vichy, Bordeaux was in German-occupied territory. Mr. Papon tried, he said later, to balance German demands against the interests of France and of the Jews and others that the Germans soon started asking him to dispossess, arrest and finally deport to concentration camps.
At first, Mr. Papon and his superiors rounded up foreign Jews, telling themselves that this way they would at least spare French Jews. But as 1942 wore on and the Germans grew more demanding, the French officials were drawn into the fatal machinery, still telling themselves it would be worse without them.
Writing to a subordinate in January 1944, Mr. Papon seemed aware that many of the people rounded up at the French concentration camp in Mérignac, outside Bordeaux, and then shipped off in trains to Drancy, north of Paris, would never return.
“We have to try,” Mr. Papon wrote, “to free or, if not, keep in Mérignac, Jews of interest: holders of the military Légion d’Honneur or Croix de Guerre, war invalids, wives of prisoners.”
But when the Germans said people like these had to go too, they went. The orders signed by Mr. Papon went into the files, where researchers like Mr. Slitinsky and Serge Klarsfeld, a lawyer who has documented the fates of almost all of the 74,721 Jews (out of 330,000) deported from France during the war, found the documents decades later. All but a few died in Nazi extermination camps.
The Germans who dealt with Mr. Papon found him “correct and readily cooperative,” as one field report put it in 1943. “He works well with the Kommandatura and he is fast and competent,” the report added.
By mid-1944, with the Allies landed in Normandy and the days of the German occupation clearly numbered, Mr. Papon was cultivating contacts with Gaston Cusin, a Resistance leader who named him prefect of the Landes after the Allies took control in August.
To other Resistance fighters who expressed surprise and indignation, Mr. Cusin said that Mr. Papon had several times refused Vichy promotions, showing that his heart had been on the right side.
Mr. Papon was soon promoted to Paris, where in 1945 and 1946 he was involved in administering the affairs of Algeria, then a French overseas department. After a brief interlude as chief government administrative officer on Corsica, in 1949 he went to Constantine, Algeria, to be regional prefect, then spent time in Morocco, before returning to Algeria in 1956 to direct counterinsurgency tactics in the war of independence.
The war was reaching a climax by the time Mr. Papon left Algeria, in 1958, telling superiors in Paris: “France is on the offensive on all fronts. The populations are returning to us.”
In Paris, though, attacks on the police by supporters of Algerian independence had led to a major morale crisis, and Mr. Papon was called in as prefect to control the violence.
When a demonstration on Oct. 17, 1961, turned violent, there was retaliation: At least 48 Algerians were killed, probably by police officers, and their bodies thrown into the Seine, a report to the government 38 years later established.
At the time and later, Mr. Papon insisted that only three Algerians were killed, and denied he had covered up the truth.
The Paris police also brutally put down a demonstration against the shadowy Secret Army Organization, a cabal of officers trying to keep de Gaulle from granting independence to Algeria, in February 1962.
When eight civilians died in a crush after a police charge drove them down into a subway station, Mr. Papon’s response was that the demonstration had been forbidden. And when a Moroccan opposition leader, Mehdi ben Barka, was abducted on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in daylight in 1965 by two policemen, turned over to Moroccan gangsters and never seen alive again, Mr. Papon said he was not responsible. The police service, he said, had been betrayed by the officers involved.
Mr. Papon retired from the civil service with honors in 1967 and, following a classic French technocratic pattern, went off to run a state-owned industry, Sud-Aviation, which was then involved in introducing the supersonic Concorde.
The following year he went into Gaullist politics, winning a seat in Parliament in from the Cher, the rural central French district his father and grandfather had come from. Over the next decade he rose steadily in Parliament, becoming head of the finance committee in 1972. In April 1978 he was named budget minister under Prime Minister Raymond Barre.
It was three years later, shortly after the election of France’s first Socialist president, François Mitterrand, that Mr. Papon’s Vichy past resurfaced.
He spent the rest of his life defending himself.
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