Experts give conflicting accounts on Vichy role

France was yesterday faced with two conflicting versions of its second World War history: in one version, the nation was Germany's victim and its civil servants guiltless of collaboration; in the other, France's officials were fully implicated in Nazi war crimes.

Two experts on the period, the US historian Mr Robert Paxton and the French writer Mr Henri Amouroux, gave their different accounts of French history when they testified in the trial of Mr Maurice Papon.

As the second highest-ranking official in Bordeaux between 1942 and 1944, Mr Papon - on trial for crimes against humanity - signed deportation orders for 1,560 Jews who were gassed at Auschwitz.

Mr Paxton, a professor at Columbia University in New York, was the first historian to search German archives for the truth about French Vichy government collaboration with the Nazis. He learned that contrary to post-war myth, the French often co-operated enthusiastically with German occupiers, even surpassing German requests in the persecution of Jews.

The Vichy leader, Marechal Philippe Petain, claimed his government "shielded" France from the full force of German occupation. That has been the 87-yearold Mr Papon's defence.

But as Mr Paxton noted yesterday, 76,000 Jews were deported by the Vichy administration. "How can you claim the Germans' task was made more difficult when they were given such . . . assistance?" he asked in the Bordeaux Assize Court.

Mr Paxton's 1972 book, Vichy France, is the authoritative work on the period. In it, he showed that Vichy actively implicated France, particularly the French police, in the Nazis' war on the Resistance, the arrest of Jews and the seizure of Jewish property.

Because the second World War was a civil war in France - where French militiamen fired on French resistants - the country has not yet healed what the weekly news magazine Le Point this week called "the disease of memory".

Mr Amouroux is more indulgent towards the Vichy authorities. France was decimated by its 1940 defeat, he says, and moral rights and wrongs were not clear. So did Mr Papon know the Jews he deported would be murdered? He says he did not. "Those who organised the trains knew there would be deaths," Mr Paxton has said. "When you deport old people and children, you obviously know that they're not going to work-camps. You may not know their exact fate, but you must know . . . that their treatment will be inhumane."

Mr Amouroux yesterday claimed Mr Papon could not have known the consequences of his acts. There was a "total absence of information about where the Jews were being sent from France".