Title : Plea for a few obscure Jews, victims of Monsieur Papon - Preface by Pierre Vidal-Naquet - Gérard Boulanger - book

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Summary :

On April 2, 1998, the verdict of one of the most important French trials of the 20th century was delivered: Maurice Papon was sentenced by the Bordeaux Assize Court to ten years of criminal imprisonment for complicity in crimes against humanity. Secretary General of the Bordeaux Prefecture from 1942 to 1944, he had contributed to the deportation of 1,600 Jewish men, women, and children.
A month earlier, on March 9, 1998, Mr. Gérard Boulanger began the pleadings as representative of the first individual plaintiffs and the majority of the civil parties. This Bordeaux lawyer had been actively fighting for this trial to take place since December 8, 1981. It took seventeen years of a twisty investigation for him to finally be able to plead.
This book is a faithful transcription of his plea. Gérard Boulanger gives the history of this seventeen-year investigation, of the fierce battle of the civil parties to ensure that the trial took place despite attempts at destabilization. Then he describes the role played by Maurice Papon during the Collaboration. Arriving in Bordeaux in 1942, he was given responsibility for "Jewish questions" and, de facto , significant police powers that would lead to requisitions and several roundups, starting with that of the night of July 15-16, 1942, then to the establishment of a formidable file of Jews. From 1944, Papon tried to cover his tracks, but Gérard Boulanger shattered the pseudo-resistance of the senior official.
This book, illustrated throughout with courtroom drawings by Edith Gorren, is an indispensable document that contributes to the national duty of remembrance, an essential text for generations who did not experience the war. It is a plea against forgetting and for the truth to come out: Papon was not a cog in the Vichy bureaucratic machine, but rather an active and merciless executor of its policy of collaboration.

• EAN : 9782702135518
• Used book
• Book in good condition
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