JEWISH GROUPS yesterday welcomed a ruling by the French Council of State, the country’s highest administrative tribunal, formally recognising the responsibility of the French state in the deportation of 76,000 Jews to Nazi death camps between 1942 and 1944. Fewer than 3,000 survived.
“The Conseil d’État recognises the error and responsibility of the state,” the court said in a written statement on Monday.
“In absolute rupture with the values and principles notably of the dignity of the human person . . . these anti-Semitic persecutions provoked exceptional damage of extreme gravity.”
The ruling blamed Marshal Philippe Pétain’s Vichy government for carrying out “arrests, internments and transports whose destination was transit camps that were, during the second World War, the first station of the deportation of these people towards the camps in which most of them were exterminated.”
The Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, whose father was deported from France, said the ruling was “satisfying” and that “France is now showing itself to be a leader amongst countries facing up to their past”.
Estee Yaari, a spokeswoman for Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial authority, told the Associated Press: “Initial press reports indicate this is an important and courageous decision that unambiguously confronts actions during the Holocaust.”
A lower court had referred the case of a woman whose Jewish father was murdered at Auschwitz to the council of state.
She demanded €200,000 in reparations, but the council decided the state has already amended “as much as was possible” the wrong done to Jews.
“Pensions, indemnities, assistance and measures of reparation” granted by French governments since 1945 were “comparable in nature and amount to those adopted by other European states,” it noted.
A state commission established in 2000 has paid €500 million, Mr Klarsfeld said. The council’s decision could close 400 reparations cases still pending in French courts. A half million Jews live in France today, making it the largest Jewish community in western Europe.
France took decades to come to terms with its second World War past. When Gen Charles de Gaulle came to power at the end of the war, he portrayed his country as a nation of resistors.
This version prevailed until the US historian Robert Paxton published Vichy France in 1972. Marcel Ophuls’ 1969 film about the extent of collaboration, Le Chagrin et la Pitié, was kept off state television for 12 years.
As recently as September 1994, the late president François Mitterrand said: “France is not responsible, nor is the Republic” for the Vichy regime. The former president Jacques Chirac broke the taboo, becoming the first high-ranking French official to admit France’s role, in July 1995.
Mr Chirac apologised for “the dark hours which will forever tarnish our history” and regretted that “the criminal insanity of the occupying power was assisted by the French, by the French state . . . On that day France delivered those she was protecting to their executioners.”
A flood of apologies, by French bishops, the police union, doctors’ association and national assembly followed Mr Chirac’s admission of state guilt.