René Bousquet

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René Bousquet (right in fur coat) on 23 January 1943 in Marseille at a meeting on the "liquidation" of the waterfront and the local Jews deportation, second from left SS Sturmbannführer (or better Standartenführer ) and Colonel police Bernhard Griese .

René Bousquet (born May 11, 1909 in Montauban ; † June 8, 1993 in Paris ) was general secretary of the police of the Vichy regime from April 18, 1942 to December 31, 1943 and was involved in the deportation of Jews in France .

Life

In his youth, Bousquet was accepted into the Legion of Honor for rescuing several people from a flood disaster in France in 1930 and was already working in the Ministry of the Interior at the age of 22. In the following years he held several high administrative positions (Ministry of the Interior, Ministry of Agriculture, Secretary General or Prefect in various departments) and, after the defeat of France in 1940 , received a leading position at the police authority from the Vichy government of Pierre Laval . In this function he worked closely with the occupation authorities and from 1942 with the HSSPF France Carl Oberg . In July 1942 he organized the mass arrest of several thousand Jews in the Vélodrome d'Hiver together with Helmut Bone and Theodor Dannecker .

In the summer of 1942, at the request of Nazi Germany, the Vichy regime approved the deportation of 10,000 foreign Jews, thus starting the deportations from the southern zone. On August 26, 1942, 45 Jewish youths over the age of 16 and employees of the Château de la Hille children's home of the Children's Aid of the Swiss Red Cross (SRK, Kh) (as well as some from the SRK children's home Saint-Cergues-les-Voirons ) joined the French police brought to Le Vernet internment camp, from where they were to be deported. With the help of the Swiss embassy, ​​the SRC delegate Maurice Dubois was able to obtain the consent of the general secretary of the police of the Vichy regime, René Bousquet, that all arrested persons should return to La Hille (and Saint-Cergues-les-Voirons) from the government in Vichy were allowed to.

For this collaboration with the German police and the SS he was indicted before the Haute Cour after the war in 1949 and sentenced to five years of deprivation of political civil rights due to mitigating circumstances. His membership in the Legion of Honor was initially revoked. Bousquet worked in senior positions at the Banque de l'Indochine and various newspapers. In January 1958, his sentence was overturned by an amnesty, and membership of the Legion of Honor had been restored to him in 1957.

After the amnesty, Bousquet became politically active again and held various offices in the administration of departments and as a board member of the French airline UTA . He supported François Mitterrand and was also personally acquainted with him and other high-ranking politicians.

In the mid-1980s, further details of his collaboration with the German occupation authorities became known, and in 1989 Serge Klarsfeld initiated a charge of crimes against humanity for the deportation of 194 Jewish children . These charges came to trial in 1991 because of various delays in legal proceedings. Thereupon Mitterrand broke off his friendly relations with Bousquet. Since he had to fear for his own reputation with the process, he delayed its opening. In 1993, Bousquet was shot and killed by Christian Didier at 34 avenue Raphael in Paris.

Movies

literature

  • Pascale Froment: René Bousquet . Stock, Paris 1994; again Fayard, Paris 2001
  • Limor Yagil: Chrétiens et Juifs sous Vichy, 1940-1944: sauvetage et désobéissance civile . Éditions du Cerf, Paris 1995.
  • Max Lagarrigue: 99 questions sur ... les Français pendant l'Occupation . CNDP, Montpellier 2006
  • Serge Nessi: The Children's Aid of the Swiss Red Cross 1942–1945 and the role of the doctor Hugo Oltramare . Preface by Cornelio Sommaruga . Karolinger Verlag, Vienna / Leipzig 2013, ISBN 978-3-85418-147-7 (French original edition: Éditions Slatkine , Genève 2011, ISBN 978-2-8321-0458-3 ).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Another photo in the Federal Archives shows General Hans-Gustav Felber , Bernhard Griese laughing head-on into the camera and Carl Oberg in civilian clothes during a conversation during the deportations from the destroyed old town: 1011-027-1476-37A of January 24, 1943, Photographer Wolfgang Vennemann.
  2. ↑ Serge Nessi: The Children's Aid of the Swiss Red Cross 1942-1945 and the role of the doctor Hugo Oltramare .
  3. ↑ Benjamin Korn, Death of a Murderer. About René Bousquet, police chief of Vichy and confidante Mitterrands , p. 43, in: Lettre International, Heft 89, Berlin 2010, pp. 40–43.
  4. ↑ With four shots. Der Spiegel, June 14, 1993, accessed November 20, 2015 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bousquet, René
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French perpetrator of the Holocaust
DATE OF BIRTH May 11, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Montauban
DATE OF DEATH June 8, 1993
Place of death Paris