The Perversion of Holocaust Memory

Writing and Rewriting the Past after 1989

Judith M. Hughes

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Academic
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350281899
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Histoire
• Sous-sujet: Histoire du monde

In the early years of the 21st century it appeared that the memory of the Holocaust was secure in Western Europe; that, in order to gain entry into the European Union, the countries of Eastern Europe would have to acknowledge their compatriots' complicity in genocide. Fifteen year later, the landscape looks starkly different. Shedding fresh light on these developments, The Perversion of Holocaust Memory explores the politicization and distortion of Holocaust remembrance since 1989. This innovative book opens with an analysis of events across Europe which buttressed confidence in the stability of Holocaust memory and brought home the full extent of nations' participation in the Final Solution. And yet, as Judith M. Hughes reveals in later chapters, mainstream accountability began to crumble as the 21st century progressed: German and Jewish suffering was equated; anti-Semitic rhetoric re-entered contemporary discourse; populist leaders side-stepped inconvenient facts; and, more recently with the revival of ethno-nationalism, Holocaust remembrance has been caught in the backlash of the European refugee crisis. The four countries analyzed here – France, Germany, Hungary, and Poland – could all claim to be victims of Nazi Germany, the Allies or the Communist Soviet Union but they were also all perpetrators. Ultimately, it is this complex legacy which Hughes adroitly untangles in her sophisticated study of Holocaust memory in modern Europe.

1

The Papon Affair

On July 16, 1995, Jacques Chirac, France’s President, gave a speech marking the anniversary of the massive Vél d’Hiv roundups—in July 1942, French police arrested 13,152 Jewish men, women, and children in Paris, interning the majority under appalling conditions in the Vélodrome d’Hiver bicycle stadium before shipping them to Auschwitz. In speaking at the annual ceremony, the first President of the Republic to do so, Chirac “used a language free of the ambiguities, loopholes, and contortions that until then characterized most presidential speeches” touching on the Vichy regime.¹ He underlined the responsibility of the state: it was French police agents who carried out the arrests of Jews, who first penned up their prisoners in French camps, and who then deported them on French trains. The principle of state continuity, especially in a country as centralized as France, entails, he claimed, assuming responsibility for acts carried out under the authority of its leaders, even if those leaders were responding to Nazi demands. Here was a stark condemnation of the state, the rulers, the higher echelons, and of government employees who committed crimes or let crimes be committed.

At the war’s end the French had punished the most visible Nazi collaborators: 9,000 were summarily executed during the liberation campaign, 1,000 were executed after a trial, and 40,000 were sentenced to prison.² Those claiming to have worked for the Resistance—and indeed the postwar government fostered the myth that nearly all French citizens had supported the Resistance—were spared; and civil servants and businessmen, desperately needed by the new government to revive the crippled nation, were among those who escaped unscathed. It took a quarter century for this myth to be seriously challenged: in late 1969, The Sorrow and the Pity, a documentary by Marcel Orphuls, portrayed a France more collaborationist than resistant; in 1972, Robert O. Paxton’s Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 showed that Vichy never engaged in any kind of subterfuge, that it had begged the Germans to accept collaboration, and had done so starting in the summer of 1940.³ Even so, French leaders dragged their feet in bringing Vichy officials to account. For example, in the early 1990s, President François Mitterand intervened to postpone the trial of his friend René Bousquet, the police chief most responsible for French assistance to the Nazis. Chirac’s speech, delivered by someone who was only twelve years old in 1944, served to speed up the machinery of justice. Two years later Maurice Papon stood trial for crimes against humanity.

Who was Papon? He figured as the embodiment of administrative continuity between Vichy and successive postwar governments. Radical under Léon Blum, Pétainist under Vichy, socialist during the Fourth Republic (1946–58), Gaullist then Giscardist under the Fifth (1958–present), Papon seemed less committed to the republican government than to serving the state, whoever was in power and whatever the nature of the regime. Among the posts he held was Paris chief of police in the Fifth Republic. He subsequently moved on to a political career becoming a Gaullist representative in the National Assembly and finally budget minister under Raymond Barre during the Giscard presidency.

A Vichy functionary, but only of a middling sort. So why Papon? Two others had been accused of crimes against humanity, Jean Leguay, Bousquet’s representative in the occupied zone and Bousquet himself. Leguay was on the verge of standing trial when he died in 1989. Four years later, Bousquet, the man responsible for the Vél d’Hiv roundup, was gunned down in his apartment building and thus escaped judicial reckoning. As for Papon’s immediate superior, Maurice Sabatier, he died before charges could be brought against him. Papon, it turned out, had the disadvantage of a long life.

The 1997 trial lasted six months, the longest in French legal history, and ended with Papon’s conviction for complicity in crimes against humanity. He had stood accused of lending active assistance to arrests, internments, and deportations as the Germans pursued, on French soil, their project of exterminating Jews. Close to 1,600 Jews were deported in ten convoys from the Bordeaux region to Drancy and from there to Auschwitz; Papon was implicated in eight of these. A reporter for Le Monde summed up the prosecution’s case: “He signed what he should not have signed, he carried out what he should not have carried out, and, above all, he organized what he should not have organized.”⁴

At the start of the trial, a battalion of lawyers, broadcasters, journalists, and historians descended on Bordeaux. Video cameras were installed on the four walls of the courtroom to record, for posterity, each moment of the trial. During recesses, as the lawyers exited, television crews waited for them in the hallway. In front of the cameras, they described what had been going on and added their particular spin. And outside the courthouse, protests, vigils, and readings of the names of French Holocaust victims took place throughout the trial. With this kind of saturated media and public attention, expectations ran high that the trial would yield lessons for French society as a whole.

I. From Barbie and Touvier to Papon

As the Second World War drew to a close, the Allies debated how to punish the Nazi elite. The British, Churchill chief among them, toyed with the idea of simply executing a dozen or so leading figures. Stalin increased the number: he suggested shooting 50,000 German general staff officers. The Americans took a different line: senior figures in the War Department argued that a legal response offered a valuable opportunity to apply and enforce principles of international law. And to extend them as well.

In May 1945, Harry Truman—he had become president a month earlier following Roosevelt’s death—appointed Robert Jackson to lead the prosecution team in the trial of major German war criminals. During a long summer, the representatives of Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States hammered out a charter. Of all the difficulties, the most serious concerned Article 6, the list of crimes with which to charge the defendants. Seeking help, Jackson turned to Hersch Lauterpacht, a British legal expert. It was Lauterpacht’s proposal to put a new term into the Nuremberg statute to address atrocities against civilians—crimes against humanity.

Here is the exact language:

Crimes against humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the [International Military] Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.⁵

Clearly this was an innovation, so Lauterpacht told the British Foreign Office. It declared that international law was not only law “between States” but “also the law of mankind.” Those who transgressed it, even if they were leaders, would have no immunity. Crimes against humanity thus reflected “the outraged conscience of the world.”⁶

As it turned out, crimes against humanity did not stand as the great master offense. At the Nuremberg trial, its radical potential was restricted. The tribunal essentially enfolded crimes against humanity into war crimes, treating them as either a subcategory of war crimes or as offenses covering a small range of conduct not formally covered by conventional rules of war.

The charter of the International Military Tribunal had failed to mention what, if any, statute of limitations would apply to the crimes tried at Nuremberg. In June 1964, French legislators filed a bill making crimes against humanity imprescriptible, that is, not subject to a time limit. (The bill was in response to an announcement by the West German government that, as of May 8, 1965, the statute of limitations would be valid for all war crimes, including crimes against humanity. This action was later postponed.) The discussion in the National Assembly went without a hitch, and in December the bill passed unanimously. The new law covered only crimes against humanity, not war crimes, and in 1967, the French applied the statute of limitations to the latter. It meant that all future prosecution of war criminals would be pursued as crimes against humanity alone.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

On the morning of April 6, 1944, a detachment of the Lyon Gestapo carried out a raid on a children’s house in Izieu and arrested all the occupants. For a year the house had provided refuge for dozens of children. Some were French; others had come from Algeria, Belgium, Austria, Germany, and Poland. All were Jewish. The forty-four children, aged between four and sixteen, along with seven staff members, were trucked off, incarcerated in a Lyon prison, deported to Drancy, and from there shipped to Auschwitz. Of those rounded up, only one adult survived.⁷ Klaus Barbie, SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain), chief of the Intelligence Section of the Gestapo in Lyon, had signed the deportation order.

Twice in the 1950s, Barbie was tried and sentenced to death. Both times in absentia. In 1952, a permanent military tribunal in Lyon convicted him of war crimes, and in 1954, he was again convicted of different war crimes in a different region of France. His crimes included assassinations, arson, and pillage. Above all, he was notorious as the alleged torturer and killer of Jean Moulin, hero of the French Resistance.

In 1945, the Allies had placed Barbie’s name on a list of war criminals. In no small measure, thanks to going to work for the U.S. Army’s Counter-Intelligence Corps in Germany, he was able to escape. When the French discovered his whereabouts, he managed, thanks again to the Americans, to make his way to Bolivia. For three decades he lived under the assumed name of Klaus Altmann, all the while conducting business and unapologetically spouting Nazi propaganda. In 1971, the Klarsfelds, indefatigable Nazi hunters, tracked him down. It took another dozen years for the French to ask for, then demand, his extradition.⁸ On February 5, 1983, Barbie, now aged seventy, arrived back in France. Marcel Orphuls’s documentary Hotel Terminus (1988) captures Barbie’s changing fortunes and the twists and turns of bringing him to trial.

This time Barbie was charged with crimes against humanity. Who were the victims? The Nuremberg definition described them as “civilian populations.” Barbie was accused of having deported 650 people, Jews and Resistance fighters in almost equal number. The Jews were apparently civilians, arrested, deported, and assassinated simply because they had been born. But the Resistance fighters sent to Buchenwald, Dachau, or Mauthausen—who were they? After the war, the French gave them the title of “honorary combatants.” As such, their arrest, torture, or inhumane treatment in the Nazi camps fell into the category of war crimes—prescriptible in French law. If, however, one bracketed their character as combatants and instead emphasized the nature of their sufferings, they, too, could be counted among the victims of crimes against humanity. In the end the High Court of Appeals did just that: it expanded the definition of victims of crimes against humanity to include Resistance fighters as well as Jews.⁹

As the legal scholar Lawrence Douglas put it, at Nuremberg, “the Jew was treated as a kind of lesser political prisoner, a victim of a novel species of war crime; at the Barbie trial, the Resistance member was treated as an innocent martyr, a kind of Jew, slaughtered for his membership in a reviled group.”¹⁰

The trial lasted from May 11 to July 4, 1987. The court rendered a guilty verdict, and sentenced Barbie to life imprisonment.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

“Klaus Barbie was to the SS, what Paul Touvier was to the Milice,”—Vichy’s brutal paramilitary force. Lawyers accusing Touvier of crimes against humanity repeated this refrain again and again. On the surface the comparison seemed a good one. Barbie, chief of the Gestapo’s intelligence section in Lyon, was assigned to pursue Resistance members and to organize the mass murder of the Jews. Touvier, regional chief of the intelligence service of the Milice, also in Lyon, gathered information on members of the Resistance and hunted them down. Ferreting out Jews was also one of his specialties. Finally, their crimes were committed only a few dozen kilometers apart, at Izieu and Rilleux, both located in the same department of the Ain.

The lawyers also compared Barbie and Touvier’s crimes. But the comparison was far from persuasive. At Izieu, at a house way out in the middle of the mountains, Barbie came to take hidden children. The sole “justification” for this act was a plan for the systematic extermination of Jews—wherever they might be. The roundup had been premeditated long in advance and was driven by a fierce ideological determination to kill Jews. In contrast, Touvier arrested certain specific Jewish individuals—all men—with the aim of seeking vengeance for the killing of Philippe Henriot, Minister of Information and voice of Radio Vichy. The seven victims were murdered and left where they fell, as an example to terrorize the population. Unlike Izieu, these executions did not stand as a textbook example of the Final Solution.

Twice in the aftermath of the war, Touvier escaped justice. On September 18, 1946, and again on March 4, 1947, he was charged with treason and sharing intelligence with the enemy. Both times he was condemned to death in absentia. On the lam within France, Touvier married secretly and had two children; he survived financially thanks to the complicity of powerful figures in the Catholic Church. By 1967 the statute of limitations had run out on the convictions themselves. There were, however, “secondary” penalties, for example, the confiscation of property. In 1971, after years of effort by a prelate devoted to his cause, Touvier obtained a pardon from President Georges Pompidou. News of the pardon provoked an uproar, and Touvier was forced to go into hiding once again. For the most part he holed up in right-wing monasteries. On May 24, 1989, gendarmes located him at the Saint-François priory in Nice. This time he was accused of crimes against humanity.¹¹

Before the case came to trial, the original indictment was thrown out. In April 1992, the Indicting Chamber of the Paris Court of Appeals dismissed the charges.¹² In the Barbie case, the High Court of Appeals had restricted the “inhumane acts and persecutions” constituting crimes against humanity to those “committed in the name of a state practicing a politics of ideological hegemony.”¹³ Now the Indicting Chamber justified its decision by claiming that “no well-defined ideology ruled” at Vichy, that for Vichy Jews were not considered to be “enemies of the State” as they were in Germany, and that the phrase “state practicing a politics of ideological hegemony” applied to Hitler’s Third Reich, but not to Pétain’s regime—Vichy was described...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Papon Affair
• 2 Germans in the Dock
• 3 Victims, Jewish and German
• 4 From Holodomor to Holocaust
• 5 Revising History, Reviving Nationalism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint