Paul Touvier, a French Nazi collaborator who headed the wartime Vichy-regime militia in Lyon, will be tried for crimes against humanity, under a ruling this week by a French appeals court.
It will be the first time a French citizen has been tried here for crimes against humanity. Touvier’s superior, Klaus Barbie, known as the “butcher of Lyon,” was convicted of crimes against humanity in 1987, but he was German.
French Jewish groups lauded the decision by the Versailles Court of Appeals, which reversed a ruling in April 1992 by the Paris Court of Appeals that had drawn fire from French citizens and media throughout the country.
Jean Kahn, head of CRIF, the umbrella body representing French Jewry, hearing of the reversal, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “It is a very good thing that French justice is, for the first time, about to try a Frenchman for crimes against humanity.
“It took a very long time to reach this point, and there is still much to do to expose the whole of Vichy’s responsibility in the Final Solution.”
The only charge retained against Touvier is the alleged execution of seven Jewish hostages in Rillieux-le-Pape, near Lyon, on June 29, 1944.
The executions were made in retaliation for the murder by Resistance fighters of the collaborationist Vichy regime’s propaganda master, Philippe Henriot.
Touvier, 78, has acknowledged he picked the seven to be shot, but also claims he prevented the killing of many more hostages and partisans and was only following orders when he singled out Jews for the executions.
In April 1992, the Paris appeals court decided that Touvier could not be tried for crimes against humanity, because this would imply that the Vichy regime had an “ideologically hegemonic policy” of its own.
What the court actually intended to say was that France was occupied by Germany and that its administration was merely obeying orders.
MITTERRAND SAYS HE’S ‘GLAD’
That ruling, now reversed, essentially sought to clear Touvier and the Vichy regime altogether of any guilt in crimes against humanity.
The 1992 decision outraged large sections of the public opinion. In a rather unusual move, the president of France’s Supreme Court decided to appeal that ruling.
Historians have noted that the Vichy regime issued racial and anti-Semitic laws well before the Germans even asked the French to do so.
Large-circulation magazines have repeatedly published documents about the “dark years” between 1940 and 1944 that implicated the Vichy regime in carrying out Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution.
This week’s court ruling means that Touvier may be brought to trial next spring. The trial will probably be held in Versailles.
The court decision is the latest in a roller coaster of events and legal decisions affecting Touvier.
Touvier was twice condemned to death in absentia for war crimes. He was then hidden and protected by members of the French Catholic clergy until the 1970s, when he obtained a secret dispensation from president Georges Pompidou restoring his personal property.
By then, a blanket pardon had been granted for war crimes, and Touvier and his family emerged from hiding. But Pompidou’s action infuriated former Resistance fighters, and new complaints were brought against Touvier for crimes against humanity, a category not covered by the pardon.
Touvier went back into hiding until he was arrested at a convent in Nice in 1989.
On Wednesday, French President Francois Mitterrand, who had earlier been accused of trying to flinch from trials of alleged Vichy war criminals, said he was “glad that the courts could do their job.”
It was soothing news for those who lived through this dark period, added the French president.
Two other Frenchmen are still liable to be tried for crimes against humanity.
Rene Bousquet and Maurice Papon, both over 80, were respectively head of the Vichy police and secretary-general of the Bordeaux district.
No final decision has been taken yet regarding their possible trials.
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