Maurice Papon, who died on Saturday aged 96, was the former French cabinet minister convicted in 1998 of having helped the Nazis to deport Jews to concentration camps during the wartime occupation of France.
Papon's trial was the overdue calling to account of one prominent collaborator, but he stood in the dock as the representative of the thousands of French men and women who had actively served the Vichy state, and of the millions who had quietly acceded to German rule and its consequences.
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