French Appeals Court is to Decide in June on Touvier War Crime Case

A French court of appeals is to decide next month whether the French Nazi collaborator Paul Touvier will stand trial for crimes against humanity.

Touvier, 78, is charged with choosing seven Jewish hostages who were executed by France’s collaborationist Vichy regime on June 28, 1944, in retaliation for the assassination by partisans of the head of Vichy’s propaganda department.

The Versailles Court of Appeals met in a closed session last week to deliberate on the matter, after government prosecutor Bernard Pasturaud urged that Touvier be prosecuted.

The court will hand down its decision on June 2.

Touvier’s lawyer, Jacques Tremolet de Villers, said his client was being prosecuted as a scapegoat.

“I’m doing my best so that it is the Touvier case that will be heard, and not the case of the Vichy regime,” de Villers said.

According to his lawyer, Touvier did his best to save a large number of hostages. By picking “only” seven to be killed, he supposedly spared the lives of hundreds of persons, Jews and non-Jews alike.

De Villers said Touvier’s action, by reducing the number of hostages to be killed from 100 to 7, could actually be seen as a legitimate way to defend the rest of the hostages.

“Concretely speaking, a crime was committed, but there was no criminal intention,” de Villers said.

But Pasturaud ridiculed de Villers’ argument.

DEMONSTRATIONS OUTSIDE THE COURT

As the legal debate went on inside the court, some 250 people demonstrated outside the building, demanding that the judges decide in favor of bringing Touvier to trial.

Some of the demonstrators carried signs reading “Touvier, you sent all my family to death, now you must pay.”

An earlier decision taken last year not to prosecute Touvier caused an uproar in France, particularly since the three judges handing down that decision appeared to absolve the Vichy regime of all guilt.

Those judges said that the government of Marshal Philippe Petain had no responsibility whatsoever in the mass murder of Europe’s Jews in the Holocaust.

In response, noted historians reminded France that the Vichy regime issued racial and anti-Semitic laws without being asked to do so by the Nazi occupiers.

However, many observers consider Touvier’s alleged crimes to be small in comparison to two other Frenchmen already indicted for crimes against humanity, Rene Bousquet and Maurice Papon, both over 80.

Bousquet was in charge of the Vichy police and personally oversaw the arrests and deportation of Jewish children.

Papon, in charge of the Bordeaux region in the southwest of France, issued orders to the local police that any opposition to the deportation of Jews be immediately quashed and reported.

But some politicians are opposed to bringing Bousquet and Papon to court, fearing it would “disrupt the social peace in France.”