|
An Assassin Beats the Courts to the Punch
NEWSWEEK/JUNE 21, 1993 A half century late, French justice seemed about to catch up with Rene Bousquet. In 1942 and 1943, when he was head of police under the Vichy regime, he had been responsible for sending more than 60,000 French Jews—including 3,500 children—to Nazi death camps. Tried for treason in 1949, he received a five-year suspended sentence after he convinced the court that he had once helped the Resistance movement, and he went on to grow rich as a banker and businessman. But Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld finally persuaded the government to open a new case, and French prosecutors were prepared to bring Bousquet to trial this September on charges Vichy's top cop: Bousquet (right) with German officers in 1943 of crimes against humanity. A self-appointed avenger named Christian Didier got to him first. One morning last week he went to Bousquet's Paris apartment with a pistol, and when Bousquet, who was 84, came to the door, he shot him four times at point-blank range. Police arrested Didier and charged him with murder. Didier—a 49-year-old frustrated novelist—appeared to enjoy his moment in the spotlight. Before the police arrived, he summoned TV cameramen to a hotel in a Paris suburb and told them why he had killed Bousquet. "I was good and he was evil," he said. "I wanted to do something good for humanity." Leaders of France's Jewish community were dismayed by Bousquet's assassination. They had hoped that his trial would act as a long-overdue catharsis—that it would somehow force France finally to acknowledge the extent to which even many ordinary French citizens had collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation. "For 15 years I worked to get this case heard," said Klarsfeld, a respected French attorney. "In the general interest, Bousquet should have been tried." |
