French Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon died. Papon, who worked with German forces occupying France during World War II and oversaw the deportation to Nazi death camps of at least 1,500 of his Jewish countrymen, succumbed Saturday to complications from heart surgery in the Paris region. He was 96. Papon evaded the postwar purge of Nazi collaborators and rose through the ranks of French politics to become a Cabinet minister in 1978. But a few years later his wartime past was exposed, and he was convicted in 1998 of crimes against humanity and sentenced to 10 years in prison. The lawyer representing the families of deported Jews was Arno Klarsfeld, the son of famed Nazi hunter and lawyer Serge Klarsfeld. Papon fled to Switzerland but was extradited to France, where he was jailed in 1999, winning an early release three years later for health reasons. Arno Klarsfeld, also the head of the Association of Sons and Daughters of Deported Jews in France, called Papon’s death “anecdotic.” “What is important to us,” he told Le Figaro, “is his condemnation in Bordeaux [which was] very symbolic because, through him, the entire Vichy regime was condemned.”
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