Maman's Boy

Matronly Yvonne Vasseur, 69, has had but one consuming passion in her life: her son Jacques, now 45. When he was a child, she gave him dolls to play with and kept him away from other little boys and girls. When the Nazis invaded France, she begged her son to do anything that they asked in order to stay near her, rather than be shipped off to a forced-labor camp in Germany. When he returned, a hunted, hated collaborator, to her after the war, she hid him in the empty garret above her second-story apartment in a grim, redbrick building in a working-class suburb of Lille.

There he stayed for 17 years. Police kept him on their "wanted" list, but cunningly, Yvonne Vasseur shopped for two on her tiny widow's pension by dividing her purchases among several shops. She knit him special slippers with felt soles, so that the neighbors would not hear him. In his garret Vasseur learned seven languages to add to his French and German; she learned Latin to help him along, brought him down to watch TV on quiet nights. In 1962, police discovered him accidentally. Paying a routine call on Mme. Vasseur, they rang the neighbor's doorbell downstairs by mistake, then knocked on Mme. Vasseur's door--and found her son hiding behind a curtain. He could, of course, have easily escaped from France any time before then, but, as he explained, "I was in perfect joy to stay with Maman."

Outlet for Virility. All through his trial this month, Mme. Vasseur devoured her son with her eyes. A five-man Court for State Security in Paris heard him accused of responsibility for 430 arrests, 310 deportations, and the deaths of 230 of his countrymen while employed at Gestapo headquarters in the city of

Angers. Some 200 witnesses recounted the now almost forgotten horrors: how Vasseur, known as "Vasseur the Terror," beat them, tortured them, and condemned their fathers, brothers and sweethearts to death.

One man recalled having been bull-whipped for ten hours by Vasseur, who looked "mighty pleased with himself." A woman told how he burned her breasts with a cigarette. Vasseur listened impassively, commenting, "It's possible" or "It's plausible." His mother blamed herself. Taking the stand, she cried: "I had a very strict mother. I wanted to spare my son. I sinned in the other direction. It is not he who ought to be on trial. It's me. It is my fault. Punish me, but let him go."

The defense produced a psychiatrist who, in a certain sense, agreed with Mme. Vasseur. He testified that Vasseur was "emotionally castrated" by her as a child, and embraced his grisly Gestapo duties because they gave him a chance to express his virility. "To this day," observed the psychiatrist, "he always refers to her as Maman (Mummy), and suffered most in jail from seeing Maman only once a week." The court listened impassively, then sentenced him to be shot unless--as seems unlikely--Charles de Gaulle grants him a pardon. To the end he maintained that, although guilty of many crimes, "I swear on my mother's head that I never killed anybody."

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