Sins of the Fathers

In October 1978 the French magazine L’Express published a chilling interview with eighty-one-year old Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, the former Commissioner for Jewish Affairs in Vichy France.  Still in exile in Spain, the country to which he had fled after the Liberation, Darquier used the opportunity to pour forth once again with unrepentant anti-Semitic bile. As he scribbled away, a tape recorder concealed in a fan, the journalist Philippe Ganier-Raymond was aghast at the violence of Darquier’s language. The man might have been a bedridden octogenarian but confronted with his war-time record Darquier showed no remorse. To the charge that he was the French Eichmann Darquier retorted that the Holocaust was a ‘hoax’ and that only ‘lice’ were gassed at Auschwitz. The work of Serge Klarsfeld who had painstakingly chronicled the names of all the Jewish deportees from Occupied France was dismissed as a ‘Jewish invention’. Indeed at one point Darquier even accused Ganier-Raymond of being an Israeli spy.