The interview in Louis' apartment took about two hours. Naturally Louis did not realise that Ganier-Raymond was the man who had threatened him on the phone a few years earlier; but the interview was sufficiently acrimonious for him to howl that he had been trapped by an Israeli spy. Ganier-Raymond took with him Juana Biarnés, a photographer on Pueblo magazine in Madrid (and now Bamberger's wife). He did not tell Louis he was a journalist, nor that he had a tape recorder. Juana Biarnés spoke French badly at the time, and did not follow the entire conversation. Louis did not want any photos taken, so the camera was hidden in Juana's photographer's bag. Ganier-Raymond hid his tape recorder in the fan, and took notes discreetly on small pieces of paper.
In the hurricane which followed publication, all these facts were held against Ganier-Raymond, and were used to cast doubt on the authenticity of the interview; he was accused of spreading anti-Semitic propaganda, and was interrogated by the police. Ganier-Raymond's response was to insist that Darquier “was not senile, and was happy to see me and talk to me.” What those who questioned the interview ignored was that “for all his life Louis would have done ANYTHING to be famous.” His boasting was as notorious in Madrid as it had been in Paris: this interview was his last boast, almost a conversation about himself, as he loudly told Ganier-Raymond: “Jews are always ready to do anything to get themselves talked about, to make themselves interesting, to complain.”20
At the age of eighty-one, Louis was almost bedridden. He drove Teresa mad with his talking and his opinions, to such a degree that they gave each other ten minutes by the clock to talk in turn. Through this, Teresa knew “what he was really like.” He would refuse to get up, or exercise, so for the interview he lay on the wicker chair in his room. He could speak, as ever, but often he would not make much sense. It was August 1978, blazing hot in Madrid, and there was no air-conditioning, but there was a fan and it was whirring. Louis expressed himself badly, dribbled a bit, but every word he said was authentic and no effort for him, for however senile he might have been, he had said it all and written it all thousands of times before.
“In Auschwitz They Only Gassed Lice,” Philippe Ganier-Raymond's interview, was published in l'Express in Paris in the issue of 28 October– 4 November 1978 (see Appendix I). It covers sixteen pages, is well illustrated and includes a photograph of the aged Darquier lying in his chair, bellowing to camera. In France few people had thought of Louis Darquier for thirty years. Yet here he was, alive and unrepentant, telling the French nation of men and deeds they wanted to forget. As usual, Louis mixed shameless lies—yes, he had slapped Léon Blum, and was proud of it—with his emphatic version of the truth: “I was not responsible…I wanted the children to be taken into care…I had nothing to do with the Vel' d'Hiv' round-up as you call it.” Mostly he told Ganier-Raymond that everything said to have happened to the Jewish people during the war was
A Jewish invention, of course. Jews are like that: they're ready to do anything to get publicity … Jews have only one idea in their heads: to wreak havoc everywhere. And why? You know perfectly well: to make Jerusalem the capital of the world … When the Marshal put me in charge of the Commission for Jewish Affairs, I determined on one fixed end. A humanitarian end, please note: to make the situation of French Jews as comfortable as possible …
Here we go again with Jewish propaganda! … Jewish propaganda has always been based on lies. Always … Always … I don't remember anything about this story of the yellow star … another example of your Jewish propaganda … Auschwitz … Auschwitz … You know there have been too many stories about Auschwitz! It's time to begin to face up to what really happened there … satanic Jewish propaganda which has spread and encouraged this myth … The Final Solution is an invention, pure and simple. Do you know anyone who has ever seen what they call a gas chamber?
Finally, Ganier-Raymond asked Louis if he had any regrets or remorse. Louis replied: “Regrets for what? I don't understand your question.”
This interview produced the only worthwhile result of Louis Darquier's life: it triggered the process by which France joined Germany as the only major belligerent of the Second World War to try its own citizens for crimes against humanity. A stupefied French nation rediscovered a Frenchman whose existence questioned all comforting interpretations of their Vichy past, and de Gaulle's myth of “un seul peuple” united in resistance to Germany. A Frenchman whose anti-Semitism was of a violence they hardly knew existed, or, if they did, thought had disappeared forever.
Louis' words broke another taboo, and led to an eruption of shamed and painful remembrance which expressed itself first in—almost unbelievably—condemnation of those who carried the message. Ganier-Raymond was hauled over the coals, and the authenticity of his tapes questioned. Because Darquier's speech was impaired and the tape recorder was hidden in the fan, the whirring made the tapes almost inaudible. L'Express was accused of promoting anti-Semitism, of providing Louis Darquier with a soapbox and of irresponsible journalism for publishing the interview without condemnation and explanatory texts. To all this, the only possible response was the one the magazine used at the time: “l'Express is stupefied that a section of public opinion and commentators could confuse or pretend to confuse the publication of a document on French anti-Semitism under the Occupation with anti-Semitic propaganda itself. This proves that French society is not yet sufficiently mature to come to terms with its past and to examine it critically.” It also demonstrated, added l'Express, that France did not want to acknowledge that there was a French Nazism, or that anti-Semitism was not merely an importation.
Ganier-Raymond was accused of lying to get the interview, by pretending he was researching a book that was already published; he was accused of provoking Louis, and of transcribing his words incorrectly. Some of this was true, but not all of it. In the media coverage of l'affaire, the occasional presence of a young woman with Louis was often noted. Some reporters said that this was Darquier's wife, some his maid, others that she was a young woman with a very new baby. In fact it was Teresa, her identity protected by Ganier-Raymond, who also changed the location of the interview from Madrid to Estremadura for the same reason.
Until 1978 Teresa had no clear idea of her father's past, though she knew there were things that did not tally; and after two years of living in close contact with him, she knew what she thought of him: he was “mad, completely cuckoo… closer to a beast than a human being.” Later, Ganier-Raymond told Le Monde that Teresa was the “sworn enemy” of her father. Throughout the interview she came and went from his room, and “asked almost as many questions as Ganier-Raymond.”21 The day after the August interview, Teresa and Ganier-Raymond compared notes; they confirmed that Darquier had said, five times, that in Auschwitz they only gassed lice. At this meeting with Teresa, Ganier-Raymond settled on the final version of the text.22 Teresa had listened to her father talking like this for years, and this was also what Anne heard, when she visited Louis in Madrid in 1948 or 1949.
L'Express protested that it wanted to illuminate “the mentality of a dinosaur.” It was referring to Louis, but it could have used the words in another sense. Unwittingly, Louis Darquier gave the French a new opportunity for ethical soul-searching: after Le Chagrin et la pitié, l'affaire Darquier was a second watershed. Despite the fact that he was now a little too doddery to fully enjoy it, Louis Darquier had made himself the centre of an affair of state. Articles, television and radio programmes and letters from the public poured into the public arena: “Why drag this nonentity out of his obscurity?” “I am outraged.” “When will the French grow up?” “I knew nothing about this man before… our history books do not mention him… though I have heard about those Nazis who spend happy hours in South America, I have never read such a vivid document as this …”23
Throughout France there were public meetings of protestation; indignant journalists and writers objected to the soiling of their trade with the derisory outpourings of an “old imbecile, under the pretext that he was a
dirty bastard.”24 In Paris, Ganier-Raymond received death threats and l'Express installed security doors in his flat. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, president of France at the time, warned about lack of balance in any discussion of Nazism and anti-Semitism; Simone Veil, Minister of Health, herself a survivor of three years in Auschwitz, regretted the banality of Darquier and what she considered to be the ambiguity of l'Express's approach; in the National Assembly members of all parties called for Louis' extradition.
French communists abused political personalities, and vice versa; philosophers opined about the meaning of it all; the Church lectured against racial hatred. In l'Express Louis had said: “… until the recent past I always maintained the best relations with the French ambassador in Madrid. We saw each other often. I sometimes went to their receptions.” Louis de Guéringaud, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, denied that Darquier had ever frequented the French embassy or consulate in Madrid, although Jeanne Degrelle affirmed as recently as 1999 that she and her husband Léon were invited to celebrations organised by the French embassy in Madrid on 14 July every year.25 Prime Minister Raymond Barre warned all television and radio channels about “vigilance in the presentation of history,” and a TV programme about Pétain was cancelled. Giscard's Minister of Justice, Alain Peyrefitte, stated that a demand for Darquier's extradition from Spain would have been possible after his sentence had been passed, but because of “une bizarrerie”—a peculiarity— this had never been done.
Louis Darquier's death sentence expired in 1968, but French law incorporated crimes against humanity in 1964: the interview supplied more than sufficient grounds for opening a new case. The Ministry of Justice instructed the Paris public prosecutor to institute proceedings against Louis for “war crimes and collaboration, provocation towards discrimination and racial hatred, racial defamation and racist abuse.” A police investigation began almost immediately. The examining magistrate, émile Cabié, interviewed Ganier-Raymond several times, and other journalists too; he listened to the tapes—barely audible, but you could hear the voice of a rambling old man, and also, very clearly, the words “In Auschwitz they only gassed lice.” In her sheltered housing in Woodstock, Elsie could have read in any English newspaper articles such as “How a War Criminal Shocked France.”26
The French police arrived in Madrid—Cabié had ordered a medical evaluation of Louis—and their investigation led to disconcerting enquiries among his friends there, all of whom reported in Louis' favour. They were not the only ones to have an uncomfortable time of it in November 1978. All the Spanish newspapers covered the affair—in Madrid, Teresa was hiding behind her door, besieged by journalists. There were many people trying to protect her: François Gaucher even slipped out of his école Briam late at night to advise her. On 5 November the Sunday Times in London reported that Louis was now living on his estate in Spain, and that “a member of his staff [this would have been Teresa] said ‘He is very ill, quite deaf and his doctors give him three months to live. ’ ” Louis' speech had miraculously disappeared. Both Louis Darquier's daughters exhibited a preference for self-destruction, rather than patricide.
The investigating police reported doubts about the tapes and the capacity of Darquier to express himself; the judicial inquiry concluded that Louis was very ill, near death, and that extradition was out of the question. The tempest did not so much subside as blow into many nooks and crannies, to explode in a series of law cases over the next twenty years.
More immediate was the dagger Louis plunged into the back of his old enemy René Bousquet, for revenge on whom he had waited for over thirty years. “The Vel' d'Hiv' round-up,” Louis said to Ganier-Raymond, “it's funny that you want to talk to me about that. It was Bousquet who organised the Vel' d'Hiv' round-up. From A to Z. Bousquet was the chief of police. It was he who did everything. And you know how Bousquet ended up? He only got five years of national indignity. He had helped the Resistance! What a farce! And he ended up the director of the Bank of Indochina. Oh, he wangled things very well, Bousquet! Whatever, it was he who organised everything.”
And so l'affaire Darquier led to l'affaire Bousquet. En route, other French war criminals were brought to trial as an exorcism of French evil spirits began, not without constant delays, prevarications, stallings and much anger. “Thanks to the interview with Darquier in l'Express,” said Serge Klarsfeld, “I was able to attack Leguay, and then Touvier, Barbie, Bousquet, Papon—only Aloïs Brunner is left.”27
Jean Leguay, Bousquet's police deputy in the Occupied Zone, was the first Frenchman to be arraigned for crimes against humanity; Klarsfeld brought an end to Leguay's successful career in cosmetics (at Nina Ricci) when he filed a complaint on behalf of the Association des Fils et Filles de Déportés Juifs de France—Sons and Daughters of the Deported Jews of France—only a week after the l'Express interview. Leguay died of cancer, untried, in 1989; unusually, when the case was closed, he was pronounced guilty.
The Milicien Paul Touvier was the first Frenchman to be convicted of crimes against humanity. In 1946 Touvier had been, like Louis Darquier, sentenced to death in absentia. Aided and protected by the Catholic hierarchy, for many years a fugitive hidden in convents and monasteries, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1994, and died in prison two years later. Lyon's Gestapo chief, Klaus Barbie, under whose direction Touvier worked, was sentenced for life in July 1987, and died in prison in 1991.
Of all of them, Maurice Papon was the most unfortunate, his gravest mistake being to continue in public life after the war. As chief of police in Paris in 1961, Papon had the violent repression of an Algerian demonstration laid at his door—two hundred died, sixty of their bodies found floating in the Seine—and he was actually Budget Minister in Raymond Barre's government in 1978 when Louis Darquier fingered Bousquet.
There were hundreds if not thousands of French officials, civil servants and police, most of them, if alive, now in old people's homes, who had done even worse than Papon. But it was he who provided the longest and most flamboyant of all these French trials, for Papon was a haut fonctionnaire, a senior civil servant, and a quintessential example of a Vichy functionary, amoral, unquestioning, arrogant. His trial was the nearest a new generation could get to the sins of their fathers. Papon's trial was stalled by friends in high places for sixteen years, and only began two years after François Mitterrand stood down as president of France. Papon was eighty-seven. He was finally condemned to ten years' criminal detention in 1998 for the deportation of Jews from Bordeaux—his correspondence with Darquier only one clear piece of evidence of his activities. It was all too late, particularly for the old men and women who clustered round the trial courtroom wearing yellow badges (not yellow stars). In 2002, Papon was released.
Klarsfeld did not get Aloïs Brunner, although the decision was taken to try him for crimes against humanity. If alive, Brunner is still securely hidden in Damascus.28 René Bousquet, protected by influential friends, amongst them President Mitterrand, had, like so many others, flourished after the Liberation. A few days after D-Day in June 1944 he was taken into custody and sent to Germany with his family, where they stayed in modest comfort until the end of the war. This permitted him to qualify himself as one of the “deported.” Arrested at the Liberation, he spent three years in Fresnes prison, from 1945 to 1 July 1948, and was with Laval the night before his execution.
Bousquet was brought before the High Court of Justice in June 1949, when he was acquitted. At his trial he repeatedly blamed Dannecker and Darquier for the July 1942 round-ups and Vel' d'Hiv'. He insisted that dealing with Jews was outside his bailiwick, that there was a specific office for that—the CGQ J, run by Louis Darquier. Bousquet's instructions had always been to dampen the ardour of Darquier, to watch him closely; the proposal for the transfer of Jews from Vichy to the Occupied Zone had been entirely Darquier's; it was Darquier who had sent copies of his, Bousquet's, correspondence with Laval to the Germans. As to the Vel' d'Hiv', Darquier coordinated it; he, Bousquet, was merely an o
bserver. Forty years later, Bousquet could still use the Vichy argument that French Jews (he would admit that foreign Jews suffered) were protected under his regime, quite oblivious of the implication of such remarks.
In 1949 Bousquet was sentenced to five years of dégradation nationale, which was immediately suspended in recognition of his putative “acts in favour of the Resistance.” The judgement came from the High Court, and therefore no appeal was possible. Bousquet proceeded into his brilliant career with the Banque de l'Indochine and the Dépêche du Midi.He held many directorships and led a most comfortable life. In 1955 everything for which Bousquet was responsible was published in Joseph Billig's book, but on he went. His Légion d'honneur was restored to him, and he stood in the legislative elections of 1958 as an anti-Gaullist Radical. In 1965, as Louis Darquier was moving into his tower block in Madrid, Bousquet was helping to finance François Mitterrand in the presidential elections, opposing de Gaulle.
Bousquet, who arranged so imperturbably the deaths of so many, who could do everything better than Louis Darquier and who was, above all, a better liar, was finally brought to book by Louis' rantings. Louis' revenge turned into fifteen years of misery for Bousquet; not as long as Louis' exile in Spain, and perhaps insufficient acknowledgement of the crimes of this meticulous functionary, but more than Klarsfeld or anyone else had achieved. After the interview Bousquet resigned from the Banque de l'Indochine almost immediately, but it took ten years before Klarsfeld could assemble new facts and documentation which had not been presented at the High Court trial of 1949. By September 1989 these were in place, but two years of judicial procrastination and state protection meant that Bousquet was not indicted for crimes against humanity until March 1991.
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