Xavier Vallat - After The War

After The War

At his trial before the High Court of Justice in December 1947, Vallat remained an unrepentant anti-Semite, demanding that one of the judges, Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont, be disqualified because he was Jewish. He denied direct responsibility for the deportations of the French Jews, claiming that his policies had saved more than half of the Jews from deportation. He claimed that Vichy's anti-Jewish laws had been enacted on German orders, but they were really done by the French themselves. Vallat was sentenced to only ten years in prison: the court said he received a relatively lenient sentence in the light of his service in World War I, and many witnesses he had ssaved Jews by giving them false papers, as he wanted a separate zone for the Jews, not their extermination.

Vallat was released on parole in 1949 and amnestied in 1954. He returned to anti-Semitic agitation, although he found few followers in postwar France. From 1962 to 1966 he was editor of the extreme right-wing journal Aspects de la France.

When Vallat died in January 1972, the Nazi hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld created a sensation by arriving at his funeral with a large wreath in the shape of a yellow Star of David, the symbol that French Jews had been forced to wear by the Nazis (although this measure had in fact been opposed by the Vichy government and was not enforced in the Vichy-controlled zone).