PARIS, Feb. 16 (JTA) — As far as the lawyers for the civil plaintiffs in the war crimes trial of Maurice Papon are concerned, there is a loose cannon among them. Already fearing that the slow pace of the trial may work against them, the lawyers for the prosecution were infuriated when colleague Arno Klarsfeld dealt a blow to their case by saying he believed the defendant’s claims that he was merely obeying orders. “In my opinion, Maurice Papon, you would not have acted without orders. I cannot believe that you wanted to see our fellow countrymen deported,” Klarsfeld told the defendant last week in court. With that one comment, Klarsfeld embarrassed and angered the other prosecution lawyers by contradicting the argument of criminal intent on which their case is based. “He’s pleading in Papon’s defense,” said lawyer Gerard Boulanger. “It’s very dangerous. Let’s just hope that the jury is sufficiently convinced of Papon’s guilt that whatever the Klarsfelds do won’t ruin the trial.” “It’s a theatrical ploy to grab attention,” added Boulanger, who first launched legal action against Papon in 1981. Papon, 87, is accused of ordering the arrest for deportation of 1,560 Jews, including 223 children, from the southwest city of Bordeaux between 1942 and 1944, when he was a senior bureaucrat of the collaborationist Vichy regime. Papon denies the charges and says he used his position to save Jews and to help the anti-Nazi resistance. From the start of the trial, Klarsfeld and his famous Nazi-hunter father, Serge, have called for a more lenient sentence for Papon to emphasize the difference between his deeds and those of people like Klaus Barbie, ex-chief of the Gestapo in Lyon, or Paul Touvier, a leader of the fascist militia in the same city. Touvier was sentenced to life in prison by a Versailles court in 1994 for the shooting of seven Jewish hostages, and Barbie was also jailed for life by a French court for torturing Jews and deporting them to death camps. “The Klarsfelds have always said Papon was less important than the others,” said Alain Jakubowicz, who represents B’nai B’rith and the Consistoire, the body tending to the religious needs of French Jews. But many saw Arno Klarsfeld’s tactic as a way to get back at his colleagues, who had publicly condemned him last month for abruptly revealing — without consulting them — that the judge was related to some of the Jews allegedly deported by Papon, and therefore should step down because of a conflict of interest. Those disclosures nearly led to the judge’s removal from a trial already dogged by delays. “In 10 minutes, he got what he was looking for — revenge, right in court, against his colleagues who had denounced his offensive against the presiding judge in January,” wrote Pascale Nivelle in the daily newspaper Liberation. Klarsfeld has never been a team player, according to those familiar with his trial tactics. At Touvier’s trial three years ago, he sparked the ire of his colleagues by being the only one among the 17 lawyers for the civil plaintiffs to argue that the defendant had acted on his own free will when murdering Jews. The other lawyers, bound by an appellate court’s controversial definition of crimes against humanity, had tried to prove that the former militia chief had been following Nazi orders.
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