PARIS — A painful chapter for France’s Jewish community has ended after a French court sentenced four neo-Nazis for the 1990 desecration of 35 graves at a Jewish cemetery in the southern town of Carpentras.
In an April 24 decision, the court sentenced Olivier Fimbry, 26, and Patrick Laonegro, 29, who were identified as the ringleaders, to two years in prison, the maximum penalty under the law.
Two other skinheads, Yannick Garnier and Bertrand Nouveau, both 27, each received 20-month sentences for their roles in exhuming the body of Felix Germon and impaling it on a beach umbrella.
The four also desecrated 34 other graves during the night of May 8-9, 1990.
They were arrested last year after they confessed to the desecration of the Carpentras cemetery. A fifth member of the group was said to have died in a motorcycle accident.
The four said at the time that they had desecrated the graves and disinterred Germon’s body to pay tribute to Adolf Hitler and to mark the anniversary of Germany’s surrender, which was May 8, 1945.
The cemetery desecration caused an outrage in France and sent 100,000 people, including then-president Francois Mitterrand, out onto the streets of Paris in a mass demonstration.
Many of the protesters wore yellow stars like the ones European Jews had to wear by the Nazis.
The four skinheads were all members of or sympathizers with the French and European Nationalist Party, a tiny far-right faction that gained notoriety during the 1980s in connection with bomb attacks on immigrant hostels and on the offices of a left-wing magazine.
Last week, Jewish officials said they were disappointed that the verdict only involved prison sentences.
Henri Hajdenberg, head of CRIF, the umbrella group of secular French Jewish organizations, said the four should also be taught about the true nature of the Holocaust.
“Besides prison terms and fines, wouldn’t it be advisable to send [the perpetrators] to a Holocaust documentation center so that the ultimate consequences of the hate ideologies that fascinated them would come to life before their eyes?” Hajdenberg said in a statement.
In its ruling, the court described the desecration as stemming from “the most primary and violent anti-Semitism that went so far as to hunt down individuals beyond death.”
“The men committed an intolerable attack upon the sacred meaning of death,” the court added.
During their trial last month, the men testified that they were fascinated with the Third Reich. All four said they owned swastikas, brown shirts and other Nazi memorabilia, and confessed to acts of vandalism and violence in the late 1980s.
Two of the defendants appeared repentant.
Fimbry “apologized sincerely” to Magdeleine Germon, the widow of Felix Germon, and to “the Jewish community and the city of Carpentras.
“I learned my lesson. I hope that they can forgive me,” he said.
Magdeleine Germon, 87, attended the trial. A civil court had awarded her about $8,600 in damages, which her lawyer termed “insufficient.”
Last September, Germon was attacked and beaten by an unidentified man after she publicly rejected an apology from one of the vandals responsible for the cemetery desecration.