War Crimes Suspect Enters Prison

Looking frail and glum but making no secret of the fury in his heart, Maurice Papon, onetime official of the wartime Vichy regime, surrendered at a prison near Bordeaux on Tuesday on the eve of his trial for alleged involvement in World War II crimes.

In a angry communique made public by his attorneys, Papon, 87, denounced the imminent proceedings as a “prefabricated trial” and a “masquerade unworthy of a state of law.”

Papon, who in 1942-44 was secretary-general of the prefecture, or regional government, in Bordeaux, is accused of complicity in the round-up and deportation of more than 1,500 Jewish men, women and children, most of whom perished in the death camps of Nazi Germany.

His keenly awaited trial, the first of a ranking official of the Vichy regime for alleged connivance in the Nazi “Final Solution,” has sparked enormous media interest throughout France.

The same day Papon turned himself in at Gradignan prison outside Bordeaux, the country’s largest police union, the National Union of Uniformed Police Officers, offered an extraordinary apology for the willingness of French police during World War II to take part in mass roundups of Jews.

“Current events send us back to the dark hours of our history and highlight the preponderant and harmful role of a good number of policemen who spontaneously put themselves at the service of the ‘French state’ (Vichy) and voluntarily acted in the Holocaust in organizing and implementing the roundups of the Jews of France,” the union said.

It was Vichy-era authorities who, in part to safeguard remaining slivers of French sovereignty, took charge of mass arrests of Jews here, including an infamous roundup of more than 13,000 men, women and children in Paris on July 16, 1942, in which 4,500 police participated. The detainees were eventually shipped to the concentration camps of Eastern Europe, where all but a few died.