Voices from the Dark Years Read Online Free Page A

by a court that refused to hear his defence. He was shot in Fresnes prison on 15 October 1945.
    Joseph Lécussan and other miliciens involved at St-Amand-Montrond were shot in 1946.
    Jean Leguay , the key planner of the rafle of July 1942, pursued a successful post-war career with the perfumery company Nina Ricci in the US and later in France. He was never prosecuted before his retirement in 1975, but subsequently became the first collabo to be indicted for crimes against humanity, dying on 3 July 1989 before being brought to trial.
    Jean Mayol de Lupé , the aging chaplain of the LVF, was arrested by the Americans in March 1945 and condemned by a French court on 14 May 1947 to fifteen years’ imprisonment and confiscation of his property. Released in May 1951, he retired to Lupé and died there in June 1956.
    Bernard Ménétrel , Pétain’s doctor, was imprisoned in Fresnes on his return to France in May 1945, but released for health reasons in 1946 and died accidentally the following year.
    Karl Oberg was condemned to death in Germany, but returned to France for a second trial with Knochen in October 1954. His death sentence in 1954 was commuted to twenty years’ imprisonment. In 1965, he was granted a presidential pardon and returned to Germany, where he died the same year.
    François Papon succeeded in the civil service until 1981, when evidence linked him with Jewish deportations from the Gironde département . Accused in January 1983, he displayed scant respect for the court or his judges and exploited his poor health to delay hearings. Sentenced to ten years in prison for his role in sending 1,560 Jews of all ages to their deaths, he was released after three years thanks to a specially introduced law of March 2002 permitting liberation of prisoners whose health was endangered by incarceration. Of nearly thirty prisoners over 80 years of age in French prisons, Papon was the second to be released. On 25 July 2002, the European Court of Human Rights declared his trial to be ‘inequitable’.
    Philippe Pétain returned voluntarily to France in April 1945, by then partially incontinent and not truly lucid. He was sentenced to death on 15 August for high treason and aiding the enemy, but de Gaulle commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. Transferred to a military prison on the island of Yeu, Pétain survived to die aged 95 in 1951.
    Dr Marcel Petiot was identified and arrested at a Paris Metro station on 31 October 1944. He defended himself vigorously to the examining magistrate, claiming to be the head of fictitious Resistance network ‘Fly-Tox’, but no résistant had ever heard of him. His story of having provided false medical certificates for STO evaders likewise rang false when he could not name a single man helped in this way.
    The mystery of the burning bodies in the rue Lesueur was unravelled when it was discovered that Petiot had been arrested on 23 May and spent the eight missing months in Fresnes prison for allegedly helping people escape from France – which posed the question why he had not come forward at the Liberation to claim his reward as a patriot. Petiot’s military discharge papers of 1918 recorded signs of mental disturbance, which had not prevented him from qualifying as a doctor. So popular was his first practice at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne in Burgundy that he had been elected mayor in 1927 – until dismissed for petty theft and shoplifting, and suspected of drug trafficking. After that, he fled to the anonymity of Paris, opening his consulting room near the Opéra in 1933.
    Police investigations connected numerous missing persons with Petiot. When more than forty suitcases filled with men’s and women’s clothing were found at the home of a friend of his, the truth at last came out. Telling Jews threatened with deportation to come to the apartment in rue Lesueur with only their most precious possessions, he gave them a lethal injection under the pretence that it was a sedative – and