France Undertakes Painful Remembrance of Vichy Past

In the past week, after decades of official silence, half-truths and cover-ups, France has come closer to scrutinizing its role during World War II and its share of responsibility in the Holocaust and the pillaging of Jewish property.

A Paris court has cleared the way for the trial of Maurice Papon, France’s budget minister in the 1970s, who is accused of having organized the arrest of Jews for deportation when he was a police official of the collaborationist Vichy regime in Bordeaux in southwestern France.

The trial of the 86-year-old Papon, who says he has been selected as a scapegoat and contends that he was in the Resistance, would be the first case against a ranking civil servant focusing on Vichy’s complicity in the Nazis’ “final solution” against Europe’s Jews.

The late President Francois Mitterrand--himself a former Vichy official and a friend of the regime’s police chief, Rene Bousquet, who was murdered in 1993--admitted slowing the prosecution of wartime collaborators for the sake of national unity.

But in July 1995, Mitterrand’s Gaullist successor, Jacques Chirac, heralded a new official willingness to confront France’s checkered wartime role by acknowledging for the first time his country’s responsibility in the mass deportation of Jews.

According to historians, of the 300,000 Jews who lived in France before the war, at least 74,000 were rounded up by the Nazis or French Vichy officials and shipped to concentration camps, where almost all perished.

Legal proceedings against Papon began in 1982 and have dragged along since. Now expected to go on trial this fall in Bordeaux, Papon is accused of having drawn up for German authorities lists of Jews for arrest between June 1942 and August 1944.

The 1,560 people detained, many of them children, were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and few survived, according to court documents.

Last weekend, in response to calls from French Jewish leaders, Prime Minister Alain Juppe announced that he will set up a committee of inquiry to investigate what happened to the buildings, businesses or other property confiscated from French Jews.

Such a probe, Juppe said, is “more than a moral gesture, it is a national duty.”

In October, the city of Paris suspended the sale of municipally owned apartments after allegations that many of the buildings had been plundered during World War II from Jewish families.

Even the Louvre and other museums of France may contain spoils of the Holocaust.

A government report, leaked this week to Le Monde, said nearly 2,000 works now in French museums and public buildings--including paintings by Monet, Renoir and Gauguin--may have been stolen by the Nazis from Jewish owners.

For the French, the revelations are a painful reminder that the Germans found plenty of willing allies and subordinates among the underlings of Vichy leader Marshal Henri Philippe Petain. Also in the minds of Chirac, Juppe and other current-day leaders may be the desire to stress the republican virtues of liberty, equality and fraternity in a political and social climate where the racist, anti-Semitic rhetoric of the far-right National Front appeals to more voters than ever.

“What the French Jewish community wants” in turn, said Henri Hajdenberg, president of the Council of French Jewish Institutions, “is that the trust be established. That is all.”