IN THE MEANTIME, the Papon affair blew up. At that time, Maurice Papon was the French minister of the budget under Prime Minister Raymond Barre since 1978. Papon had been chief of the Paris police between 1958 and 1967, and many blamed him for the deaths of protesters in acts of police brutality in 1961 and 1962. Until now, however, few had been aware that some of the policemen who had carried out this repression had also taken part in the roundups of 1942, when Maurice Papon was already active in Bordeaux.
The Papon affair was begun by a young researcher, Michel Bergès, who recovered a mass of dossiers from Bordeaux’s regional police headquarters that were headed for the garbage heap. Realizing that these dossiers included some from the Jewish Affairs Department and that the documents within incriminated Maurice Papon, Bergès sent them to Michel Slitinsky, a former Resistance fighter and the son of a murdered Jew who was calling for the truth concerning the fate of Bordeaux’s Jews. Slitinsky passed the documents on to the satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné, which, on May 7, 1981, revealed that Papon was implicated in the arrest and delivery of Jews to the Gestapo. Papon’s response: “All this has little effect on me. Le Canard Enchaîné is nitpicking, but I have bigger things to worry about at the moment.”
I demanded Papon’s resignation in the pages of Le Monde the next day: “Papon played a role in these events; not a leading role, but his actions were real nonetheless. He probably did less than Jean Leguay, the only Frenchman to have been charged with crimes against humanity … But he did much more than the ordinary policeman who arrested Jews or the gendarme who escorted convoys of defenseless children to their deaths for the crime of being born Jewish.”
My opinion on this case did not change between that 1981 article in Le Monde and my son Arno’s momentous courtroom speech in 1998, when he was the only lawyer to ask not for life imprisonment but for a ten-year prison sentence for Papon, which is what the jury decided upon. In doing so, he probably saved the trial from an acquittal, which would have been the likely outcome if the jury had been forced to choose between acquittal and a life sentence. Arno concluded his speech with the words: “Why this unease? Because we are in the presence of an educated, civilized man who almost certainly would not have attacked a child on religious grounds. Because he is not a bloodthirsty monster, but simply a man who forgot the republican values of compassion and humanity in his desire for professional advancement. Maurice Papon hid behind instructions. For him, orders took precedence. He believed himself the spectator of a tragedy, in the shadow of his dossiers. And yet he was actively involved, becoming, without any internal conflict, an efficient instrument in the service of a crime against humanity. Maurice Papon is no Klaus Barbie or Paul Touvier. He did not assume the political role of a Leguay or of a Bousquet, either. To sentence him to life imprisonment would not correspond to the historical truth. But he is guilty because he never had the courage to say ‘No!’ just once, to his career or his chance for glory.”
* * *
IN 1981, PAPON demanded—and was granted—a jury made up of former Resistance members. Among them were Father Michel Riquet, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, Daniel Mayer, Jean Pierre-Bloch, and Charles Verny, the rapporteur, who, on July 27, 1981, asked me for my opinion on the matter. I testified before the jury on September 29, 1981, but my testimony was met with hostility and incomprehension. My opinion—backed up by a detailed dossier containing a nine-page summary and forty-nine separate supporting documents—was that Maurice Papon should be tried for crimes against humanity.
On December 15, the jury gave its verdict in four points, presenting a highly ambiguous vision of Papon:
1. Papon is acknowledged as being a member of the Resistance from January 1, 1943.
2. He had to take part in acts apparently contrary to the jury’s conception of honor and which, understandably, have shocked the French sensibility. But these acts must be seen in the context of the times. Moreover, several of them were not as significant as their revelation might make them appear … Maurice Papon should have resigned from his position as a policeman in July 1942 before the roundup.
3. The documents produced by Le Canard Enchainé and by Serge Klarsfeld are authentic.
4. Of the sixteen witnesses, all—with the exception of Serge Klarsfeld—believed that there was no justification for legal proceedings against the leaders of the Bordeaux police.
I responded with a scathing press release: “As representatives of Jewish families, we can affirm that it was probably better to be saved by Vichy’s anti-Semitic bureaucrats, who were sometimes loath to do the Gestapo’s dirty work, than to be arrested and handed over to the Nazis by Resistance fighters or sympathizers like Mr. Papon and his kind. In delivering this verdict, the jury is, to my knowledge, the first mouthpiece of the Resistance to publicly declare that the Jews of France were sent to their deaths by a member of the French Resistance.”
I worked very hard gathering complaints from witnesses about the deaths of young children delivered to the Gestapo in the summer of 1942 by the Jewish Affairs Department under Papon’s authority, and I was in possession of original documents relating to these facts, signed by Papon. So on May 10, 1982, I filed six new complaints that I was sure would not be rejected by the investigating judge—and I was proved right. On July 29, 1982, an investigation was opened, and on January 19, 1983, Papon was charged with crimes against humanity.
I went to Paris, Reims, Lens, and Versailles to offer support to our plaintiffs. This became a painful task in 1985, when Papon brought slander charges against them. These plaintiffs had lost mothers, brothers, and sisters, and now they were faced with an investigating judge who, in an attempt to uncover the truth, was treating them as the accused. None of them gave up their battle, in spite of the harassment they received in the form of threatening and insulting phone calls.
* * *
THE INVESTIGATION OF the Papon affair took a backseat once Klaus Barbie was brought back to Lyon in February 1983, as his trial became my overriding priority. Without the German occupation, there would have been no persecution of Jews by the French authorities; without Lischka, without Hagen, without Barbie, there would have been no Leguay, Papon, or Touvier.