FRANCE: Sparing the Butcher’s Life

In June 1942, as Vichy France proved unable to cope with the growing resistance against the Nazi occupation. Adolf Hitler dispatched egg-bald SS General Karl Oberg to Paris with orders to get tough. Oberg did. In the next two years as head of the Nazi security police in France, Oberg and his eagle-beaked adjutant, SS Colonel Helmuth Knochen, were responsible for the execution of more than 1,000 French hostages, the execution of underground resistance fighters at Mont Valérien and at the Cascade in Paris’ beautiful park, the Bois de Boulogne, the extermination of hundreds of the Maquis, the destruction of the old port of Marseille, the deportation of the faculty of the University of Strasbourg, and the deportation from France of 120,000 Jews and 80,000 other Frenchmen, at least half of whom died in Nazi concentration camps or gas chambers. Frenchmen called Karl Oberg “the Butcher of Paris.”

Arrested by the British in Germany in 1945, Oberg and Knochen languished for nine years in Paris’ Santé prison until in 1954 a Paris military court sentenced them to death as war criminals. Then came four more years in prison until finally last week French President René Coty ruled. In keeping with the general Allied policy of no longer exacting the death penalty for war crimes, he commuted the sentences of both men to life imprisonment.