Volume 46, Number 20 · December 16, 1999
The Trial of Maurice Papon
By Robert O. Paxton
On October 22, 1999, Maurice Papon, an eighty-nine-year-old former high-ranking French civil servant, was locked up in the Paris suburban prison of Fresnes, of sinister memory to both sides in World War II. Papon had been condemned on April 2, 1998, to ten years of criminal detention for complicity in crimes against humanity. He was found guilty on two counts of having helped organize the arrest and the deportation of Jewish men, women, and children from Bordeaux, where he was a young functionary of the Vichy regime between 1942 and 1944. He was acquitted, however, of a third count: complicity in their murder at Auschwitz.
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