|
|
October 29, 1999/19 Cheshvan 5760, Vol. 52, No.9
Questions follow capture of Papon
LEE YANOWITCH
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
PARIS - After 18 years of legal maneuvering, convicted Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon is finally behind bars. But questions persist about the preferential treatment the 89-year-old former Vichy official appeared to have enjoyed.
Swiss police seized Papon late last week in a hotel in the swanky ski resort of Gstaadt and whisked him back to France, where he was taken to a prison hospital. Papon had fled to Switzerland on Oct. 10, some 10 days before a Supreme Court appeals hearing was held last week that upheld his 10-year prison sentence for crimes against humanity.
Papon was found guilty of helping deport some 1,500 Jews to Nazi death camps during World War II, when he was supervisor of Bordeaux's Service for Jewish Questions and the second-ranking official in the area for the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. In the postwar years, he served as Paris police chief and budget minister.
At the beginning of his trial in Bordeaux in October 1997, the presiding judge allowed Papon to remain free during the proceedings in an unusual decision that triggered outrage among the civil plaintiffs - most of them relatives of Jews deported to Nazi death camps. This is why Papon stayed out of prison pending his Supreme Court appeal. When he fled into exile, he was certain he would lose his appeal.
"The question that has to be answered is whether he benefited from any collusion or help in fleeing," said Alain Jakubowicz, president of a regional branch of the CRIF, France's umbrella group for Jewish organizations, and lawyer for B'nai B'rith France in the case.
In an effort to answer that question, the London Sunday Times reported this week that Papon's short-lived flight to freedom in Switzerland was organized by a clandestine network of aging French right-wingers. One of his most ardent defenders confirmed this week the existence of an underground ring of retired military officers and former Resistance fighters with close ties to conservative Catholic organizations. The network was reportedly responsible for initial rumors, made in an attempt to throw pursuers off his track, that Papon had fled to Spain.
"There are plenty of people in France and abroad ready to come to his aid," said Hubert de Beaufort, author of a book on Papon. They include members of a shadowy group, Resistance, Verite, Souvenir - Resistance, Truth and Remembrance - which police suspect of helping Papon to flee.
Papon's closest associates reportedly visited him at his villa near Paris earlier this month and urged him to leave France before he was due to enter jail, as is customary in France, on the eve of his appeal. His supporters, who comprise prominent lawyers and former government ministers, regard Papon as a heroic figure who was made a scapegoat for the Vichy regime's collaboration during the Nazi occupation.
A number of measures could have been taken to avoid Papon's flight. Months before his initial trial, Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld asked the Justice Ministry to confiscate Papon's passport. But the request was ignored.
JTA correspondent Douglas Davis in London contributed to this report.
|
