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Journalism of Courage
Reopening a painful case about the persecution of Jews in France during World War II, a court on Wednesday ordered the release for medical reasons of Maurice Papon, 92, a former top Vichy official convicted of deporting more than 1,600 Jews to Nazi death camps.
Papon walked out of the Sante prison here after an appellate court ruled that coronary ailments entitled him to benefit from a law mandating the release of gravely ill inmates. He had been serving a 10-year sentence handed down in 1999 for crimes against humanity.
The decision enraged relatives of his victims and other veterans of a 15-year battle to punish a defiant, emblematic figure who steadily accumulated power after the war, rising to become France’s budget minister in 1978. Papon used political connections to resist prosecution, steadfastly denied guilt and even fled briefly to Switzerland after his conviction. ‘‘This man has showed no remorse at all,’’ said Shimon Samuels, director of the Paris office of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, which helped bring Papon to justice.
‘‘A court has shown mercy for a man who showed none to his victims. This case is important because it tests the collective memory of France as a country of the Resistance versus France as a country of collaborators,’’ he said.
However, others argued that the three-judge panel correctly obeyed a legal reform passed in March to protect old and sick convicts in France’s increasingly harsh penitentiaries.
Inevitably, the decision revived a still-delicate debate about France’s reluctance to confront the sins of the past. Papon was the highest-ranking official of the Vichy government, the French wartime regime that collaborated with Germany, to be convicted of crimes related to the systematic roundup and extermination of Jews during the Nazi occupation. During his six-month trial, the longest in French history, Papon came to personify the bureaucrat-as-executioner.
As former President Francois Mitterrand once admitted publicly, leaders interceded on Papon’s behalf in the 1980s to obstruct attempts to prosecute him. Wednesday’s ruling was not Papon’s first recent legal victory.
In April, a state administrative panel ruled that the government shared blame for his wartime conduct and should pay half of the about $720,000 in damages he was ordered to pay the relatives of the victims.
Despite calls from prominent politicians for Papon’s release on humanitarian grounds, President Jacques Chirac rejected three requests for a pardon.
That made the decision Wednesday by the judges especially startling. They agreed with Papon’s lawyers, who submitted two medical exams asserting that his health and age make him a near-invalid and that continued imprisonment would endanger his life. Papon has had triple bypass surgery and wears a pacemaker. (LATWP)
