Papon, Facing Possible Trial for War Crimes, Condemns ADL

A French court has opened hearings to decide whether a former cabinet minister should be tried for his role in deporting 1,690 Jews, 223 of them children, to Nazi concentration camps between 1942 and 1944.

And in an interview published as the court convened, Maurice Papon said the Anti-Defamation League was behind efforts to bring him to trial.

Papon, who is accused of complicity in crimes against humanity, kidnapping, arbitrary arrests and persecution, was secretary-general of the Bordeaux region’s local government during Germany’s wartime occupation of France.

Papon, 85, whose wartime activities only became known to the pubic in 1981, after the war to served as Paris police chief, from 1958 to 1967, and later as budget minister.

The accused also said in the interview, with the daily Liberation, that Jews had helped draw up lists of other Jews for deportation, prompting charges of slander by the son of Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld.

During a recess in the closed-door hearings, held in the southwestern city of Bordeaux, lawyers said outside the courtroom that French public prosecutor Henri Desclaux had attacked Papon, saying that he must have known about Hitler’s Final Solution and the destination of the deportees.

Papon, who was not in court, has insisted in the past that he did not.

Desclaux accused Papon of participating in a large number of arrests and of sending people to transit camps, “the antechambers of death,” lawyers said.

The court is expected to make a decision in about two months.

In the newspaper interview, Papon said he was the scapegoat of a political plot by the Anti-Defamation League to make France share responsibility with Germany for the Holocaust.

He accused Serge Klarsfeld, one of several lawyers representing the 36 plaintiffs in the case, of being on the ADL’s payroll.

“Monsieur Klarsfeld, in reality, is an employee of the American organization, made up of German Jews who have obtained U.S. citizenship and whose propaganda aims abroad have always been to prevent Germany” from talking all the blame for the eradication of the Jews, he said.

“They needed a political trial. I am a sort of expiatory victim of the misfortune of the time,” he said.

His main line of defense is that he was only a junior official following orders.

“It was a very subordinate position, it was a back seat. It was a job of carrying out orders,” Papon said.

He said the main evidence in the case – documents from the period that bear his signature detailing the organization of the arrests and deportation – were not orders but simply reports.

“There are two things I did that I’m proud of. First, I replaced the Feldgendramerie (German military police), which escorted the convoys of Jews, with French gendarmes,” Papon said.

“The grand rabbi had begged us to take charge because the Feldgendarmerie made those poor Jews get in the livestock cars by hitting them with gun barrels,” he said.

“Then, I replaced the livestock cars with passenger cars. Once,” he added.

Papon said in the interview that he used this position to try to help the Resistance and that he even saved 139 Jews by taking their names off lists of people to be arrested.

He also told Liberation that the lists were compiled by the chief rabbi of Franc and the UGIF, the General Union of French Jews – a statement that sparked an outcry.

“Papon says he was a minor official, that the did what he could to save Jews and that the Jews were the artisans of their own fate. That’s slander. He was a ruthless cog in Hitler’s Final Solution in France,” Arno Klarsfeld, Serge Klarsfeld’s son, told reporters.

The UGIF was created on German demand in 1941 to represent the Jews of France. It was dissolved shortly after the 1994 liberation.

The aging Papon is probably the last French official to face the possibility of trial for wartime crimes.

He plans to take the case to the Supreme Court if he is put on trial, which would delay the case until next year at the earliest.

In April 1994, former Lyon militia chief Paul Touvier was found guilty of crimes against humanity and imprisoned for life.

Touvier was convicted for his role in the assassination of seven Jewish hostages on June 29, 1994, in Rillieux-la-Pape, located near Lyon in southeastern France.

He had been arrested after hiding for more than 40 years with the help of extremist right-wing French Catholics.