Nazi Collaborator Identified, Brought to Justice

In 1981, Maurice Papon, who has died aged 96, was the minister for the budget in the administration of Prime Minister Raymond Barre, when his role in the deportation of French Jews during the second world war was uncovered. Eventually brought to trial, he was convicted in 1998 of complicity in crimes against humanity and sentenced to a 10-year prison sentence for ordering the arrest and deportation of 1,690 Jews, including 223 children, from the Bordeaux region to the Nazi death camps in Germany. However, he served less than four years of his sentence, and was released in September 2002 on grounds of ill-health.
None of this would have been known if it had not been for the research of Michel Bergès, a young French historian working in the departmental archives of the Gironde. He was looking for documents concerning relations between local wine merchants and the Germans during the occupation. By chance he came across the archives of the department of Jewish affairs, which had been attached to the préfecture of Bordeaux at the time of Vichy, the puppet government set up by the Nazis. In these forgotten papers he found evidence concerning the forced deportation of Jews from Bordeaux to the transit camp at Drancy, near Paris (from where they were sent to the death camps), during the years 1942 to 1944.