By Robert Fisk
Published: 24 February 2007
SourcePapon insisted he did not know the fate of the Jews he dispatched so efficientlyMaurice Papon, lowered into his grave along with his precious Légion d'honneur last week, proved what many Arabs have long suspected but generally refuse to acknowledge: that bureaucrats and racists and others who worked for Hitler regarded all Semitic people as their enemies and that - had Hitler's armies reached the Middle East - they would ultimately have found a "final solution" to the "Arab question", just as they did for the Jews of Europe. Papon's responsibility for the 1942 arrest and deportation of 1,600 Jews in and around Bordeaux - 223 children among them, all shipped off to the Drancy camp and then to Auschwitz - was proved without the proverbial shadow of a doubt at his 1998 trial.
Less clear were the exact number of Algerians murdered by his police force in Paris and hurled into the Seine in 1961. Of course, he was not tried for this lesser but equally unscrupulous crime. He organised the police repression of the independence demonstration by 40,000 Algerians; in the cities of Algiers and Oran and Blida and other areas of modern-day Algeria where this atrocity festers on among elderly relatives, they say that up to 400 Algerians were massacred by Papon's flics. Some historians suggest 250. Papon preferred to claim that only two were killed - in much the same way as he later insisted at his trial that he did not know the fate of the Jews he dispatched so efficiently to Drancy and onwards to Poland.
The same was always claimed of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He it was who fled to Iraq during the Second World War, escaped again after the British crushed the pro-Axis government that had taken power in Baghdad and who ended up in Nazi Berlin, shaking hands with Hitler and working enthusiastically for the Third Reich's propaganda machine. From Hitler, he obtained a promise that "when we (the Germans) have arrived at the southern Caucasus, then the time of the liberation of the Arabs will have arrived - and you can rely on my word." Haj Amin gratefully recorded how Hitler insisted that the "Jewish problem" would be solved "step by step" and that he, Haj Amin, would be "leader of the Arabs" after entering Egypt and then Palestine with the Italian army.
More than a decade ago, I spent much time researching the life of Haj Amin - whose portrait with Hitler hangs in the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem and whose body lies buried scarcely two miles from my home in Beirut - and met members of his surviving family. I even met the last - now dead - survivor of his Berlin entourage who believed that Haj Amin did not know the fate of the Jews. To this day, I don't believe this.
In July, 1943, when the extermination camps were already in operation in Poland, he was complaining to the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, that rather than allow Europe's Jews to emigrate to Palestine, "if there are reasons which make their removal (sic) necessary, it would be essential and infinitely preferable to send them to other countries where they would find themselves under active control (sic again!) as, for example, Poland...". Haj Amin went on to encourage Bosnian Muslims to join the SS Hanjar division, a fact which Serbia's bloodthirsty militiamen never failed to remind me when I covered their own fascist-style war against the Muslims of the Drina Valley in the early 1990s.
Three months before he died, the old man met in Beirut one of Yasser Arafat's lieutenants, Abu Iyad, who later wrote of their meeting: "Haj Amin believed that the Axis powers would win the war and would then grant independence to (British mandate) Palestine... I pointed out to him that such illusions were based on a rather naive calculation, since Hitler had graded the Arabs 14th after the Jews in his hierarchy of races. Had Germany won, the regime which it would have imposed on the Palestinian Arabs would have been far more cruel than that which they had known during the time of British rule." Haj Amin's granddaughter Alia also told me of his later conclusions. "He said that after the Jews, the Germans would destroy the Arabs - he knew this. But what could he do?"
All this came back to me last week when I received a remarkable letter from Toulouse in my Beirut mailbag. It was a response to an article I wrote last year about Irène Némirovsky, whose magnificent, Tolstoyan novel of the Nazi occupation of France was unfinished when Irène was herself sent to Drancy and on to the crematoria of Auschwitz. My article earned a stiff call of complaint from the press attaché at the French embassy in London.
The letter, in slightly ungrammatical English, was written by Némirovsky's only surviving daughter, Denise Epstein, and I hope she will not mind if I quote from it: "Allow me to present myself: I am the girl of Irène Némirovsky ... and I wanted to thank you for having spoken so well about my mother. This book caused a certain awakening of the consciences undoubtedly but according to what you teach me from the attitude of the French embassy when one evokes the memory of the Jewish children assassinated with the complicity of the authorities of the time, I realize that the memory is really diluted very easily and which that opens the door with other massacres innocent whatever their origin. It is thus with emotion and gratitude that I want to send this small message to you. I am now 77 years old and I nevertheless live the every day with the weight of this past on the shoulders, softened by happiness to see reviving my parents, and at the same time as them, I hope to make revive all those of which nobody any more speaks. PS: Sorry for my very bad English!"
It would be hard to find more moving words than these, a conscious belief that the dead can be recalled in their own words along with that immensely generous remembrance of other innocents who have died in other massacres. And that extraordinary image of the "dilution of memory" carries its own message. This, of course, is what Haj Amin suffered from. Papon, too, I imagine, before they buried the terrible old man last week.