French Confront Their Past with Conviction of Touvier

The conviction here this week of Nazi collaborator Paul Touvier signals that France may finally be ready to confront its wartime past.

Some 23 years ago, then French President Georges Pompidou pardoned Touvier on charges of committing war crimes with the explanation that France should bury the period of its history when the Vichy government supported the Nazi program for the extermination of the Jews.

But this week, concluding a trial that lasted little over a month, a jury took 5 1/2 hours to reach the verdict that Touvier, 79, was guilty of crimes against humanity. He was given the maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

Nearly 50 years after committing the deeds for which he was tried, Touvier has become the first Frenchman to be convicted of crimes against humanity.

The majority of the French population was in favor of bringing Touvier to trial. More than 64 percent of those recently polled supported the idea, saying it would help shed light on this dark period of French History.

The verdict in the Touvier trail was greeted with relief by the French Jewish community.

Jean Kahn, head of CRIF, the umbrella organization representing French Jewry, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he was “totally satisfied with the outcome of the trial. This was not the trial of Vichy, like some people have said, but the trial of one of the smaller wheels of the collaboration.

“Touvier was sentenced to the maximum penalty, and this is justice for what he did. Touvier was a faithful and a loyal ally of the Nazis,” said Kahn.

Three other Frenchmen have been charged with crimes against humanity, but their cases never went to trial.

Rene Bousquet, Vichy’s police chief between 1942 and 1944, was charged with the deportation of 2,000 Jewish children. But before he could stand trial, he was killed by a deranged gunman last June at the age of 82.

Jean Leguay, indicted in 1979 for organizing the first mass roundup of French Jews in 1942, died of natural causes in 1989 at the age of 79.

Maurice Papon, a senior official in wartime Bordeaux, has so far managed to evade trial with a series of legal maneuvers. Papon, who served as Paris police chief in the 1960s and was a Cabinet member in the 1970s, is now 83 and may never come before a court.

But Kahn said Papon should be brought to trial, because he was “much more important than Touvier.” He pointed out that Papon ordered the deportation of hundreds of Jews from the Bordeaux region, “which was not even occupied by the German army.”

“I do regret that there will be no Bousquet trial,” he added, “because Bousquet was the one responsible for the arrest of Jews in France. I still cannot understand how Bousquet was so conveniently suppressed so close to his trial.”

Kahn added that he was totally opposed to the idea of “erasing history.”

“Given the crimes committed by those people, how can anyone speak of erasing the memory of what they did? The unique circumstances of the Holocaust forbid us from holding such a view,” he said.

French Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld expressed bitterness at the current French government’s handling of the Vichy period.

Noting that President Francois Mitterrand has a different vision of Vichy than the one Jewish families have. We see in Vichy a government that decided to send the police after Jews all through France and who wrought havoc in our lives.

“The leniency of the French president is not a surprise for us. He has expressed it on various occasions, and we had to oppose it, as in the Bousquet case.

“Mitterrand joined the Vichy regime in 1942, a collaborationist and anti- Semitic regime. He left this regime to join the Resistance, but he’d rather have these years of the beginning of his career not mentioned anymore in the courts,” said Klarsfeld.

The jury at the Versailles Court of Jewish hostages in Rillieux-la-Pape, located near Lyon in southeastern France, on June 29, 1944.

Touvier was at the time the local head of the intelligence service of the militia, the 30,000-member collaborationist civilian armed force created by the Vichy regime.

The killings of the Jewish hostages were in reprisal for the murder the day before by the Resistance of Vichy Propaganda Minister Philippe Henriot.

Touvier has admitted that he personally picked the seven Jewish hostages who were killed in retaliation.

After the liberation, Touvier was arrested and held at the Paris police headquarters from where he mysteriously escaped. Condemned twice to death in absentia for his numerous was crimes, he went into hiding.

It was discovered later that he was helped by numerous members of the Catholic Church in France, some of them belonging to the highest ranks of the Catholic hierarchy.

Because of the statute of limitations for war crimes – a charge different from that of crimes against humanity, which has no statute of limitations – Touvier reappeared in his hometown of Chambery, located near Lyon, in 1970.

Touvier asked for a pardon from President Pompidou who, it was widely believed, despised the Resistance. Pompidou obliged in 1971.

Aware of the scandalous implications of his pardon, the French president requested that his decision not be printed in the official state publication where all laws and decrees are published.

In spite of that, a few months later, Pompidou’s decision was discovered by a group of former Resistance members from the Lyon area.

The outrage was immediate, and Touvier was tracked down by a French reporter. Touvier’s picture appeared in the large-circulation weekly L’Express, triggering a wave of protests against Pompidou’s pardon.

At a news conference, instead of trying to defuse the scandal, Pompidou justified his action by saying that it was time for the French to cast a veil over this period of history “when Frenchmen didn’t like each other.”

Touvier, in a letter to a Catholic priest, revealed that he was the one who had picked the seven Jewish hostages who were murdered in Rillieux-la-Pape.

The letter, which was published by the press, then prompted relatives of the victims to sue Touvier for crimes against humanity, a charge for which pardons do not apply.

Touvier went back into hiding in various convents and monasteries until he was discovered by the French police in a monastery near Nice in 1989.

During the five-week trial, the French media provided extensive coverage of the proceedings. As a result, the generations born after World War II discovered to what extent the government that ruled France from 1940 to 1945 was collaborationist and ant-Semitic.

Touvier, an obsessive anti-Semite, never retracted his opinions. In diaries discovered by the French police in 1989, Touvier wrote about television programs he watched in 1985 and 1988 that he described as “Jewish rubbish.” In another journal entry, he referred to a television reporter as a “dirty Jewess.”

In court, Touvier testified that he wrote those entries “for amusement.”

The lawyers for the plaintiffs – which included members of Jewish and Resistance organization, and relatives of the Jews executed at Rillieux-la-Pape – argued that Touvier had acted on direct orders from the Nazis.

only one lawyer, Arno Klarsfeld, son of the French Nazi-hunter, took a different approach. He said that Touvier had acted on his own, picking Jewish hostages because he was an anti-Semite and not because he was ordered to do so by the German occupiers.

Had the court agreed with Klarsfeld’s arguments, Touvier would have walked out free from the dock, since according to French law, the charge of crimes against humanity requires proof that the individual did not act on his own.

Instead, it must be shown that the individual was following orders of an Axis power, in this case Germany, bent on pursuing a “hegemonic” policy aimed at the annihilation of populations because of their race, religion or political beliefs.

The French courts have ruled that the Vichy government was not following such a policy, but was compelled by its Nazi occupier to take some actions against the Jews.

Touvier’s lawyer, Jacques Tremolet de Villers, had pleaded for the acquittal of his client, because, he said, Touvier was guilty of war crimes and not of crimes against humanity.

Touvier, who was given the last word before the jury withdrew for deliberations, offered an expression of remorse.

“I have never forgotten the victims of Rillieux. I think of them every day, every evening,” he said.

But on Tuesday night, the jury of nine returned a verdict of guilty on all counts, without any extenuating circumstances, as the state prosecutor had requested.

The only person brought to trial in France before now for crimes against humanity was Klaus Barbie, the German Gestapo police chief in Lyon. Barbie was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987. He died in jail of cancer in 1991.

The French media reported the Touvier verdict and the reactions of the lawyers of the victims, who said they were now waiting for the trial of Papon.

But some French journalists surmised that the Barbie and Touvier trials were sufficient and that there should be no more such trials in order to protect the cohesiveness of French society.

Some extreme right-wing French weeklies, in articles published before the verdict was handed down, called Touvier the “French Schindler.” This was an allusion to Touvier’s line of defense, which was that if it bad not been for his personal intervention, the Nazis would have had 100 Jewish hostages, not merely seven, shot in retaliation for Henriot’s assassination.

After the trial, Touvier’s lawyers announced he would appeal the sentence.

Under French law, an appeal can only be requested on procedural or specific legal grounds, not for reviewing facts presented during the trial.

When reporters asked Touvier’s lawyer on what grounds he would seek an appeal, he replied, “We will find a reason.”