Klaus Barbie
(May 1987)
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
- The Occupation: The Years France Forgot
- Criminal In Absentia (1945-1983)
- Preparing Barbie's Defense (1983-1987)
- The Courtroom (1987)
- Conclusion
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.
| Klaus
Barbie's ID card from when he was an officer in the Bolivian
secret police (Source: Children of Izieu). |
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 1954, where
political parties of all kinds flourished, where the men who ran Vichy
were running the Fourth Republic, and where the veterans of the Resistance
were calling for wars in the colonies, there was no shortage of controversy.
Vergès' first major case was to defend a group of communist militants
who had tried to disrupt the departure of a trainload of draftees headed
for Algeria. He fought passionately and won.91 But just as he seemed headed for a fruitful career as a politicized
attorney for the Communists, Vergès got a taste of the PCF politics,
and was sorely disappointed. Specifically, as Vergès identified
more and more with the Moslem rebels, who like himself were treated
as second-class citizens in their own country, the PCF pulled the rug
out from under him by conforming to the Fourth Republic's foreign policy
and therefore supported the colonial war with Algeria. For the Communists,
conforming to the Republic was just another turnabout in a long series
of political maneuvering, but for Vergès it amounted to betrayal.92 Thus ended Vergès' career as a French Communist.
By mid-1956, the various factions of the Algerian nationalists
who launched guerrilla attacks against the French presence in Algeria
were united by the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN). Even though
the French had tried to make concessions to appease those responsible
for the guerrilla attacks, the FLN was not appeased when it discovered
the superficial nature of those concessions. As the rebel attacks intensified,
French troops began to pour into Algeria and by 1958 over 500,000 French
troops had been deployed to protect French interests. What had started
as a an expedition to protect French interests soon became a war of
attrition, and both sides used tactics that can only be described as
barbaric. For the FLN revolutionaries, war often meant planting bombs
in crowded cafés and firing mortar shells into open-air markets.
The French, however, were no less brutal in their efforts to stop the
guerrilla attacks and many French military commanders used torture to
interrogate their prisoners and, more importantly, as a means of intimidation.
The use of torture was widespread and as personal diaries of many French
soldiers in Algeria recall, Vergès' remark that "the French
were Nazis in Algeria"93 was not too
far off the mark: "The captured terrorist...was to expect harsh
treatment from the French army if he did not give the 'requested information,'
in which case 'specialists must force the secret from him."94
As pitched battles were being fought on the streets
of Algiers, Vergès brought the war into the courtroom. During
the Algerian war, Vergès made his name by defending men and women
accused of terrorism against France.
His strategy was to "disrupt" and his goal was public attention,
not legal victory. The case that transformed Vergès into a nationally-known
figure was his defense of Djamila Bouhired, a twenty-year-old Algerian
woman accused of planting bombs in two cafés in Algiers that
were popular with European young people.95 Instead of trying to defend Bouhired, Vergès used the occasion
to publicly attack the French army, the government, and the judicial
system. During his defense speeches, in which he was trying to get his
audience to understand why Bouhired hated the French enough to blow
up their cafés, Vergès condemned the atrocities conducted
by the French army in Algeria and the inherent unfairness of the imperial
system that the government supported. As passionate as Vergès'
speeches were, they could not save his client and Bouhired was sentenced
to death. Soon after the trial, however, several journalists demanded
that Bouhired be released on the account of her youth. The rabble-rousing
worked, and by 1962 Bouhired was freed.
By defending Bouhired, Vergès became one of
the first of a growing number of people who devoted themselves increasing
public awareness about the Algerian War. When Vergès spoke, he
often shocked people, and when people are shocked, they tend to listen.
Soon whole publishers, most notably Les Editions de Minuit96,
devoted themselves to printing anti-war books and Vergès was
one of the most successful authors of this genre.
As the ranks of those who opposed the Algerian War
both grew in size and prestige, Vergès' reputation grew as well.
The increased attention made Vergès even more bold, but his disruptive
tactics earned him a two-month stint in prison for "attempting
to undermine the security of the state" and cost him his license
to practice law.97 In November 1960, Vergès,
fresh out of jail and chomping at the bit, made his second major public
appearance. This time Vergès, with or without an official license,
would defend members of the Jeanson network, a group of intellectuals
who openly and actively opposed French control of Algeria. Building
on the success of his previous strategy, Vergès and his clients
used the case to voice their views to the international press and, as
the attention mounted, Vergès knew exactly how to use it. In
the glare of the spotlights and with all eyes on him, Vergès
was at his best. Vergès was only at his best when he was angry
and, in 1960, just as the war in Algeria was reaching its peak, he was
furious. It was during Vergès' ferocious cross examinations that
Paul Teitgen, secretary general of the police in Algiers, publicly admitted
to the use of torture. And it was Vergès, who after his tirades
against the French military and government, got to produce a letter
from Jean-Paul Sartre denouncing the French presence in Algeria.98 With the letter from Sartre, France became polarized, much like the U.S. became polarized during the Vietnam
War, and in the glow of political chaos basked Jacques Vergès.
In France, the
Algerian crises wreaked havoc in the Fourth Republics's administration.
As the war intensified and the losses mounted, an increasingly vocal
minority within the National Assembly began to push for negotiations
between the French and the FLN. Negotiation, for the most part, was
unpopular because of Algeria's perceived importance to France,
and this unpopularity was spearheaded by the Right's harsh opposition
to any sort of compromise regarding France's
sovereignty over Algeria. When it became clear that those who favored
negotiation were gaining power, extremist Right-wing groups, most notably
ones with close ties to pied noirs, hatched a plot to overthrow the
Fourth Republic and replace it with a military regime. Like the general
public, the government contained groups that both violently opposed
and violently supported the French presence in Algeria. In May, 1958,
the Cabinet openly confronted the National Assembly, and in response,
Right-wing extremists took to the streets. With the Right-backed military
growing politically bolder by the day, a coup seemed imminent, and just
as France had turned to Joan
of Arc and Marshall Pétain in its times of need, it turned to
its newest great figure, Charles de Gaulle. With the approval of the
National Assembly, de Gaulle took full powers on June 1, 1958, and in
putting an end to the Fourth Republic, he put an end to the threat of
a military coup. With the end of the Fourth Republic also came the end
to the French empire because de Gaulle believed that stability could
only be achieved by ending the war in Algerian and order to end the
war, one had to negotiate.
When France gave independence to Algeria, de Gaulle faced yet another crisis, recovering
from the loss of Algeria. One the first effects of Algeria's loss was
the flood of pied noirs and pro-French Arabs into France,
and as a result of France's painful
withdrawal from Algeria, many groups felt betrayed. De Gaulle had a
simple solution: pardon everybody, both Algerians and French, for what
they did in Algeria, and move on. Just as the Fourth Republic forgot
the ambiguities of the Occupation to preserve itself, the Fifth Republic
quickly forgot the trauma of Algeria for the same reason. By pardoning
everyone, including the torturers, the controversy of what took place
in Algeria was ignored and because it was ignored, it could create no
instability. Although France could ignore what had happened in Algeria for the sake of French unity
just as it pardoned many of those responsible for the Vichy regime,
the democratic nature of French society ensured the France would eventually have to face the past.
While France was busy forgetting Algeria, Jacques Vergès was making it his
mission to make sure France never
forgot anything. He saw the French crimes in Algeria as comparable to
those the Nazis committed during the Holocaust, and when the Fifth Republic
dismissed those crimes just for the sake of political unity, Vergès
became furious. The national push to bury the memories of Algeria, however,
created an atmosphere where it was impossible for even Vergès
to attack. He would have to wait, and as he waited for the right moment
to strike, his rage built.
By 1962, the war in Algeria was over. The Fourth Republic
of Pierre Mendès had fallen and in its place arose the Fifth
Republic of General de Gaulle. When Algeria finally won its independence,
Vergès chose to move there and convert to Islam. In 1963, Vergès,
now a Muslim, married Djamila Bouhired, whom he made his name by defending.
For their honeymoon, the couple went to China to visit Chairman Mao
and Vergès returned an avid Maoist and officially dropped out
of the PCF.99 The reason for his break
with the PCF was simple, they did not support his battle against colonialism
whereas the Maoists did, and without that battle, Vergès would
have nothing.
Just as soon as his old enemy, colonialism, had fallen
in Algeria, Jacques Vergès had acquired a new enemy, Israel.
In the aftermath of the Algerian war, Vergès began to grow closer
to radicals in the Third-World who opposed the remnants of imperialism
in their region. These radicals represented all parts of the political
spectrum and came from dozens of ethnic groups, but one thing almost
all of them agreed on was that Israel was a growing bastion of imperialism
in a world where imperialism was supposed to be collapsing. In order
to stop imperialism, the Third-World radicals believed they had to stop
Israel because they feared its "the real ambition...was to annex
the entire Middle East."100 With
Israel around, imperialism would never die, and when many Third-World
leaders began to oppose Israel, Jacques Vergès, anti-colonialist
extraordinaire joined them. To consider Jacques Vergès an anti-semite
is probably a mistake, but it is absolutely true that he opposed Israel's
existence body and soul, and like others who opposed Israel, he often
blurred the line distinction between "Zionist" and "Jew."
Thus, it should have been no surprise that when PFLP terrorists were
being tried for hijacking El Al planes in 1969, Vergès appeared
as their attorney. Again, Vergès employed his strategy of disruption
by claiming the terrorists' acts were political, not criminal, and that
Israel was to be blamed for the El Al passengers' deaths, not the Palestinians.101 As in his previous cases, his defendants were found guilty, but in the
process of their trial, their cause was well publicized thanks to their
provocative attorney.
By 1970, Jacques Vergès was one of the most
formidable lawyers in the world. Vergès, however, was more than
just an outspoken lawyer, he was a man with a cause and there seemed
no shortage of battles for him to fight. No matter where he went, Vergès
was followed by a hoard of eager reporters waiting to hear his newest
accusation and, for the first time, when he spoke, even his enemies
listened. In short, he had it all. Then, the strangest thing happened.
Vergès, one of the world's most active and most prominent anti-colonialists,
just disappeared off the face of the earth. Naturally, there was much
speculation that one of Vergès' numerous enemies had finally
decided to do away with him. Perhaps some pieds noirs blamed him for
the loss of Algeria. Maybe the Mossad, Israel's secret service, had
decided he was too much a nuisance. Or perhaps one of myriad other groups
decided the world was better off without him. But in truth, nobody knew
what happened and for the next eight years, his fate remained a mystery.
Then, just as suddenly as he disappeared, Jacques Vergès
reappeared. In 1978 he was spotted buying groceries in Paris but when
reporters asked about his missing years, he remained uncharacteristically
silent. Even in 1983, all he had to say about his disappearance was,
"I am a discreet man. I stepped through the looking glass, where
I served an apprenticeship..."102 Whatever the reason for Vergès' absence, it did not change him
much and he returned the same disruptive anti-colonial, anti-Israel
lawyer that he had been eight years before.
Just as he did in the in fifties and sixties, Vergès
took up political cases and his specialty soon became defending terrorists
and just as in the fifties and sixties, most of Vergès' clients
were found guilty of the crimes of which they were accused. Over the
next five years, Vergès defended terrorists from both ends of
the political spectrum. He defended Neo-Nazi bombers and Armenian plane
hijackers alike.103 As long as the case
was political, and as long as his clients were fighting against either
the French establishment or Israel, Jacques Vergès was happy
to provide his services. As was reflected by a low win rate so low that
he earned the nickname "Monsieur Guillotine," Vergès'
priorities in the courtroom had little to do with protecting the freedom
of his clients. When he defended his radical clients, he used his well-known
"attack the prosecution" method of defense and even if he
did not win the case, he would bring attention to his client's and ultimately
his own cause. Another important aspect of Vergès' cases during
the early 80s was that they revealed and bond between groups on the
far left and on the far right. Although Neo-Nazis and Third-World leftists
should have hated each other with a passion, they had one goal in common,
the destruction of the status quo, and because of that goal they often
cooperated. It was through this merger of the extreme ends of the political
spectrum that Neo-Nazis gave weapons to African and Asian militants
while anarchists smuggled white-supremists in and out of various countries.
It was also through this merger that Vergès made connections
with the neo-fascists and ex-Nazis. Thus, there was nothing awkward
about the request for help Vergès received from the Swiss Nazi
François Genoud about a week after Klaus
Barbie's forced return to France in 1983. Genoud wanted Vergès' help defending Barbie and Vergès
instantly complied. Within an hour, Vergès was on a plane to
Geneva and after a brief meeting with Genoud, he flew to Lyons to meet
his client.
When Klaus
Barbie realized that the half-Asian man who came to visit him in
Montluc Prison was going to be his lawyer, he was shocked. Barbie simply
could not understand why anyone but another Nazi would want to defend
him. As Vergès later recalled, Barbie's first words to him came
in the form of a question: "Why is it that you are defending me
today?"104 Vergès, of course,
knew exactly why. For Vergès, the Barbie case presented the chance
to tie all the loose ends that had been accumulating over the years.
Unlike cases involving contemporary terrorists, Barbie's trial concerned
crimes the took place forty years earlier and, because of that, promised
to delve deep into national history. If the court could examine crimes
from the 1940s, then bringing up crimes from the 50s and 60s would not
be too difficult. It was the crimes of the 50s and 60s, specifically
those the French committed in Indochina and Algeria, the Vergès
wanted to address. Furthermore, there was an added bonus in the Barbie
trial; the defendant was being accused against crimes against humanity.
If France could accuse Barbie
of such an immense crime, then Vergès, using the same logic,
could apply equal weight to what happened in France's
struggle to maintain its empire. Thus, the immensity of the Barbie trial
finally provided Vergès with the means to do what he had long
dreamed of, to topple imperialism and all of its facets, especially
French society and Israel, in the courtroom.
The Courtroom (1987)
After more than four years of legal wrangling, the
trial of Klaus Barbie was
ready to take place. The date for Barbie's trial was originally set
for sometime in 1984 but because of enormous legal obstacles in the
path to trying him, the trial did not take place until May 11, 1987.
Over the four years between Barbie's return and that date, both tensions
and frustrations had been slowly mounting. The nervous euphoria that
surrounded Barbie's return in 1983 quickly turned to a more contemplative
anxiety. By 1987, that feeling had turned to pure dread. There was dread
of what Barbie's lawyer, Jacques Vergès, might do; if this was
truly to be the fight of Vergès' life, then the prosecution and
Barbie's victims, if not all of France,
were in for some rough times. There was dread of the pain evoked by
those who would testify against Barbie. There was dread that the trial
would bring back memories France was not ready for. And most of all there was dread that somehow, against
all odds, Klaus Barbie would walk away from the trial a free man. Should that happen, it would
not just be Barbie who was cleared of all charges, but whole Third Reich
as well. To set Barbie free would require only one thing: forgetting
the Holocaust. In a country that was to able to forget Vichy, Indochina,
and Algeria, it seemed a distinctly real possibility that France could push the Holocaust into the dark closet in which her other dark
memories lay hidden.
To those following the trial, it was crystal clear by 1987, that "the
historical show trial originally desired by both the Resistance and
the Jews would probably not take place."105 Over the previous four years, the seemingly simple process of bringing Klaus Barbie to justice
turned into a quagmire of legal problems. Ironically, those problems
were brought about on the most part by quarrels within the prosecution
rather than the usual antics of defense lawyers. There were two large
obstacles for the prosecution to clear before it could formally try
to convict Barbie. First was choosing the crimes for which Barbie should
be tried and the second, stemming from the first, was figuring out if
French law would permit Barbie to be tried for those crimes.
The problem of choosing the crimes for which Barbie
was to be tried was so severe that it came close to preventing the trial
from ever taking place. When Judge Christian Riss, the young magistrate
whose job it was to prepare the government's case against against Barbie,
asked if anyone would be willing to press personal charges against Barbie,
he got plenty of responses. Too many responses, in fact. A total of
forty-two different lawyers, each representing a different group with
a different charge against Barbie, appeared before the judges in Lyon
to file their claims. There were lawyers representing various factions
of the Resistance, there were lawyers representing Jews, and there were
lawyers representing the citizens of Lyon. Each group believed it had
the right to see Barbie tried for his crimes against them, and each
group would be sorely disappointed if Barbie were not to answer to the
pain they had to live with for forty years. To address each and every
complaint against Barbie, however, would require a resource neither
the prosecution nor France had,
time.
When Judge Riss began selecting the crimes for which
he sought to prosecute Klaus
Barbie, his goal was to win as quickly and as solidly as possible.
For the dozens of groups and individuals who wanted Barbie brought to
justice for his crimes against them, there would be disappointments.
What started as disappointment soon turned to anger and, before long,
the prosecution had split into two camps. There were those who wanted
Barbie tried for the murders, torture, and coercion he used against
the Resistance, and there were those who wanted Barbie punished for
his role in the Final Solution.
On one hand, many former members of the Resistance, especially those
who had experienced Barbie's tortures firsthand, did not view his deportations
of Jews as his real crimes. The deportations, they argued, were conducted
by Barbie as part of his administrative work, and not something of own
his initiative. On the other hand, the Jews argued that Barbie's acts
against the Resistance were merely part of his duty as a police officer
and that his real crimes were sending whole families to die in the gas
chambers. As Elie Wiesel put it, there lay in the trial the potential
for a crime even worse than the Holocaust, forgetting the Holocaust.106 Thus, before Barbie had even entered the courtroom, he had already managed
to turn his two most dangerous enemies, the Resistance and the Jews,
against each other.
For a while it seemed as if the prosecution would be
torn apart by the two groups, but fortunately cooler heads on both sides
prevailed. They pointed out that many Jews were active résistants
and that many résistants were packed in the same trains that
carried the Jews to near-certain death. The two sides declared a truce,
albeit uneasy, since many still quietly blamed the other side for preventing
Barbie from being brought to "full" justice. For the time
being, though, the desire to see Barbie punished for something substantial
was enough to keep the various factions of the prosecution united. Moreover,
there was the fear that Klaus
Barbie, this man who had so many victims that they fought each other
to decide who got to punish him, would escape all justice by dying of
old age before his victims could decide on his punishment.
While Barbie's victims were bickering over how to try
and punish Barbie, the prosecution was facing an even more formidable
challenge, navigating the minefield of the French penal code. When he
arrived in France, Barbie faced
eight charges:
The massacre of 22 hostages in the basement of the Gestapo building during
the summer of 1943.
The arrest and torture of 19 people during the summer of 1943.
The roundup of 86 people from the U.G.I.F. offices on February 9, 1943.
The shooting of 42 people (40 of whom were Jewish) as reprisal killings
during the years of 1943 and 1944.
The roundup, torture, and deportation of SNCF railway workers on August
9, 1944.
The deportation to Auschwitz of 650 people (50% Jews, 50% résistants
) on the last train to leave Lyon.
The shooting of 70 Montluc prisoners at Bron on August 17, 1944 and
on August 20, 1944. Two of those executed were priests.
The arrest and deportation of 55 Jews (52 of whom were children) from
the children's refuge at Izieu.
Notably absent from the list of charges was the murder of Jean Moulin
and the reason for its absence ties in with the trial's true nature
as a trial of all aspects of the past.
After passing the charges through the rigors of the French legal system
all but three were dropped. All charges against Barbie that could be
considered "war crimes" had to be dropped under the Statute
of Limitations because Barbie had been gone for more than twenty years.
Another dimension of the Statute of Limitations is that it is a convenient
tool by which to amnesty people. The Fourth Republic's bureaucrats used
it to forget Vichy. The Resistance used it to forget Algeria. And Barbie
would use it to forget Lyon. Thus, the very law the French had passed
in order to amnesty their own war criminals had backfired. The result
was paradoxical: not only had Klaus
Barbie escaped two death sentences, he would not be punishable for
the crimes for which he had been sentenced to death because of those
same death sentences. The Statute of Limitations did not, however, include
"crimes against humanity," and it would be for those crimes
that Barbie was tried.
Nuremburg distinguished between "war crimes"
and "crimes against humanity." Crimes designated as "crimes
against humanity" were, because of the grave nature of their intent,
deemed incircumventable. Consequentially, in the fifty years since the
Nuremburg trials, Nazi criminals like Barbie have consistently been
brought to trial once they were flushed out of their hiding places.
Most, but certainly not all, of those accused of crimes against humanity
were given extremely heavy sentences. Therefore, if the prosecution
could prove that Barbie had the intent of following an "ideological
hegemony"107 when he killed, tortured,
and deported, then he could be found guilty of "crimes against
humanity." Ironically, Barbie's defense team was centering its
case around the same sort of crime, but in the defense's view, the perpetrator
was not Barbie.
At one o'clock in the afternoon on May 11, 1987, the
trial of Klaus Barbie finally
began. André Cerdini, the leader of the court's three judges,
or "President of the Court," as the French called him, sat
down and asked for the accused to be brought forward. Below Cerdini
were seated the lawyers for both the prosecution and the defense. Of
the forty-five lawyers present in the court, five represented Klaus
Barbie. The defense team, led by Jacques Vergès, consisted
of lawyers from Third-World countries "In this trial made in the
name of humanity," explained Vergès, "it was important
that the defense was made of the colors of the human rainbow: black,
white, brown, and yellow."108 Barbie
probably approved of having a multi-racial defense team because he thought
their presence would discredit his reputation as a diehard racist. His
Asian, African, and Arab lawyers, however, had completely different
reasons for being present at the trial.
The other forty lawyers represented the various parties
of the prosecution. Some represented the French government, others the
city of Lyon, but the largest group, including Serge Klarsfeld, represented
the victims. In the benches normally reserved for the public sat the
one hundred witnesses who would be called to give testimony over the
next few weeks. The best seats in the house were occupied by the most
important group, the fourteen jurors109 who would be called upon to judge Klaus
Barbie, the Third Reich, and ultimately France.
As one reporter pointed out, the jurors were much younger than most
of the other people in the courtroom: "The jurors are fairly young
men and women, the oldest being fifty-one years old, all the others
being born after 1940."110 The age
gap between the jurors and the accused was regarded by the press as
one of the most significant aspects of Barbie's trial. The jurors were
hand-picked and approved by both the defense and the prosecution. Vergès
hoped that the young jurors, who not adults during the Occupation, would
have a more objective view of Barbie's crimes and, more importantly,
of what France did in the forty
years that Barbie was absent. The prosecution approved of the young
jurors for the same reason. Their logic was that Barbie's punishment
would have even more weight if he were tried by those who never suffered
at his hands. Appropriately chosen or not, Barbie's young jurors were
irremovable once in place.
Next to the jury box was the witness stand and the
first person to be called forth for testimony was Klaus
Barbie. For weeks, the French general public had been prepared by
the press for this very event. During those weeks, the daily papers
had published haunting recollections of Barbie's crimes and passionate
essays on the necessity of condemning Barbie. Along with almost every
article about Klaus Barbie appeared another name, that of Jacques Vergès, who made no effort
to hide what he planned for the upcoming trial. The French would put
Barbie on trial and Vergès would put France on trial. For every crime attributed to Klaus
Barbie, Vergès found a corresponding crime attributed to
the French. "French society is sick," exhorted Vergès
in an interview in the popular weekly, L'Evènement, "it
does not want to recognize the lies on which it constructed its existence."111 From his tirades in the press it became evident that if Barbie were
to be convicted, France would
have to judge itself in the process. With Vergès, the very epitome
of the history France so badly
wanted to forget, as Barbie's lawyer, there was no way around it. The
trial thus took on yet another dimension, not only was it going to be
about Klaus Barbie, the
Third Reich, and France, it would
be about memory and memory's legacy, history. In the same issue in which
it interviewed Vergès, L'Evènement issued a warning about
the role history would play in Barbie's trial: History is not and will
not ever be objective. It is and will always be a contestable reconstruction
and it exists without ceasing to be modified to the demands of the circumstances..."112
The trial would be about the intertwining questions
of morality and history. Were the French any different than Nazis? Were
the Jews any different than Nazis? Was anyone any different than the
Nazis? Down to his very core, Jacques Vergès believed the answer
was "no." Supporting him were "Revisionist" historians
who argued that the Holocaust was merely one in a long string of human
catastrophes brought about by the nature of humanity and the nature
of war.113 Thus, to get their client off
the hook the defense sought to prove that his crimes were no different
than the crimes of those who judged him. By that logic, all Vergès
had to do was compare the crimes of Barbie, "a small criminal against
humanity," with the crimes of French imperialism.114 If Vergès could convince the French that they had no right to
judge a little old man just doing his job because of the corrupt nature
of their society, then Klaus
Barbie would walk free. If Vergès failed to convince the
French that the crimes of their society were essentially no different
than those of Klaus Barbie,
he could provide concrete evidence for his long-held claim that French
society was fundamentally corrupt.
There were many ways Vergès could have defended Klaus Barbie. Vergès
could have tried to diminish Barbie's importance by comparing his crimes
with those of higher-ranked Gestapo and S.S. officials. Barbie was only a Lieutenant, and he had certainly
not thought of the Final Solution all by himself. Just as easily, Vergès could have demonstrated
that Barbie was a man who obeyed orders without questioning them. Vergès
could have also showed how much Barbie had changed over the past forty
years, because very little evidence existed of Barbie's activities during
the 50s and 60s. Vergès could have done all those things, but
he did not and, in failing to do so, he revealed the true nature of
his presence at the trial. The truth is that Vergès could not
have cared less about the fate of his client. Thus, when Klaus
Barbie was called sit in the box of the accused, Vergès did
not defend, he attacked. Vergès did not attack to defend, he
attacked to harm French society because he wanted to the French to answer
to their past and because he wanted make people stop thinking of the
Holocaust whenever they heard the word Israel.
Opposing Vergès were the victims of Barbie's
actions against the Resistance and of the role he played within the
greater framework of the Final
Solution. Like the defense, the prosecution saw that Barbie's trial
was about history and not just a lone henchman. When Barbie's victims
heard what Vergès had in mind for the trial, many were outraged
and scared, because just as Vergès believed he had a broader
historical perspective on the trial, so did they. Vergès was
an elegant speaker and many of the victims feared that he would use
the occasion to make a mockery out of the French judicial system and
more importantly out of Resistance and the Holocaust. An editorial in
Le Nouvel Observateur entitled "Why do you menace us so, Vergès?"
captured the anxiety of the victims quite well: "For the last few
weeks, Jacques Vergès, whose dramatic genius must be saluted,
and who takes from that one of the lead roles, has succeeded in putting France in a state of hypnosis."115 A state of hypnosis, it must be kept in mind, is the product of illusion
and many of the victims took solace in that. What kept victims' hope
from collapsing was their belief that they had on their side the undeniable
truth. It is true that Klaus
Barbie shattered lives and it is true that the Holocaust happened,
but it is also true that when faced with the truth, justice does not
always prevail. Their hope was that nothing, not even a vengeful Jacques
Vergès, could prevent the world from hearing their testimony
and, in the process, recognize their pain. They figured not even Vergès'
most ferocious attack could withstand their sincerity: "So, compare,
denounce, dear monsieur Vergès," challenged Le Nouvel Observateur,
"it will not discomfort us, well to the contrary, because you will
surely find...enough men and women will want to return to the essential;
to explain."116
The entire first day of the trial of Klaus
Barbie, France, and history
itself, was devoted to just one thing, reading off the list of crimes Klaus Barbie's crimes.
Ordinarily, specifying the crime takes only a few minutes, but the Klaus
Barbie was no ordinary criminal. For hours on end, the prosecution
recited the list of all the crimes Barbie had been accused of before
specifying for which ones they were seeking charges. In Plantu's political
cartoon on the "Une" of the next day's Le Monde, the list
of Barbie's crimes is so ludicrously long it extends beyond of the cartoon's
frame, falls down the rest of the page and spills over onto the next
page. Of Barbie's hundreds of crimes, including murders, torture, rape,
deportation, and more, only those of the gravest nature, the crimes
against humanity, would be pursued.
After the recitation of the list of crimes was finished,
midway through the second day of the trial, Vergès got to his
feet and demanded that his client be set free immediately. He claimed
Barbie had been kidnapped illegally by France and was being tried twice for the same crimes, something not legal in
the French judicial system, which he proceeded to claim was corrupt.
Truche, the head prosecution attorney, fired back, "...Barbie will
not be condemned for the same deeds twice...in '54, the word 'deportation'
hadn't been pronounced."117
Vergès was ready with a disruptive response,
"'Deportation?' The word is employed today with audacity. The people
who left, left for Drancy, the trains left Lyon...for Paris."118 Technically, Vergès was correct, being sent from Lyon to Paris
was not deportation in the strictest sense of the word, but everyone
knew the eventual fate of the passengers aboard those trains. Vergès'
transparent claim had been crafted to shock his audience, and it worked.
In a mere thirty seconds, Vergès had established the tone for
the entire trial.
Vergès would question everything, and when he
could, he would accuse. As waves of distressed murmurs swept through
the audience, Klaus Barbie's
confidence began to build. Probably he perceived that his lawyer was
trying to establish that his crimes were merely part of a soldier's
duty and therefore not testable under the aegis of Nuremburg's "crimes
against humanity." Barbie's confidence had built so much in the
tense atmosphere Vergès had created that he chose to speak for
the first time. Like his counterparts who were tried at Nuremburg thirty-seven
years before, Barbie claimed that he was only taking orders. He was
only a cog in the machine and why should he be punished if he was only
doing his job. But before he could say anything more that could possibly
incriminate him, Barbie was silenced by his own lawyer.119 Normally, a lawyer is supposed to let his client do as he pleases, but
Vergès was no average lawyer, and he did not want Barbie spoiling
his case. Barbie's little speech on how he was only executing orders
had enormous potential to ruin Vergès' whole strategy of disruption.
If Barbie incriminated himself, as he was doing whenever he spoke, then
the trial would not drag on as Vergès hoped it would. Barbie
was stealing his lawyer's spotlight and after all, the trial belonged
to Vergès, not Barbie.
The next day, Vergès had solved the problem
of the outbursts from his client. Following the interrogations on Barbie's
background, in which Barbie again revealed that he was still "an
honest Nazi" and emphasized that he just "doing his job"
during the Occupation, Vergès handed Barbie a statement to read.120 The written statement was a surprise, even to Barbie, given that he
read it silently before reading it aloud in German. As the translation
came through, it appeared that Vergès' savvy had seized the day
once again:
Mister prosecutor, I would like to say that I am a Bolivian citizen
and that if I am present here it his because I have been deported illegally...And
I ask of you, your honor, the president to take me back to the Saint
Joseph's Prison. I place it fully in the hands of my lawyer to defend
my honor in front of justice, despite the climate of vengeance [and]
the lynching campaign set forth by the French media."121
In accordance with French law, Barbie possessed the right not to be
present at his own trial, so when he asked to be excused from courtroom
for the remainder of the trial, the judge was forced to oblige. That
day, Barbie was returned to his cell in Saint Joseph's Prison, but,
with or without him, his trial went on. Following Barbie's departure,
when the defense spoke, it was only through the voice of Jacques Vergès.
Thus, in one fell swoop, Vergès was back in full control. He
had silenced his client and he had gotten permission to run the show
the way he wanted. All he had to do now was wait for the perfect moment
in which to release the rage that had been building within for the past
four decades. In a trial centered around repressed memories, that moment
was inevitable.
While Vergès was waiting for the ideal time to strike, the prosecution
began interviewing its witnesses. Over the next three weeks, the prosecution
called forth and extensively interviewed fifty-eight different witnesses.
The prosecution limited the number of witnesses, of which there were
probably several hundred, because they wanted to avoid conflicting stories
between witnesses. If one witness' account conflicted with any other's,
then the whole trial could be thrown out. Besides being limited in numbers,
the prosecution witnesses were usually victims of Barbie's lesser atrocities.
The thousands who bore the full brunt of Barbie's crimes were dead and
as one paper put it, each witness represented about fifty victims.122 Many witnesses were also selected because they had confronted Barbie
personally at one time or another and could point their fingers at him
in the courtroom.
Although they were spared death, did not mean many
of the witnesses did not suffer. One witness, thirteen years old when
she was interrogated by Barbie, recalled the trauma of the water torture
Barbie frequently employed: " 'You'll talk,' said Barbie. In the
bath, when he pulled up my head, I was thinking, 'what would happen
if I didn't speak?'...It was said that you must swallow right away in
order to drown yourself. I couldn't. I never recovered from the torture."123 Another women who was interrogated by Barbie at least nineteen times
refused to give the court the full details of her torture session: "It
was there [at Gestapo headquarters] that I had my back cut open with a stick that had on its
end a ball with spikes. I excuse myself from recollecting the rest."124
According to those present at the trial, the court
was visibly shaken by many of the testimonies. Often the air was filled
with a heavy silence as yet another witness, whose aging was accelerated
by the trauma of his or her encounter with Barbie, had to stop in order
to regain enough composure to continue speaking. "Her eyewitness
account made the courtroom cry,"125 recalled one journalist after the testimony of a women who was forced
to watch Barbie's men beat her father to death before she would face
an even greater nightmare in the death camps.
As witness after witness recollected the horror of
their encounters with Barbie, the evidence mounted against the accused.
Moreover, the prosecution was still weeks away from resting its case.
During the third week of the trial, the prosecution began its attack
on Barbie in earnest. But before they brought forth their most powerful
witnesses and most powerful accusations, the prosecution attempted to
defuse Jacques Vergès by interviewing a witness who was hand-picked
to give Vergès a taste of his own medicine by questioning his
morals. The witness was André Frossard, a Catholic résistant
who was arrested by Barbie in 1943 and who we last saw hanging over
a bathtub during a "reinforced interrogation" session. When
Frossard was sent to Montluc, he wound up in the "Jewish Barracks"
and during his incarceration he discovered the the difference between
"war crime" and "crime against humanity." Besides
being an intelligent writer and a eloquent speaker, Frossard had crossed
paths with Jacques Vergès before. This is where the plot thickens,
for it turns out that that Vergès owed Frossard an enormous debt.
Specifically, Vergès owed Frossard the life of his wife, Djamila
Bouhired. When Bouhired was condemned to death in 1956 for planting
two café bombs, her execution seemed imminent. Her attorney had
been a young Jacques Vergès and, although Vergès proved
more than able to disrupt the court, he could not prevent his client
from being sentenced to death. Then, a few days after her condemnation
an article entitled "No, no, no!" appeared in L'Aurore, the
same paper in which Zola wrote "J'accuse."126 The author of the article was André Frossard, and he pleaded
against the death penalty for the young woman and tried to fill in the
gaps that her lawyer had missed while he was busy "attacking the
prosecution." The article was well-received and because of the
public uproar caused by it, Bouhired was spared execution and eventually
released. If anyone in the courtroom had any sort of moral control over
the loose cannon Vergès, it was Frossard, and perhaps, hoped
the prosecution, Frossard could talk some sense into him.
As a witness at the Barbie trial, Frossard's mission
was to force Jacques Vergès to spell out exactly how he viewed
history and how that history related to Barbie's trial. Specifically
Frossard asked Vergès to distinguish between "crime of war"
and "crime against humanity." Vergès said there was
no difference between the two but Frossard countered by relating his
own experience as an inmate in Montluc Prison.127 Jews, claimed Frossard, were special victims of the Occupation, but
Vergès would not budge, and when the interview was over, neither
man had changed. After his confrontation with Frossard, Vergès
was still unfazed. If anything, the prosecution's plan of throwing Vergès
off balance by forcing him to confront Frossard had backfired. During
his encounter with Frossard, Vergès got the opportunity to refine
his argument that Klaus Barbie's
crimes were no different than those of France or Israel. From then on, Vergès would weave his way through even
the most imposing evidence against his client. Consequentially, when
the prosecution began to present their trump card, the "liquidation"
of the children's home at Izieu, Vergès with was ready to put
up a real fight.
One by one, every living witness of the events that
took place in Izieu on April 22, 1944, was interviewed by the prosecution.
Even before the first witness reached the stand, everyone in the court
and probably most of France knew
exactly what they were going to hear. Ever since the 1985 publication
of "The Children of Izieu," a narrative written by the Klarsfelds
about how the children hiding in Izieu were so brutally torn away from
their young lives, the forty-four "martyred children" had
acquired an international following. The smoking gun linking the Izieu
tragedy with Klaus Barbie was a single scrap of paper, found by Serge Klarsfeld, which read:
"Forty four children, ages three to thirteen years
have been captured in Izieu. In addition, the entire Jewish personnel
there were arrested...The transport to Drancy will take place the 7th
of April on my orders." 128
The note, printed on the the bureaucratic form paper that the Gestapo used was dated April 6, 1944, and was addressed to Roem, the Gestapo head in Paris. Near the bottom of the page the note was signed "Barbie, SS-Ostuf."129 Before the note could even be presented in court, however, Vergès
had already claimed it was a fake. It was, according to Vergès,
yet another part of the Zionist plot to justify Israel's existence and
its oppression of the Palestinians by morally blackmailing the world
with the sufferings of the Jewish people during the Holocaust. The note,
claimed Vergès, was therefore a fabrication by the "Zionist..and
hitman,"130 Serge Klarsfeld. For
its part, the prosecution did not stand by quietly as Vergès
tore apart one of their primary pieces of evidence. Experts were called
in. From Germany came historians
and ex-Nazi bureaucrats who claimed the coding on the note matched that
of similar Gestapo deportation
orders. From France and the U.S.
came handwriting analysts who proved that the signature at the bottom
of the page belonged to Klaus
Barbie because it matched his signatures on dozens of other forms.
After almost a full day of testimony from the expert witnesses, the
obvious had been established as true beyond the shadow of a doubt. Vergès,
however, was far from giving up.
Keeping with his true purpose for defending Klaus
Barbie -- to inject into the mainstream of public thought his views
on French society, Israel, and the Third World -- Vergès launched
a ferocious attack on the seemingly unquestionable popular account of
what had happened at Izieu on April 22, 1944. According to Vergès,
it was not the Nazis who were responsible for the deaths of the forty-four
children, it was the Jews. Instead of blaming the deaths of the children
on the Third Reich's racial policies or on Klaus
Barbie's own cruelty, Vergès had placed the entire blame
on the victims. The courtroom was shocked but Vergès did not
stop there. It was the U.G.I.F., the agency that placed the children
in the home in Izieu in the first place that should take the blame,
not Klaus Barbie, said
Vergès.131 It was the U.G.I.F.
that doomed the children by putting them in an unsafe region. It was
the U.G.I.F. that kept track of all of those they hid by keeping easy-to-read
files. It was the U.G.I.F. that openly collaborated with both Vichy
and the Nazis to protect itself. And who ran the U.G.I.F.? The Jews.
Following this logic, what Klaus
Barbie had committed was not an act against humanity, but merely
a political act, just as Vergès claimed terrorists who blow up
airplanes do so only for political reasons. In a political act, there
is neither aggressor or victim, but just two (or more) struggling points
of view. Following this logic further, if one views the raid at Izieu
as a political act, then one can view the whole Holocaust as a political
act against Zionism and nothing more. If one can view the Holocaust
as a mere political act, then Israel, the land given to the victims
of the Holocaust, had absolutely no moral basis. With no moral basis,
Israel would become nothing more than a tool of imperialism and of the
oppression of Third World peoples. That, argued Vergès, was the
true nature of Israel.132
There was, however, a major flaw in Vergès'
argument that the Holocaust was essentially a political act; he failed
to take into account both how and why the Nazis conducted their war
against the Jews. Had he done so, anyone could have seen how the Final
Solution transcended mere politics. Nazism was more than just politics,
it was an ideology. Unlike politics, Nazism gave its followers a whole
new set of morals, one in which killing "subhumans" was not
only necessary but praiseworthy. Like religion, ideology relies on faith,
thus even when its morals seem illogical, men like Barbie could circumvent
ethical dilemmas through their faith in the Nazi ideology. Thus, it
was the combination of the ideology and the Third Reich's administrative
machine that caused the Holocaust to happen, not political drive. Eventually
it was soul-wrenching accounts of the victims that deprived Vergès'
argument of its validity. Witness after witness proved that the Holocaust
was encompassed far more than just political beliefs and taking orders.
It was about unprovoked brutality, cold-hearted inhumanity, and endless
suffering. It was pain at its highest form and humanity at its lowest.
As Sabin Slatin, the sole surviving adult of the raid in Izieu, put
it, "Barbie said that he made war on the résistants and
maquisards but the forty-four children of Izieu were neither résistants
nor maquisards. They were innocents. Neither pardon nor forget."133 By the middle of the trial, the public knew that the Holocaust was more
than a mere political crime and despite of Vergès' claims to
the contrary, the papers portrayed him as a desperate buffoon rather
than a voice of reason. Vergès, however, was only beginning to
bring forth the full implications of what happened at Izieu.
Also to blame for the murder of the Izieu children
were the French. Although the villagers in Izieu claimed they wholeheartedly
supported the children, a great deal of evidence pointed to French collaboration
as the source of information for the Gestapo men who actually performed the deed of arresting the children. As was
evident in the popularity of groups like Action Française and
the bond between anti-semitism and the conservative nationalism of the
Vichy regime, there were plenty of French who did not view the deportations
as entirely negative. Vergès did not hesitate to point this out
and from there he began to mount another attack on the seemingly unquestionable.
This time, the French bore the responsibility of the children's deaths,
and if Vergès could prove to the French that they were responsible
for the suffering of the children at Izieu, then he could proceed to
bigger things like Indochina and Algeria. By forcing the French to take
at least part of the blame for what happened at Izieu, Vergès
would be prying open the door to the closet in which hid Vichy and the
rest of France's forgotten history.
With national attention focused on the hearings about
Izieu, Vergès had the chance to force the French to face not
only the ambiguities of the Occupation but the ambiguities of their
entire modern history. Thus, when the prosecution called forth its witnesses
to recall what happened at Izieu and in the death camps, Vergès
protested at every step of the already painful tale. Vergès did
not just protest though, he put on a show. He accused, he shocked, he
threatened, and he warned. And it worked. Although Vergès did
not get the revolts in the streets that he wanted, there was a great
deal of public response to his accusations about the role the French
played in the Holocaust. In the week following the calling of the witnesses
of the Izieu tragedy, gallons of ink were spilt trying to reconciled France's actual history with
the myths of the past. For Philippe Brunet-Lecomte, a writer for the
Lyon Figaro, a sole conclusion loomed: "The French have fear of
looking the truth in the eye. That is to say collaboration, the denunciations...
and all of those who permitted the Gestapo to do their 'work' so well."134
The testimony of André Frossard and the evocation
of Izieu had created quite an uproar, but the climax of the Barbie trial
was still to come. It was not until June 2nd, during the fourth week
of the trial, that the prosecution called forth its star witness, Elie
Wiesel. Although Wiesel had not personally been a victim of Klaus
Barbie, he had experienced Auschwitz firsthand and had lost most
of family during the Holocaust. Since the war, Wiesel had become an
internationally-renowned writer and a leading authority on the Holocaust.
In 1982, less than a year before his appearance at Klaus
Barbie's trial, Wiesel had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for
his role in enlightening the world about the Holocaust. Thus, wherever
Elie Wiesel went, there was attention, and Jacques Vergès was
certainly not going to miss this golden opportunity to make the most
of that attention.
When Wiesel was called to the witness stand, Vergès
was ready to pounce. After Wiesel answered several questions from the
prosecution about the nature of the Holocaust and about the significance
of trying Klaus Barbie,
it was the defense's turn to question the witness. Vergès got
straight to the point and asked Wiesel if he had done anything for the
thousands of Algerian children who died in French internment camps before
and during the Algerian War.135 Wiesel
responded that he was in America at the time and had not heard about
it, but had he been in Paris at the time, he would have acted. Vergès
seized the opportunity and began his attack: "I conclude from it
that the deaths of these children were silent, their cries did not cross
the Atlantic let alone the Mediterranean...You are an American citizen,
what do you think of the fate of the children of Mai Lai, of whom the
murderer is today still free?"136 Vergès had at once attacked Wiesel, France,
and imperialism, but Wiesel saw what Vergès was trying to do
and fighting for the moral upper ground he responded, "When I see
an injustice, I protest, and have done it." To quote Lyon Liberation
, Vergès "applied the accelerator" and snapped back:
"Have you heard talk of the massacre of children at Deir Yassin?
[Palestinian village razed by the Israelis during their war of independence
in 1947]"137
At this point, Cerdini, sensing the increased tensions
not only on the courtroom floor but all around the chamber, tried to
intervene, but he was about forty years too late. Both Wiesel and Vergès
had things to say and nothing was going to stop them from having it
out if they wanted to. When calm was restored to the room, Wiesel in
a calm voice replied to Vergès' accusation: "Yes, I stand
with Israel. I'm proud of it. It's the only country in the world that
was ready to recognize a Palestinian Arab. The Arabs did not want to.
They wanted to make a war with Israel...That does not justify the brutalities.
I am against such things, wherever they occur." Vergès,
unlike Wiesel, was letting his fury build and continued to press his
attack: "One cannot be unconditionally for Israel. I asked a question
about Deir Yassin and nobody answered it!"138 Wiesel had no immediate reply.
By cracking Elie Wiesel, Vergès could unravel
the entire prosecution, and given Wiesel's loss of composure after that
last question it looked as if he had succeeded. After a long pause,
Wiesel, this time his voice trembling, had an attack of his own: "I
find it especially regrettable that the lawyer of the defense dare accuse
the Jewish people of the very crimes committed against them. Is that
all he has to say today in 1987?"139 Cerdini, seeing that the argument was going to spin out of control,
and wanting to avoid national embarrassment over what might happen next,
shouted, "We are getting distracted from our trial...!" But
in mid-sentence the much louder voice belonging to Jacques Vergès
took over, "...[our trial] that all peoples are considered the
same!"140
What followed was described by the papers as a "heavy
silence."141 The silence that followed
Vergès' last outburst was not the empty stillness of shock but
the pensive silence of reflection and understanding. From that moment
on, the court understood. They understood what Vergès was trying
to do, even if they did not agree with him. They understood the difference
between a crime of war and a crime against humanity. And they understood
how little the trial had to do with Klaus
Barbie. For every new understanding gained from the encounter between
Vergès' and Wiesel, there were also new questions. Did the French
legal system have right to try a man like Klaus
Barbie, let alone convict him? Could the charge of "crime against
humanity" be levied against France for what it had done, both to foreigners and her own citizens, over
the past fifty years? Was imperialism a crime against humanity? Was
the Holocaust unique or just another "consequence" of war
and human nature? Was history a victim too?
When the silence lifted several minutes later with
the calling of a new witness, the trial continued with these new understandings
and new questions. As the trial stretched on, a seemingly endless stream
of witnesses continued to relate their experiences in France during the Occupation. As he did before, Vergès continued to
attack the Collaboration and evoke images of French atrocities in Algeria
and the other horrors of colonialism, but something had changed. As
was reflected in the French newspapers that were printed over the next
few weeks, the public had grasped what Vergès was trying to do
and in that understanding shifted their focus to what they thought was
the real issue, the fate of Klaus
Barbie and his victims. Vergès had therefore lost in his
quest to make France acknowledge
the full weight of its crimes by putting them on the same level as the
Holocaust, but before the trial ended he would make one last attempt
to gain recognition for those who died at the hands of imperialistic
oppression.
On the final day of the trial, when Vergès
walked onto the courtroom floor to plea for his defendant, he was not
alone. By his side were Nabil Bouaita, an Algerian attorney, and Jean-Martin
M'Bemba, a Congolese attorney. Bouaita, an old friend of Vergès
from his Algerian days, claimed he was present at the trial for only
one reason, to "plea for the Arab people." Likewise, M'Bemba,
an active "Third-Worldist" was present to "plea for the
African people."142 What was supposed
to be a plea for Barbie's freedom had little or nothing to with the
defendant at all. Instead, it was the moment Vergès had been
waiting for all his life, the chance to "attack the prosecution"
while the world listened. If anything, France was the true defendant and, with this in mind, Vergès began his
"plea:"
In the name of the defense, I humble myself before
the struggle of the Resistance, and nobody can contest that right because
the Algerian, African, Malagasy peoples were engaged in the fighting.
I humble myself before the suffering of the Jews and the martyrdom of
the children of Izieu because of racism... and because of that same
racism we take with us the grief of the Algerian children killed by
the thousands in French 'regroupment camps.' Does crime against humanity
only force emotion or merit commemoration if it hurt Europeans?...Would
there be in death a hierarchy that made the distinction between the
dead dignified by memory and those dignified by being forgotten?143
No sooner than Vergès had finished than his Congolese comrade,
B'Memba, began his own "plea." B'Memba, in the name of all
of those who suffered at the hands of colonialism, began to recall the
"crimes against humanity" that took place in French colonial
Africa. For the construction of a mere 140 kilometers of railway, said
B'Memba, at least 8000 natives died at the hands of their white bosses.
Why did the natives die? "Because they were black."144 B'Memba finished by accusing France of "lagging" behind other nations in terms of addressing humans
rights and racism and in the same tone asked: "Do you [the French]
have a tranquil enough conscience to judge Barbie?"145
After B'Memba finished his attack on the French colonial
system in Africa, the third major defense lawyer, Nabil Bouaita stepped
forward to give his "plea." Just as B'Memba's mission was
to condemn the French for the suffering brought about by their colonialism,
Bouaita's mission was to condemn the "Zionists" for their
crimes against the Arab. He began by comparing Israel's acts in Lebanon
with America's aggression in Vietnam and France's
war in Algeria. "The Israelis," he claimed, "were just
as guilty as the Nazis."146 The key
piece of evidence supporting Bouaita's claim was the massacre at Sebra
and Chiatila where "between 3500 and 5000" Palestinian refugees
were killed by a Lebanese militia who "acted under the benevolent
eye of Israelis stationed only 200 meters away." Unlike Vergès
or B'Memba, Bouaita did not shield his argument in any Barbie-related
rhetoric, he just kept attacking Israel until Cerdini silenced him for
moving off the subject. Thus ended the defense's plea. In three swift
and furious attacks, the defense attorneys, led by Jacques Vergès
had managed to speak publicly against all of their traditional enemies.
Their argument was simple, what right did the French, or the Jews, have
to judge Klaus Barbie if
they themselves had committed atrocities of a similar nature? All that
remained now was for the jury to decide the fate of Klaus
Barbie. And of France, the
Holocaust, "crimes against humanity," and history itself.
In the hours after the defense pleaded its case, the
jurors would have to decide whether Klaus
Barbie was guilty and if so, to what degree. What had started as
a simple trial of a man who was blatantly guilty had turned into a four-year
war of legal attrition and, in the process, had acquired an entirely
new nature. On the night of the verdict, it seemed as if the original
issue, the justice of Klaus
Barbie, had been lost in a sea of unwanted questions and discomforting
moral dilemmas. Vergès had created a paradox, if the French were
going to punish Barbie for what the Nazis did to them, then they could
not continue going on without facing their own history of inconsistencies
starting with the persecution of Dreyfus and continuing through the
Algerian War. In order for France to punish Barbie, it would have to permanently prop open the door to
its closet full of inconsistencies, and after a century of remaining
closed, that closet was bound to have more than a few skeletons in it.
Thus, the price for punishing Barbie would be high; either facing the
ambiguities of the past head-on or facing decades of moral discomfort.
The question that remained was, would France be willing to the the price of finally facing its past in order to satisfy
its craving for justice?
Ten minutes after midnight on Saturday, July 4, 1987,
the jurors emerged from their chamber with a verdict. After more than
six hours of deliberations the jurors found Klaus
Barbie guilty of "crimes against humanity" and for that
act sentenced him to spend the rest of his life in prison, France's
highest punishment. Vergès immediately protested the verdict,
calling the whole trial a "farce," but before he could say
any more, a new, previously unheard voice, silenced him. The voice belonged
to Klaus Barbie, who after
hearing the verdict, addressed the court in French for the first time:
"I have some words to say, in French," began Barbie, "
I did not commit the raid in Izieu. I fought the Resistance and that
was the war and today the war is over. Thank you." Despite Barbie's
appeal, all of the evidence was against him. Vergès tried to
"plea" one more time, but as one reporter put it, "he
was talking only to himself" and nobody even bothered to record
what he said.147 The verdict stood and
the trial was over, but neither the prosecution nor the defense walked
away satisfied.
Conclusion
What was supposed to have been a triumph for the prosecution
had turned into a nightmare of legal difficulties followed by a grueling
trial in which the prosecution, France,
and the victims, the résistants and the Jews, found themselves
being judged instead of Klaus
Barbie. Had it not been for ferocious counter-attacks launched by
Jacques Vergès, however, the prosecution would have walked away
from the trial with nothing more than the conviction of a man already
twice condemned to death by French courts. As a consequence of Vergès'
controversial approach to crime and its relationship to memory, the
prosecution was forced to prove and reprove what distinguished the Holocaust
from ordinary acts of war or criminality. Thus, from the testimony of
dozens of witnesses, the prosecution was able to clarify like never
before that the Holocaust was real and that its special kind of horror
placed it in a unique category.
With the recognition of the full significance of the
Holocaust came another realization; that of the French role in implementing
the Final Solution. When
the truth about French collaboration finally emerged after more than
forty years of repression, its teachings were often painful. No longer
could the Resistance be viewed as the sole French role during the Occupation
and no longer could its glories serve to shelter France from the shame and guilt of its other past. As Raymond and Lucie Aubrac,
the "couple vedette" of the French Resistance, put it during
an interview following the Barbie trial, "The French are now capable
of understanding what happened in their country."148 Thus, by understanding France's
whole history, that is, taking the bitter with the sweet, the French
were able to realize both the full depth of the collaboration and the
full glory of the Resistance.
By exposing France to its history's true nature, the Barbie trial proved that history could
be rewritten, and this upset many supporters of the prosecution. Instead
of simply rewriting history, the Barbie trial, especially through Vergès'
reinterpretations of the Occupation and the colonial wars, provided
a health environment for anyone who wanted to reinterpret any part of
history. Nothing was sacred. Instead of viewing what was revealed about France during the Barbie trial
as the truth, many viewed such revelations as interpretations. As soon
as the voices of Elie Wiesel and the hundreds of other victims died
down, historians were revising the past. Overnight, history was rewritten:
when people spoke of the "deportations" they longer meant
the thousands of French men Laval shipped to Germany where they would work in factories, they meant the one-way train rides
from Drancy to Auschwitz. If history could be revised one way, then
it could be revised another, and before the new view of French history
could be accepted, it was already being challenged.
Although Vergès claimed that his defense of
Barbie would "hurt France,"
the pain he inflicted by attacking the very foundations of French society
was probably the only way the old wounds that had scarred France for so many decades could begin to healed. In essence, Vergès
had forced the French to discuss publicly the taboo subject of the past.
From 1987 on, whenever the French would think of crimes against humanity,
they would think of more than just the Holocaust. Now, they would conjure
up the atrocities in Algeria alongside those of the Nazis and now more
than ever the French would take a leading role in trying to avert genocide
wherever they saw it start happen.
Judging by the amount of coverage such events get in
the French media as opposed to their American counterparts, the French
public pays a great deal of attention to genocide or even the potential
of genocide in any region of the world. The importance of preventing
another Holocaust or even another Algeria has also made itself prominent
in French foreign policy. When the U.N. called for nations to step forward
to help stop the hatred-based war in former Yugoslavia, it was the French
who sent the most economic aid and troops to the region. In 1996, when
the ethnic conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi erupted in Africa, it
was again the French who were among the first to make an effort to bring
peace to their former colonies.
Although the healing process commenced by the Barbie
trial has had a significant impact on almost all aspects of French life,
it is still very far from complete. The fury of the Barbie trial may
have changed the way people think about the potential danger of racism
more, but it was not a change without backlash. Probably the most dramatic
instance of backlash against the Barbie verdict would be the rise in
popularity of Jean-Marie Le Pen after the trial. Le Pen, a proud nationalist
and xenophobe, would have been right at home in the Vichy government,
and his ultra-conservative party, le Front National, won a record 14.44
percent of the vote in the presidential elections of 1988.149 In the ranks of his political party stood many ex-Pétainists
who lashed out at the Barbie trial for questioning, or even worse, attacking
what they thought were the pillars of French society, the French "character"
and France's role a world leader.
They were sick of being criticized for what they thought was protecting
French culture from the outside and they succeeded in maintaining an
atmosphere in France that can
be downright hostile to immigrants and ethnic minorities. Thus, the
same racism that scapegoated Dreyfus and that drove the anti-semitic
policies of the Vichy regime was still alive and well.
Perhaps the greatest triumph of the nationalistic,
xenophobic Right after the Barbie trial came in 1992 with the dismissal
of all charges against former milice leader Paul Touvier. Like Barbie,
Touvier murdered both Jews and résistants, and like Barbie, Touvier
hid from justice for decades, but unlike Klaus
Barbie, Touvier was French to the very core. As the leader of a
collaborationist militia unit in Vichy France,
Touvier openly collaborated with the Nazis, but, unlike many of his
peers, he did not stop there. While many of his peers balked at rounding
up French Jews or stealing their property, Touvier gave himself to the
task "body and soul." One of Touvier's best-known acts was
the cold-blooded murder of the president of the League for the Rights
of Man, Victor Basch, along with Basch's wife, Hélène.
The Baschs were both octogenarians when they were arrested by Touvier
on January 10, 1944 for the crime of being Jewish. Touvier then drove
the couple to a secluded spot and shot each of them in the head.150
When France was purging itself of Vichy's most grotesque collaborators during the
late 1940s, Touvier should have been among the first up against the
wall. After the war, Touvier was hidden and protected by the Church
for almost fifty years. Due to lack of evidence against him, Touvier
escaped death sentences in 1946 and in 1947, a trial in 1973, and another
trial in 1992. In the 1992 trial, Touvier was accused of hurling grenades
into a synagogue but, as in the previous cases, there were conflicting
accounts by eyewitnesses and the case was therefore thrown out.151 For the fourth time in four decades, Paul Touvier had escaped justice
by the grace of the French legal system which found it either too difficult
or too painful to try him, let alone convict him.
Throughout the entire four decades that Touvier escaped
French justice, he was being sheltered by the Church. Although many
officials within the Church had aided the Resistance and sheltered Jews,
many openly collaborated with the Vichy regime. They collaborated not
because they were afraid, but because they thought Vichy was going to
revive Catholicism in France.
Thus, when Touvier, a Vichy fanatic, was accused of collaboration and
therefore treason, enough Church officials were still sufficiently pro-Vichy
to hide Touvier, a fairly devout Catholic. In order to attack Touvier,
the prosecution, that is the Fifth Republic, would therefore have to
attack the Church, but doing that could create new rifts in society
by pitting the Church directly against the State. The solution was simple,
just forget about the whole thing and move on. The press was outraged,
but after the years of talk about "the Holocaust" and "crimes
against humanity" and "collaboration" that surrounded
the Barbie, the public was tired examining its history. Thus, during
the Touvier "Affair," as it was called in a sick mockery of
the Dreyfus Affair almost a century before, France proved that although it had come a long way, it had not completely conquered
the shadows of the past.
In the background to both the Barbie trial and "L'Affaire
Touvier," lurked yet another ghost from the past, Maurice Papon.
As Secretary General of the prefecture of Gironde during the Occupation,
Papon was the principle liaison between his constituents and the Vichy
government. After the war, Papon claimed he had protected his prefecture
through ingenious bureaucratic maneuvering within the Vichy command
structure and after being hailed as a hero, he went onto a prosperous
career as a high-ranking civil servant in the Fourth and Fifth Republics.
However, as would soon be discovered, Papon's past would come back to
haunt him. During the Second World War, Papon served as the General-Secretary
of the Prefecture of the Gironde region, in which he was responsible
for overseeing Jewish affairs. As a result of his civic duties, and
his position as senior police official in the Vichy regime, Papon had
the opportunity to come into contact with various Nazi SS soldiers and
to be previed to a lot of high level information; thus leading many
to believe he was, if not well, at least partially informed as to what
was going on with the Jewish situation in Germany and his contribution
to their deportation. It was not until the late 1970s that Papon's associations
would come back to haunt him. Throughout the years more and more information
was accumulated in relation to the 1,560 Jews, including 223 children,
that Papon deported to such concentration camps as Auschwitz. It was
not until 1981 that pieces if paper detailing the arrest and deportation
of hundreds of Jews, were found containing Papon's personal singature.
For seventeen years, Papon tried to battle the charges make against
him for crimes against humanity, claiming he was not aware of the Final
Solution, and that he was merely acting as a civic servant, who in fact
keep his job so he could try and aid the Resistance movement and help
the Jews. Although Papon was willing to overlook some of his past indesgretions,
his victims were not. They argued that because"...[Papon] knew
full well that it [his orders] concerned the deportation and extermination
of members of the Jewish community, chosen uniquely in accord with religious
or racial criteria,"152 he should
be tried for "crimes against humanity. His case was finally brought
to trial in October 1997, and Papon was charged with complicity of crimes
against humanity. He was convicted in 1998 and sentenced to ten years
in prison, only to serve three and be released on the basis of a 2002
law, which calls for the release of ill prisioners so they can seek
quality care.
Whether he was found guilty or innocent, Papon's trial
reinforced the teachings of the ordeal of the Barbie trial. With a guilty
verdict, Papon will incriminate the collaborators even more, and with
an innocent verdict, he will incriminate Vichy for its "political
killings" and the Fifth Republic for finding him innocent. Either
way, the Papon trial will be another rendezvous with history.
With the publicity from the Papon trial and with billboards
declaring "Victory for the Revisionists!" it appears that
the Barbie trial's offspring are beginning to make themselves known.
On one side, there are the supporters of the prosecution, who claim
with confidence that what Papon did was a "crime against humanity"
by reflecting on the lessons of the Barbie trial. On the other side
there are the spiritual heirs to Jacques Vergès, who claim that
Papon should not have even been tried because of the pettiness of his
crime compared to more modern ones in Africa and the Middle East.
Whatever its impact on the Papon trial and beyond,
the Barbie trial was, more than anything, a lesson. For Marcel Merle,
the trial was a history lesson. Not a lesson of history, a lesson about
history: At a time when a certain history tries to deny the evidence
and when the stench of racism seeps insidiously to the surface, a healthy
history lesson has been administered to the public opinion, particularly
to the youths who are tempted to hide themselves behind the slogan,
"Hitler, I didn't
know him." 153
Other lessons were even more important. When Télérama
magazine asked Claude Lanzmann, author of Shoah, a documentary on the
Holocaust, to tell them what the most important lesson of the Barbie
trial was, he responded to four years of agonizing soul-searching and
moral discomfort on a national level with a single phrase: "Fiction
is a crime."154
Sources: The
Trial of Klaus Barbie
1. Pierre Bois, "D'Izieu à Auschwitz, le
martyre de 44 enfants," Le Figaro 28 May, 1987
2. Philippe Brunet-Lecomte, "Les trois traîtres
français d'Izieu," Lyon Figaro 2 June, 1987
3. Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds (New York, Grove Press:
1985) p. 78
4. Raymond and Lucie Aubrac, "Un Entretien avec
Raymond et Lucie Aubrac," in Bernard-Henri Lévy, Archives
d'un Procès (Paris, Globe: 1986) p. 207
5. Alain Woodrow, "Le Pasteur Potter: 'Il sommeille
en chacun de nous,' " Le Monde 11 February, 1983
6. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France
and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981) p. 28
7. ibid, p. 29
8. Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds (New York, Grove Press:
1985) p. 56
9. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France
and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981) p. 31
10. Ted Morgan, An Uncertain Hour (New York; William
Morrow and Co., 1990) p. 92
11. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France
and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981) p. 33
12. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third
Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Fawcett Crest Books, 1960)
pp. 387-388
13. Benjamin Sax and Dieter Kuntz, Inside Hitler's
Germany: A Documentary History of Life in the Third Reich (Lexington,
MA: DC Heath, 1992) p. 189
14. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France
and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981) p. 37
15. ibid, p. 45
16. ibid, p. 64
17. ibid, p. 36
18. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third
Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Fawcett Crest Books, 1960)
pp. 944-945
19. Ted Morgan, An Uncertain Hour (New York; William
Morrow and Co., 1990) p. 108
20. Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds (New York, Grove Press:
1985) p. 60
21. ibid, p. 61
22. ibid, p. 57
23. René de Chambrun, Pierre Laval, Traitor
or Patriot? (New York, Charles Scribner: 1984) pp. 128-136
24. Edwy Plenel, "Le piège Touvier,"
Le Monde 22 April, 1992
25. Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds (New York, Grove Press:
1985) p. 88
26. René de Chambrun, Pierre Laval, Traitor
or Patriot? (New York, Charles Scribner: 1984) p. 134
27. Alain Finkielkraut, Remembering in Vain: The Klaus
Barbie Trial and Crimes Against Humanity. Trans. Roxanne Lapidus with
Sima Godfrey. (New York, Columbia University Press. 1992.) p. 53
28. Philip W. Whitcomb (trans.), France During the
German Occupation, 1940-1944, volume 2 (Stanford, Stanford Univ. Press:
1957) p. 628
29. ibid, p. 628
30. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of
the World, 1914-1991, (New York, Vintage Books: 1994) p. 120
31. Philip W. Whitcomb (trans.), France During the
German Occupation, 1940-1944, volume 2 (Stanford, Stanford Univ. Press:
1957) p. 629
32. ibid, p. 636
33. René de Chambrun, Pierre Laval, Traitor
or Patriot? (New York, Charles Scribner: 1984) p. 134
34. Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds (New York, Grove Press:
1985) p. 78
35. Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds (New York, Grove Press:
1985) p. 45
36. Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds (New York, Grove Press:
1985) p. 45
37. Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds (New York, Grove Press:
1985) p. 106
38. In 1974, Barbie bragged to a journalist that he
had saved France from Communism by killing Moulin, who had leftist leanings.
In 1983, when Barbie was extradited to France, he changed his mind about
Moulin. Barbie claimed that he and Moulin became fast friends upon Moulin's
arrest and that he never abused Moulin in any way. Moulin's death, according
to Barbie, was a suicide. If one is to believe Barbie, then Moulin committed
suicide by repeatedly bashing his head against a blunt object, and in
the process, somehow breaking his ribs, arms, and legs. Agence France
Presse, "Jean Moulin s'est tué lui-même," Le
Monde February 11, 1983
39. Serge Klarsfeld,The Children of Izieu: A Human
Tragedy (New York, Abrams: 1984) p. 17
40. Serge Klarsfeld, The Children of Izieu: A Human
Tragedy (New York, Abrams: 1984) pp. 31-32
41. Pierre Bois, "D'Izieu à Auschwitz,
le martyre de 44 enfants," Le Figaro 28 May , 1987
42. Philippe Brunet-Lecomte, "Les trois traîtres
français d"Izieu," Lyon Figaro 2 June, 1987
43. Serge Klarsfeld, The Children of Izieu: A Human
Tragedy (New York, Abrams: 1984) p. 15
44. Françoise Rolland, " 'Aucun Nazi ne
pouvait ignorer le sort des déportés,' " Le Progrès
11 June, 1987
45. Ted Morgan, An Uncertain Hour (New York; William
Morrow and Co., 1990) p. 202
46. Ted Morgan, An Uncertain Hour (New York; William
Morrow and Co., 1990) p. 247
47. Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds (New York, Grove Press:
1985) p. 106
48. Allan A. Ryan, Jr., Klaus Barbie and the United
States Government: A Report to the Attorney General of the United States
(Washington, D.C., U.S. Dept. of Justice, Criminal Division: 1983) p.
29
49. René de Chambrun, Pierre Laval, Traitor
or Patriot? (New York, Charles Scribner: 1984) p. 134
50. Allan A. Ryan, Jr., Klaus Barbie and the United
States Government: A Report to the Attorney General of the United States
(Washington, D.C., U.S. Dept. of Justice, Criminal Division: 1983) p.
28
51. ibid, p. 31
52. ibid, pp. 30-35
53. ibid, p. 40
54. Philippe Brunet-Lecomte, " 'Barbie n'a jamais
rompu avec les anciens SS,' " Lyon Figaro 15 May, 1987
55. Allan A. Ryan, Jr., Klaus Barbie and the United
States Government: A Report to the Attorney General of the United States
(Washington, D.C., U.S. Dept. of Justice, Criminal Division: 1983) pp.
159-160
56. Jean-Marc Théolleyre, "Nazi impénitent,
agent américain, homme d'affaires bolivien," Le Monde 16
May, 1987
57. Allan A. Ryan, Jr., Klaus Barbie and the United
States Government: A Report to the Attorney General of the United States
(Washington, D.C., U.S. Dept. of Justice, Criminal Division: 1983) p.
39
58. Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds (New York, Grove Press:
1985) p. 21
59. ibid, p. 188
60 ibid, p. 188
61. ibid, p. 188
62. ibid, p. 189
63. Edmond Frédéric, "De La Paz
à Lyon, Muré dans son silence," Le Monde 8 February,
1983
64. Ted Morgan, An Uncertain Hour (New York; William
Morrow and Co., 1990) p. 16
65. Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds (New York, Grove Press:
1985) p. 108
66. P. -J. Franceschini, "Klaus Barbie est expulsé
vers la France: Le criminel-enseignant," Le Monde 6-7 February,
1983
67. Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds (New York, Grove Press:
1985) pp. 208-209
68. Jean-Marc Théolleyre, "Un vaincu impénitent,"
Le Monde, 8 February, 1983
69. Jean-Marc Théolleyre, "Le sens d'un
procès," Le Monde 3 May, 1987
70. Edmond Frédéric, "De La Paz
à Lyon, Muré dans son silence," Le Monde 8 February,
1983
71. Jean-Marc Théolleyre, "Un vaincu impénitent,"
Le Monde, 8 February, 1983
72. Eichmann's trial, which took place in Jerusalem
in 1961, lasted nine months and caused considerable contreversy. His
kidnapping in Buenos Aires jeopardized Israel's relationship with Argentina
and his defense strategy, claiming that he was a Zionist because of
the role he played in forcing the Jews out of Europe, caused an uproar.
He was executed in Tel Aviv in May, 1962. - Encyclopedia Britannica
Online, http://www.eb.com/
73. Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds (New York, Grove Press:
1985) p. 14
74.Gilbert Comte, "La justice de qui?" Le
Monde 10 February, 1983
75. Joseph Rovan, "Ce procès vient trop
tard," Le Monde 10 February, 1983
76. Alain Woodrow, "Le Pasteur Potter: 'Il sommeille
en chacun de nous," Le Monde 11 February, 1983
77. Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds (New York, Grove Press:
1985) p. 132
78. ibid, p. 134
79.ibid, p. 131
80. ibid, p. 139
81. Alain Finkielkraut, Remembering in Vain: The Klaus
Barbie Trial and Crimes Against Humanity Trans. Roxanne Lapidus with
Sima Godfrey. (New York:Columbia University Press. 1992.) p. xx
82. Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds (New York, Grove Press:
1985) p. 149
83. ibid, pp. 149-150
84. ibid, p. 148
85. Encyclopedia Britannica Online (http://www.eb.com)
1996
86. Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds (New York, Grove Press:
1985) p. 130
87. Vergès actually traveled constantly back
and forth between Prague and Paris so that he could lead a youth organization
and study law simeoltanaously.
88 Jacques Vergès, Je Defends Barbie (Paris,
Jean Picollec: 1988) pp.175-178
89. Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds (New York, Grove Press:
1985) p. 155
90. ibid, p. 152
91. ibid, p. 152
92. Jacques Vergès, Je Defends Barbie (Paris,
Jean Picollec: 1988) pp.175-178
93. Rita Maran, Torture: The Role of Ideology in the
French-Algerian War (New York, Praeger:1989) p. 82
94. Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds (New York, Grove Press:
1985) p. 155
95. Recently Les Editions de Minuit has published several
works of "revisionist" history, most notably Roger Garaudy's
popular essay that refuted the existence of the Holocaust.
96. Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds (New York, Grove Press: 1985) p. 165
97. ibid, p. 161
98. ibid, p. 166
99. ibid, p. 169
100. ibid, p. 175
101. ibid, p. 176
3 102. ibid, p. 181
103. Jacques Verges, Je Defends Barbie (Paris, Jean
Picollec: 1988) p. 163
104. Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds (New York, Grove
Press: 1985) p. 210
105. Eliane Begue, "Elie Wiesel, l'autre mémoire,"
Lyon Matin 3 June, 1987
106. Claude Bourdet, "Pourquoi Juger Barbie,"
Témoinage Chrétien 11 May, 1987
107. Jacques Vergès, Je Defends Barbie (Paris,
Jean Picollec: 1988) p. 13
108. Nine primary jurors and five alternates
109. Jean-Marc Théolleyre, "Nom, prénom?
Altmann, Klaus," Le Monde 13 May, 1987
110. André Chambraud, "L'Histoire, cette
garce qui nous rattrape," L'Evènment du Jeudi 14 May, 1987
111. ibid
112. Some "revisionists," most notably
Roger Garaudy, take their argument even further and claim that the Holocaust
never occured at all.
113. J.J., "Mais de quoi nous menace donc Vergès?"
Le Nouvel Observateur 15 May, 1987
114. ibid
115. ibid
116. Françoise Rolland, "L'Ombre de Jean
Moulin s'eloigne...et se précise," Le Progres 13 May, 1987
117. ibid
118. Patrice Burnat, "Le procès Barbie
sans Barbie," Le Matin 14 May, 1987
119. ibid
120. ibid
121. Odile Cimetière, "Pourquoi sont-ils
venus témoigner?" Le Progres 21 May, 1987
122. Françoise Rolland, " 'Je me suis
sentie sale avec ce matricule,' " Le Progres 23 May ,1987
123. ibid.
124. Jean-Jacques Billon, "Temoins du jour: Mme
Simone Kaddosche-Lagrange," Lyon Matin 23 May, 1987
125. Françoise Rolland, "Le S.S. faisait
répéter au juif 'Le juif est un parasite,' " Le Progres
27 May, 1987
126. Yves-Michel Gillet, "Questions à
André Frossard," Le Figaro 28 May, 1987
127. Pierre Bois, "D'Izieu à Auschwitz,
le martyre de 44 enfants," Le Figaro 28 May, 1987
128. Serge Klarsfeld, The Children of Izieu: A Human
Tragedy (New York, Abrams: 1984) p. 94
129. Jacques Vergès, Je Defends Barbie (Paris,
Jean Picollec: 1988) p. 26 --Vergès was referring to Klarsfeld's
'hands-on' role in Barbie's capture and extradition.
130. Jacques Vergès, Je Defends Barbie (Paris,
Jean Picollec: 1988) pp.87-123
131 Jacques Vergés, Je Defends Barbie (Paris,
Jean Picollec: 1988) p. 12
132. Pierre Bois, "D'Izieu à Auschwitz,
le martyre de 44 enfants," Le Figaro 28 May, 1987
133. Philippe Brunet-Lecomte, "Les trois traîtres
français d"Izieu," Lyon Figaro 2 June, 1987
134. Pierre Mangetout, "Elie Wiesel face à
Me Vergès," Lyon Libération 3 June, 1987
135. ibid
136. ibid
137. ibid
138. Patrice Burnat, "Le témoignage d'Elie
Wisel a été le grand moment d'émotion de la 15e
audience du procès Barbie," Le Matin 3 June, 1987
139. Pierre Mangetout, "Elie Wiesel face à
Me Vergès," Lyon Libération 3 June, 1987
140. Patrice Burnat, "Le témoignage d'Elie
Wisel a été le grand moment d'émotion de la 15e
audience du procès Barbie," Le Matin 3 June, 1987
141. Laurent Greilsamer, "Les deux 'frères'
de Me Vergès," Le Monde 3 July, 1987
142. Jean-Marc Théolleyre, "La défense
evoque les crimes contre l'humanité avant et après le
nazisme," Le Monde, 3 July, 1987
143. ibid
144. ibid
145. ibid
146. Sorj Chalandon, "Klaus Barbie sort reclus
à vie," Lyon Libération 4 July, 1987
147. Raymond and Lucie Aubrac, "Un Entretien
avec Raymond et Lucie Aubrac," in Bernard-Henri Lévy, Achives
d'un Procès (Paris, Globe: 1986) p. 20
148. Alain Finkielkraut, Remembering in Vain: The
Klaus Barbie Trial and Crimes Against Humanity. Trans. Roxanne Lapidus
with Sima Godfrey. (New York, Columbia University Press. 1992.) p. 90
149. Edwy Plenel, "Le piège Touvier,"
Le Monde 22 April, 1992
150. Edwy Plenel, "Le piège Touvier,"
Le Monde 22 April, 1992
151. A.F.P, "Maurice Papon sera jugé
pour 'crimes contre l'humanité,'" Le Monde 20 September,
1996
152. Marcel Merle, "Le procès Barbie.
Ou la fin du droit de la guerre?" Etudes 367/5 (1987): 459-467
153. Jean-Claude Raspiengeas, "La Mémoire
de l"Holocauste," Télérama 24 June, 1987
154. ibid
|