Paris ? Frail but now a free man, wartime collaborator Maurice Papon walked out of prison Wednesday and into a storm of public outrage after judges ruled him too old and sick to finish his 10-year sentence for helping send Jews to Nazi death camps.

To victims of France’s wartime regime and their families, the decision by appeals court judges to release the 92-year-old Papon after serving less than three years of his sentence erased the huge moral victory they won with his 1998 conviction.

Wartime collaborator Maurice Papon, who was serving 10 years in jail for his role in the persecution of French Jews during World War II, rides in his lawyer's car heading home after he was released from prison. An appeals court permitted his release for medical reasons Wednesday,.

After the longest trial in French history, Papon was convicted for complicity in crimes against humanity for his role in deporting 1,690 Jews to Germany as second-in-command of Bordeaux area police. Most were sent to Auschwitz camp, and few survived.

Papon fled to Switzerland after his conviction but was arrested and began serving his sentence in October 1999.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” said Colette Guttman, as she watched Papon shuffle out of Paris’ La Sante prison into a waiting car. “My father, my mother and my uncle were killed at Auschwitz because of people like Papon, who now have the right to rest in their old age.”

Papon’s lawyers hailed his release as “a great victory.”

Papon had triple coronary bypass surgery several years ago and has a pacemaker. His imprisonment set off a debate about the ethics of jailing the elderly.

Jewish groups accused France of turning its back on Holocaust victims.

“We had fought so hard so he would stay in prison,” said Serge Klarsfeld, a Nazi hunter and historian who helped produce much of the evidence used at Papon’s 1998 trial. His release, Klarsfeld said, “gives a feeling of injustice.”

“What I hope is that this sick man doesn’t turn out to be healthy,” Klarsfeld said.

The U.S.-based Simon Wiesenthal Center called the release “a bad case of misplaced sympathy.”

Israel’s Foreign Ministry also expressed regret.

“A man who committed such grave crimes against the Jewish people and humanity ought to end his days in jail,” said Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Rabbi Michael Melchior.