Maurice Papon, the Frenchman who sent Jews to their death, dies aged 96

In death, as in life, Maurice Papon, the only French official to be convicted of sending Jews to the Nazi death camps, will defy the country that he claimed always to have loved and served.

Papon, who died at the weekend, aged 96, will be buried by his family wearing the Légion d'Honneur awarded to him by President Charles de Gaulle in 1962, still, in effect, protesting his innocence. He was stripped of the award - France's highest honour - after his conviction in 1998 for "complicity in crimes against humanity".

Related articles

• Maurice Papon

Papon was sentenced to 10 years in prison but served only three before being released in September 2002 because of his age and ill-health. He never admitted his guilt. He never expressed a word of remorse. He regarded himself, to the end, as the innocent victim of a political show trial,

Papon had a glittering career in France after the war, before his role in rounding up Jews in the Bordeaux area in 1941-43 was uncovered in 1981. He was finally brought to trial in 1997. He was convicted of organising the arrest of 1,690 Jews, including 223 children.

The six-month trial became a symbol of France's determination to exorcise the memory of French complicity in the Holocaust. However, Papon's post-war career - rising to become Budget Minister - also symbolises France's refusal for more than 30 years to face up to the willing collaboration of the Vichy state in Nazi persecution of the Jews.

Even after the evidence of his involvement emerged in 1981, parts of the French establishment - including President François Mitterrand - fought a rearguard action to prevent the case coming to trial.

Although he was the only French official to be tried for such crimes, Papon was not a senior figure in the Vichy government. Nor was he especially anti-Semitic. He emerged at his trial as a cold bureaucrat, who was determined to succeed - and to be seen by his superiors to succeed - at whatever task he was given.

By early 1944, when the writing for Nazi Germany, and for Vichy, was on the wall, Papon had transferred his allegiance to the Resistance.

But earlier, as deputy head of the national civil service in the Bordeaux area, Papon was in charge of, among other things, the "Jewish question". The court was given documentary evidence of his meticulous organisation of arrests of Jews, who were sent in four trains from Bordeaux to the Drancy holding camp north of Paris.

Papon told the court that he had no choice but to obey Vichy and Nazi orders; that he did not know the fate of the Jews that he arrested; and that he did his best to save Jews where he could.

The only documentary evidence to back his claim was a chilling memo in which he talked of his desire to save "interesting Jews". By this he meant, among other things, French Jews who had been decorated or wounded in the First World War.

After the failure of an appeal against his conviction in 1999, Papon fled to Switzerland but was arrested a week later. After three years in the Santé prison in eastern Paris, he was allowed to go home suffering from acute heart trouble.

As recently as 2001, Papon sent a letter to the Justice Ministry stating that he had "neither regrets nor remorse for a crime I did not commit and for which I am in no way an accomplice."

In October 1961, Papon was involved in another of the darkest stains on modern French history. As prefect of police in Paris, he organised the repression of mass demonstration by Algerian workers in favour of independence. Scores of demonstrators were killed and their bodies dumped in the Seine.

Although there is no evidence that Papon ordered the massacre, he was certainly involved in the cover-up.

Michel Slitinsky, 82, the journalist who first uncovered Papon's past - and whose father died in the Holocaust - said Papon's death should be "first and foremost a moment to remember his victims".