Justice enfin:
A French court has ruled that the Vichy government of France during World War II was instrumental in the handing over of Jews and others to the Nazis for extermination camps.
Calling for a “formal admission of the state’s responsibility and of the prejudice collectively suffered”, the court said it had concluded that acts such as the arrest, internment and dispatching of Jews to transit camps were clear indicators of the government’s guilt. “As they led to the deportation of people considered Jewish by the Vichy regime, the acts and activities of the state … became its responsibility,” it added.
The move was welcomed by historians and Jewish groups, many of whom have expressed disbelief at France’s unwillingness to face up to its actions. From 1942 to 1944 a stream of Jews were rounded up by Vichy authorities, and by the end of the war some 76,000 had been deported to Nazi concentration camps. Although under the overall control of the SS, the main transit camp of Drancy, from which 63,000 people were sent to their deaths, was run by Paris’s police force.
“It is a decision with which I am content,” Serge Klarsfeld, the leading French historian of the Holocaust, told Le Figaro. “France is showing now that she is at the forefront of countries which are confronting their past, which was not the case even in the 1990s.”
For decades after the war, the suffering of French Jews at the hands of their countrymen was buried, along with the shame of collaboration, at the back of national consciousness. François Mitterand, president from 1981 until 1995, insisted France “was never involved” in ill-treatment of its Jewish population, and it was not until Jacques Chirac in 1995 that a head of state admitted France’s “inescapable guilt”.