Paul Touvier, the only Frenchman convicted of crimes against humanity, was a murderer and also a miserable. But what made him a particularly sinister character were not his crimes – it was one of the many French who collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust – but his escape: for more than four decades he managed to hide in full sight, protected by ultra -right networks that operated in France and within the Catholic Church.
Like Lucien Lucien, the protagonist of the 1974 film by Louis Malle who reopened many wounds in France, joined the militia, the armed arm of the Vichy collaborative government, which did the dirty work to the Nazis during the occupation. But his militancy had more to do with opportunism and cowardice than with a personal conviction, which did not prevent him from organizing the shooting of seven Jews as reprisal for the execution for the resistance of Philippe Henriot, one of Vichy’s main propagandists, among other crimes and atrocities. At the end of the war, he vanished and, although he was briefly arrested in 1947, he managed to escape mysteriously and continue his escape.
As I remembered an excellent radio program program Sensitive affairsof France Inter, in its location the role of a investigation journalist, Jacques Derogy, who revealed that President Georges Pompidou had amnestized without it publicly, and a team of police officers headed by Jean-Louis Recronon, who thought that the wounds of the past of a country are only solved when it faces the most painful moments and not when they hide under the carpet are essential. He was captured in 1989, court and condemned to life imprisonment in 1994 for crimes against humanity, a crime that no amnesty could erase – two large correspondents of El País in Paris, Javier Valenzuela and Enric González, covered the long process from their arrest to their conviction and reflected in their chronicles to what extent a revulsion represented for the French society. He died in prison in 1996 at age 81.
The journalist of The New York Times Ted Morgan wrote two long reports on the case: one about its impact on France and another on its escape. Morgan was a fascinating guy: he was actually called Count San Charles Armand Gabriel and also wrote a brutal book about his experience in the Algeria War; another about witch hunt and anti -communist hysteria; and a third over Lyon during World War II after the capture of Klaus Barbie and Touvier himself.
One of the most amazing things that has the friendship of the Nazi criminal with the Belgian singer Jacques Brel, the author of Don’t leave me. He reports that he approached him after a concert in 1959 and that he confessed, with a false name, that he was a sentenced to death, that he had spent ten years hidden in his house and that his songs had helped him a lot. Instead of calling the police, Brel hired him to take care of a house he had in Switzerland and had enough relationship, although his family alleged that he never got to know his real identity. Morgan says that “during the process, the judge read a letter that Brel’s wife had sent, in which he said that Touvier was an expelled priest, because he was very gift.
His encounter with Brel represents only a small episode of a 40 -year escape in which he had the protection of ultra -right networks, especially the most ultramontanos sectors of the French Catholic Church. The long spokesman of Touvier – as happened in Germany with ancient Nazi gerifaltes, including Dr. Mengele, who could visit his relatives without many problems until he disappeared after the capture of Eichmann in Buenos Aires – reflects how ultra -right -wing thought survived the Second World War: he remained hidden but on the prowl.
What we are seeing now is his departure to light: there are the open defense of Franco, fascism or the Vichy regime by some sectors, the falsification of history to wash the faces of the black farther in Europe, the meteoric electoral ascent of some ultra -right -wing parties that presume their racism, the put in question even one of the dogmas on which the postwar period of Europe was based on Crimes of Nazism not to repeat them – the rise in anti -Semitism or fascist greetings discouraged in massiveties in the US. The main problem of Europe does not come from the United States, not even from Russia, but is inside. He Touvier It shows that not even the disaster disaster managed to erase it. What has changed is that what was previously done in the shadows is now proud.