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NEWS
Sartre Revealed to Be Nazi Backer and Pro-Terror
By Arnon Yaffeh, Paris
A 500-page book of interviews with Jean-Paul Sartre is causing a stir in intellectual circles and the Jewish community 30 years after the renowned French existentialist's death.
In the series of interviews conducted with him from 1970 to 1974, Sartre reveals esteem for the Nazis, supports Palestinian terrorism, justifies the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and defends the Baader-Meinhof gang, a German left-wing terror group active in the late 1960s and 70s.
Why the interviewer, John Gerassi — Sartre's only official biographer — waited 30 years to publish the conversations remains unclear.
Despite the image of a friend of the Jewish people and a supporter of Israel which the philosopher himself and his Jewish disciples tried to create, another Sartre comes to light in the interviews, a writer who was deceptive about his past as an opponent of the Nazi occupation, while in fact he wrote articles that appeared in Vichy publications and praised writers like Jean Giraudoux, a Hitler supporter in France. His reputation as a freedom fighter and underground figure who fled German captivity is shown to be fabricated.
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