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Lifting The Veil

Dr. Joseph N. Epel

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The Touvier trial hinted at the extent of French
collaboration with the Nazis. But is France willing
to hear more?

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DOUGLAS DAVIS FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT

Alex J. Etkin

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Jean Fredson
Salman Grand
Dr. Howard and Marcia Parven

AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR TECHNION • DETROIT CHAPTER

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James A. Safran, President Lawrence A. Berry, Chairman of the Board

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ust one week after Prisoner
275-205-U was led out of
court to start serving a life
sentence in Paris's Sante
jail, French Jewish leaders are
enraged by a call from President
Francois Mitterrand to draw a
veil over his countrymen's col-
laboration with their World War
II Nazi occupiers.
At the age of 79, Paul Touvier,
the first Frenchman to be con-
victed of crimes against human-
ity for ordering the death of seven
Jews in Nazi-occupied France,
knows that he is unlikely ever to
leave his first-story jail cell alive.
During a half-century of de-
liberate French indifference and
complacency since the war, Mr.
Touvier, twice
sentenced to
death in his ab-
sence, was con-
cealed and
succored by
rightwing ele-
ments of the Ro-
man Catholic
Church. During
that time he
married and
raised a family.
His convic-
tion following a
five-week trial
barely amount-
ed to applying a
Band-Aid to a
national malig-
nancy, but it did
generate mas-
sive media cov-
erage and it Paul Touvier
triggered the
start of an ago-
nizing cathartic process that fi-
nally appeared to be bringing the
French people face to face with
their tainted, haunted history.
The Versailles court where Mr.
Touvier at last faced justice had
little difficulty in establishing
that he was responsible, at the
very least, for ordering the cold-
blooded execution of seven Jews
whom he had been rounded up
in 1944 in the southern French
town of Rillieux-le-Pap.
No sooner had this relatively
insignificant former gangster
been led out of court than de-
mands were raised for the arrest
of Maurice Papon, a much bigger
fish in the pond of war criminals,
also on charges of crimes against
humanity.
Unlike Mr. Touvier, an anti-
Semitic thug and local intelli-
gence chief who served up Jewish

626-7776

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victims to the notorious "Butch-
er of Lyons," Klaus Barbie, before
seeking refuge in a string of
Catholic monasteries, Mr. Papon,
now 84, had been an inestimably
more senior figure during the
Nazi occupation.
While Mr. Papon's lawyer,
Jean-Marc Varaut, argues that
his client merely applied a bu-
reaucratic stamp to a system he
did not control, documents con-
firm that he personally signed or-
ders for the deportation from the
port of Bordeaux to Nazi death
camps of 1,690 French Jews, in-
cluding 223 children, between
1942 and 1943.
Perhaps sensing that he had
joined the losing side, Mr. Papon
then signed up
with the French
Resistance,
emerging from
the war with the
Resistance
Cross and, more
important, the
certain knowl-
edge that his
special skills
and his adapt-
ability would
carry him far.
It was a colos-
sal gamble for a
man with a
hideous history,
but the gamble
paid off: By the
1960s, Presi-
dent Charles de
Gaulle had pro-
moted him to
police chief of
Paris and in the
'70s he achieved his highest am-
bition when he was appointed a
minister in the government of
President Valery Giscard d'Es-
taing.
Mr. Papon's world disinte-
grated suddenly in 1981, howev-
er, when a Jewish historian,
trawling through the archives of
the pro-Nazi Vichy regime, dis-
covered the documented truth
about the respected French cab-
inet member.
The fact that 13 years have
passed without even- the hint of
an inquiry is evidence of the
lengths to which official France,
at its most senior levels, is pre-
pared to go in order to avoid con-
fronting the most humiliating,
embarrassing and divisive
episode in its history.
The opening of a museum last
weekend in Izieux, near the