The Trial of Klaus Barbie

(May 11, 1987)

Historical Background
The Occupation: The Years France Forgot
Klaus Barbie: Criminal In Absentia (1945-1983)
Preparing Barbie's Defense (1983-1987)
The Courtroom (1987)
Conclusion
Notes

On May 11, 1987, after four years of legal wrangling, Klaus Barbie, the SS officer in charge of the Gestapo in Lyon, France from November, 1942 to August, 1944, would finally attend his long overdue meeting with justice. There was little doubt that Klaus Barbie, a frail old man sitting in the defendant's box of a French courtroom, was the same Klaus Barbie who had been responsible for thousands of deaths forty years earlier. Of Barbie's hundreds of crimes, including murder, torture, rape, and deportation, only those of the gravest nature, the "crimes against humanity," would be pursued at the trial. Specifically, Barbie would be tried for his role as a perpetrator of Hitler's Final Solution and the material evidence against him was staggering.

When the trial began, the forty-lawyer prosecution team, which represented Klaus Barbie's myriad victims, opened its argument by reciting a list of Barbie's crimes. The list turned out to be so long that the entire first day of the trial was devoted to its reading. Moreover, the prosecution had scores of witnesses, mainly those who had been tortured by Barbie because he suspected that they were members of the French Resistance or because they were Jewish.

While the prosecution was preparing its witnesses, the defense was preparing its own argument. To defend Barbie, who France already sentenced to death twice, in absentia, would be a daunting and unpopular task, but for a radical lawyer named Jacques Vergès, the Barbie trial was the moment for which he had spent most his entire adult life preparing. Vergès' defensive strategy was in his own words to "attack the prosecution," and almost as soon as the judges let him speak, he transformed Barbie's trial into a trial of France and of something much greater, history itself.

Historical Background

On April 6, 1944, actually Maundy Thursday, three vehicles, two of which were lorries, pulled up in front of the children's refuge in Izieu, a sleepy village nestled in the piedmont east of Lyon. The children, most of whom were Jewish, were hiding in Izieu in order to escape their hunter, the regional Gestapo, which was led by First Lieutenant Klaus Barbie. The lorries' arrival signaled the end of this hunt and as a witness later recalled, Barbie's Gestapo caught its quarry:

It was breakfast time. The children were in the refectory drinking hot chocolate. I was on my way down the stairs when I saw three trucks in the drive. My sister shouted to me: it's the Germans, save yourself! I jumped out the window. I hid myself in a bush in the garden...I heard the cries of the children that were being kidnapped and I heard the shouts of the Nazis who were carrying them away...They threw the children into the trucks like they were sacks of potatoes. Most of them were crying, terrorized.¹

Following the raid on their home in Izieu, the children were shipped directly to the "collection center" in Drancy by the Gestapo. Upon reaching Drancy, the children were put on the first available train "towards the East" and, of the forty-four children kidnapped by the Nazis in Izieu, not a single one returned.² The most tragic aspect of the Izieu raid, however, was that Barbie would have never found the children had patriotic French citizens not volunteered to help him search for refugees.

When Klaus Barbie arrived in Lyon in November, 1942 he was assigned two tasks, to dismantle the Resistance and rid the city of Jews.³ The city's medieval architecture had earned Lyon the title of "Capital of the Resistance" by providing more than enough cul-de-sacs and long-forgotten basements in which guerrillas and refugees could hide.⁴ Barbie's job, however, was not nearly as difficult as it sounded. For every résistant he encountered, Barbie found that there were equal numbers of French willing to collaborate with him. Many of the French who collaborated with Barbie did so out of greed or a lust for power, but many more collaborated simply because they believed what they doing was good for France. The reason for this, as Barbie would soon discover, was that two completely different notions of what it meant to be French existed side by side. Such coexistence often led to violence, but more importantly, it both fed upon and nourished French society's disregard for certain elements of its past. Barbie's role in that nation-scale oversight was key; during the Occupation, he manipulated and reinforced it, and during his trial in 1987, he provided the means to destroy it. Destroying national amnesia, however, is no easy task considering how far into the past it reached.

The story of the Barbie trial begins not during World War Two, but with the Enlightenment, where the ideas that propelled both Barbie and those who judged him were born. Philip Potter, a pastor from the Antilles, knew as much when he was interviewed by Le Monde shortly after Barbie's extradition to France:

In reality, Barbie and his like are the products of your [French] history. Hitler, Barbie, Eichmann, and company represent the end of the Aufklärung (century of Enlightenment) which produced four things: the Industrial Revolution, which subordinated man to the machine; the founding of the United States on a declaration of independence where liberty and equality were applied to all men -- except for blacks and Indians; the French Revolution of 1789 where liberty, brotherhood, and equality were indeed claimed by the bourgeoisie; and imperialism based on racism.⁵

It was the Enlightenment that proclaimed all men to be equal and that all equals be treated as equals; it was also the Enlightenment that allowed people to look at the world from a more rational, scientific perspective. Although this way of thinking transformed France into one of the world's greatest democracies, it also made France into a breeding ground for a new, extremely dangerous form of racism. Thus, it was the Enlightenment's dual nature that allowed France to become the first nation to grant full civil rights to all of its minorities and concurrently become the first nation in which racism was justified through scientific reasoning. As was demonstrated in the rise of guillotine following the French Revolution, all it took was a tweak here and a twist there to employ the newfound knowledge to making blood both boil and flow.

As liberty and equality became rationalized, so did hatred. It was this dual nature that brought suffering to those who benefited most from the principles of the Enlightenment when those same principles were distorted. No finer example exists of the Enlightenment's dual nature than the fate of the European Jews. When France, in a fervor of putting the principles of the Enlightenment to good use, became the first nation to grant full rights to all of its minorities, including Jews, it also provided fertile soil for hatred to take seed and grow. As the Jews used their newfound civil rights to integrate into French society, they increasingly became the victims of a new form of racism, a scientific one. While democracy and equality were being rationalized, so were nationalism, xenophobia, and racism. Consequently, by the 1880s, those who continued to be anti-Semitic, despite the lack of a religious basis for doing so in a secular democracy, now had a whole new set of ideas on which to base their hatred.

Now, instead of being persecuted for religious reasons, Jews became the victims of economic and then racial discrimination. French Jews, who were well-integrated into French society by the 1880s, were disproportionately involved in the nation's finance and capital markets. Whenever there was an economic downturn, the Jews got blamed, and, this being the age of scientific reasoning, anti-Semites began looking for scientific explanations for the Jews' place in society. If there was a "French national character" then there was also a "Jewish character," and the new generation of French anti-Semites viewed the two as conflicting.⁶ Theories emerged that Europe was dominated by Jews, who through their heavy involvement in finance, academics, and culture managed to control a disproportionate share of power and wealth. The Jewish "character" was blamed by many rightist thinkers for the rise of socialism and the collapse of Europe's monarchies. Everywhere the European Right saw their enemies they also saw Jews. It was Karl Marx, a Jew, who designed communism, and it was therefore the Jews who were destroying Europe's status quo. If Marx was Jewish, then so was communism, and as the Right intensified its battle against Marx's growing popularity, it stepped up its battle against the Jews as well. The new racial anti-Semitism was therefore neither a spontaneous nor an isolated event, and it often went hand-in-hand with nationalism, xenophobia, religiosity, and monarchism. Furthermore, the new wave of anti-Semitic nationalism would prove itself as only the tip of the iceberg of a much larger trend, one which earned Paris the title of "the spiritual capital of the European Right."⁷

The turn-of-the-century marked a new age for French tolerance and a new age for French anti-Semitism as well. Religious tolerance was on the rise and by the 1890s, Jews were even allowed to serve as officers in the French Army, traditionally a bastion of conservatism and therefore anti-Semitism. The first modern test of the Jewish presence in France began in 1895 when Alfred Dreyfus, the first Jew to serve as an officer in the French Army's General Staff, was stripped of his medals and denounced as a traitor and a spy. From this incident, which soon swelled into a decade-long national drama, French anti-Semitism got a major boost. Many French already distrusted Jews and the Dreyfus Affair gave them the perfect opportunity to continue doing so. In the minds of many French nationalists, especially the militarists on the monarchist Right, Dreyfus was a spy and a traitor because he was greedy and hated the French. Why would he be greedy and hate the French? Because he was a Jew. And why would a Jew be greedy and hate the French? Because that was his character, his essence, his inner-being, his Jewishness.

Rightists like Charles Maurras, the founder of Action Française, typified those who used the Dreyfus Affair to gain support for their attacks on the Jewish presence in France. As Erna Paris put it, "Maurras was no mass murderer, to be sure, but rather an aesthete, a snob, a worshiper of the ancient world, a masculinist...and an elitist in every sense of the word."⁸ By 1889, La Libre Parole, the daily paper of Action Française whose sole purpose was to attack the Third Republic, boasted a circulation of about 300,000.⁹ Every time something went wrong on any level, papers like La Libre Parole blamed the policies of the Third Republic for whatever happened. Specifically, La Libre Parole attacked the Third Republic for its liberalness and its toleration of foreigners, especially Jews. Moreover, these papers frequently revealed Jews at the center of the Third Republic's scandals and occasionally even called on the government to revoke the citizenship of Jews or at least put some restrictions on their involvement in French government, industry, and culture. Thus, when Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, was denounced as a traitor, men like Maurras were ready to pounce. Even though Dreyfus was eventually pardoned, the uproar surrounding his trial and incarceration renewed the public's traditional fear of France's Jewish population, and groups like Action Française were allowed to ease xenophobia into popular acceptance.

Along with their newfound popular acceptance, French anti-Semites found that their political base was expanding as well. During the Dreyfus trials, the anti-Semites held a great deal in common with conservatives and military leaders whose interests would be advanced by condemning Dreyfus. Both groups wanted to change or remove the Third Republic and both groups saw multi-culturalism as a threat to French society. In both groups, most members were ardent nationalists like Maurras, some were devout Catholics, and many were enemies of the Republic as well. They saw the Third Republic as a great hindrance to France for among other reasons, its tolerance of minorities and liberals. Armed with their new theories of French racial character, they were alarmed by the Third Republic's willingness to taint French culture by allowing outsiders to settle there. As a result of the popularity of groups like Action Française and their association with the popular Right, many French began to believe that they could not be good nationalists without being at least mildly anti-Semitic.

Although groups like Action Française appealed to many by attaching anti-Semitism and xenophobia to the promise of a better future for France, they were not without opposition. While the French anti-Semites used the Dreyfus Affair popularize their cause, an equally vocal group defended Dreyfus, and indeed the whole Jewish presence in France, against false accusations made against them. When it became clear that Dreyfus had been framed, the journalist Emile Zola wrote his famous article entitled "J'Accuse" in which he pointed out the inconsistencies of Dreyfus's enemies, most of whom were both conservative and anti-Semitic. For the Left as well as for the large non-socialist Republican Center, a conviction of Dreyfus would go against tolerance and justice, two values held dear by the Third Republic. Thus, by the time the Dreyfus Affair ended, France was completely polarized over the issue of Dreyfus's role in the army and over the larger issues of the Jewish presence in France and the validity of what the Third Republic stood for. For the most part, the socialists and the Center supported Dreyfus while most conservatives, monarchists, and the military opposed him. Both sides refused the change their views, but for the time being the more liberal values of the Republic prevailed and the Right was forced to confine its anti-Semitism to a more tacit level. Although anti-Republicanism and the anti-Semitism went with it were buried, they certainly had not died.

Much of the xenophobia and anti-Semitism that was aroused during the turn of the century disappeared from the political arena during World War I. On the battlefields of Verdun, the Somme, and Ypres, French Christians and Jews fought and died side by side for France. Those who managed to survive the ordeal of the trenches were respected regardless of their creed or ancestry. Henceforth, all one had to do to refute the arguments of an anti-Semite was simply to point to one of France's many Jewish veterans. Consequently, anti-Semitism in France declined during the 1920s, and as the decade progressed, it faded from most aspects of life with the notable exceptions of social clubs and spousal choice.¹⁰ Moreover, French Jews were allowed to integrate more than ever and it would be fair to say that France during the 1920s was much more tolerant of Jews than the either the U.S. or the U.K. at the time.¹¹

France's national mood of unity and toleration that followed the war was doomed for precisely the same reasons it came about in the first place. The 1920s attitude of toleration and unity hinged on a rebounding French economy and a stable society. As long as mouths were fed, pockets were full, and jobs were available, everybody was fairly happy, but this national mood of content quickly faded when France succumbed to the Great Depression in the early 1930s. Besides bringing mass unemployment and therefore mass unrest to France, the Great Depression brought Adolf Hitler to power in Germany. France not only had to worry about its internal upheaval, but it had to face the growing threat of yet another war with Germany as well. After World War One, the French were simply tired of war, especially given their atrocious losses and the fact that much of that war was fought on French soil. In the trenches on the Western Front, France lost a whole generation of young men and like most other nations that participated in the slaughter, France had no desire to repeat the experience ever again. Understandably, France's foreign policy reflected the popular pacifism brought about by World War One, and almost all French, from Communists to right-wing radicals, despised the idea of another war.

Such pacifism on the part of French society beckoned like a siren's wail to Adolf Hitler, who from the start of his political career declared that the "mongrel" French stood firmly in the path of German progress.¹² As one of primary forces behind the massive burdens heaped upon Germany at the conclusion of World War One and as a society unprepared for war, France provided an ideal target for the expansionist Nazis. To make matters worse, French pride in the Republic bitterly opposed fascism, with which Hitler had replaced the Weimar Republic. Nazi "philosophers" hurled invectives against the principles of the Enlightenment, which they viewed as responsible for the rise of the Republic and the Jews. Ironically, the Nazis owed their ideology of the Volksgemeinschaft, the organic people's state, to the same principles of the Enlightenment that paved the way for the French Republics and their toleration of religious diversity.¹³ Just as French anti-Semites derived their science-based views from the Enlightenment, the Nazis drew their own brand of anti-Semitism from the same scientific principles.

As if a faltering economy and a looming war were not enough, France was flooded by a steady stream of refugees fleeing fascism and poverty. Most prominent, although not most numerous, were the Jewish refugees from the east. From Poland and other places in eastern Europe came a wave of poor, uneducated, and very unassimilated Jews. When these eastern Jews arrived in cosmopolitan France they spoke little or no French and placed a great strain on the French economy that was already facing record unemployment. Not only did these Jewish immigrants clash with French culture, they, like all immigrants, were viewed as threats to French job security. Thus, from fears of job displacement arose yet another kind of anti-Semitism, one in which Jews were, depicted as "predatory proletariats."¹⁴ When anger towards Jewish immigrants expressed itself in renewed hostility, fully assimilated and highly successful French Jews were often lumped together with their poor immigrant counterparts. As a result, economic worries became blended with traditional anti-Semitism, and the word "Jew" began to mean "job stealer" as well as "exploiter."

Although French xenophobia was on the rise in the early 1930s because of the socioeconomic problems brought about by the new wave of poor immigrants, the bulk of the French population was sufficiently liberal and open-minded to elect in 1936 the Popular Front headed by Léon Blum, a socialist and a Jew. The Popular Front's main platform stood against the fascism that was on the rise in France's neighbors Germany, Italy, and Spain. Although the Popular Front had put a Jew in power, the same forces that persecuted Dreyfus were also returning. For the enemies of the Third Republic, many of whom were anti-Semitic, or became anti-Semitic once Blum took office, Blum's role as Premier confirmed their fears that Jews were taking over France. They pointed to France's sluggish economy and deteriorating relationships with its fascist neighbors as sure signs that the Jews were out to ruin France. Many also feared that an enraged Blum and his "Talmudic Cabinet" would try to pick a fight with Germany because of Hitler's anti-Semitism.¹⁵ In reality, Blum's administration made great efforts to appease Hitler, and ironically, that effort to make peace would soon bring unprecedented disaster to France.

When something went wrong in France during the Blum administration, and a lot did go wrong in the late Thirties, the Jews as a group were often blamed along with Blum's government and the immigrants. To make matters even worse for Blum, France experienced the Refugee Crisis, its biggest-ever surge of refugees, between 1938 and 1941. When Germany began to expel political opponents and Jews en masse in 1938, many of them ended up in France, and soon other waves of political refugees swept in from fascist Spain and Italy. As if the sheer volume of refugees was not enough to test French tolerance of outsiders, many of the refugees were violent political extremists, not the type of people a society on the verge of turmoil wanted. Although the French tried to prevent the refugees from ending up in France, they had the misfortune of sharing the same landmass with the source of the refugees. From the Blum administration's point of view, France was faced with the choice of paying for the refugees' food, clothing, and shelter or letting them run amok in the streets. Either way, Blum would lose.

In the southern regions of France, massive camps de concentration were set up for the destitute refugees. The bill came to $6 million per month to run each of these camps and Blum got blamed for the whole thing.¹⁶ In the area where the camps were located, later to become the geographic heart of the Vichy regime, the locals had become thoroughly fed up with refugee situation. Henceforth, the cards were stacked against the refugees from the minute they entered France. Immigrants could not find work because there were no jobs, they could not integrate because they were unwanted, and they could not leave because they were trapped. Worse, to many native French, the refugees seemed like a lost cause. As evidence, they pointed out that the refugees, many of whom were Jews, were not working, were not assimilating, and were staying on French soil completely at France's expense. In short, the locals wanted the refugees out, immediately. They would have their wish granted much sooner than they expected.

Unfortunately for Blum, the situation went from bad to worse as the surge of refugees swelled due to the deteriorating situations in their homelands. After a decade of economic regression and social upheaval, the traditional Republican tolerance of refugees was pushed beyond its limit. As popular sentiment against the Jews intensified because of the Refugee Crisis and the apparent ineptness of Blum's government, the distinction between assimilated French Jew and immigrant faded while the old distinction between Catholic Frenchman and Jew resurfaced. Many conservative and pacifistic French began to worry that the Refugee Crisis would drag France into war with her fascist neighbors and they often blamed the Jews for the growing tensions in Europe. The idea that it would be the Jews who dragged France into war was reinforced in 1938 when Herschel Grynszpan, a recent Jewish immigrant to France, shot and killed a German diplomat in Paris.¹⁷ In the minds of conservative pacifists, the Grynszpan incident was a worst-case scenario: a Jew, who was an unwelcome burden for France to begin with, had sabotaged the already delicate relationship between France and Germany.

When war between France and Germany finally broke out on September 3, 1939, it was certainly not because Blum had picked a fight with the Germans. Instead, it was Hitler's aggression and the Nazis' fear that France would become a formidable foe if given enough time to build up its armies that prompted the Werhmacht to sweep across the Low Countries into France.¹⁸ Before the German army even reached French soil, however, France was invaded by over a million refugees from Holland and Belgium who were fleeing the advancing armies. The wave of panic-stricken mobs that poured into France made the Refugee Crisis of the late Thirties seem like a picnic. For the French government, which was trying to fight a war at the time, this flood of refugees could not have come at a worse moment. Desperate times called for desperate measures and the government resorted to cramming thousands of refugees in boxcars and shipping them to the already crowded camps de concentration. The camps de concentration were nothing like the camps the Nazis would soon run, but conditions there were nevertheless wretched; a typical camp de concentration being the Velodrome d'Hiver, a huge indoor sports complex in Paris where up to 5,000 refugees lived in squalor for months. In the camps, families were split apart and disease ran rampant. Most refugees, however, did not end up in the government-run camps and when the hotels and boarding-houses filled up or when they ran out of money, they simply lived on the streets.¹⁹ In every public space in Paris there were refugees and where there were refugees there was chaos.

Many French citizens were so angry about refugee situation that they demanded an armistice with Germany just so that the refugees could be sent home. If the war between France and Germany would end, then so would the refugee problem. Those who wanted a quick end to the war got their wish as the combination of German innovation and French ineptness on the battlefield, caused mainly by poor leadership and outdated tactics, brought the "Phony War" to an end a scant two months after the Germans began their westward push. With the German troops on their way to Paris and with the French armies nowhere to be seen, there was absolutely nothing to stop Nazi Germany's occupation of its longtime enemy, France.

In the chaos following the German invasion of May-June 1940, the Third Republic collapsed. The death knell of the Third Republic occurred on June 14, 1940 when the Germans entered Paris. Two days later, with a swastika hanging from the Arc de Triomphe and German soldiers goose-stepping down the Champs-Elysees, the last remnants of the Third Republic collapsed. That day, in a last-ditch attempt to salvage traditional honor, the government gave full executive power to Marshal Philippe Pétain. What Pétain was supposed to do was be a savior. If Pétain could be a savior on the battlefields of Verdun where he overcame terrible odds to halt the German advance in 1916, then he could do it again in 1940. Pétain was no ordinary military leader though, he attained the status of a demigod: "On the army's most glorious day, Philippe Pétain had been its most glorious leader and in the minds of those for whom the army was the nation, the Marshal had become the incarnation of France itself."²⁰

For rightist anti-Semites like Charles Maurras, Pétain's ascension was a dream come true. Upon taking office, Pétain vowed to "take up a righteous sword against liberalism, communism, and 'selfish capitalism' and rid our country from the most menacing threat of all, that of money."²¹ France, under Pétain's nominal leadership and under the guidance of conservative nationalism would at once be proud, militant, and xenophobic. Thus, when Maurras boasted that he would prefer a German occupier to the Third Republic, he was deadly serious: "Our worst defeat has had the good result of ridding us of democracy." ²² Within a week of its formation, Pétain's rightist government settled in the resort town of Vichy and began to prepare a formal surrender to German. The Vichy government's surrender to the German's would not be a loss but rather a triumph, especially to those who disliked the Third Republic so much. In its quest to battle the evils of communism, a force that many, if not most, of Vichy's leaders saw as France's true nemesis, Vichy found itself allied with the Nazis for more than just reasons of survival.

Although those who ran the Vichy regime would later claim that Vichy served to shield the French from the full wrath of the Nazis, most of them had far more in mind than deterring the Nazis when they first took charge.²³ The leaders of Vichy, who had been enemies of the Republic before it fell, had always had their own visions for France and sought to implement them now that the Republic was gone. Who were these men who led Vichy? One trait they had in common besides hatred for the Third Republic was a strong sense of conservative nationalism. Common aspects of the sort of nationalism found in Vichy's leaders were xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-Leftism. They were the old Right who fought against Dreyfus forty years before and they were the old Right who had been denied any political say for decades.

Though one would think that people who were so ardently nationalistic would be the first the resist the invading Germans, in fact the opposite was true. Even though many of these nationalists were fiercely anti-German, their drive to purge France of what they called "subversive elements" overpowered their hostility towards the invaders.²⁴ The Germans, after all, were fighting against the Communists and the Jews, two groups that rightist French nationalists traditionally hated. Consequently, more than a few Pétainists saw the German invasion as a blessing because it would for the first time give them a free hand in ruling France and in fighting their traditional enemies, the Communists and the Jews. Some French were so impressed by the Nazi zeal against Bolshevism that they volunteered to serve in the Waffen ("fighting") SS. The 20,000 Frenchmen who fought in the "Charlemagne" division of the SS fought so well that several were awarded the Iron Cross for their actions on the Eastern Front.²⁵ By keeping in mind the extremely nationalistic beliefs of men like Maurras one can understand that they were not collaborating with the Nazis because they admired Germans but because collaboration would be best way to obtain their vision of a "pure" France. Pierre Laval, the man who really ran the Vichy regime, was sure that the Germans would eventually conquer all of Europe and wanted to ensure that France would still be a major power when the Nazis prevailed.²⁶ He sought to accomplish this by playing a dangerous game of diplomacy during which he tried to wheedle concessions out of the Germans in exchange for French cooperation.

Many times the interests of the Vichy regime and of the Nazis coincided. When the Nazis demanded that Vichy France deport its Jews, the Vichy government wholeheartedly complied. The Rightist xenophobes who ran Vichy were overjoyed that the Germans wanted to take the refugees off their hands and ordered the milice, state-sponsored militia units that did the dirty work for the Vichy government and ultimately the Nazis, to begin rounding up the Jews. Probably no two Vichy leaders had the same reason for supporting the deportation of the Jews, though. Populist leaders answered to the many inhabitants of southern France who wanted the foreign Jews deported because they were fed up with the refugees and the camps de concentration. Besides the popular backlash against the refugee camps, ultra-conservatives associated the Jews with communism and saw the deportations as a sign of the true France reasserting itself. Meanwhile, racial anti-Semites like Maurras who saw the Jews as a threat to French culture shed no tears when they were "excised."²⁷

The incarnation of the Vichy regime's nationalistic ideology took the form of the Alibert law, which was perhaps the most blatant expression of anti-Semitism in France during the Occupation. The Alibert Law isolated and alienated Jews by excluding them from all state administration jobs, and forbade them to work in the press, cinema, radio, and theater. This law was applied mercilessly to all Jews, assimilated and non-assimilated, with the exception of war veterans. Though it is tempting to claim that the Vichy government passed such laws to appease their Nazi masters, those who drafted and enforced Vichy's anti-Semitic policies asserted that such laws had nothing to do with Nazism. Xavier Vallat, Vichy's Commissioner-General for Jewish Affairs proudly claimed from his prison cell that Pétain's government was not a "servile plagiarist of the Nazis" and that the anti-Jewish legislation of Vichy never went beyond the "just limits set by the Church in order to protect the national community."²⁸ Revealingly, Vallat boasted that "The Alibert Law...owes nothing at all to Nazism," and dispelling any doubt about the origins of the Alibert Law, continued: "...M. Raphael Alibert was only adhering to a policy which found not only its source in a long national tradition, but also its justification in the position taken throughout the centuries by the Church with regard to the Jewish problem." ²⁹

When Vallat claimed Vichy's anti-Semitism was a product of French tradition rather than Nazi occupation, he also went to great lengths to defend Vichy's anti-Semitism by pointing out the differences between it and Nazism. Vallat thus argued that the surfacing of French anti-Semitism during Vichy was part of the popular French Catholic tradition and not something forced upon the French by the Nazis. In defense of his claim, Vallat points out the similarities between Vichy's anti-Semitism and that of the various popes throughout the ages. Following this logic, even the Vichy decree of forcing Jews to wear yellow stars did not come from the Nazis but rather from Pope Honorius III who introduced the idea in 1221.³⁰ Such a distinction is echoed by historian Eric Hobsbawm who claims the Holocaust arose from the same "grassroots" anti-Semitism of eastern Europe that catalyzed pogroms as opposed to the more academic anti-Semitism of Western Europe.³¹ Furthermore, the Vichy government did not force Jews to live in ghettos or force them out of public areas. Nor did it forbid mixed marriages or social interaction between Jews and gentiles.³² Vichy's anti-Semitism, concluded Vallat, was even milder than the what papal legislation called for and therefore much milder than Nazi legislation.

Vallat's mentality is perhaps best illustrated in his attitude toward to the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews. In his memoirs, Vallat also says that he knew of the Final Solution starting in January, 1941, but that he "had problems" with the Nazi plans.³³ His main concern at that time was to protect the French "national community," and he therefore wanted to rid France of all foreign Jews, regardless of their fate. Thus, Vallat was quite relieved when the Germans began to deport foreign Jews in large numbers as well as French Jews who "threatened the national community." But as much as Vichy wanted to get rid of the Jews, it also wanted political leverage with the Germans and Laval unhesitatingly used trainloads of Jews as his bargaining chips. When the Germans did not grant Vichy the concessions it demanded in exchange for a given number of Jews or French laborers, or material goods, Laval would withhold all exportation of humans and materials until the Germans complied. Until his execution as traitor in 1945, Laval firmly believed that his collaboration with the Nazis was a patriotic act and he died shouting "Viva La France!"³⁴ Those who shot him believed the opposite, that they were serving France's best interests by ridding it of collaborators like Laval. It is this duality that allowed the two sides of France to coexist during the Occupation (the subject of the next chapter) and it is this duality that determined the course of Klaus Barbie's trial forty years later.

The Occupation: The Years France Forgot (1940-1945)

When the Germans invaded France, they only occupied the portions of France that provided them with what they thought would be worth the expense and trouble of occupation. The Germans therefore occupied Paris, the Channel Coast, and the Atlantic Coast. Paris was important because it was a capital and controlling it meant controlling the region. The North and West coasts were the front between the Germans and their main enemy at the time, the British. By being located between territory that the Germans firmly controlled and Mussolini's Italy, the southeastern part of France was strategically negligible and thus not worth the trouble of occupying. Not wanting to waste their valuable resources guarding a secure region, the Germans left southern France complete in French hands. The Germans also had bigger plans than just occupying France. In 1940, Hitler was pooling every available resource the Reich had for his main attack, the one against his ideological enemy but then ally, the Soviet Union. If the French wanted to govern themselves and cooperate too, then why should the Germans waste any of their precious resources that they could be using in their fight to gain Lebensraum in the East.

Although the Vichy regime's zeal for persecuting the Jews pleased the Nazis a great deal, it alienated and angered the bulk of the French population. While some Frenchmen were glad to see the foreign refugees get sent back East, many were horrified when Vichy began to deport French Jews. When Frenchmen saw other Frenchmen handing their compatriots over to the Nazis, they became disillusioned then infuriated. For many, the mistreatment of the Jews was the key factor that caused them to join the Resistance but resistance did not always take the form of fighting. While some French blew up railroad tracks or shot Nazis, many men and women resisted Vichy and the Nazis passively by refusing to collaborate or by hiding rèsistants and Jews. Perhaps the best illustration of France's dual nature can be found in the film, Au Revoir Les Enfants. In the film, which is based on a true story, a group of priests hide French-Jewish children in their boarding school, but their generosity ends in tragedy when someone on their own staff informs the Gestapo of their crime. When the Gestapo arrive to haul the Jewish children and the head priest off to their certain deaths, the informant, a young Frenchmen, seems quite proud of his work.

By 1942, the Vichy government was in full-swing and at the peak of its power. Under Vichy, order had been restored, the refugee problem solved (many of them were deported, never to be heard from again) and it looked as if France might be entering a special relationship with her patron and ally, Nazi Germany. In Germany, 1942 was also the year it achieved its greatest power. On January 20, 1942, the Nazis held the Wanasee Conference and worked out all of the details of the Final Solution and decided to put it into action. By choosing to exterminate the Jews, the Nazis had opened their war on three fronts; Russia, Western Europe, and Jewish civilians. In 1942, the Third Reich was at its maximum size: its territories stretched from the Urals in Russia to the Atlas mountains of Morocco, and its enemies either lay in ruins or had yet to assemble their armies. In 1942, it was also clear that Germany would not win its war nearly as quickly as everybody thought it would in 1940. Defying what both Hitler and Pétain called its fate, Britain stubbornly held out against German aerial attacks and was even beginning to strike back on the fringes of Hitler's vast empire. On a much larger scale, the Russians, with the help the of the "endless steppe" and an extremely harsh winter, had stopped to bulk of the Wehrmacht dead in its tracks. Meanwhile, the Americans and British in North Africa were beginning to set the trap in which they could catch and destroy Rommel's Afrika Korps. In France, the Resistance, most violently carried out by the Communists, was hampering German control of the area and was growing.

The German military planners knew they would soon be on the defensive and wanted to make sure they had complete control over all of Europe before the Allies tried to invade it. One glaring exception to this complete control was Vichy France, and on November 11, 1942 the Germans entered the area under the Vichy regime's control without meeting any resistance. The Vichy government was still allowed to function as it had before, but the Germans would keep a closer eye on it and would conduct operations of their own within Vichy's territory.

Exactly twenty-four years after his native Germany surrendered to France, Oberssturmfüher (First Lieutenant) Klaus Barbie of the Gestapo entered the city of Lyon. Barbie's orders were simple and strict: "...fight and kill the Resistance" and rid Lyon of Jews.³⁵ When the Gestapo assigned Barbie to Lyon, an ancient city where both the Resistance and Jews could easily hide, they knew they would not be disappointed. Before being sent to Lyon, Barbie had proved himself an able and enthusiastic SS officer in Amsterdam where he earned a well-deserved reputation for being both especially cunning and especially brutal. One time, when he received orders to arrest two German-Jewish ice-cream peddlers, he decided that a mere arrest would not satisfy his Nazi ideology. Instead of arresting the two men, he decided to kill them on the spot. He killed one man by bludgeoning him with an ashtray and the other he shot. For his zeal, he was awarded the Iron Cross by his superiors.³⁶ On a separate occasion, Barbie was given credit for rounding up and dispatching over 200 "Zionists" when he tricked the local Jewish Council into giving him the locations of hundreds of Jews who were hiding in Amsterdam.³⁷ Thus, when the Gestapo needed to pick a man to head their office in Lyon, the "Capital of the French Resistance," Klaus Barbie with his cunning, language skills, and special zeal was a natural choice.

When Barbie arrived in Lyon, he immediately set up shop in the elegant Hotel Terminus, which would serve as his base of operations throughout his stay in Lyon. Although Barbie was comfortable in his posh new headquarters, he had a tough job to do, and Lyon proved to be his biggest challenge yet. Lyon had earned the nickname "Capital of the Resistance" for several reasons: it had been under the relatively lax control of the Vichy regime for two years, it was near Switzerland, and it was a medieval city with more than enough winding streets, cul-de-sacs, and secret basements to hide in. The job of "cleansing" Lyon was far too large for the Gestapo to handle alone, but, as Barbie would soon discover, the natives had already started his work for him.

During his time in Lyon, Klaus Barbie was responsible for two of the most infamous acts the Nazis committed in France. First was the murder of Jean Moulin, Charles de Gaulle's right-hand man, and the man who united the Resistance. Immediately after Moulin succeeded in uniting the various factions of the Resistance, he went to meet the leaders of Lyonnaise Resistance. Moulin was supposed to meet with several of his most important allies but he found himself sharing a park bench with none other than Klaus Barbie. Following his arrest, Moulin would spend his days in Montluc and his nights in a basement near Gestapo headquarters where he was tortured almost to the point of death by Barbie's men, and probably by Barbie himself. After his final meeting with Barbie, a half-dead Moulin was unceremoniously dumped in the courtyard of Montluc Prison. As Christian Pineu, the prison's barber describes, Moulin was in bad shape: "Moulin was unconscious, his eyes [were] pushed into his skull as though they had been pushed through his head. A horrible blue wound scarred his temple. A rattling sound came out of his swollen lips."³⁸ Within a week, Jean Moulin succumbed to his wounds, and in dying, made Klaus Barbie, his murderer, a name France would never forget. What makes Moulin's death even more tragic is that he never would have been captured had he not been betrayed by his fellow résistants. Even Klaus Barbie later acknowledged that he would have never caught Moulin had it not been for the help of Réné Hardy, one of Moulin's comrades.³⁹

The other crime for which Klaus Barbie's name should never be forgotten was the "liquidation" of a camp where Jewish children were hiding. The forty-four children, most of whom were immigrants and all of whom were under the age of fourteen, were living in an old boarding house in the tiny village of Izieu which lies in the foothills not too far from Lyon. The camp, where the children were being schooled while they were being hidden was run by the O.S.E. (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants - "Children's Welfare Organization") , an organization that among other things ran camps to keep Jewish children away from S.S.-infested areas.⁴⁰ Thus, it was not by chance that the O.S.E. picked Izieu, a sleepy little town a few miles east of Lyon, for the location of a modest children's camp. The town seemed friendly enough to their presence and there were relatively few problems establishing a children's home there in late 1943.⁴¹ For several months the children, under the guardianship of half-a-dozen adults, lived the bittersweet lives of homesick children. For the time being, the children and their guardians, tucked away in an isolated and friendly village, seemed perfectly safe from the goings on in the outside world. Then, on April 6, 1944, actually Maundy Thursday, four vehicles, three of which were lorries, pulled up in front of the house; from those vehicles emerged Klaus Barbie's Gestapo. As a witness of the raid later recalled:

It was breakfast time. The children were in the refectory drinking hot chocolate. I was on my way down the stairs when I saw three trucks in the drive. My sister shouted to me: it's the Germans, save yourself! I jumped out the window. I hid myself in a bush in the garden...I heard the cries of the children that were being kidnapped and I heard the shouts of the Nazis who were carrying them away...They threw the children into the trucks like they were sacks of potatoes. Most of them were crying, terrorized.⁴²

Following the raid on their home in Izieu, the children were shipped directly to the "collection center" in Drancy by the Gestapo. Upon reaching the at Drancy, the children were put on the first available train "towards the East" and, of the forty-four children kidnapped by the Nazis in Izieu, not a single one survived the journey. One survivor of Auschwitz revealed during Barbie's trial what happened to the children:

I asked myself where were the children who arrived with us? In the camp there wasn't a single child to be seen. Then those who had been there for a while informed us of the reality. 'You see that chimney, the one smoke never stops coming out of. . . you smell that odor of burned flesh. . . ?' ⁴³

As was the case in his capture of Jean Moulin, Barbie was able to locate and conduct a surprise raid on the Izieu house because a Frenchman saw it in his interests to help the Gestapo. Without collaboration, the Gestapo, which had never set foot in Izieu until the day of the raid, would have never known about, let alone found, the house where the Jewish children were staying. Someone, and nobody in the tight-knit community of Izieu wants to say who, had gone out of his or her way to inform the Gestapo that there were Jews staying in Izieu.

Although they are his most well-known crimes, the murder of Jean Moulin and the deportation of the forty-four children staying in Izieu were certainly not Klaus Barbie's only crimes. During his eighteen-month reign of terror in Lyon, Klaus Barbie oversaw the deportation of thousands of Jews and résistants from Lyon. Most of those whom Barbie deported would never return, and, when Barbie signed the orders to send people to Auschwitz, he knew full well what would happen to them.⁴⁴ One deportee distinctly remembered the Gestapo officer who was leading him and hundreds of others onto a train saying in broken French, "Where you're going it will be worse than death."⁴⁵ For the prisoners who stayed in Lyon, life was not too much better. A trip to Lyon's Montluc prison when Barbie was running it meant almost certain death. When Barbie wanted to discourage the Resistance, he took hostages, and when the Resistance ignored his warnings, the hostages were lined up in Montluc's courtyard and shot.

Klaus Barbie did not just limit his activities to shootings and deportations. What made Barbie such an effective Gestapo officer, and what made people afraid to try to assassinate him for fear they would miss, was his use of torture. Most people who were tortured by Barbie had similar experiences. Following their arrest, the prisoners who had information or who had somehow angered the Gestapo, were taken the elegant fourth-floor lounge of the Hotel Terminus for "reinforced interrogation." As the prisoners sat in the lounge waiting for their "interviews" with the Gestapo, those who arrived a few hours earlier were paraded in front of them. Often just seeing the mutilated bodies of one's comrades was enough to make otherwise stubbornly brave people cooperate. Then, the prisoners were taken one-by-one into one of the hotel's most luxurious suites where they were beaten by club-wielding Gestapo men.⁴⁶ Once the Gestapo broke enough of the prisoner's bones to make sure he or she would remain sedentary for the interrogation session, they would leave the prisoner alone for a few hours. For the most stubborn prisoners, Barbie resorted to whipping, amputations, starvation, and the infamous "baths." A bath at the Hotel Terminus meant being held under water in one of the hotel's elaborately decorated baths until one fainted, then being revived, then being asked questions, then being dunked again. As prisoners were being tortured, a normal office operated in the background. As André Frossard, a résistant captured by Barbie, the process of being torture often had a level of absurdity rivaling the best fiction of Sartre or Camus:

[I] was strung up by the hands and feet, then suspended by a pole and immersed in cold water. And the strangest thing was that everything was normal. Here you were hanging naked over a bathtub while a secretary typed, and people told jokes, and someone smoked, and someone munched on a sandwich, and someone else looked out the window. ⁴⁷

Barbie would have stayed in Lyon to the bitter end of the German occupation of the city in September, 1944, but just before Lyon fell, Barbie contracted a venereal disease and had to be hospitalized in western Germany. As Barbie was being driven to the hospital, his men were carrying out his last order, emptying Montluc prison. Instead of fighting on the battlefield to defend Lyon, Barbie's men rounded up their 70 remaining prisoners and shot them. Among the dead were two priests.⁴⁸ Within a week, Lyon fell, but by time the Allies captured Lyon, Barbie was already in Germany and most of his victims dead. When Barbie recovered from his illness a few months later, he was released from the hospital, and that was the last time anyone officially saw him for almost forty years.⁴⁹

When the war ended, the Vichy regime was dissolved and its leaders were tried as traitors. The beloved Pétain was convicted but then pardoned, but Laval was excuted by a firing squad on October 15, 1945. Until the very end, Laval firmly believed that his collaboration with the Nazis was a patriotic act and he died shouting "Viva La France!"⁵⁰ Laval's view was held by many of his underlings and when the newly forming Fourth Republic incorporated those who ran the Vichy regime into its own adminstrative body, it chose to reconcile the two views of France by forgetting, not teaching or supressing. By forgetting, the Fourth Republic dismissed the pain of those who suffered at the hands of Vichy and set a precedent for future inconsistencies. Each time it forgot though, the pain built, but more than forty years would pass before that pain would see the light of day.

Klaus Barbie: Criminal In Absentia (1945-1983)

Klaus Barbie was gone for almost forty years and in those forty years France changed a great deal. France had not only put the ambiguities of the Occupation behind her, but had done the same for the colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria. The transition back to democracy was not smooth, nor was the process of losing the empire, and France decided that the best way to cope with the inconsistencies of the past was to forget about them as quickly as possible. In the name of progress, France forgot and forgave the sins of the Occupation, Indochina, and Algeria. But, for each sin France forgave, there were victims. There were victims of the Occupation, there were victims of Indochina, and there were victims of Algeria. When the victims cried for justice, France, the land of the tricolor chose to ignore them. This, the victims neither forgave nor forgot.

Like France, Klaus Barbie experienced many changes during the forty years between his disappearance and his trial. It turned out that Barbie did not just disappear on his own, but had been smuggled out of Europe by the United States government. (See FBI document on U.S. role in hiding Barbie) Immediately following Germany's surrender, Barbie became a leading figure in a clandestine "resistance" organization made up of other former SS officers who were at large and who wanted to prevent the former Reich from falling into the hands of the Communists. The group planned to approach the British and Americans and offer them "a strong experienced corps of post-war leaders, loyal to Germany and opposed to Communism."⁵¹ In February, 1947, however, the American Counter-Intelligence Corps (C.I.C.) infiltrated the organization and arrested all of its senior members, except for Barbie, who eluded arrest by climbing out his bathroom window.⁵² The C.I.C., which was mainly concerned with countering Soviet espionage, wanted to force the S.S. men to work for the Americans by arresting them and then recruiting them through bribery and blackmail.⁵³ Despite his escape, the C.I.C.'s offer of money and protection was too much for Barbie to resist and he surrendered himself to a C.I.C. agent in June, 1947.⁵⁴ For the next two years Barbie would act as a U.S. agent in Germany where would live "very comfortably" and would receive "hundreds of dollars" for his anti-communist activities.⁵⁵ Then, in 1949, Barbie disappeared again.

An investigation by Allan A. Ryan, Jr. of the U.S. State Department revealed that Barbie's disappearance in 1949 was sponsored by the C.I.C., which wanted to use him as an anti-communist agent in Bolivia.⁵⁶ By 1951, the transformation of Klaus Barbie from a Gestapo officer to an American agent was complete, and he was living under the assumed name of "Klaus Altmann" in Bolivia. In Bolivia, Barbie used his identity as a former Gestapo officer to his advantage; if the C.I.C. ever tried to prosecute him for his crimes during the war, he would embarrass the U.S. government by revealing that he and others like him were on their payroll. With the only people who knew of his identity and whereabouts silent, Barbie was a free man.

In order to secure his place in Bolivia, Barbie often performed services for Bolivia's various military regimes. When Hugo "El Petiso" Banzer, one of Bolivia's most oppressive leaders, came to power in 1971, he relied on Barbie's expertise to maintain his unpopular rightist regime. That year, Banzer "gave total powers to Klaus Altmann [Barbie] to concentrate on the creation of internment camps for his [Banzer's] political opponents...torture and executions were common in those camps." Many of Banzer's enemies were Communists and Barbie probably saw no discontinuity between his activities in Lyons and La Paz."⁵⁷ Between 1951 and 1983, Barbie also participated in drug-running schemes and even served as an officer in the Bolivian secret police for a few years. When he was not suppressing uprisings against Bolivia's various military regimes, Barbie led a peaceful life as businessman and was an active socialite in some La Paz circles. Aside from his activities in Bolivia, Barbie also had a wife and children in Europe and he visited Europe on a regular basis throughout the Fifties and Sixties to see them. On one visit he even had the nerve to go on a sightseeing tour of Paris, where he had been sentenced to death twice in absentia, in 1952 and 1954, by French war crimes tribunals.

As Barbie transformed from a Gestapo agent into an American agent and then into a businessman and henchman in Bolivia, he never gave up his Nazi ideology. Robert S. Taylor, an American intelligence operative who recruited Nazis to work for the C.I.C., described Barbie as "strongly anti-Communist and a Nazi idealist who believes that he and his beliefs were betrayed by the Nazis in power."⁵⁸ Not only was Klaus Barbie free, he was still a proud Nazi. Such a proud Nazi that in 1966 he was forcibly removed from the German club in La Paz for shouting "Heil Hitler" to an envoy from the West German government.⁵⁹

While Barbie roamed South American and Europe, his numerous victims and enemies began to look for him. Barbie's principle adversary was Serge Klarsfeld, a French Jew who devoted much of his adult life to hunting Nazis and bringing them to justice. Klarsfeld himself was a survivor of the Holocaust but his survival would not have been possible had it not been for the fatal sacrifice made by his father, Arno Klarsfeld. When the SS swept through Nice on the night of September 30, 1943, to round up Jews, the Klarsfelds hid behind a false wall in their apartment's coat closet. Arno Klarsfeld, knowing how thoroughly the S.S. searched for hidden people, realized that in order to save his family he had to prevent the Nazis from examining the apartment too closely. He knew that if the S.S. found his wife and children, they would almost certainly die, but, as a healthy man who spoke German fluently and who had years of experience as a manual laborer, he figured the Germans would put him to work instead of simply killing him. When the Gestapo arrived, Arno was waiting for them and surrendered himself while his family hid behind the closet. His gamble paid off and the SS left with their prisoner without bothering to thoroughly search the apartment.⁶⁰ The family was saved, but it turned out that Arno Klarsfeld's guess was only partially correct. He was right that his family would have been killed by the Nazis, and he was right that as an able-bodied man the Nazis would put him to work. He was wrong, however, to think he would survive. Arno Klarsfeld expected hard work ahead of him, but not even the heartiest of men could survive the notorious Furstengrube mines where he worked until his health was destroyed by 36-hour work shifts and malnutrition. When he was worn down to the point at which he could no longer work, Arno Klarsfeld was sent to Auschwitz, where he disappeared in March 1944.⁶¹ For the young Serge Klarsfeld cowering in a closet and knowing that he would never see his father again, the Nazis became his eternal enemies and he vowed never to rest until they had all been brought to justice.

The other person responsible for the end Klaus Barbie's life as a free man was Beatte Kunzel, the wife of Serge Klarsfeld. Kunzel, a German whose father had served in the Wehrmacht, was enraged that Nazis could go free "because of the apathy of governments" and, like her husband, devoted her life to tracking down these criminals.⁶² The Klarsfelds' strategy was simple; they would flush a hidden Nazi criminal out of hiding and then whip up public interest so that a trial could take place. The really tricky part was not finding the Nazis or getting the public enraged, but was getting the governments of the counties where the Nazis were hiding to cooperate. In 1972, the Klarsfelds got a lucky break when they stumbled across a secret report claiming that Klaus Altmann, a German living in Bolivia, and Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyons," were one and the same.⁶³ While Serge worked his way through the French legal system, Beatte went to La Paz and told the Bolivian press about Altmann/Barbie. Although she succeeded in creating an uproar and in getting to French government to ask formally for Barbie's extradition, Barbie was again saved from answering to justice.

What saved Barbie in 1972 was the greed of Hugo Banzer, the military dictator who ran the Bolivian government from 1971 to 1978. Not only was Barbie one of Banzer's most valuable henchmen, he was a potential form of currency. In essence, Banzer wanted to sell Barbie to France for increased political leverage, money, and weapons and because Barbie was valuable to both Banzer and France, the price was quite high.⁶⁴ So high, in fact, that the Pompidou administration refused to play Banzer's game. The relatively conservative Pompidou administration had another reason for not purchasing Barbie, they were perfectly content with Barbie staying in Bolivia where he could not dredge up any unwanted memories.

Favorable circumstances saved Barbie in 1972, but it was only a matter of time before both France and Bolivia saw it in their best interests to extradite him. Barbie's time ran out in the early 1980s, when Banzer had been replaced by a leftist regime who wanted to get rid of Barbie, and when Pompidou was replaced by the liberal Mitterand administration which was eager to take Barbie off of Bolivia's hands. In late 1982, the Bolivians had lowered their demands but still wanted something in exchange for turning over Barbie and surely it was no coincidence that the Bolivian president received "a planeload of arms, three thousand tons of wheat, and fifty million dollars" on his visit to Paris in 1983.⁶⁵ With Barbie's "airfare" paid for, all that remained was the actual extradition, but even in 1983 France was not truly prepared for Barbie's arrival, because with Barbie also arrived the past.

For the Mitterand administration, Barbie's return seemed like a no-lose situation. The administration figured that if they prosecuted Klaus Barbie, who was guilty beyond the shadow of a doubt of some of the most heinous crimes of the Occupation era, they would surely become more popular among their constituents. When France brought justice to Klaus Barbie, it would redeem all the wrongs and inconsistencies of the Occupation. Thus, it was not just Barbie who was on trial but France itself. By confronting Barbie, France would be confronting its past and by punishing him, France would be conquering the past. And most importantly, it was a trial the government thought it would certainly win.

For his victims and their relatives, Barbie's return had even greater significance; justice finally seemed within grasp after almost forty years of painful waiting. In 1983, Klaus Barbie was the same man as forty years before. Never once over the past forty years had Barbie apologized for his crimes, nor did he ever show the slightest bit of remorse for them. Even in the late Seventies, Barbie bragged to a journalist that he was proud of his role in Lyons and he went so far as to claim he prevented France from falling to communism.⁶⁶ Thus, the only cure for many of the wounds Barbie had inflicted and then his irreverent absence would be his punishment. Even the usually pessimistic French press was caught up in the excitement. "He is going to pay, at last!" boasted Le Monde's front page on February 7, 1983, the day following Barbie's arrival in France.⁶⁷ No group was more optimistic than the Left, though. Daniel Voguet, lawyer for the Parti Communiste Française, was quite optimistic about the upcoming trial: "The entire trial will be an accusation of the Right. The French right-wing was in collaboration with the Germans."⁶⁸ The PCF thus saw the trial as a chance to highlight its role in the Resistance and for the first time ever it seemed as if the 150,000 Communists who died during the Occupation would be vindicated. Whatever their political outlook, most of the French media were looking forward to the trial and promised that trial would be "long and spectacular."⁶⁹ That was too true.

Although he did not know it when he was being taken to a Bolivian prison for failing to repay a debt, Klaus Barbie would play a key role in forcing France to confront her inconsistent past and present. What he did know was that chances were pretty slim that his arrest was solely for the failure to repay $10,000. To begin with, Barbie had already been sentenced to death in absentia in 1952 and 1954 for his crimes against the Resistance Under France's Statute of Limitations, however, Barbie was no longer accountable for his past crimes and could not be punished for them. The logic behind this law is that, if twenty years passes between when a person is convicted for something and when he is punished for it, there have been so many changes in the political environment and the individual's life that punishment would be futile. Over the course of twenty years a criminal might "go straight" and raise a family and try to leave the past behind; likewise, what was a crime twenty years ago, may not seem so bad in retrospect. Barbie, who was sentenced to death twice in absentia by French military tribunals, in 1952 and 1954, for his "war crimes," and who twenty years after those trials, was still in Bolivia, could not be excluded from the Statute of Limitations should he be tried under French law.⁷⁰ Although he had escaped being punished for his war crimes, Barbie was far from off the hook. Starting in 1972, when the Klarsfelds found Barbie living under the name of Altmann in Bolivia, there was a considerable push to try Barbie for a different set of crimes, those he conducted against humanity. The Klarsfelds' success is illustrated by the shift in the French government's attitude towards Barbie. In 1972, the French government attempted to extradite Barbie for war crimes, that is, for acts of violence against the Resistance, but by 1983 the Mitterand administration extradited Barbie for his "crimes against humanity." To admit that Barbie's crimes were against humanity was to give a new and well-deserved weight to his crimes, but it was also to make any trial of Barbie that much more sensitive. Although distance and time had saved Barbie from paying for his crimes against the Resistance, the incircumscribability of the Nuremburg laws made it impossible for him to escape being tried for the torture, massacres, and deportation of civilians.

From his prison cell in La Paz, Barbie was taken to the airport and flown to French Guiana where was put on a military plane bound for Lyons. Once he figured out that the plane was going to France and not Germany as he had hoped, Barbie "walled himself in silence."⁷¹ Maybe he thought that if he were quiet enough, the French would forget about him, just as they had so conveniently forgotten about their own past. He was not forgotten and when he arrived in Lyons on February 6, 1983, the whole world remembered who he was. Although the French military had tried to keep the details of Barbie's flight secret, someone leaked Barbie's itinerary to the press. By the time Barbie arrived in Lyons, the police were struggling to restrain the angry crowds that awaited Barbie at the airport. The emotions running through the crowd were at a fever pitch and more than one person had come to the airport with plans to kill Barbie. For instance, a woman who had been interned in Drancy for three months bought a 22-caliber rifle just for the occasion.⁷² Unluckily for those who wanted to continue forgetting about the past, she missed. Also at the airport that day was another group of people, those trying to flee the memories brought back by Barbie's return. For some, Barbie's return triggered unbearable flashbacks to the Occupation, but many others feared that Barbie would denounce them collaborators and shatter the lives they had constructed for themselves over the past forty years.

When Barbie arrived back in Lyons, the memories of the Occupation began to return and the general public became nervously euphoric about finally getting the chance to confront one of the darkest, most tragic chapters of their history face on. As was the case with most trials of prominent Nazis, the trial of Klaus Barbie was surrounded by a swarm of misconceptions. Like the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution, the most prominent and most short-lived misconception was that the trial would be an easy victory for the prosecution.⁷³ The problem was that what Barbie and his fellow Nazis had done had caused a great deal of pain and because that pain had gone unanswered for almost forty years, it became even deeper. Repressed agony on a massive scale makes for moral uneasiness and given the amount of memories they repressed, it is fair to say that the French liked to avoid such uneasiness. To paraphrase Erna Paris, in order to convict Barbie, France would have to open the door of the closet into which the truth about Vichy had been so hurriedly shoved.⁷⁴ Once that door had been opened, it would remain that way until all its contents had been exposed. Nervous or not, most French thought they were ready to finally confront their past. What they did not know was how much of the past they would confront, because far more than just the Occupation was going to be brought up during Barbie's trial.

Preparing Barbie's Defense (1983-1987)

During the first few days following Barbie's return, it seemed that his upcoming trial would run along the lines of France versus the forces of evil. On the day after Barbie's arrival, Le Monde printed a special section intended to educate the public on who Barbie was and what he had done. The press emphasized two things the most: that Barbie was the murderer of Jean Moulin and that Barbie had been working for the Americans when he was in Bolivia. There was very little mention of Barbie's role in the Final Solution and even less mention of the French collaborators. Once the papers tired of printing chronologies of Barbie's whereabouts and the like, they opened up their pages to political writers and philosophers. Instantly the mood changed from nervous glee to just nervousness. In an article entitled "The Justice of Whom?" the prominent political writer Gilbert Comte worried aloud that the Barbie trial would "demoralize the youth of France more than it instructs them."⁷⁵ Opposite Comte's article was a piece by Joseph Rovan, a former résistant and historian. Rovan complained that the trial came too late and the only thing that could come from it was pain. In Rovan's opinion the French would try to place too much weight on the trial and act as if "Bolivia gave us Hitler himself." Doing that, feared Rovan, would hurt Franco-German relations, and would ultimately hurt the French themselves.⁷⁶ As the politicians and writers scrambled to have their views on Barbie printed, perhaps the most poignant statement on Klaus Barbie was one by Philip Potter, a pastor from the Antilles. Tucked neatly under the continuation of a huge article about Jean Moulin's death, a tiny side column several pages deep into February 11th's Le Monde quoted Potter as saying:

In reality, Barbie and his like are the products of your [French] history. Hitler, Barbie, Eichmann and company represent the end of the Aufklärung (century of Enlightenment) which produced four things: the Industrial Revolution, which subordinated man to the machine; the founding of the United States on a declaration of independence where liberty and equality were applied to all men - except for blacks and Indians; - the French Revolution of 1789 where liberty brotherhood, and equality were indeed claimed by the bourgeoisie; and imperialism based on racism. ⁷⁷

It was racism, ironically justified by the principles of the Enlightenment that created the Nazis and that same racism was eternally bound to both the ideals of the Republic and the evils of imperialism. What Potter both hoped for and feared was that Barbie's reappearance would make those who were products of the Enlightenment, that is, everyone, realize the pain their history had caused. Potter's only mistake was that he spoke to soon, and three short days after Barbie's arrival his voice was drowned in a sea of others.
When Barbie arrived in the Montluc Prison in Lyons, this time as a prisoner, he was greeted by his lawyer, Alain de la Servette, head of the Lyons Bar Association. De la Servette, a fairly liberal lawyer of "impeccable reputation" had, like many of his peers, volunteered to defend Barbie. For a young aspiring lawyer, the Barbie trial could be the chance of a lifetime, but de la Servette had already succeeded and though he stood to gain much respect from his peers for taking such a tough case, what he really wanted was a fair trial.⁷⁸ De la Servette, who had a great deal of experience in criminal law was concerned that because the evidence was overwhelmingly against Barbie and because the charges were so serious, the accused would not be able to receive a fair trial in a country quite hostile to his presence. If Barbie was to be convicted under French law, then he must enjoy its benefits as well. Of all of France's lawyers, de la Servette believed he was the one most qualified to defend Barbie because he had experience, because he avoided politics, and because he had a sense of judicial fairness. If justice were to prevail during the Barbie trial, claimed de la Servette, then that trial must be fair. Unlike all the others who volunteered to defend Barbie, de la Servette, as head of the Lyons Bar Association, was in charge of picking a lawyer for Barbie, so he picked himself for the job.

Keeping with his desire to see Barbie receive a fair judgment, de la Servette brought onto the defense team Robert Boyer, a nationally-renowned priest-turned-lawyer. Boyer, who had earned his reputation as a "champion of the wronged" by defending a man wrongly convicted of murdering a child, served a special purpose on de la Servette's team.⁷⁹ Specifically, Boyer would serve to counter-act the Church's official condemnation of Barbie and his presence would to boost national respect for de la Servette's defense team.

Unfortunately for de la Servette and Boyer, the Barbie trial had far less to do with justice than it did with memory. It had not to do with just memories of the Occupation but with memories of all of France's inconsistencies over the past forty years. It was not Barbie who was on trial but France, and had de la Servette and Boyer, two lawyers interested in only the legal process of Barbie's trial, remained in charge of the defense team, the trial still would have been disturbing, but chances are that much of France's past would have still remained hidden in its dark closet.

While de la Servette and Boyer ploughed through law books in search for a good defense for Barbie, the pressures of the trial's true nature, a repressed past, begin to exert themselves on the two lawyers. Boyer, who joined de la Servette's team in the face of Church condemnation of Klaus Barbie, was under enormous pressure from the Church to drop out of the case. On his part, de la Servette became increasingly disturbed by bad publicity, death threats, and ridicule he was receiving because he was Barbie's lawyer. The main factor that made de la Servette uncomfortable, however, was the ever-growing pressure put on him by two groups: those who supported Klaus Barbie and those who saw in Barbie's trial the enormous potential to make France answer to its past.

Those who supported Klaus Barbie because they admired him had very little in common with those who wanted the Barbie trial to catalyze France's awakening to its past. Both groups, however, did share one interest, they did not want the "fair," quiet trial de la Servette and Boyer were preparing for. Trouble for the defense team began when François Genoud, a Swiss businessman who was a Nazi both during and after World War Two, offered to bankroll Barbie's defense and give advice to the defense team. Although de la Servette rejected Genoud's offer once he figured out who Genoud was, he hesitantly allowed Genoud an advisory role on Barbie's defense team.⁸⁰ For Genoud, de la Servette was running the wrong sort of trial, and he worried that his enemies, the Jews, would benefit from such a trial. Genoud was convinced that the Jews as a group were trying to use the Barbie trial boost support for Zionism by drawing attention to the Holocaust, something whose existence he denied. From the minute he heard that Barbie had been extradited to France, Genoud was looking for a way to prevent him from being punished for doing his duty. What Genoud really wanted though, was the trial and punishment of those who were trying, judging, and convicting Klaus Barbie. As it turns out, this desire was shared by the least likely of allies.

On the far opposite end of the political spectrum from François Genoud was the man who held the key to the closet of France's past. His name was Jacques Vergès, and he was the living, breathing icon of France's inconsistencies, both past and present. The last thing in the world Vergès wanted was for the Barbie trial to run the way France wanted it to, that is, a trial that would glorify the Resistance and bring attention to the Holocaust. Such an outcome was intolerable for Vergès who was a sworn enemy of both the French Resistance and Israel. Although he could not have cared less about what happened to Klaus Barbie, Barbie and the Occupation were in the national spotlight, and he saw the perfect opportunity to push the rest of France's history on stage as well. For Vergès, who had tried in vain since the mid-fifties to make France answer to its past, the Barbie trial was not only a battle against his enemies, but a once in a lifetime chance to make the world listen to what he thought was the truth. All he needed to do was to convince de la Servette that he, Jacques Vergès, a half-Vietnamese and wholly Leftist lawyer, was the man for the job or if that did not work, get rid of de la Servette.

With the help of the Nazi, Genoud, Vergès forced his way onto de la Servette's team. Initially, de la Servette welcomed the help of such an intelligent, prominent lawyer, but when it became apparent that Vergès wanted far more than to defend an old man against the wrath of a nation, he began to worry. De la Servette feared mostly that Verges' increased presence would turn the Barbie trial into a media circus. Just as Vergès had done to numerous other trials, he promised to do the same for Barbie's trial and, in doing so, would potentially distract France from what de la Servette thought was the real issue, a fair trial. De la Servette's fears proved correct; and no sooner had Vergès arrived than had the press. Unlike de la Servette and Boyer, Vergès was loud and did not hesitate to use the media to voice his opinions. In a matter of days, all of France knew that Vergès, who was already infamous for his courtroom tirades and his method of "attacking the prosecution," promised to do the same for the Barbie case. With Vergès on the case, it would be France sitting in the box for the accused and not Barbie, and de la Servette and Boyer wanted no part of Vergès' politicized courtroom shenanigans. On June 15, 1983, de la Servette and Boyer resigned as Barbie's attorneys and handed the entire task of defending Barbie over to Vergès.⁸¹ With de la Servette gone, Vergès, "a man with a mission to create moral discomfort," was free to run the show his way when he promised that "this trial will hurt France," he would disappoint nobody.⁸²

To understand Jacques Vergès is to understand the true nature of the Barbie trial, and all one has to do to understand Vergès is look at his life. From the moment of his birth in 1925, in Thailand, Vergès had experienced racial hatred firsthand. His father, Raymond Vergès, a French doctor and a diplomat, had lost his job because he married a Vietnamese woman, something Frenchmen were simply not allowed to do in those days. The same racism that cost Raymond Vergès his career would play an important role in shaping the personalities of his biracial twin sons, Jacques and Paul. For the Vergès twins, growing up half-Asian on the island colony of Reunion in the Thirties would be tough and they would be victims of the racism that went along with imperialism for their entire lives. Everywhere around him, said Jacques Vergès of his youth, he saw racism, and where he saw racism he saw the evils of unfairness, and when he saw unfairness he became angry. When the young Jacques Vergès was treated as a second-class citizen, he became angry; when he saw native coolies being kicked by their white passengers, he became angrier; and when saw African men working fourteen hours a day on the docks for just a few scraps of food, he barely managed to contain his rage. One of the few political groups on Réunion that did not exclude non-whites was the island's budding communist party, and Jacques Vergès, hater of imperialism and its racist colonial system, joined along with his father and brother. When news reached Réunion in 1940 that some French were actively resisting the Germans and the collaborators, Jacques Vergès wanted to help them. In 1942, even though he was only seventeen, he joined the Resistance but because France was blockaded, he wound up with the Free French in Britain under the command of General Charles de Gaulle.

Towards the end of the war against Germany, Vergès would discover the truth about the inseparability of French nationalism and French imperialism. For the French, the smooth transition from a war of liberation to a war protect the colonies seemed natural, but for Vergès it was not. When the natives of the Algerian city of Constantine rose up against the French just one week after Hitler's suicide, the French reaction was swift and brutal. The Algerians counted 40,000 victims of the repression, but the French admitted to only 1,500.⁸³ As Vergès later recalled, he was horrified by the repression of the Constantine revolt:

I was still in the Resistance and I was terribly shocked. I didn't understand how they [the Resistance] could fight Hitler then turn around and do that. Two years later there was a similar repression in Madagascar. The Nuremburg trials were taking place at the time. I simply could not understand how nations could hold these trials so that the sort of thing the Germans did would never happen again. It was clear that the victorious colonial nations were doing exactly what the Germans had done in France.⁸⁴
Even from the outset of France's struggle to maintain its empire, Vergès was disillusioned. As the struggle became more intense, his disillusionment turned into same sort of anger he had experienced on Reunion as a child. He wanted to do something, but he did not want to end like his twin brother Paul, who, in 1945, was facing a lifetime in prison because he had assassinated the man whom his father was competing with for a minor political position.⁸⁵ So Jacques Vergès decided to get an education. When Vergès was in Paris studying law, he became an active opposer of colonialism, and he joined the Communist party. For Vergès, the Communists seemed like the only ones who were trying to create a world in which imperialism and racism had no place. Surely it was no coincidence that the Communists actively supported colonial revolutionaries all around the world in their fight against economic exploitation and racism.
Besides having a passionate hatred for colonialism and racism, Vergès also had talent. While at the Sorbonne, Vergès discovered that he had a special flair for public speaking and for getting others to see things his way. In 1949, he became president of the AEC (Association for Colonial Students), and quickly turned the group into a militant organization. One of the more active members of Vergès' student organization and one who influenced Vergès very much as over the years was the young Pol Pot, who was studying Radio-Physics at the Sorbonne. Pol Pot was so involved in the "revolutionary activities" of Vergès' group that he was forced to leave Paris when he failed his exams.⁸⁶ Although Pol Pot quickly moved to bigger and even more radical things than the AEC, he remained one of Vergès' lifelong friends. As was the case for his friend Pol Pot, the AEC was but the first step in a journey that would take Vergès around the world and across the political spectrum.

The Communist Party knew Vergès had talent too and in 1950, they sent him to Prague to lead a youth organization there.⁸⁷ For four years in Prague⁸⁸ , Vergès was immersed in Party doctrine and on one occasion even met Joseph Stalin. Although he was influenced by Party training to a degree, perhaps the most important aspect of Vergès' experience in Prague were the lifelong friendships he forged with other young Communists, many of whom were from Third World countries and many of whom would be active leaders and fighters over the decades to come. All Vergès needed now was something to struggle against and as France tried to tighten the grip on its empire, he found his calling.

Of all the post-war powers, it would be France that conducted the grandest struggle against those who were fighting to remove the shackles of colonialism. For the French, who were from recovering from the psychological wounds inflicted on them during the Occupation, reasserting France's stature in the world became a matter of utmost importance. The best way to recover from the spectacularly quick defeat by the Germans and from the shameful acts of the Vichy Regime, would be for the Fourth Republic to boost its esteem by reasserting France as a world power. In terms of world power, France, which was no longer an economic or military leader following World War Two, had only its crumbling empire. Unlike the British, the other big colonial power, the French considered their empire part of France and the colonized peoples potential Frenchmen. Thus, to lose part of that empire was to lose part of France on more the just an economic level. France may have lost World War Two twice, but it was not going to lose its empire.

Although the colonies were considered eternally bonded to France by many French, most of the colonized who were fed up with the oppression, exploitation, and racism of imperialism did not see things the same way. When the colonized began to revolt, the French reaction was swift and brutal. In 1945, when Muslims revolted in Algeria, tens of thousands were killed by French colonial authorities and the 1947 repression in Madagascar was even more violent. Ironically, the brutality of the colonial suppressions worked against their intended purpose of strengthening the empire and therefore France. Instead, the native populations became even more alienated from the French and massive reform would be required to save French imperialism. That reform was laid out in the Fourth Republic's constitution when the empire was renamed the French Union and the colonial peoples were given a small amount of autonomy as well as a few seats in parliament. The "reforms," however, changed none of the largest problems of imperialism, like racism or exploitation, and in the face of the lack of change, the colonized began to revolt.

The first war the French would fight to preserve their empire started in 1946 in Indochina (now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). From the outset it was apparent that the French were losing their grip on the region but it was not until 1954, when they were defeated by the Communist-nationalist Ho Chi Minh at their stronghold at Dien Bien Phu, that they official let go. What especially sickened Vergès about the Indochinese war was that much of the fighting and oppression was done not by the French themselves but by mercenaries from Senegal and the Congo. For Vergès, it was clear that the colonized had the moral upper-hand and that imperialism was only a destructive process that pitted whites against natives and natives against each other.⁸⁹ Like many others who had suffered under and therefore opposed imperialism, Vergès knew Indochina was only the beginning.

While the French were still coping with the loss of Indochina, another, much larger and much more important revolt was taking form. This time the colony was Algeria, right across the Mediterranean; and this time both colonizer and colonized really had something at stake. Algeria, which was more important to France than the rest of the empire combined, had been a French colony for two hundred years and more than a million Europeans, mostly French, called it home. Economically, Algeria was both profitable and vital for France as the colonial system there yielded France enormous agricultural benefits and the recent discovery of oil in Algeria's southern desert promised a very profitable future. If losing Indochina was regrettable, then losing Algeria was unthinkable.

What Algeria offered in terms of economic reward, it lacked in moral progress. The white regime in Algeria, which had openly sided with Vichy during the war, was a notoriously racist bastion of old French conservancy. To the dismay of most Frenchmen, the Algerian colonial government refused to yield any political or economic concessions to the overwhelming native majority. Faced with a refusal to give them even the most basic of rights, the natives had a choice, submit to imperialism or fight. When it came apparent that the white colonists, or pieds noirs (literally "black feet"), would never give them more than a few superficial rights, bombs began to go off.

When the Algerian Muslims revolted in 1954, the obvious response was to for France to protect the colonial regime in the name of preserving the empire and therefore France itself. Many of those who fought in Indochina and Algeria had also served in the Resistance and saw the colonial wars and the Resistance as part of a larger battle to protect France. Thus, for the men and women who fought for Algerie Française, the war to keep Algeria was no different than the war fought to liberate France from the Nazis, and by fighting to preserve the empire, they were fighting to preserve France. Although many French, especially the generation of the Resistance, supported the colonial wars at first, there was also an large segment of the population, mainly young people, who opposed using violence and economic oppression to maintain an empire. When résistant Vergès, however, saw France sending her armies off to yet another war of racism and oppression, he knew on which side of the line he fell. As Erna Paris put it, "Jacques Vergès was set on a collision course with his former [Resistance] comrades who now defended colonialism."⁹⁰

With years of pent-up anger towards colonialism and with his Communist training and ideals, Jacques Vergès the attorney was from the start a firebrand. Vergès did not take just any case, he took just the ones he wanted and those were the controversial ones. In France, in 19