“Papy Paul” died in June 2018, at the age of 93, from a lung infection. Paul Pradier was then cremated in Vendée, where he had chosen to end his days, and where the entire village of Les Herbiers appreciated him. Far, far from the death sentence that awaited him in Périgueux then Bordeaux at the end of the Second World War, to punish his active participation in the Nazi police and in intense denunciations of Jews.
The story, as incredible as it is confusing, is told by Frédéric Albert in a book, “The Last Gestapo”, after years of investigations. Intrigued by a mysterious past that Paul Pradier spoke very little about, this resident of the village considered the valiant retiree as a very close friend of the family. Until the discovery of his serious misdeeds with the French Popular Party, a far-right party operating until 1945.
Paul Pradier, friend of the resistance and of Vendée
When he moved to Vendée in 2006, at the age of 82, the inhabitants of the village of Les Herbiers knew nothing of Paul Pradier's sinister past, reports Paris Match. Considered “energetic, jovial, with a heart on his sleeve and a smile full of kindness”, the 1m60 old gentleman knows everyone, walks to the local bar, takes his daily walk while buying Valeurs Actuelles and Le Figaro.
Since the end of the war, he has even gotten into the habit of rubbing shoulders with former resistance fighters. For 25 years, he first worked at the Regain inn, in the Luberon, an anti-Pétain establishment managed by a former resistance fighter who hid Jewish families. Then in Vendée, it was with the Albert couple, Frédéric's parents, that he found temporary accommodation, advice and kindness. Marcel was mayor of Les Herbiers for 18 years, he and his wife are “two resilient spirits” and make Paul Pradier a real close friend.
But they know very little about him: he was born in Montagrier, in Dordogne, was a “delivery man, master driver”. Single and without children, the retiree “evades personal questions”. There is indeed this woman from Montagrier who one day in 2009, while collecting an inheritance from the notary, recognized in him “a ghost emerging from the past”, a vision which “chilled her blood”. But for the rest, Paul Pradier lived in the open and without being recognized for decades, until his death in 2018.
A “sadist”, who infiltrated the resistance and had dozens of Jews deported
After the cremation of the man nicknamed “Popaul” in the village, Frédéric Albert, the son of the couple Marcel and Régine, and who himself knew the retiree well, decided to investigate. He struggles to understand why a nephew of Paul Pradier spoke on the telephone of a “cruel, cynical, formidable scoundrel, sadist” character, also evoking prison.
In the middle of Covid, the 50-year-old man ended up digging through the Bordeaux departmental archives. He thus discovered “the militiaman Paul Pradier, originally from Montagrier”. A 19-year-old militiaman, agent number 302 of the Gestapo, the security police of the SS. “It is the most total and accomplished commitment to the collaboration (…) of fanatics, opportunists, eager for profit,” reports specialist historian Patrice Rolli to Paris Match.
At this time, the young Nazi agent worked in Dordogne, joined the French Popular Party; his file actually reports a “cruel, cynical, sadistic” man. In one year, he denounced, executed or had “a few dozen of his compatriots” deported, including a teenager on the grounds that he “desired his girlfriend”. When Paul Pradier is not strutting around within the militia in Périgueux, he is dressed in civilian clothes, infiltrating resistance groups to better denounce them or distributing pro-Red Army leaflets to better handcuff those who accept them. A work which earned him to be rewarded by the PPF for “his activity against the resistance and his courage” and to receive 60,000 francs from the Gestapo.
Runaways, two convictions and 10 years in prison
As the end of the war approached, in August 1944, the devoted collaborator fled Périgueux, which sentenced him to death in absentia, to join Germany. He returns to France but is arrested in Strasbourg. He was again sentenced to death in Bordeaux, which transformed his sentence into “forced labor for life”. After 10 years in prison, his young age and his good behavior in detention allowed him to be released in 1955. “Only his mother would agree to see him again,” closed Paris Match.
For Frédéric Albert, who also testifies to Sud Ouest, his book “is reparation for (his) family and for the victims of Paul Pradier. Legally, he has paid his debt to society.” But in the village of Herbiers, talking about him will now always bring a dark feeling of betrayal.
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