Action Against The Police
After the Liberation, survivors of the internment camp at Drancy began legal proceedings against gendarmes accused of being accomplices of the Nazis. An investigation began into 15 gendarmes, of whom 10 were accused at the Cour de justice de la Seine of conduct threatening the safety of the state. Three fled before the trial could start. The other seven said they were only obeying orders, despite numerous witnesses and accounts by survivors of brutality.
The court ruled on 22 March 1947, that the seven were found guilty but that most had rehabilitated themselves "by active participation, useful and sustained, offered to the Resistance against the enemy." Two others were jailed for two years and condemned to dégradation nationale for five years. A year later they were reprieved.
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Famous quotes containing the words action and/or police:
“When the course of events shall have removed you to distant scenes of action where laurels not nurtured with the blood of my country may be gathered, I shall urge sincere prayers for your obtaining every honor and preferment which may gladden the heart of a soldier.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“There are all sorts of ways of murdering a person or at least his soul, and that’s something no police in the world can spot.”
—Max Frisch (1911–1991)