IN 1993, THE Papon case was still under investigation, its focus limited to the year 1942, as only the charges filed by our plaintiffs had not been thrown out. I had chosen 1942 because that was the year when deportation was at its height (forty-three thousand people, including thirty-three thousand in eleven weeks) and when relations between the Sipo-SD, the police, and the French authorities had been at their most fluid, when the pressure that the Germans put on their French colleagues was least felt. Maurice Papon was the only one of the four French war criminals we had targeted (the others being the Bordeaux prefect Maurice Sabatier, Jean Leguay, and René Bousquet) who was still alive.
Unlike the other plaintiffs’ lawyers, Arno and I were not perturbed by the relative slowness of the investigation. We had faith that it would end up in the office of the prosecutor general, and in August 1995, that is precisely what happened. Six months later, the case was directed, as we had hoped, to the criminal court in Bordeaux.
Incredulous at this outcome, Papon claimed he was the victim of a political plot and that I was working on behalf of a shadowy group of Jewish Americans of German origin with the aim of diminishing Germany’s guilt in the Holocaust by making France share in it.
On February 9, 1997, Le Monde published an article by Laurent Greilsamer, who had been following my cases since 1978: “Serge Klarsfeld acts on behalf of the mission he has given himself, in accordance with the strategy he has chosen. First of all, he wanted to bring the German criminals to justice. Only then did he pursue their French counterparts … Sometimes, the work of one man can awaken or reawaken the memory of all.”
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WE KNEW THAT this trial would be difficult because there was, from the start, disagreement among the numerous other plaintiffs’ lawyers and ourselves. Meanwhile, Arno digested all the volumes of the investigation and the historical archives that I had gathered. He would fight the case while I remained outside the courthouse with Beate and the Sons and Daughters.
We also knew that among the enemies we would face in this trial was the president of the criminal court. Unlike the United States or Germany, France is not a country where the presiding judge in the criminal court is chosen randomly. In France, the president of the criminal court is chosen by the first president of the court of appeal. Some friends of ours from Bordeaux told us that, during a dinner party for a few friends, the judge who would make that choice had expressed open hostility toward the idea of a trial of Papon, before it had even become a reality. Consequently, it seemed unlikely that he would choose someone who did not share his point of view. So we were well aware that there was a good chance that the president of the court would be in favor of acquittal.
From the start of the trial, our apprehensions were confirmed: the court president, Jean-Louis Castagnède, prevented Arno from speaking freely when it came to examining Papon’s state of health. Arno was going to point out that the cardiologist who had been looking after Papon had refused to confirm that his health was in decline, which had led Papon to turn to another, more malleable cardiologist. The decision to free Papon, taken by the president, meant that, even if he were convicted, Papon would only go to prison the day before his appeal was heard at the court of cassation—and who knew when that would happen. If his appeal were accepted, he would spend only one night in prison; if it were rejected, he would stay there for the period of the sentence he would eventually receive. Papon was eighty-six years old.
Castagnède had effectively given Papon control of the trial: he could decide whether he attended it or not. If he believed that he was likely to be convicted, he would merely have to stay in bed, and the trial would be adjourned until a later session—in other words, never. On the other hand, if Papon believed that there was a chance he would be acquitted, he would continue making the effort to go to court, and he would only be convicted if he turned out to be mistaken about the probable outcome.
When the decision to free Papon was announced on October 10, Arno withdrew from “a trial that has lost its meaning.” Outside the courtroom, where the Sons and Daughters were protesting, I declared, “The French courts took sixteen years to send Maurice Papon to prison; Judge Castagnède took three days to free him.”
Meanwhile, the prosecutor general urged us to return to the trial. He also decided to go public with his opposition to President Castagnède by lodging an appeal—an unprecedented step! In those circumstances, we felt able to take our place in the courtroom once again.
On January 28, 1998, there was a dramatic turn of events, as we revealed that Jean-Louis Castagnède was the nephew of one of Papon’s victims and that he could himself have been a plaintiff against Papon.
Micheline Castagnède was the daughter of the court president’s only paternal uncle and his wife, Esterina Benaïm. She was the sole surviving member of her family, which was transported from Bordeaux to Auschwitz via Drancy in three separate convoys, all overseen by Papon.
We did not know about Micheline’s existence until she got in touch with the regional office of the CRIF. She went there on January 26 and asked for information on the deportation of the Benaïm family. The secretary transmitted this request to me in Bordeaux on the morning of the twenty-seventh, and it was only the next day in Paris that I researched those convoys. On the afternoon of January 28, I called the CRIF office in Bordeaux and spoke to Micheline Castagnède, who explained to me that she had heard her cousin, the court president, as he examined the convoy of December 30, 1943, read out the names of her mother and her two sisters. She had told the CRIF secretary that she had regularly seen Jean-Louis until she was about sixteen or seventeen; that he knew who his aunt was; and that their distant relations now were due to the president’s wife, who looked down on Micheline’s branch of the family.
I did not ask Micheline to do anything; nor did Arno. But she spontaneously gave us information that we had every right to use. We had to do this for three reasons: first of all, because it was the truth; second, to prevent Papon’s defense team from using this information—if they came into possession of it—either to recuse the president or as an argument in their defense or as a means of appeal; last, so that the president would take it upon himself to resign from his position. If we had asked Micheline Castagnède to become a plaintiff, which she would almost certainly have agreed to, we could have had the president recused immediately and without appeal. But we wanted him to make the decision himself. He did not.
President Castagnède claimed to be “flabbergasted” by this new information. We didn’t believe him.
Our revelation of the truth was not the cause of the fuss that followed; there was nothing aggressive about Arno’s press release. It concluded with the words: “To our knowledge, the president of the criminal court of Bordeaux, Jean-Louis Castagnède, avoided mentioning this kinship.” In other words, he had hidden his direct relationship with a victim because otherwise he could not have served as president of the court and been allowed to be an associate plaintiff against Papon. The scandal blew up from the immediate, outraged solidarity toward the president shown by the other lawyers, both defense and prosecution, who issued a virulent press release of their own, calling for disciplinary and criminal proceedings to be brought against Arno and myself for slandering the court president.
But the practical result of our intervention was the formal agreement we got from Papon’s lawyers not to use this information as the basis of an appeal.
We held firm, and very quickly the president, destabilized by this turn of events, altered his behavior, becoming much more severe toward Papon and his defense team.
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IN HIS VIBRANT closing speech, Arno asked for a sentence of ten years. The other prosecution lawyers demanded life imprisonment. The prosecutor general sided with us, even if his demand for a twenty-year sentence was double what we were suggesting. The defense lawyers asked for an acquittal, and the other prosecution lawyers declared that they would prefer acquittal to an intermediate sentence. But to us, taking that risk was a betrayal of the victims’ families, who wanted Papon to be convicted and who knew that acquittal would be a disaster. It would have meant that, from the prefect to the gendarme, no one active in the arrest of Jews was guilty except Pétain and Pierre Laval, respectively the head of the state and the head of the government.
On April 2, 1998, faced with these four possibilities—life, twenty years, ten years, or acquittal—the jury made its choice. Papon was convicted and, as we had asked, sentenced to ten years in prison. But Papon remained free until the day before his appeal to the court of cassation.
When that day came—October 20, 1998—Papon did not, as he was legally bound to, present himself at the door of the prison but fled with his granddaughter.
Some of the other lawyers were outraged by this, damning Papon as a “scoundrel.” We, by contrast, saw him simply as a scared old man, overwhelmed by the prospect of this supreme humiliation.
And so he was forced to flee at the last minute, unprepared, at an advanced age. This in itself was a sort of poetic justice: he found himself in the same situation that a Jew of his age would have been in in 1942.
While Touvier was on the run for five decades, Papon’s flight lasted only forty-eight hours. At 4:00 p.m. on October 21, the court rejected Papon’s appeal. The next day, in Switzerland, Papon was arrested, and that very evening he was incarcerated in Fresnes.
Papon’s imprisonment shows that, even for crimes going back nearly sixty years, a powerful man can be brought to justice. Despite all his efforts to evade prison, despite his lawyers, his appeals, all the protection offered to him—including that of President Mitterrand—this man was finally put behind bars.
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HE DID NOT serve ten years in prison. In fact, he served only three before being released—thanks to a new French law—on grounds of ill health. On September 4, 2002, Papon came out of prison, not on a stretcher, but on his own two feet.
He died on February 17, 2007, at the age of ninety-six.
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THE PAPON CASE was difficult, unpleasant, and exemplary. We had to fight stubbornly against almost everyone, we were widely misunderstood, and our only solid support came from the collective will of the Sons and Daughters. But that was enough to sustain us.