Jewish leaders have condemned the murder of Rene Bousquet, the French Nazi collaborator who ordered the roundup and deportations of thousands of Jews, but added they could not shed tears over his death.
Bousquet, 84, was shot dead Tuesday morning in his Paris home by an apparently deranged French writer, Christian Didier, who several years ago had been caught in a failed attempt to kill another war criminal, Klaus Barbie.
Bousquet, as former secretary-general of the Vichy police, was responsible for sending tens of thousands of French Jews to German death camps and personally oversaw the infamous Velodrome d’Hiver roundup of Jews in 1942.
Bousquet also reportedly asked the Nazis to lower the age of the Jewish children to be arrested and deported.
Ironically, a French court of appeals had been scheduled to decide within a few weeks whether to try Bousquet for crimes against humanity.
Jean Kahn, head of CRIF, the umbrella organization representing French Jewry, said he was sorry that Bousquet’s long-awaited trial would never take place.
“It would have been something essential to the younger French generations,” Kahn said.
“We are living in a state of law. No one should take the law into his own hands. We have been deprived of a very important trial,” said Kahn.
ADMITS KILLING ‘THAT PIECE OF GARBAGE’
In Washington, Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said, “I will not shed a tear for his death, but I wish he’d lived to face trial and be subject to justice.
“I’m sorry that his death may impact on the freedom of another individual. Bousquet took enough lives in his lifetime,” said Foxman.
Didier, the 49-year-old killer, escaped the scene of the crime, but later summoned the French media to a hotel room where he confessed to the killing and was later arrested.
Posing as an agent of the French Ministry of Interior, Didier rang the bell at Bousquet’s apartment on Paris’ elegant Avenue Raphael early Tuesday morning.
Didier said he was carrying a subpoena for Bousquet. Once inside, Didier pulled out a 38-caliber revolver and shot Bousquet four times.
“I didn’t care about killing that piece of garbage,” Didier said in an interview on French television.
“The guy had incredible energy. I fired a second time and he kept coming at me. I fired a third time and he started to stagger.
“The fourth time I got him in the head or the neck and he fell with blood running out of him,” Didier said.
Didier explained his actions by saying, “In order to feel better, I knew I had to do something big, something important, something for the well-being of mankind.”
Didier then read a message he had sent to various newspapers, in which he explained his “divine wandering,” his search of the “breath of God,” his “mission on Earth.”
Police confirmed that the gun found in Didier’s possession was the weapon used in Bousquet’s murder.
TRIED TO KILL KLAUS BARBIE
Didier previously served a four-month sentence for his attempted murder of Barbie.
In May 1987, Didier tried to enter Barbie’s prison cell in Lyon, posing as a urologist, since Barbie was suffering from a bladder cancer. But Didier was discovered to be carrying a gun.
Reacting to Tuesday’s murder, Jewish leaders lamented the fact that since a Bousquet trial would now never be held, an opportunity to publicly expose the Vichy regime’s collaborationist record would be denied.
Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, said in New York, “The Vichy government should not be let off the hook by this assassination. Its sordid record must still be scrutinized and brought to public light.”
Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, called Bousquet “a notorious war criminal who deported innocent children to the death camps.
“But justice would have been better served had he been tried in a court of law and his record of inhumanity documented there for all time,” he said.
Hopes that Bousquet would be brought to trial had been recently buoyed by a recent French appeals court ruling last week that, for the first time, ordered a Frenchman to be tried for war crimes in the case of Paul Touvier, wartime chief of the Lyon militia.
Those who pursued the case against Bousquet, chief among them Paris Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld, said he owed his success to lying about his wartime activities, among which were that he had assisted the French Resistance and had refused to deal with affairs concerning the Jews.
But documents Klarsfeld discovered in Nazi archives in 1989 were found to contain a memorandum Bousquet sent to his deputies all over France in August 1942, stating that “the head of the government,” then Marshal Philippe Petain, “wants you to personally supervise control of the measures decided against the foreign Jews.”
Bousquet was indicted in 1991 for crimes against humanity. The indictment culminated a 10-year effort by Klarsfeld and his organization, the Sons and Daughters of Deported People, to reopen the Bousquet case despite official reluctance.
When he was brought to trial in 1949, he was given a symbolic sentence which was immediately revoked in recognition of “services rendered to the Resistance” and having been a deportee. He was pardoned in 1949.
Afterward, Bousquet lived in the lap of luxury and success as a banker and businessman. In his waning years he was a director of the famed Baccarat crystal factory.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
