Leader of wartime France 'collaborated' with Nazis'

The head of the French government which collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War personally made harsh anti-Jewish legislation even tougher, a leading Nazi hunter has said, citing a newly unveiled document.

Serge Klarsfeld, decorated for his work to bring Nazis to trial, said Marshal Philippe Petain pencilled harsher measures into a Statute on Jews issued by his Vichy regime 70 years ago.

First World War hero Mshl Petain signed an armistice with the Nazis in 1940 which divided the country, leaving the north in German hands. He created a government to the south in unoccupied France with its capital in Vichy.

According to the Statute, which Mr Klarsfeld said had been handed over anonymously to the Holocaust Memorial in Paris and authenticated by its experts, Mshl Petain pencilled in his own notes, drastically worsening conditions for Jews in France.

"We didn't know until now that Petain had made changes to the text of 3 October 1940 and made it more strict," Mr Klarsfeld, founder of the Association of the Sons and Daughters of Jews deported from France, said.

The Vichy government helped in deporting about 80,000 Jews to concentration camps from France between 1942 and 1944. The amendments "completely redrafted" the nature of an already extremely anti-Semitic text, Mr Klarsfeld added.

"It shows this was the desire of Petain," he said of the document.

The original text had excluded the descendants of French Jews born or naturalised before 1860, but the notes showed Petain had crossed this out, making all Jews targets for discrimination. Mshl Petain also widened the exclusion for Jews in society, barring them completely from jobs in education and the justice system and preventing them from standing for elected posts.

Mshl Petain's defenders have always said his policies aimed to protect French Jews by assimilating them into the local culture and converting them into Catholics.

He was tried after the war and sentenced to death for treason, but this was commuted to life imprisonment. He died in 1951.