Maurice Papon, the only French Nazi collaborator to be convicted for his role in the deportation of Jews during the second world war, died in a private clinic in Paris yesterday aged 96.
A successful post-war politician who became a minister before his past caught up with him, Papon, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1998 for complicity in crimes against humanity, underwent heart surgery last week.
The former bureaucrat's lawyer Francis Vuillemin said that his client, who had been released from jail after three years for health reasons, had 'died in his sleep'. 'Maurice Papon fought till the end [and] died a free man', Vuillemin said.
Papon, who was promoted five times during the German occupation, insisted he knew nothing of the Holocaust at the time and escaped a post-war purge of collaborators to rise through the ranks of the French right. But in May 1981, satirical weekly Le Canard Enchainé published wartime documents signed by Papon ordering the arrest and deportation of 1,690 Jews, including 223 children, from the Bordeaux area to Nazi death camps.
Papon was also reviled for events in 1961 when he was Paris's chief of police. In one night scores of demonstrators were shot or beaten to death while protesting against French policy in Algeria. Documents showed officers had been ordered by Papon to 'shoot on sight'. Papon remained defiant throughout his trial, which he described as 'political'.