A French court's historic finding today that Maurice Papon is guilty of complicity in Nazi crimes against humanity because he turned Jews over to the Germans in World War II has both comforted and disconcerted the country he served as a high-ranking civil servant for 50 years.
Jews and some lawyers for the survivors faulted the court for absolving Mr. Papon, then a functionary of the wartime collaborationist government in Vichy, of knowingly furthering Nazi plans for the extermination of the Jews by officially cooperating with the German occupation authorities.
Defenders of the idea that Vichy was a lesser evil that had spared France and most of its 330,000 Jews the worst at the hands of the Germans denounced Mr. Papon's condemnation as an insult to the memory of the Resistance he also claimed to have served.
The criminal court of the Gironde region, where he worked as Secretary General of the civilian administration half a century ago, handed down its findings at 9 A.M. today, after the three judges and nine lay jurors had deliberated for 19 hours.
They imposed a 10-year prison sentence, with deprivation of civil rights, on the 87-year-old Mr. Papon, though prosecutors had asked for a 20-year term. He remains free while he appeals, and both the sentence and his continuing freedom also drew criticism from those who expected a more severe sentence.
Continue reading the main storyToday, wearing a dark pin-stripe suit and holding his chin in his hands, he looked stricken behind the bulletproof glass of the defendant's box as Judge Jean-Louis Castagnede quickly read out the technical details of the findings after a trial that had lasted six months. Mr. Papon made no statement today, but on Wednesday he denounced the proceedings as a show trial.
His leading lawyer, Jean-Marc Varaut, said he would take the case to the Court of Appeals in Paris and to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg if necessary, and called the verdict ''neither fish nor fowl.''
Today's decision, not accompanied by any explanation or exposition from the court, was far from a blanket acceptance of all 764 of the charges brought by prosecutors. Their 16-year investigation was plagued by lack of documentation and a dearth of surviving witnesses to a dark part of the past that most French people would prefer to forget.
The court found Mr. Papon guilty of complicity in German crimes for using his authority in occupied southwest France between 1942 and 1944 to satisfy German demands for the illegal arrest and detention of hundreds of French and foreign-born Jews, though not all 1,560 numbered in the original indictment.
The court also ruled that Mr. Papon bore responsibility for authorizing five of the eight rail transfers that the prosecution charged he had helped organize from Bordeaux to Drancy, north of Paris, from where the Germans sent the victims to Auschwitz. The court apparently did not find enough evidence to tie him with the three others.
Nevertheless, these findings alone established his complicity with crimes against humanity under French law, establishing the criminal link that survivors of the Holocaust had sought between German war crimes and functionaries of the collaborationist and anti-Semitic Vichy government that was set up after the Germans swept all the way down to Bordeaux in 1940.
But the court found Mr. Papon innocent of the charge of deliberately and knowingly taking part by these actions in a systematic Nazi plan for the killing of millions of Jews. His defense tried, apparently successfully, to show that the Germans kept the full scope of their plans for the Holocaust secret from the French authorities.
For the most part, relatives and lawyers for the survivors of those deported expressed satisfaction with the result after six months of painful case-by-case examination of one of the most shameful chapters in modern French history.
Three leading Jewish organizations in France deplored the 10-year sentence as incommensurate with the crime. One, the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France, said the court had shown leniency to Mr. Papon because of his poor health and because of the death last week of his 88-year-old wife.
The trial had been delayed because of the reluctance by French leaders to dig up the past, particularly since Mr. Papon's claims to have cooperated with the French Resistance against the Germans and Vichy were backed by some Resistance leaders.
And he was not just any minor Vichy functionary. He became Prefect of Police in Paris during the turbulent period of the French-Algerian war. In 1962, while he was Prefect, a demonstration by Algerians supporting independence resulted in the deaths of scores of them, allegedly at the hands of the police. A French Government investigation last year of the incident was concluded without publication of its results, because, the authorities said, Mr. Papon's trial was under way. When the charges against Mr. Papon first surfaced in 1981, he was Budget Minister in the Government of Prime Minister Raymond Barre.
''I am not disappointed by the verdict,'' said Therese Stopnicki, whose two sisters, Nelly, 5, and Rachel, 2, were picked up by the French police, put into a taxi and packed off to a concentration camp near Bordeaux in July 1942. The two girls and their parents perished in Auschwitz, and the bill for 350 francs that was sent by the taxi company to Mr. Papon's office in Bordeaux was a key link in the chain of evidence against him.
''I am concerned that he was not found co-responsible for the murders,'' said Miss Stopnicki, who came from her home in eastern France to spend the night in the Bordeaux courthouse waiting for the verdict and shed tears when it came.
''I'm afraid the extreme right will exploit that finding, but the important thing was to see Maurice Papon found guilty and given a just sentence,'' she said.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front, has dismissed the Nazi gas chambers as ''a detail in history,'' and is supported by many French conservatives who believe that Vichy did the best it could to preserve the country's honor after its defeat by the Germans.
Michel Slitinsky, a Polish-born Jew who escaped a roundup by the French authorities accompanied by German officers in October 1942 and later found documents in the Bordeaux archives that started the investigation of Mr. Papon in 1981, also expressed satisfaction with the verdict today.
''Papon thought he would have his honor restored, and today the victims have theirs instead,'' he said. ''But what we want now is for him to go to jail and start serving his sentence.''
Two days after the trial started in October, Judge Castagnede allowed Mr. Papon to remain free instead of staying in prison during his trial because he suffered from respiratory and heart trouble. Under French law that would normally mean he could also remain free during his appeal.
Arno Klarsfeld, son of the Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld and one of the lawyers representing relatives of the victims of the wartime deportations, said, ''The verdict is a condemnation of Maurice Papon and of Vichy, and it sets a benchmark by which the conduct of future state bureaucracies will be judged.''
Michel Zaoui, another lawyer representing survivors of deportees, said: ''The important thing is the conviction, but the court decided Maurice Papon didn't know about the Nazi's Final Solution. It's the first time that a high-ranking French official has been convicted for crimes against humanity, but there is some disappointment that the court didn't want to make a connection between Vichy and the Holocaust.''
In Bordeaux, where pro-Vichy sentiment was strong during the war and where summary justice after the Resistance restored the authority of the French Republic in 1944 was often brutal, public reaction to the trial was subdued. A few hundred people, watched over by almost as many blue-uniformed riot policemen, kept a vigil in front of the neo-classical courthouse as the jury's deliberations dragged into the night.
''I thought 10 years wasn't that heavy a sentence for such a big crime,'' said Nathalie, a law student in her 20's who declined to give her full name.
Mr. Papon's immediate superior, Maurice Sabatier, and other officials of the wartime French state set up in Vichy who were investigated with him died before the investigation could be completed.
The principal French wartime collaborationists -- including Vichy's head of state, Marshal Philippe Petain and his Prime Minister, Pierre Laval -- either died in prison or were executed for treason after the war.
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