Jean Leguay, a French collaborator with the Nazis in the deportation of Jews, will be tried on war crimes charges filed against him last March. Prosecution of the case was ordered after an investigating judge rejected his lawyer’s appeal to have them dropped Leguay, a high-ranking police officer during the Nazi occupation, was a deputy of the Secretary General of the French Police, Rene Bousquet, in the occupied zone in 1942.
Court action was brought against Leguay earlier this year by Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld and two other lawyers, Charles Libman and Lucien Holimi. They acted on behalf of the families of Jewish deportees who were rounded up on masse in Paris in July, 1942 on the orders of Leguay and Bosquet. Leguay’s lawyer tried unsuccessfully to have the investigating judge declared incompetent in the case. The appeals court decided, however, that there were no grounds to drop the charges.
Leguay was in trouble briefly after World War II for collaboration with the Nazis but avoided prosecution and has been a successful businessman for the last 25 years.
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