The trial of former members of the Vichy “Commissariat for Jewish Affairs,” established during the Nazi occupation, began during the week-end with the reading of an 80-page indictment. At an earlier trial, Joseph Antignac, the former secretary-general of the Commissariat, was sentenced to death.
The prosecution charged that the defendants not only had control over the application of the racial laws, but that they also arrested Jews “guilty” of such crimes as hiding the yellow Star of David, which they were compelled to wear under their coats or “improperly” adjusting it on their clothing. Most of their victims, the prosecution added, were sent to the concentration camp at Drancy, 20 miles east of Paris, and thence to extermination camps in the East.
Meanwhile, the court trying Otto Abetz, Hitler’s envoy to Paris who is charged with complicity in deporting 40,000 Jews from France to their death in Poland, heard the defendant disclaim any responsibility for the death of former Minister of Interior Georges Mandel, a Jew. M. Mandel was assassinated by Vichyite militiamen while being transferred from one prison to another. Abetz admitted that he suggested to his government that M. Mandel and former Premier Leon Blum, also a Jew, be executed as reprisal for the execution of French collaborators in North Africa, but added: “I was proposing something that could not and would not have been carried out.”
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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.
