news.bbc.co.uk . . .

Last Updated: Saturday, 17 February 2007, 22:28 GMT

Obituary: Maurice Papon

French Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon was a cunning political operator, moving up the ladder under both the Germans and post-war government until his war crimes caught up with him.

As head of the south-western Gironde region of France during the Nazi occupation, he in effect sent hundreds of Jews to their deaths by ordering their deportation to concentration camps.

But he covered his tracks skilfully, becoming involved with the French Resistance, and avoided the post-war purge of collaborators.

He was even decorated by General Charles de Gaulle and became a cabinet minister more than 30 years after the war before his past was revealed and he was finally put on trial in 1997.

Papon was born in the Paris region in 1910, the son of a solicitor-turned-industrialist.

He studied law, sociology and psychology at university and at the age of 20 entered public service.

Clever and ambitious, he rose through its ranks and in 1942, aged 31, he took over the powerful position of secretary-general of the Prefecture of the Gironde region, in the collaborationist Vichy government.

Collaborator turned informer

Armed with special responsibility for Jewish affairs, Papon had regular contact with Nazi Germany's SS corps, responsible for the mass ethnic cleansing of Jews.

At his trial, it was alleged that 1,560 men, women and children were sent to detention camps at Drancy outside Bordeaux on Papon's direct orders.

Most went on to concentration camps such as Auschwitz and all but a handful died.

By mid-1944, by which time it was clear that the war was turning against the Germans, Papon began to inform on the Nazis to the Resistance - actions for which he was later to be decorated with the treasured "Carte d'Ancien Combattant de la Resistance".

After the war, Papon moved to Paris as Prefet de Police under General de Gaulle, a post he held until 1968.

He then moved into politics, going on to serve as Budget Minister to President Valery Giscard d'Estaing in the 1970s.

But in 1981, the past came back to haunt him.

Hundreds of documents were found by accident in the recesses of Bordeaux town hall, among them the deportation orders signed by Papon.

Legal quagmire

The papers were published by the satirical magazine Le Canard Enchaine.

Legal proceedings began and Papon was forced to leave public life because of the scandal.

The first charges filed in 1983 were dropped because of legal technicalities in 1987.

Fresh charges laid in 1988 accusing Papon of crimes against humanity were changed to complicity in crimes against humanity in 1995.

Papon lodged a number of appeals to stop legal proceedings against him, but he finally stood trial in October 1997.

Some French lawyers and human rights activists suggested that the government had dragged its heels in pushing the prosecution because of its reluctance to expose French complicity in the Holocaust.

Delays continued to arise during the trial, with Papon often absent through ill-health.

His defence played heavily on possible mistaken identity and the difficulty of interpreting 50-year-old facts in the light of current knowledge.

Papon told the court that he kept his job to try to help the Resistance and conduct an underground struggle to help Jews.

He also claimed he did not know what was happening to the Jews he put on the trains, but it was judged that he was guilty of complicity in war crimes.

In a BBC interview recorded in 1997, Papon denied any sense of guilt.

"I have the feeling of being some sort of scapegoat for a former regime, and of being - as has been said - judged as a symbol of all its sins, rather than as a man who has nothing to blame himself for," he said.

Shattered myth

His six-month trial was the longest in French history and stirred uncomfortable memories for many in France.

Other collaborationist officials had been put on trial, but only pro-Nazi militia leader Paul Touvier was ever brought to court charged with crimes against humanity.

At the time of his trial, correspondents pointed out that Papon's case shattered the myth clung to by many French that there was mass national resistance under the occupation.

He had undoubtedly been protected for a long time by President Francois Mitterrand who, as a former Vichy official himself, had his own reasons for not raking up the past.

Papon was convicted of complicity in crimes against humanity and sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1998.

Maintaining that he was the victim of "an unprecedented media pillorying made up of lies, insults and infamy", Papon briefly fled to Switzerland during his appeal period

Imprisoned in France, he served only three on grounds of his sentence on grounds of ill-health and his release in 2002 outraged anti-Nazi campaigners.

However, a bid by his lawyers to get his conviction overturned was thrown out by an appeals court in 2004.

By mid-1944, by which time it was clear that the war was turning against the Germans, Papon began to inform on the Nazis to the Resistance - actions for which he was later to be decorated with the treasured "Carte d'Ancien Combattant de la Resistance".

ROFLMAO!

A DOUBLE COLLABO!!

Nazi collaborator: I did my duty

By Stephanie Hare-Cuming

news.bbc.co.uk . . .

February 18, 2007

Maurice Papon - who died on Saturday, aged 96 - became a symbol of French collaboration with the Nazis because of his role in the arrest, internment and deportation of Jews during World War II.

It was a description Papon himself could not understand, as he explained to me during conversations over the past three years.

I first contacted Papon in early 2004 to inquire if he would be willing to discuss his career - the subject of my doctorate in history at the London School of Economics.

He agreed, and I made what would be the first of several trips to his home in Gretz-Armainvilliers, a small town east of Paris.

While I was most interested in Papon's career as a civil servant during the Algerian War, it was impossible to avoid his conviction in 1998 for crimes against humanity.

Doing 'his duty'

To judge by that alone, Papon seemed to have been a willing agent of state-sponsored anti-Semitism during World War II.

Yet the evidence pointed towards a more nuanced judgement.

Papon appeared not to have been motivated by anti-Semitism, but by a willingness to carry out the state's policies regardless of their consequences.

Papon's willingness to obey the state, despite the dreadful human cost, fascinated me.

Papon told me that he did not consider resignation to be an option, even after he was instructed to issue warrants for the arrest and internment of Jews in July 1942.

During his trial, he said: "To resign would have been easier perhaps but, in the culture that I received from my parents, my philosophy teachers, it meant deserting."

Papon was by no means unique in thinking that his duty was to remain in his post, for not a single prefect resigned from the civil service.

In fact, the only prefects who left the civil service were those whom the Vichy government removed from their posts. THE FROGS IN VICHY WERE ALL COLLABOS - CONFIRMED!

Papon told me that he felt it was his duty to continue serving France during the crisis of wartime.

Resistance hero

Yet he was unable to explain how he felt it was his duty to participate in the arrest, internment and deportation of 1,560 Jews from July 1942 to June 1944.

This nightmare was repeated across France, which deported 76,000 Jews, less than 3% of whom returned after the war.

At his trial, the jury found Papon guilty of the illegal arrest of 37 people and the arbitrary internment of 53 others, but acquitted him of acting with the knowledge of the Final Solution.

To many the distinction was academic, but to Papon it was essential.

It enabled him to argue that he did not know the ultimate fate of the Jews.

In the course of our conversations, Papon preferred to remember his other wartime activity: resistance.

There was no centralised resistance in France, but rather a series of separate cells that operated independently of one another.

Personal recommendations were critical; lives depended on them.

In 1943, Roger-Samuel Bloch, a Jewish resister, began a mission to infiltrate the civil service in the south of France.

In search of an agent to help him in Bordeaux, he was given the name of Maurice Papon.

Mr Bloch made contact, and Papon began his work with the resistance from November 1943 until the liberation of Bordeaux in August 1944.

Papon went so far as to shelter Mr Bloch once at his home and twice in the guest rooms of the Prefecture.

In the summer of 1944, Papon risked holding a meeting in his office at the Prefecture with the heads of the police and the gendarmes to discuss how they would maintain order at the imminent liberation.

Thus on 23 August 1944, when Bordeaux was liberated and resistance leader Charles de Gaulle stepped out on a balcony to greet the enthusiastic population, Papon was with him. DOUBLE COLLABO!

Servant above all

Papon's transition from Vichy collaborator to Gaullist resister was assured, and he rose through the ranks to become France's top civil servant by 1958.

Attaining that post must have been a crowning achievement for him, for while history seems certain to remember him as a Nazi collaborator who sent Jews to their deaths, Papon defined himself as a civil servant above all.

And that may be the key to understanding his actions.

Papon believed a civil servant could not do wrong if he was acting in the service of the state.

I asked him what he thought of the revelations in 2001 of General Paul Aussaresses, who admitted to torture and summary executions in the Algerian War.

Papon said: "He would have done better to keep silent. There were perhaps some wrongdoings, but he was also at the service of France. He only had to keep quiet."

look at that fucking smile on his face - the bastard

I hope he is in hell screaming in agony for eternity

and a big FUCK YOU to CroixDeLorraine for trying to defend this piece of merde

How can anyone defend this shit? I just dont get it! This bastard is burning in hell right now with the devil fucking him up the arse and yet there are frogs who want to defend this guy? Only in France!!!!



This man was no hero he was a shit and a coward heck he spent so long trying to evade justice of he was so innocent why did he not just go to court and prove it?

He was even decorated by General Charles de Gaulle

Ah one tryrant saluteing another tyrant!! The French are always that way!




Maurice Papon: burn in hell you bastard!!!




Fuck French war crime denial!!!!




Fuck France!

Every French apologist on FF should read this thread and hang his head in shame for the disgrace France brought upon itself. But what are they doing instead? Trying and failing to defend France's 'military record' elsewhere on FF.

Why is that not a fucking surprise?

It's no surprise at all because the truth hurts.

That Papon, this piece of shit, was lauded by the French government is in iteslf a crime againt humanity. What's even worse is that Papon was too good for the French. Amin is more their standard, the moral revisionist, apologist, deluded vermin that they are...

caledonian.

don't tell us bullshit.

among the invaded countries, more % of jews have been saved in france.

yeah my darling clementine, more than in holland,belgium,poland, in the east,etc,etc.

there were collabo and we have not be proud. but in the other countries ,it was worst.

if you want real numbers. closer to the truth,there was probably 5% of collabo and 5 % of resistants in france.

the others tried only to survive.

Now , fuck off.

SIMPLE

I must voice all my gratitude to you. Thanks to you, now I am sure the Milice never existed, the Rue Lauriston is just a tale, Maréchal Pétain just an invention of fwance-haters.

Watcha,you understood nothing like usual.

but in the other countries ,it was worst.

This is not fuck-other-countries.com. If you're not proud, try humility instead of excuses. It worked for Japan. But you can't face the truth and hide behind statistics. It's not the numbers that are sick in France, simple, it's the French national psyche. Shame, disgrace, humiliation and embarrassment. You are true pals of Papon, all of you apoligists here. We just have different, far higher standards, "we" being the US, UK and other civilised countries.

Were someone to mistakenly think I was a Latvian, Portuguese, Chinese, Australian, Chilean or Souh African, or whatever, I'd not blink an eyelid. But if someone were to think I was French, I'd correct that error in a second as the attendant humiliation would otherwise be overpowering. Anyone can insult my country, Scotland, as much as they like. I don't mind. We have nothing to be ashamed of, no permanent stain on our character. We're not French, thank God. We don't decorate war criminals. We weren't collaborators, murderers of innocent men, women and children or revisionists. We were and are fighters, not cowards.

"You can't trust the French," I heard often in my youth. I know why, as do millions of others -- survivors, relatives and those whose lives were otherwise ruined by becoming involved with the treacherous soul of the French. A pitiful race.

Thankfully not everyone is typical of this characterisation, but the vast majority of French on this site give France a bad name. Simple, I exclude you from this category because I know you have more sense and it cannot be peasant to have your country derided the way it is here. You didn't choose to be French, but do please be careful what you're proud of...

what i tell you is serious studies not your gobbels propaganda.

Papon was not a collaborator but a member of resistance which has been used as a scapegoat to please to some lobbies including the lobby of leftist who betray France in Algeria war when Papon was responsible for police in Paris.
Papon is innocent and this trial is a shame on France.

www.encyclopedia.com . . .
here opinion of a US conservative

Papon was also acquitted of complicity in murder. Thus on the one hand, a minor provincial official in an occupied country has been placed in the same legal and moral category as a Heydrich or a Himmler, by being convicted of complicity in crimes against humanity; on the other hand, he was found innocent of complicity in murder. This incoherence bodes ill for the legal future of the concept of "crimes against humanity", for it is difficult to see how a crime which is so grave that, uniquely in the French penal code, it has been (retroactively) declared imprescriptible, can lead to anything less than the maximum sentence.

The outcome apart, very significant legal contortions were required to enable the Papon trial to take place at all, so much so that it is doubtful that it would ever have taken place under an Anglo-Saxon system of law in which, unlike that pertaining in France, political pressure is absent. The definition of "crimes against humanity" was changed four times (in 1985, 1992, 1995, and 1997) in order to allow it to be applied to Papon. The last change departed significantly from the definition of the term given at Nuremberg, by declaring that in order to prosecute someone for complicity in crimes against humanity, it was no longer necessary to show that the defendant had subscribed to the ideology of the principal actors of the crime. In other words, it was not necessary to show that Papon desired the death of Jews.

So why was Papon prosecuted? There is a whiff of ulterior political motive in the air. The original accusations against him were published in 1981, at an extremely sensitive political moment between the two rounds of the presidential election. Francois Mitterrand had emerged as the main challenger to Valery Giscard d'Estaing, whose budget minister was Papon, and the revelation that the incumbent government harbored a man who may have sent Jews to their death helped clinch the Left's subsequent victory.
In other words, there is the suspicion that Papon was pursued at least partly for political reasons. This may be because Papon's own political profile is quite specific. Unlike all the other potential and past French defendants for complicity in crimes against humanity, Maurice Papon is a Gaullist. Indeed, he belongs to the very inner core of the first generation Resistance circles.

As numerous Resistance veterans testified during the trial, and as a Jury of Honour composed of very senior Resistance figures had also testified in 1981, Papon performed services for various Resistance networks during the war (although this was contested by one witness during the trial). As well, he had undertaken other acts - such as hiding an American airman who had been shot down over Bordeaux and helping him escape to Spain - for which the Gestapo would have shot him on the spot had he been caught. Indeed, he claimed (and witnesses corroborated his claim) that the Gestapo wanted to arrest him in 1944.

For these services, Maurice Papon became the only Vichy official in the whole of France to be promoted at the Liberation within the same prefecture he had served in during the Occupation. This was at a time when nearly the entire prefectoral corps was purged of collaborators - even the ones who had been deported by the Nazis were screened on their return - and when there was ample opportunity for the settling of old scores through bogus denunciations. Yet Papon became chief of staff to Gaston Cusin, an arch-resistant whom De Gaulle appointed as the new prefect in Bordeaux. Papon was photographed standing next to De Gaulle on the balcony of the prefecture as the general addressed the city in September 1944.

After the war, Papon was a frequent guest at the dinner tables of Resistance heroes, circles that were entirely closed to collaborators. He was also a close friend of the daughter of General Leclerc, the man who liberated Paris. So when De Gaulle returned to power as president in 1958, he appointed Papon prefect of police in Paris, one of the most sensitive posts in the French power structure because the politics of France are so often decided in the streets of the capital. The general would only have given it to a man in whom he had absolute confidence.

Maurice Papon's status as a resistant explains one of the most astonishing phenomena of this "trial of Vichy": the testimony of numerous very senior Gaullists and Resistance veterans in his defense. They included two former prime ministers, President de Gaulle's own former chef de cabinet, and one of the very icons of the Resistance and head of the Academie Francaise, Maurice Druon, who had composed the movement's anthem. Another resistant communicated to the court the conviction of a group of some of its most redoubtable heroes, now dead, that the charges against Papon were absurd. Many of these people testified in this way precisely because they understood that Papon's double status as representative of both Vichy and the Resistance meant that the whole of France would stand condemned if he were convicted.

As numerous Resistance veterans testified during the trial, and as a Jury of Honour composed of very senior Resistance figures had also testified in 1981, Papon performed services for various Resistance networks during the war (although this was contested by one witness during the trial). As well, he had undertaken other acts - such as hiding an American airman who had been shot down over Bordeaux and helping him escape to Spain - for which the Gestapo would have shot him on the spot had he been caught. Indeed, he claimed (and witnesses corroborated his claim) that the Gestapo wanted to arrest him in 1944
...
France's leading Nazi hunter, Serge Klarsfeld, who worked hard to get Papon to court, and whose son Arno was one of the leading prosecuting lawyers, certainly believes they should be so condemned. He has himself accused the Resistance of being complicit in the Holocaust because it failed to give priority to fighting the Nazis' anti-Semitic persecutions.

among the invaded countries, more % of jews have been saved in france.

yeah my darling clementine, more than in holland,belgium,poland, in the east,etc,etc

WRONG! Recently I posted an artical about the country which saved more Jew than any other country that was Albania NOT France! In fact Albania ended up with more Jew at the end of the war than they had at the start!





French people did NOTHING to save the jews SCNF was makeing to much money out of sending jews to their death by rail to care!

Caledonian.

we built a part of the world. our contribution to the world is single in fact (like would say hitler )


we had the second empire in the world . we gave the independance to usa .

we gave modern laws to europe. we invaded moscow. no one country did it.

we destroyed the monarchies. a millinear system where people were only slaves.

we discovered the radio activity.

we founded the french canada. we drawn a lot of american cities.


we won WW1 . and your comparison with japan is lame


ps: japan of nowadays is extraordinary nevertheless. and we were right about Iraq.

You think he left behind his recipe for that shitty grey mustard?

I will not say anything bad about the French on the day they have lost one of thier national icons.
Will there be a state funeral??

K Deadeye - A major loss to frogs everywhere. He will be fondly remembered as one of them, who embodied all the qualities that the frwench esteem.

simple,

Those 5% collaborators. How many is that? 5% of what? I don't have the France 1945 population figure to hand, but at a guess, what, 5% of 40 million? That's just a wild stab-in-the-dark and I hope to be corrected, because 5% of 40 million means by your rough figures 2 million collaborators. That can't be right, can it, simple...?

5 % of 40 millions of inhabitants.

i let you make the calculation. it should not be too difficult no ?

SIMPLE: "we gave the independance to usa"

I'll get back to PimpleStench in a second,

dumb ass frogs should have strung him up like the Italian people did to Mussolini.

Then you would expect them to shovel their own gentic material into the hole, after all the french are all inbred so they would not attack one of their own.

Two weeks ago on FF we were offered the following by PimpleFrench in response to a suit against the french train co. SNCF by Jooos and the complicity of the french for letting their co-citizens be loaded on to SNCF rail cars for a nice trip to the gas chamber.
www.fuckfrance.com . . .

and ww2 ,it is not only the jews. in my familly, my mother received bombs on her house.

From the 8TH U.S. ARMY AIR CORP. No Doubt, they were bombing the enemy after all.

My grand father was a resistant and mayor of a big town. And in the same time ,doctor.

Bottom line for you PimpleFrench, if your grandfather was the mayor a big town during the German Administration he was a Vichy.

Did Grandpappy PimpleFrench bury or burn the papers in which he identified Joooos for the Nazis?

those who have been victims of french actions and VOLONTARLY(it makes a difference ) have to receive compensations.

there were french who did not have the choice. they are not guilty in this case.

You use the word voluntarily, you and your inbred filth countrymen really believe that the Jooos got on the train and you didn't know why?

The concept of complicity escapes you. You're like the assholes who stand around while the woman is being raped and do nothing.

At least for them, the event takes a matter of minutes for you and the vichy it was four years where you stood around, did nothing and took the property of the Joooos.

Je ne sais pas pourquoi le Jews est monté dans le train

simple,

i'm truly shocked. 40 million was a wild guess, but two collaborators is two too many. Two million is absolutely gruesome and a national disgrace. What's that as a percentage of the decision-making adult population, I wonder? 8%? One out of every 12 or 13 people? Five people out of the average busload, or the equivalent of 28 on every full TGV today?

What a horrific thought, to have lived amongst so many of your fellow countrymen who were also your enemies. In so many ways, France has more to live down that it ever will be capable of, however grim the numbers and statistics are. A truly shameful history.

2 millions of collabo and 2 millions of resistants.

and the other tried to survive only.


it is like that.

Atloontic is a sad cunt and a dirty lier!

40,000 in the Résistance

Much, much more in industrial, sexual, political and military collaboration…
flanSS, a nation of whores…