The German Genius

“temperature curve” of the syndrome, a year-by-year chart of the “temperature” of the obsession with Vichy, as measured by political events, books published, films screened, and so on, he identified an “acute crisis” from 1945 to 1953, relative “calm” from 1954 to 1979, and “acute crisis” ever since (the book was published in 1991). 36 This memory pattern is not dissimilar to that for the Holocaust in America.
    The actual extent—and even enthusiasm—of French collaboration was finally and fully exposed in the landmark 1981 study by Michael R. Marrus and Robert Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews , which established, “virtually beyond doubt,” that the Vichy government went well beyond even what the Germans required of it in its persecution of the Jews. Some 75,000 Jews were deported from France during the war, the great majority seized by French police. Only 3,000 survived.
    Then, in November 1991, Serge Klarsfeld, a French Nazi hunter and president of the organization Sons and Daughters of the Jewish Deportees of France, claimed to have discovered the so-called Jewish file in the basement of the French Veterans Ministry. These documents, allegedly compiled by the Paris police following the census of October 1940, were supposedly used to identify all Jews living in France. A commission of professional historians later confirmed that the real file had been destroyed in 1948, but the case raised doubts about public access to official documents relating to the Vichy regime, doubts that were sharpened in 1994, when Sonia Combe, in her book, Archives Interdites (Closed Archives), accused the French government archival service of restricting public access to historical documents about Vichy. She alleged that a combination of insufficient funding and a “specific effort to avoid scandal” had combined to limit access to wartime documents. 37
    None of this was eased by the four trials that took place in France in the early 1990s for “crimes against humanity.” Klaus Barbie, former head of the Gestapo in Lyon, went on trial in 1992 for the arrest and deportation to Auschwitz of forty-four Jewish children. In 1994, Paul Touvier, one of the leaders of the French militia, was tried in Versailles for organizing the killing of Jewish men in Rieux-la-Pape, near Lyon. In 1998, Maurice Papon, who oversaw the deportation of 2,000 Jews from the Bordeaux region, was eventually tried and convicted. In the meantime he had enjoyed a successful career in public life. No trial received more attention than that of René Bousquet, accused of coordinating with the Gestapo to organize the infamous roundup of Jews in Paris in July 1942, when 13,000 were gathered in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ bicycle stadium and shipped to transit camps in France and then on to Auschwitz. Not the least controversial aspect of this case was the fact that Bousquet’s role in the roundup had been reported as early as 1978, but it took the French legal system twelve years to do anything about it. Bousquet was assassinated in 1993 before his trial.
    There was also the scandal that surrounded the French president, François Mitterrand himself. In a 1994 biography of the president, Pierre Péan revealed that Mitterrand had been both a civil servant in the Vichy regime and a leader in the French Resistance—indeed, he had held both positions at the same time for several months in 1943. Mitterrand had always denied his participation in the Vichy regime, so this was embarrassing—more than embarrassing—all around. The revelations certainly put his comments about Vichy not being the true France into a sanctimonious light. It was not until 1995 that the French state apologized for its role in the Holocaust—half a century after the events themselves and a delay longer even than that in Austria and Germany. 38
    Against this background, there was a series of cases filed in U.S. courts in the mid-1990s, targeting French companies that had profited from the plight of Jews during World War II (such as the state railway, SNCF, and a number of banks). This case followed the similar suit filed in U.S. courts against Swiss banks holding Holocaust-era assets. The French cases were thrown out, but in March 1997 the French government under Alain Juppé responded to these concerns by setting up the Mattéoli Commission, to investigate the allegations. The commission hired 120 researchers, at state expense, and produced twelve reports on Jewish experiences