French Court Reopens Case of Nazi Aide

PARIS —  The nation’s highest court reopened prosecution Friday of suspected Nazi collaborator Paul Touvier, whose acquittals led to soul-searching over France’s wartime government.

In April, a lower court cleared Touvier, 77, of war-crimes charges in the killing of Jews and anti-Nazi Resistance leaders while he was a militia leader and right-hand man to “Butcher of Lyon” Klaus Barbie.

But the Supreme Court of Appeals brought new charges of crimes against humanity against him in the case of seven Jews killed in June, 1944. It said the earlier trial failed to examine whether the slayings had been ordered by the Gestapo.

The lower court had classified the slayings as a war crime, for which the statute of limitations had expired. Crimes against humanity have no such limitations.

The acquittal of Touvier reopened the debate on whether France has confronted the legacy of the Vichy regime, the puppet government that collaborated with the Nazis from 1940 to 1944.

Barbie, an officer of the Gestapo, was convicted in Lyon of crimes against humanity after a three-month trial in 1987. He died in prison last year.

Touvier was arrested in 1989 in a Nice monastery after more than 40 years on the run. France twice sentenced him to death in absentia for war crimes, but the statute of limitations expired before his arrest.