MEANWHILE IN MADRID, in October 1978, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, the former general commissioner on Jewish affairs, made some outrageous remarks—for instance, “At Auschwitz, they only gassed fleas”—which provoked an indignant reaction from the press and public.
In 1972, Darquier made preparations to visit his sick brother in France. Though his address in Madrid was known to the French authorities, France had never demanded his extradition. The radical intellectual Pierre Goldman came to see me, a few days before he was murdered, to talk to me about the possibility of kidnapping Darquier. It would have been a very difficult operation. Darquier’s remarks provoked me to take a different approach.
Since 1975, I had been collecting documents on the role of the Vichy regime in the Final Solution. René Bousquet, who had been secretary-general of the Vichy police, had already been tried and more or less acquitted: it was impossible to try him twice on the same charges, unless there was new evidence. But Bousquet’s trial dossier was in the National Archives, and I did not have the necessary authorization to consult it.
In New York, Beate tracked down the whereabouts of Jean Leguay, Bousquet’s delegate in the occupied zone. Leguay had moved back to Paris; he would be our judicial target. And while we waited for new evidence to emerge, we would attack Bousquet out of the courts.
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THE VICHY REGIME’S collaboration with the Nazi police on the Jewish question essentially took place in 1942, when Germany looked almost certain to win the war: forty-two thousand Jews were deported in six months, compared with thirty-three thousand between January 1943 and August 1944. In both the occupied zone and the free zone, the regular French police and the French gendarmerie took on the role of arresting Jews on behalf of the Germans. Most of the police’s negotiations with the occupying powers were conducted by the leaders of the French police, spurred on by the General Commission on the Jewish Question.
The members of this high-ranking political staff involved in anti-Jewish actions, under the authority of Marshal Pétain, were Pierre Laval, René Bousquet, Jean Leguay, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Jacques Schweblin (Jewish affairs police), and Jean François (director of the police headquarters). These were the men who, almost exclusively, met with the chiefs of the Nazi police—Oberg, Hagen, Knochen, Lischka, Dannecker, Röthke, Heinrichsohn—when it came to organizing the arrest of Jews, their delivery from the free zone, and their deportation to Auschwitz.
We found a German diplomatic letter describing the Paris visit of Reinhard Heydrich, head of the RSHA and the chief organizer of the Final Solution. This happened in May 1942. Prior to that, there had been only one single deportation convoy, on March 27, 1942. Heydrich informed Bousquet, the head of the French police, that he would soon be able to provide trains for deporting stateless Jews interned in the occupied zone. And Bousquet’s response was, essentially: Could you also take the stateless Jews we’ve had interned for more than a year in the free zone?
As for Leguay, Bousquet’s delegate in the occupied zone, he took part in two Franco-German police meetings on July 7 and 10, 1942, during which the Vél’ d’Hiv roundup was organized. He led the delegation of high-ranking French police officers who, on July 17, repeatedly insisted to Hagen and Röthke that the thousands of children (almost all of them French) of Jews arrested on July 16 and 17 should be deported along with their parents. It was the French police who separated these children from their parents and who held them in terrible conditions in Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers. (Some of the children had already died after ten days in these camps.) It was the regular police who transported them to Drancy, where they were herded by gendarmes, under the delighted gaze of Heinrichsohn, and deported. None of those four thousand children ever returned.
Vichy’s supporters claim that, if Laval had not given the Germans all these stateless and foreign Jews, France would have been governed by a German or by an even-more-collaborationist Doriot-Déat government. This is completely false. There is no trace of any such threat in any German document.
In fact, if Pétain and Laval had been brave enough to refuse to order the French police to serve the occupying powers in their persecution of the Jews, the Nazis would have had no choice but to back off. Their priorities lay elsewhere. The men at the top of the collaborationist pyramid also had the possibility of resigning. Leguay did the work he was asked to do, and in return he received a promotion.
After the Liberation, Leguay was interrogated by a purification commission that possessed none of the documents relating to the anti-Jewish actions. He claimed that he had met Dannecker only twice, whereas we had seen the minutes of six such meetings. He claimed that he had refused to yield to Dannecker’s demands when asked, in early July, to arrest “twenty thousand French Jews,” and he did not even mention the Vél’ d’Hiv roundup. Leguay’s impudence allowed him to enjoy a good postwar career: after being sent to the United States in 1945 by the Ministry of Industrial Production, he entered the private sector and became an executive in the cosmetics and pharmaceuticals industry in New York, London, and Paris.
As for Bousquet, his trial, in 1949, skimmed over the Jewish question. He was given the minimum sentence, which was lifted due to his “services for the Resistance.” He then became an executive at the Indochina Bank.
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IN 1975, BEATE tracked Leguay down in New York. We had decided to wait until the Nazi police criminals had been indicted before starting a campaign against their French collaborators. Lischka, Hagen, and Heinrichsohn were officially indicted in the summer of 1978. That fall, we began our offensive against Bousquet and Leguay, focusing our legal efforts on Leguay, who had never been tried.
On November 1, 1978, Le Monde obtained an interview with Jean Leguay:
LE MONDE: Do you still claim that the “arrest of twenty thousand Jews by the Paris police did not take place”?
LEGUAY: There was no roundup of twenty thousand French Jews. They were foreign Jews.
LE MONDE: So, in your opinion, arresting foreign Jews who had taken refuge in France—and their French children—is a less serious offense?
LEGUAY: Listen, at the time, we had to obey the Germans. There were German Jews, Polish Jews. The French government defended its own people. That’s normal.
On November 10, 1978, I held a press conference to announce that I planned to file charges against Leguay. In my statement, I declared, “I believe that politicians and the public should demand that they resign from the various posts they currently occupy. They’ve lived in peace for thirty-five years. Well, now it’s time for them to pay for their crimes!”
On November 15, 1978, on behalf of several relatives of victims of the police operation led by this man, I filed very detailed charges against Jean Leguay for crimes against humanity. Simultaneously, I made public my dossier on Bousquet. We protested outside Leguay’s home in Paris. This caused a big stir, and it was probably that evening that we decided to create the FFDJF to represent the French sons and daughters of those deported by the Vichy regime.
Bousquet’s situation unraveled very quickly. After protests, he was forced to resign from his position at the Indosuez Bank, at UTA airlines, and from his numerous directorships, supposedly so that he could devote time to defending himself from the charges brought against him.
In the meantime, on March 11, 1979, Jean Leguay became the first French man to be officially charged with crimes against humanity. I learned this news very close to the building at 15 Rue d’Italie in Nice, where my father had been arrested. In the front window of the bookstore a few yards down the street from our old home, I saw the headlines in France-Soir and stood there in shock. It was a great comfort for me to discover such incredible news in that particular spot, especially as the trial of the Nazi criminals in Cologne was soon to begin. France’s hard-line anti-Semites reacted to this development by publishing the addresses of the Jewish plaintiffs in the weekly far-right newspaper Minute, sparking a wave of abusive and threatening phone calls.
I was grateful for the assistance of Charles Libman, an experienced trial lawyer and former Resistance fighter, in the Leguay case. When it came to direct contact with the investigating judge, Martine Anzani, who had instantly grasped the importance of the dossier and who had shown the courage to pursue the case irrespective of outside pressure, everything was fine, but I had no experience with how things worked in the Palais de Justice. Charles Libman’s help was indispensable in guiding me through that labyrinth of jargon and required forms.