Political scientist Ethan Hollander interviews a Nazi war criminal as part of his research.

Ethan J. Hollander is a professor of political science at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. He is also the author of Hegemony and the Holocaust: State Power and Jewish Survival in Occupied Europe. Hollander’s published scholarship also includes research on democratization in Eastern Europe and on the Arab Spring. At Wabash, Dr. Hollander teaches courses on the Politics of the Middle East, Ethnic Conflict and Genocide, European Politics, and Research Methods and Statistics. He is a native of Miami Beach, and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2006.

This story originally aired on Jan. 26, 2018, in an episode titled “Good and Evil”.

Story Transcript

In 2004, I interviewed a Nazi war criminal.  His name was Maurice Papon and he was convicted of crimes against humanity for being an accomplice to the Nazis in German-occupied France during World War II.  And just to get this out of the way, yes, I’m Jewish.  Yes, we did have members of our family who are holocaust survivors and, yes, this led to some very interesting family dynamics. 

I remember telling my parents that I'd gotten this interview with Maurice Papon and my mother said, “You're gonna interview a Nazi war criminal?  What are you tellin’ me?  That some of your best friends are Nazis?” 

It all started when I was a graduate student at University of California San Diego when I was doing research on very typical political sciencey stuff on international hierarchy and imperialism.  I was reading a lot of books that started with exciting titles like “state power” and “hegemony.”  And let me tell you, if you ever see a book that starts with the word “hegemony,” pick it up.  It’s a total page turner. 

So I did what any graduate student would do in such a situation.  I procrastinated and I found myself near the newspapers and I was browsing through the newspapers and I came across the story of Maurice Papon. 

Now, Papon’s story really was interesting.  He was on trial for his crimes during World War II and I wondered what he was going to say in his own defense.  There were papers that unambiguously connected Papon with the deportation so he couldn’t say that he didn’t do it. 

Well, interestingly, Papon admitted to deporting 1,500 Jewish people from Bordeaux to Auschwitz.  But he said that there were 10,000 Jewish people in Bordeaux at the time and that, had he deported nobody at all, the Germans would have fired him and replaced him with somebody who would have deported everybody.  So his claim was that by helping the Germans a little bit, he was actually able to serve the lesser of two evils and save over 8,000 Jewish lives. 

Now, this was a morally harrowing question, right?  I didn’t know about Maurice Papon himself in particular, but his claim opened up the possibility that maybe there were certain circumstances, hard as it was to believe or even to say, that by helping Nazi Germany, some people could have been doing something that was morally defensible, that at least it was possible that by doing something, helping the Germans to put some aspects of the occupation, these collaborators were able to serve a greater good. 

So I found myself doing research on a question I never thought I'd ask.  I wanted to know, was there any truth to this claim?  Was there any possibility that the collaborators did something with their role as collaborators to serve some greater good?  Was it even theoretically possible?  So I found myself in Germany doing research on a question I never thought I'd ask. 

In Germany, I was associated with the research institute The Center for Research on Anti-Semitism, das Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung which in German is less of a mouthful because in German it’s actually just one big long word.  And I remember when I got there I met with the director of the institute and I wondered if there was a place where I could have an office or a desk to kind of do my research and he said, “Yeah.”  In the library there was what amounted to an old storage closet. 

He said, “The books that are in there we don’t really use those anymore so you could just put those aside and use that office.  And if the librarian asks you what you're up to, just tell her I said it was fine.” 

Now, I was very proud of myself for this because I had just arrived in Germany and my German was still very, very rusty.  Unless I was talking about the things that my research was about, about World War II or the holocaust, it was very limited and I was able to negotiate this whole thing with the director of the institute in German so I had this newfound confidence in my ability in German that I never thought I had. 

So I go to the library, I find the closet, I start stacking books outside.  The librarian comes up and kind of wonders what I’m doing.  And, in my newfound very confident German, I said, “These inferior books must be deported immediately and subjected to appropriate measures.  My conquest of this closet is nearly complete and I intend to occupy it without delay.” 

She was horrified so I thought I would comfort her and I said, “Oh, don’t worry.  The orders for this come from the very highest levels.  I spoke to the führer this morning.” 

It was a peculiar way of putting things that I’m very sure would have served me very well in Germany about 70 years earlier.  So that was my start. 

Anyway, after about two years digging around in the archives of Berlin, I found out that actually on the national level there was something to Maurice Papon’s story.  That is to say, in Vichy France, where there was a collaborationist government, the survival rate of local Jews was 75 percent.  And that compared to about 20 percent elsewhere in Europe.  In fact, I noticed that there was this regularity across Europe that in places where there was a local government that actually stayed in power and collaborated with Nazi Germany on things related to the war, on things related to the economy, Jewish survival rates tended to be higher. 

Now, I didn’t know exactly why this was the case, but however you cut it, the observation was there that in places where there was a local government, in places where people like Maurice Papon were in power, survival rates tended to be higher, so I really wanted to know why.  Well, I figured that if I wanted to know more about what the collaborators did during World War II, I should talk to a collaborator. 

So I wrote a letter to the law firm that represented Maurice Papon and, much to my own surprise, a few months later I heard back and he said he would sit for an interview with me.  Now, Papon at this point was living in a villa outside of Paris.  He actually was convicted of crimes against humanity and served a few years in prison, but then on account of his old age -- he was ninety-three years old -- he was released and allowed to serve out the remainder of his prison sentence at home under house arrest. 

So when I met Papon, we met at his home.  I had a friend with me; he had a friend with him.  My friend was my translator and we just simply sat around a coffee table and, for the better part of two days, we talked about what he did during the war. 

I remember thinking that he looked old.  I mean, he was ninety-three.  I also remembered that he looked remarkably good for a man who had been released from prison on account of his ill health.  I remember also being nervous.  I mean, I wanted to know more about his side of the story, but I really didn’t want to come off as an apologist for him.  I just thought I should hear what it was like from him point of view so I was very nervous actually from that respect. 

So here I was nervously sitting across the coffee table talking to a man I never thought I'd get to talk to about a project I never thought I would do.  I asked him about his work during the war and he very quickly turned it to the issue at hand.  He actually said that by serving in the collaborationist regime during World War II he was actually able to serve the resistance. 

He said, for example, that by being in the French administration under German occupation he had access to information that he was able to pass off to the resistance.  In fact, he even said that he helped some local Jews by striking Jewish names off of an arrest list and he claimed that these, of course, were names that he never would have seen.  This was an arrest list that he never would have seen had he resigned from his post. 

So his claim was particularly radical and particularly striking.  It wasn’t only that he did nothing wrong under German occupation, it was in fact that by staying in office he did the right thing because, had he stepped down, he would have been giving up an opportunity to serve the resistance. 

Of course, I didn’t know if I believed Maurice Papon, right?  But the very fact that he had these kinds of stories opened up that possibility.  Of course I asked him if he had evidence for this and, surprisingly enough, he did. 

He said, for example, that there was a member of the resistance, a man who happened to be Jewish that he sheltered during the war.  And he said, in fact, actually that man had come forward in Papon’s defense during the trial. 

He also said something else that I can’t remember right now.  He said that there were internal German memos, memos that said that from the German point of view Papon couldn’t be trusted because he was too friendly with the allies and too friendly especially with the Americans.  At this point, you could actually tell that he enjoyed this story so much.  He got a smile on his face and he slapped me on the knee and he said, “You see, I've always loved the Americans.  Even the Germans knew that.” 

And the fact that he had answers to these questions, in a way, was very disappointing.  You see, in a way I hoped that nothing he would say would be credible and that I could just kind of walk away and thank him for his time and write him off.  But his answers and the fact that he had answers opened up for me that possibility that maybe there was some truth to these claims, if not in his case then at least somewhere in the collaborationist bureaucracy there was a possibility that there was someone who did collaborate with the right intentions and who did use their position and power for the right reasons. 

The second day of interviewing was a lot more chill.  We sat around, we talked, he asked me where I was from and all kinds of things that I did.  He told us about his family.  He showed us pictures of his grandchildren.  He brought up very fine scotch and he proposed a toast.  And I have to say, hard as it is to admit, it was fun.  And harder still, I’m not even sure about my own feelings on this, but if I’m really truthful of myself, I liked him.  It was a little bit like talking to somebody’s grandfather and listening to stories about the war, only in this case with that caveat that it’s not your grandfather, the decorated war hero, but your grandfather, the convicted war criminal. 

To this day, people still ask me if I believed Maurice Papon.  I’m not quite sure what to make of it.  I mean, on the one hand I take him at his word that, yes, indeed, at some point, he almost certainly helped the resistance, although exactly when and whether he only did it when it was clear that Germany was going to lose the war anyway, well, that remains up to debate.  In fact, he might have even used his position in office to save local Jews, although how many and for what reason is also something that nobody really knows. 

Whatever you make of him, though, it’s hard to square that with the fact that a better person might have refused to cooperate with Nazi Germany in the first place and that people who resisted from day one don’t have to make nuanced stories about what they did during the war. 

Moreover, to this day, people ask me if I believe him and I realize now that they don’t actually want to know do I think was he telling the truth.  They want to know if I think that people like Maurice Papon or Maurice Papon himself, if I think they were doing the right thing.  Was Papon guilty or was he innocent or was he, somehow, at the same time both? 

That’s the question I started with, that’s the question that at this point I've written a book on, and that’s the question to which even now I don't really have an answer.