FELIX GERMON had been three weeks in the grave when neo Nazi skinheads broke into the Jewish cemetery in the southern French town of Carpentras on the night of March 9th, 1990. They had planned their ghoulish act as carefully as a military operation and came armed with shovels, pick axes and a crowbar.
"We chose Monsieur Germon's tomb because it wasn't covered with a slab," Yannick Garnier (26), the security guard who later turned himself and his companions in, told a court in Marseille this week. "It was by chance."
The young men started digging. "The further we dug, the worse it smelled," said Olivier Fimbry (26), a former sergeant who committed his crime while on leave from the army.
"One of us broke the lid of the coffin with the crowbar," Garnier added.
Patrick Laonegro (30), the computer operator who served as the group's "intellectual" (an admirer of Hitler's Mein Kampf), continued: "We opened the coffin. We saw a shroud. (Jean Claude) Gos [who died in 1993] decided to take the body out."
"Gos tried to decapitate him. He hit his neck several times with the shovel. He went crazy. Then he grabbed a parasol," Garnier recounted.
Gos then propped the decomposing corpse on the end of the parasol pole, so it looked as if he had been impaled. The skinheads broke a Star of David from a nearby tomb and put it on Felix Germon's chest. They hung a funeral banner saying "souvenir of the neighbours" on the stomach.
"In my head, I knew we'd gone too far," Fimbry said.
But before they left, the group wrecked 34 more tombs.
For these outrages, the French government prosecutor yesterday asked the court to sentence Fimbry and Laonegro, the most unrepentant members of the group, to the maximum legal penalty of two years in prison. She requested shorter sentences of 18 months for Garnier, without whose confession in July of last year the trial would not have taken place, and for the fourth skinhead, a timid labourer named Bertrand Nouveau (28). The judgement will be handed down on April 24th.
Lawyers for French anti racist groups tried to transform the case into a trial of Mr Jean Marie Le Pen's extreme right wing National Front (EN).
"The moral instigator of this desecration was Le Pen," a lawyer for SOS Racisme said. Another called the skinheads "the kids of Le Pen, merchant of the vile and base".
The lawyer for the town of Carpentras, which is north east of Avignon and north of Marseille, singled out Mr Guy Macary, a local EN leader in the courtroom: "You should be in the dock with the accused because it's you, intellectually, who armed them".
Nothing in the case linked the tomb desecrators to the FN, Mr Macary shouted back.
Publications close to the Front denounced this week's trial as at "setup", citing Mr Le Pen's allegation that the skinheads were really informers working for "the political police of the government".
Felix Germon's widow Magdeleine (87) left the four day trial only once, when the four men gave details of her husband's disinterment. In one of the most dramatic moments, Mrs Germon addressed the courtroom: "Why, did they do that to him?" she asked angrily. "For fun? They are monsters. Vermin. Make them tell me why."
Garnier, a huge man with small deep set eyes, was the only one of the accused who dared reply. "It was for reasons of anti semitism," he mumbled.
Mrs Germon cut him off: "We were all Jews to begin with! God, Jesus, holy Mary ... All of us are human beings."
