Maurice Papon was a French civil servant during the 1930s who led the police in major prefectures and in Paris during the Nazi occupation. He was the only Frenchman convicted of complicity in crimes against humanity committed in France during World War II, in a trial that took place from 1997 to 1998.
Papoon was born into a middle-class family on September 3, 1910, in Gretz-Armainvilliers in the Seine-et-Marne department. Papon’s father was a glassworker and local mayor. His family had republican, center-left views. Papon was educated in Paris, studying law and political science at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the École des Sciences Politiques. In 1929, he entered the Faculté de Droit et de Lettres in Paris.
While a student, Papon joined the socialist youth movement. In February 1931, he began working as a ministerial adviser on the staff of Jacques-Louis Dumesnil, Prime Minister Pierre Laval’s minister for air. In 1935, Papon joined the Ministry of the Interior, working under Maurice Sabatier, a specialist in Islamic law, where his tasks covered Moroccan and Tunisian affairs.
At the start of World War II, Papon served in Tripoli and Syria with the French infantry. He was demobilized in October 1940, with the outset of the German occupation.
Papon had the choice of joining Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces or remaining with the pro-Nazi collaborationist government of Marshal Philippe Pétain. He opted to remain in the unoccupied zone. He rejoined Sabatier at the Ministry of the Interior and was promoted to head the administration of that department in March 1941.
In May 1942, he was appointed general secretary of the Gironde prefecture, based in Bordeaux. The mayor of Bordeaux, Adrien Marquet, was an ex-socialist who endorsed Laval. In Bordeaux, Papon implemented policies on transport, fuel, German requisitions, and general relations with the occupiers. He was also responsible for the office known as Service of Jewish Questions. Administration of this small branch of about 12 people under Pierre Garat obliged him to apply Vichy laws against the Jews.
The Service of Jewish Questions had two essential functions. The first was applying regulations arising from the Statut des Juifs, major anti-Jewish legislation enacted by the Vichy government on October 3, 1940, and renewed in summer 1941. Papon’s department also was responsible for Aryanizing Jewish property and goods, which involved the naming of an administrator to take over and dispose of Jewish assets. Central to these issues was the fichier, the card index held in Papon’s office identifying the prefecture’s Jews, compiled and brought up to date by the service. The fichier was used by the service to prepare operations for the arrest of Jews and their transfer to the transit camp at Drancy. Papon was involved in arrests and deportations of Jews from Bordeaux and signed off at all stages of Jewish roundups, signing documents ordering arrests by French police and gendarmes.
The record of Bordeaux during the occupation showed that 285 hostages were shot; 900 political deportees never returned from the camps to which they were sent; and 1,560 Jews, of whom 223 were children, were deported to their death in Auschwitz. These figures do not include resisters or forced-work casualties who also lost their lives.
Papon’s prefecture was responsible for the nearby internment camp of Mérignac. Prisoners then were transferred to the Bordeaux rail station, from where they were sent to Drancy. Between July 18, 1942, and June 5, 1944, 11 convoys left Bordeaux, carrying men and women, small children, the elderly, and the sick. Almost all perished at Auschwitz.
By late 1943, around the time the war began to turn, the Germans considered Papon pro-American, and in mid-1944, he started providing information on German movements to the French Resistance. Two days before Bordeaux was liberated in 1944, Papon transformed himself into a supporter of de Gaulle and an anti-Vichyite.
When Allied armies liberated Bordeaux in August 1944, Papon was given a position in the new government. For working with the resistance, he was awarded the Carte d’Ancien Combattant de la Résistance.
From January 1947 to 1949, Papon served as prefect of Corsica, before a succession of positions saw him serving the French Republic in a number of areas: prefect of the Constantine region in Algeria (1949), secretary-general of the Protectorate of Morocco (1954), and prefect of Paris police (March 1956 to June 1966).
In 1968, Papon was elected to the National Assembly as a Gaullist representing the Cher region, and he was reelected in 1973 and 1978. In April 1978, President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing appointed him budget minister. Despite this successful career, on May 6, 1981, facts about his past actions under the Vichy regime surfaced when a French newspaper published documents signed by Papon demonstrating his responsibility in the deportation of Bordeaux Jews to Drancy between 1942 and 1944.
In 1983, Papon was accused of crimes against humanity, but the charges were deferred in 1988. Seven years later, however, he was indicted on “complicity in crimes against humanity.” His trial began in October 1997, and in April 1998, he was found guilty of illegal arrest and incarceration of over 1,000 Jews between 1942 and 1944. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, but during his appeal, he fled to Switzerland, where he was arrested, sent back to France, and imprisoned at Fresnes prison in Paris. In September 2002, a French court released him on the grounds of ill health. Maurice Papon died on February 17, 2007, in Pontault-Combault, France.
Ante Pavelić was a Croatian ultranationalist dictator who founded and headed the fascist organization the Ustashe in 1929. From 1941 to 1945, he ran the Independent State of Croatia, a fascist puppet state carved out of parts of Yugoslavia by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Pavelić and the Ustashe persecuted many racial minorities and political opponents in Croatia during the war, including Serbs, Jews, Roma, and antifascist Croats.
The founder and head of the fascist paramilitary Ustashe movement, Ante Pavelić was an ultra-nationalistic dictator of the puppet state of Croatia from 1941 to 1945. Styling himself as the Poglavnik (“leader”), his regime subjected Croatia to four years of terror, in which tens of thousands of Jews, Serbs, Muslims, Roma, and other minorities were expelled or executed in an attempt to create a purely Croatian state. Ustashe forces also established concentration camps in which large numbers of victims were exterminated. (ullstein bild/Getty Images)
Ante Pavelić was born on July 14, 1889, in Bradina, Bosnia-Herzegovina, to Mile and Mary. His elementary school was a Muslim makteb, and then when his parents moved, he attended a Jesuit school in Travnik. Health problems interrupted his education in 1905 and again in 1908. Early in high school, he joined the Party of Rights (an anti-Serb movement). Pavelić completed his education in Zagreb, and in 1910, he began studying law at the University of Zagreb.
Pavelić was called up to serve in the Austro-Hungarian navy, but the military medical commission at the Pula naval base questioned his fitness. Instead, he worked from August 1914 to March 1915 as a mason constructing the naval building in Sibenik. During that time, he lived with a Jewish family. At the end of March 1915, he was recalled to Pula, where the medical commission concluded that Pavelić was not capable of military service and released him. He became a trainee lawyer of Aleksandar Horvat, then president of the Party of Rights, and obtained his doctor of law in July 1915. As an employee and friend of Horvat, Pavelić frequently participated in important party meetings, from time to time assuming Horvat’s duties. In 1918, Pavelić became an independent lawyer.
Elected to the Skupstina (Yugoslav Parliament) in 1920, Pavelić represented the Party of Rights. On August 12, 1922, in the church of St. Marka in Zagreb, he married Mary Lovrenčević. The daughter of renowned journalist Martino Lovrenčević, also a member of the Rights Party, she was Jewish on her mother’s side. Together, they had three children.
After election to the assembly in Belgrade in 1927, Pavelić became a member of the Croatian Bloc. He was an eyewitness to the assassination of Stjepan Radić, founder of the Croatian People’s Peasant Party (Hrvatska pučka seljačka stranka), who was shot in the assembly by Serb radical politician Puniša Račić on June 20, 1928.
In 1928, Pavelić founded an armed Croatian group and invited Croats openly to start an armed rebellion, which immediately caused the group to be declared illegal. In 1929, King Alexander suspended the constitution and initiated a government crackdown on nationalist activities, a move which saw Pavelić flee to Italy. In 1930, he formed the Croatian Liberation Movement, known as the Ustashe.
With covert Italian support, Pavelić launched a terror campaign against the Yugoslav state. In October 1934, Ustashe gunmen assassinated King Alexander and French foreign minister Louis Barthou at Marseille, for which a Yugoslav court sentenced Pavelić to death in absentia.
With the German invasion and defeat of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Pavelić and his supporters established the Independent State of Croatia with the backing of Italy, which occupied the country. Following the Italian surrender in 1943, Pavelić’s Ustashe regime transferred its allegiance to Germany and remained a German client until the end of the war.
Pavelić, who proclaimed himself Poglavnik (leader), subjected Croatia to four years of abject terror. Bands of Ustashe militia roamed the countryside, expelling or executing scores of Jews, Serbs, Muslims, Roma, and other minorities to create a purely Croatian state. Copying the Nazis, the Ustashe also established concentration camps in which tens of thousands of victims were exterminated. Ultimately, the lawlessness and violence of Pavelić’s regime alienated it from most Croatians and swelled the ranks of the Yugoslav partisans.
Under Pavelić’s sponsorship, a Croatian Muslim division was formed in Bosnia and was visited by the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. Pavelić’s regime incited the destruction of Orthodox Serb churches and the forcible conversions of Serbs to Catholicism.
The regime was generally recognized as the most murderous Nazi puppet state in all of occupied Europe. Indeed, German officers were themselves horrified by scenes of atrocities committed by the Ustashe, and they forced an end to the bloodshed, the arrest of one of the most notorious Ustashe leaders, and the disarming of a Ustashe detachment. Joachim von Ribbentrop’s chief envoy in the Balkans, Edmund Veesenmayer, reported to Berlin that Pavelić had only two wishes: first, to obtain German recognition of Croatia and, second, to thank Hitler in person and promise him his undying loyalty.
It is estimated that by early 1945 Pavelić’s murderous policies had resulted in the deaths of some 30,000 Jews, 29,000 Roma, and anywhere between 300,000 and 600,000 Serbs. Moreover, such excesses also aroused grotesquely ironic protests from Pavelić’s German overlords, who complained that Ustashe abuses were hindering the establishment of order necessary for the exploitation of Croatia’s economic resources.
Pavelić never faced a war crimes tribunal. After Germany’s defeat in May 1945, he escaped to Rome, where he was shielded in the Vatican until 1948. He then went to Argentina, where he served as an adviser to President Juan Perón. Pavelić was badly wounded in a 1957 assassination attempt by Yugoslavia’s secret police, which compelled him to flee to fascist Spain. He died in Madrid on December 28, 1959.
Erna Kürbs was born on May 30, 1920, to a farmer from Herressen in Thuringia. In July 1938, she married Horst Petri, an SS officer and protégé of Richard Walter Darré, chief of the Race and Resettlement Office. Horst Petri shared Darré’s vision of the agricultural mission of the Nazi Party, which saw the soldier-farmer as the model for German expansion into the East. From the summer of 1942 onward, Horst Petri was posted to the Ukrainian city of Lvov (Lviv) during the German occupation, where he administered an estate called Grzenda. In uniform, Horst Petri participated in the murder and deportation of the local Jewish population. At home, he routinely mistreated the forced laborers at Grzenda.
As the wife of the SS manager of the Grzenda estate, Erna Petri also mistreated those working on the farm, and she delivered several female Ukrainian workers to a concentration camp. In 1943, she killed four Jewish men who escaped from a nearby camp onto the property.
One summer’s day in 1943, Erna Petri, by then a mother of two children, noticed six Jewish boys aged 6 to 12 sitting alongside the road near the estate. Reasoning that they had probably escaped from a train heading for Sobibór, she saw that the children were at once terrified and hungry. She calmed them down and brought them food from her kitchen, but believing that all Jews roaming the countryside were to be captured and shot, she waited for her husband to return to the estate so that she could hand over the children to him. However, as he was late getting home, Erna Petri decided to shoot the six children herself.
While providing hospitality to her husband’s SS colleagues, she had overheard them speaking about the mass shootings of Jews and that the most effective way to kill was a single shot to the back of the neck. She led the children to the same pit in the woods where other Jews had been shot and buried. With a World War I pistol that her father had given her, she executed the six children in the manner described by the SS men.
In 1962 in Erfurt, East Germany, Erna Kürbs Petri and Horst Petri were tried for the crimes they committed at Grzenda between 1942 and 1944, including mass extermination. The victims of the crime were listed as foreign laborers, German soldiers, Jews, and civilians whose nationalities were given as Soviet, German, and Polish. The Petris were described as a “management couple in charge of the SS-estate Grzenda.”
Horst Petri was charged on a number of counts: mistreating numerous persons employed at the estate, in part causing incurable damage to their health; participating in chasing after and rounding up Jews who had fled from deportation transports and shooting Jews who were caught in the process; participating in the shooting of the Jewish population of a town adjacent to the estate; deporting Jewish forced laborers to concentration camps; participating in the shooting of 15 Ukrainian farmers who were reported to have delivered food supplies to the partisans; and shooting at a German soldier.
Erna Kürbs Petri was charged with participation in chasing after escaped Jews, shooting Jewish men and children who had been caught or who were discovered wandering, mistreating girls employed at the estate, and delivering Ukrainian female workers into a concentration camp. During the hearing into her conduct, she gave evidence that she had been hardened and desensitized through her contact with the SS men and that through such contact, she wanted to show them that she as a woman could comport herself like a man: “So I shot four Jews and six Jewish children. I wanted to prove myself to the men.” She added that at the time in that region, it was known that Jewish persons and children were being shot, which she added also caused her to kill them.
The couple was found guilty by the East German court. Horst Petri was sentenced to death, and Erna Petri was given a sentence of 30 years in jail. She died in 2000 in a small hamlet in East Germany.
Oswald Pohl was a senior SS officer who, as head of the SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt (SS Main Economic and Administrative Office, or RSHA) and the chief administrator of the Nazi concentration camps, became one of the most powerful men in the SS and supervised its economic needs as well as the administration of the concentration camp system.
Oswald Ludwig Pohl was born on June 30, 1892, in Duisburg-Ruhrort, the fifth of eight children of the blacksmith Hermann Pohl and his wife Auguste. After graduating from school in 1912, he enlisted in the German Imperial Navy and served throughout World War I, rising to the position of paymaster. On October 1918, he married for the first time.
At war’s end, Pohl attended courses at a trade school and began studying law and state theory at the Christian Albrechts Universität in Kiel. He dropped out in 1919, however, instead becoming active with the Friekorps Brigaheae Löwenfeld, working in Berlin and drawing on his naval training as paymaster. In 1920, he participated in the failed right-wing Kapp Putsch.
In 1924, Pohl was accepted into the Weimar Republic’s new navy (Reichsmarine). He joined the SA in 1925, and on February 22, 1926, he joined the Nazi Party.
Pohl met Heinrich Himmler in 1933 and soon became his protégé. In 1934, Himmler appointed Pohl to head the administration of the Allgemeine-SS, the largest branch of the SS. He took financial charge of the SS Death’s Head units, the Waffen-SS, and the SS Budget and Building Department, which oversaw the construction of concentration camps. By 1939, Pohl was administering the concentration camp system.
In this role, he identified the commercial possibility of forced labor. Shortly after the Anschluss with Austria in March 1938, Pohl and Himmler went to the town of Mauthausen and resolved that the SS-operated Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke GmbH (German Earth and Stone Works Company, or DEST) would begin excavating granite using concentration camp prisoners as slave laborers.
On January 19, 1942 (ironically, one day before the Wannsee Conference that would determine the future operation of the Final Solution), Himmler consolidated all the offices for which Pohl was responsible into one, creating the RSHA. In 1942, as leader of the SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt (SS Economic and Administrative Department, or WVHA), Pohl was the third most powerful man in the SS, surpassed only by Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. Pohl administered the entire Waffen-SS, operated over 20 concentration and labor camps, ran all SS and police building projects, and took charge of all SS business concerns.
On December 12, 1942, after divorcing his first wife, he married Eleonore von Brüning, widow of Ernst Rüdiger von Brüning, the son of one of the founders of the Hoechster Farbwerke, which became part of I. G. Farben in 1925.
Supervising the concentration and labor camps supplied Pohl with some 600,000 slave laborers. Pohl reorganized the camps in such a way as to exploit their victims’ labor, using his slave workforce to meet the needs of the SS and renting them out to meet the labor needs of private industries.
Pohl also devised the idea of sending back to Germany all personal possessions of Jews who had been gassed—including hair, gold teeth, clothes, wedding rings, and other jewelry—and using them or turning them into cash. This operation was all part of the SS emphasis on being efficient and financially independent.
On March 12, 1943, Pohl was named chairman of the board of directors for Eastern Territories Industries, Inc. Despite intending to use concentration camp prisoners to work in the expanding SS industries, he was limited by the Nazi ideology of exploitation and racial extermination. He refused to allow any increases in rations to starving prisoners slaving in the quarries of Gross-Rosen concentration camp, when there were administrative complaints in favor of providing more food to the inmates. Rather, he believed that concentration camp prisoners should serve the greater interests of the Reich, which also meant completely “exhausting forced labor”—working them to death.
By 1944, 250,000 slave laborers were working in private armament industries; many industries opened factories inside or adjoining the camps. As needs grew, Pohl and the WVHA also seized the labor of surviving Jews in the ghettos and eastern camps.
Pohl and the WVHA also controlled all SS-owned industries, such as the German Excavating and Quarrying Company, the German Equipment Company, the German Experimental Establishment for Foodstuff and Nutrition, and the Society for Exploitation of Textiles and Leatherworks. Industries not owned by the SS were indirectly controlled by the WVHA, including mineral-water production and the furniture industry. Jewish-owned and foreign industries were also seized by the WVHA.
At the end of World War II, Pohl first hid in Upper Bavaria and then near Bremen. He was captured by British troops on May 27, 1946, and was sentenced to death by an American military court on May 27, 1946. Imprisoned rather than immediately executed, he repeatedly appealed his case. He rejoined the Catholic Church, and in 1950, he published a book, Credo: My Way to God. Oswald Pohl was hanged on June 7, 1951, at Landsberg Prison.
PRÜTZMANN, HANS-ADOLF (1901–1945)
Hans-Adolf Prützmann was a high-ranking SS official who, from June to November 1941, was higher SS and police leader (Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer, or HSSPF) in Latvia. He set up ghettos in Riga and ran operations carried out by Einsatzgruppen units. He also organized the Nazi Werwolf guerrillas at the end of World War II.
Hans-Adolf Prützmann was born on August 31, 1901, in Tolkemit (Tolkmicko), East Prussia. On completing his education, he studied agriculture in Göttingen before joining several Freikorps between 1918 and 1921, although he did not engage in any military action. In 1923, he discontinued his studies, and in 1924, he joined a new Freikorps, which fought along the border region of Upper Silesia.
Prützmann worked for seven years as a farmworker in Pomerania, Brandenburg, and East Prussia before enrolling in the SA in 1929. Radicalized by his involvement in the Freikorps, he left the SA in 1930 and joined the NSDAP and the SS that year. His career from that point had a rapid trajectory. From July 1932, he was a member of the Reichstag, a position he held until 1945. In November 1933, he was appointed SS-Brigadeführer and progressed to SS-Gruppenführer in February 1934. At the same time, he took on the leadership in Stuttgart of the SS upper section southwest.
Between March 1937 and May 1941, Prützmann was HSSPF northwest, based in Hamburg, and in April 1941, he was appointed police lieutenant general.
From June to November 1941, he held the post of HSSPF for Latvia. This gave him effective control of the whole country, which he shared with Hinrich Lohse, who had been appointed Reichskommissar Ostland on July 17, 1941, after Germany took charge of the Baltic States. As HSSPF Latvia, Prützmann oversaw the SD and was the person responsible for implementing the Final Solution there.
The Nazis were divided about how to handle the Jewish problem in Latvia. Lohse, who was backed by Alfred Rosenberg, wanted to imprison Jews in ghettos, pilfer all their wealth, and have them work as forced labor in support of Germany’s war effort. Prützmann’s superior, SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, wanted to murder the Jews of Latvia immediately. At the beginning of August 1941, when a subordinate asked Prützmann where the Baltic Jews were being evicted to, he reportedly replied that the deportation was not to a place but to the afterlife.
Annoyed at the slowness with which the SD was murdering Jews in Latvia, Himmler flew to Kovno (Kaunas) on July 29, 1941, to ramp up mass killings in the Baltic States. By November 1941, some 30,000 of Latvia’s roughly 70,000 Jews had been killed. In mid-November 1941, Himmler replaced Prützmann with Friedrich Jeckeln, the HSSPF from Ukraine, while Prützmann was reassigned to replace Jeckeln. When Jeckeln took over as HSSPF Latvia, Prützmann reported that large numbers of Jews had already been killed. Responsible for forcing the Jews of Latvia into ghettos, Prützmann’s actions allowed them to be murdered more readily by Jeckeln.
Prützmann held the position of HSSPF Ukraine and Russia-South from November 1941 until the summer of 1944. In July 1942, he decided to train the foresters in Zhytomyr to carry out tasks similar to the police units. Besides Jewish refugees, partisans in the forests also needed to be confronted, apprehended, and shot. A unit of 272 SS men who worked for Sonderkommando Russland in Ukraine kept headquarters at Prützmann’s offices in Kiev.
In his capacity as SS-Gruppenführer, Prützmann took part in a meeting of several others of similar rank on October 4, 1943, in Posen (Poznań), where Himmler spoke openly about the extermination of the Jews. To fight partisans, Prützmann also commanded Kampfgruppe Prützmann in Ukraine during early summer 1944; the unit that saw constant action in the forests. For his efforts, Prützmann received high decorations including the German Cross in Gold.
One of his last promotions came in September 1944, when Prützmann was appointed by Heinrich Himmler as general inspector of special defense (Generalinspekteur für Spezialabwehr) and was tasked with establishing a unit that would serve as a last-ditch guerrilla service, the Werwolf force. While stationed in Ukraine, Prützmann had studied the guerrilla tactics used by Soviet partisans, and at Werwolf headquarters, he sought to teach these tactics to the unit’s members. Werwolf troops were intended to serve as military formations that would engage in clandestine operations behind enemy lines once Germany had been overrun and occupied. As things turned out, despite the mystery and allure the Werwolf detachments represented, they did not produce the anticipated results and were ineffective against the might of Allied combat troops in the last days of the war.
Shortly before the war ended, Prützmann was captured by the Allies. He committed suicide while in custody, on May 21, 1945.