BERLIN, Feb. 19 (UPI) -- Maurice Papon, an infamous French Nazi collaborator, died Saturday in a Paris hospital at the age of 96. How France dealt with the man is exemplary for how the country continues to deal with dark chapters of its past.
A leading official in the Vichy regime, which collaborated with the Nazis during France's occupation in World War II, Papon had personally organized the deportation of 1,690 Jews in southwestern France. All in all, some 76,000 Jews made the trip from France to various German concentration camps -- only 2,500 of them survived.
Yet after the war, Papon embarked on a successful career in French politics. Before the end of the Nazi occupation, he had established contacts with resistance leaders, who vouched for him after the war. He served as a prefect in Algeria, served as the Paris police chief, then became a lawmaker; and later, from 1978 until 1981, was finance minister under Prime Minister Raymond Barre and President Valery Giscard d'Estaing.
For decades, France was unwilling to deal with its Vichy past. Yet in 1981, a son of a man who died in a German concentration camp found documents showing that Papon had signed the man's deportation order, and several hundred more. It was not until 1995 however that President Jacques Chirac first acknowledged that France bore criminal responsibility for what officials like Papon had done during the Nazi occupation.
Nevertheless, prosecutors and victims had to wait until 1997 before Papon had to stand trial. He became the second French citizen to be tried on charges of crimes against humanity, after Paul Touvier, chief of the wartime paramilitary militia in Lyon who was sentenced to life in prison in 1994 after being convicted of ordering the execution of seven Jews.
Papon's trial was on a bigger scale, though. Set in Bordeaux, where Papon served during Vichy, it was the largest and most publicized French lesson in World War II collaboration.
"The trail showed that the collaborators weren't some small fish, but members of the French political elite," Sabine von Oppeln, France expert at Berlin's Free University, told United Press International in a telephone interview Monday.
Papon was sentenced to ten years in prison, but appealing the verdict, he fled to Switzerland. Extradited in 1999, he served three years of his sentence and was released in 2002 because of his advanced age and health issues.
Papon is just one of several dark chapters in the history of France, a country that "in general has a problem dealing with its past," von Oppeln said.
Yet the former Nazi collaborator is also a link to another French issue, that of the period of decolonization and especially the crisis surrounding the Algerian independence movement, which von Oppeln called "one of the great traumas of the French history." In Algeria in 1956, he was responsible for counterinsurgency tactics in the war for independence. He later became the police chief of Paris responsible for atrocities that were not fully exposed until decades later.
On Oct. 17, 1961, Papon ordered police to confront demonstrators marching for Algerian independence -- anywhere between 60 and 200 people were killed, the exact number still under debated. Their bodies thrown into the Seine river, while thousands were injured and over 14,000 people arrested. Papon insisted that only three Algerians were killed. Over the next years, Papon's police was responsible for several bloody crackdowns on demonstrations and even abduction.
"This dark chapter of French history for decades hasn't really been addressed," von Oppeln said. "In France, critical dealing with their own history has not really taken hold."
In the wake of the Papon trial, a debate shortly surfaced, but was quickly put down.
Given the fact that France has a large population with ties to former colonies, such an approach could one day backfire as it may result in alienated minorities, some observers say. Von Oppeln said young people with an immigrant background have already started to identify with the generation that fought for independence, and even with earlier generations.
"There is a tendency among third-generation Algerians to revert back to their original identity, and distance themselves from the general French public," she said. French politicians could be "reluctant to tackle the topic out of fear from further strengthening those separation tendencies."
