On the morning of 6 April 1944 a thirty-year-old Gestapo officer named Klaus Barbie, head of Section IV of the SD in Lyon, signed an order for the arrest of forty-four Jewish children and their seven adult carers at a children’s home in the village of Izieu in the Ain department of southern France. The home had been opened in 1943 by a Jewish welfare organisation as a hiding place for children whose parents had been deported. The youngest of the children was four years old. The oldest was seventeen. They were all in the village schoolroom finishing their breakfast when the SS lorries arrived at eight o’clock in the morning. The children were thrown into the lorries by their hair. They were taken to the prison at Montluc in Lyon, transferred to the Drancy transit camp outside Paris, and deported to Auschwitz on convoy 71 on the morning of 13 April 1944. Forty-two of the forty-four children were gassed on arrival. Two of the older boys were sent to the slave-labour camp at Reval in Estonia and shot there the following month. None of the children survived. The seven adults were either gassed at Auschwitz or shot at Reval. The order Barbie had signed had taken less than a minute. He had read it back, signed it, and gone on with his day.
Forty-three years and two months later, on 11 May 1987, Klaus Barbie sat in the dock of the Lyon Cour d’Assises and watched a French jury return a verdict on his conduct. He was seventy-three years old. He had been extradited from Bolivia in February 1983 after a thirty-two-year exile during which he had served the Bolivian government as a counter-insurgency adviser, run a security firm and lived openly in La Paz under his own name. He had been the subject of one of the longest sustained Nazi-hunting campaigns of the postwar era, conducted principally by Beate and Serge Klarsfeld of Paris in cooperation with French magistrates and Bolivian opposition activists. The trial in Lyon was the most consequential French war crimes proceeding since the Liberation. It produced the conviction. The conviction did not undo the killing. It did, in the laborious manner that legal proceedings produce, set the public French record on what had been done.
Who Barbie was
Barbie had served as Section IV chief of the Sicherheitsdienst in Lyon from November 1942 to August 1944. The Sicherheitsdienst was the security branch of the SS and operated alongside the Gestapo; in Lyon, as in many occupied cities, the same men staffed both. Barbie had been responsible, on the Lyon documentary record, for the arrest of approximately 14,311 members of the French Resistance, the deportation of approximately 7,591 Jews from the Lyon region to the killing centres in the East, and the personal torture, on his own admission to several investigators after his arrest in 1983, of an unknown number of detainees. The most famous single victim of the torture was the Resistance leader Jean Moulin, who had been arrested at Caluire on 21 June 1943 in circumstances Barbie had organised, and had died on 8 July 1943 either in Barbie’s office at the Hôtel Terminus or on the train to Berlin afterwards. The forensic and historical consensus is that Barbie, working personally with subordinates, had administered the torture from which Moulin died. The Izieu order of April 1944 was Barbie’s most concentrated piece of work. The Moulin killing was the one for which his name had been remembered in France since 1944.
The American escape
Barbie had been recruited by the United States Army Counter Intelligence Corps in Bavaria in April 1947 as an informant on Communist activity in the French zone of occupation. The recruitment was operationally useful to the Americans; Barbie had a network of former French collaborators and fellow SS officers in the region who provided intelligence on French Communist Party activities. The recruitment was politically problematic. The French government had requested Barbie’s extradition from American custody in 1949 and again in 1950. The CIC, knowing that to hand Barbie over would expose his service as an American informant and produce a public scandal, declined to do so. In 1951 the CIC paid the Croatian priest Krunoslav Draganović approximately 1,400 dollars to evacuate Barbie via the Vatican ratlines to Bolivia under the false Croatian name Klaus Altmann. Barbie’s wife and two children travelled with him. The arrangement was documented in detail in the 1983 United States Department of Justice investigation conducted by Allan A. Ryan, which produced the Ryan Report and a formal American apology to France. The apology came too late to undo the damage. Barbie had lived in La Paz for thirty-two years.
The Bolivian years
Barbie became a Bolivian citizen in 1957 under the name Klaus Altmann. He worked as a businessman and a security consultant. He advised the regimes of Hugo Banzer Suárez and, after 1980, Luis García Meza Tejada on counter-insurgency methods drawn from his Lyon experience. He ran a shipping company and a security firm. He was openly known in La Paz as a former Nazi; the joke at the German Club in La Paz, recorded by several visiting journalists, was that Altmann was the only member who actually had been an SS officer. He travelled internationally on his Bolivian passport. He returned to Germany twice to visit his elderly mother in Trier, the second time in 1973, on a Bolivian visa that the West German authorities chose not to query. He was recognised on both occasions and reported to the West German prosecutorial authorities. The reports produced no action.
The Klarsfelds
The pursuit of Barbie became the longest single project of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld’s careers. They had identified him by 1971 from photographs supplied by the survivor Itta Halaunbrenner, whose husband and three children Barbie had had killed. They published a dossier of his crimes in 1972 that was distributed to the French government, the German prosecutorial authorities, and the international press. They travelled to La Paz on three occasions, including once with Beate posing as a journalist on a magazine assignment, to confirm Barbie’s address and identity. They brought a court action in West Germany in 1971 that forced the West German authorities to issue an arrest warrant. They lobbied four French presidents over twelve years, including direct correspondence with Pompidou, Giscard d’Estaing, and Mitterrand. The Bolivian decision to expel Barbie in February 1983 came under the new civilian government of Hernán Siles Zuazo, after the fall of the García Meza dictatorship in 1982 had removed the political protection Barbie had relied on for two decades.
The trial
The Lyon trial opened on 11 May 1987 and ran for eight weeks. The Cour d’Assises was presided over by Judge André Cerdini. The prosecution was led by the prosecutor Pierre Truche, the assistant prosecutor general of Lyon, and the senior advocate-general of the Cour de Cassation, supported by lawyers acting for the partie civile (the French equivalent of the civil parties in a criminal proceeding) including Serge Klarsfeld himself. The defence was led by the controversial French lawyer Jacques Vergès, who had built a career on defending unpopular clients including the Algerian FLN and Carlos the Jackal. Barbie was tried on charges of crimes against humanity arising from the deportations of Jews from Lyon, the children of Izieu, and the killing of Jewish prisoners at Montluc in 1944. The Moulin killing was not within the indictment because crimes against Resistance fighters had been classified as war crimes rather than crimes against humanity, and the French statute of limitations had run on war crimes by the time of the trial.
The most consequential moment of the trial came on 4 June 1987, when Vergès raised what became known as the tu quoque defence. Vergès, who was himself a Vietnamese-born French lawyer with a sustained record of arguing for anti-colonial causes, contended that the French state was in no position to prosecute Barbie for crimes against humanity given the conduct of French forces in Algeria between 1954 and 1962. The argument was a deliberate provocation aimed at the French establishment’s selective memory. The court rejected the argument as a matter of law: the conduct of French forces in Algeria, whatever its character, was not a defence to specific acts charged against Barbie. The court accepted the argument’s political force as a public criticism of the French state and allowed Vergès to develop it at length.
Truche’s closing argument on 1 July 1987 addressed the Vergès argument directly. Truche conceded that France had unsettled accounts with its colonial history but argued that the Lyon trial was about the specific acts of a specific man on French soil:
The defendant is not on trial for what other states have done in other places. He is on trial for what he did in this city. He arrested the children of Izieu. He sent them to Auschwitz. He has not denied it. He has not expressed any regret. The court is asked to convict him of what he did. It is not asked to absolve France of anything else.
Barbie himself refused to attend most of the trial after the third day, exercising a right of absence that French criminal procedure permitted. Vergès represented him in his absence. Barbie made a single statement at the close of the trial. It was not an apology. He said:
I have nothing to add. I have not killed children. I have not killed Jews. I have not killed Resistance fighters. I have done my duty as a soldier. I leave my fate to the conscience of the French people.
The verdict
The jury returned its verdict on 4 July 1987 after six and a half hours of deliberation. Barbie was convicted on all counts. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, the maximum penalty available under French law since the abolition of the death penalty in 1981. He was held at the Saint Joseph prison in Lyon. He died of cancer in his cell on 25 September 1991 at the age of seventy-seven. His ashes were repatriated to Germany at the request of his daughter and were buried at an undisclosed location. The Klarsfelds were present in court for the verdict. Itta Halaunbrenner, the survivor whose photographs had identified Barbie sixteen years earlier, did not live to see the conviction; she had died in 1986.
What the trial did
The Barbie trial did three things that mattered beyond the conviction of one man. The first was to establish, in French law, that crimes against humanity had no statute of limitations. The principle had been written into the French legal code in 1964 specifically to keep the door open for proceedings against Vichy collaborators and surviving Nazis. The Barbie trial was the first major test of the principle. It opened the door to the subsequent French trials of Maurice Papon (convicted 1998) and Paul Touvier (convicted 1994), the latter being the first French citizen ever convicted of crimes against humanity.
The second was to force a public French reckoning with the role of the Vichy regime in the deportations from France. Barbie had been a German officer; the deportations from the Lyon region had been carried out with the cooperation of French police, French civil servants and French railway workers. The trial put the cooperation on the public record. The historian Henry Rousso has argued in The Vichy Syndrome (1990) that the Barbie trial was the moment at which the French postwar mythology of universal Resistance gave way, in the public imagination, to a more honest reckoning with what France had done to its own Jewish citizens between 1940 and 1944. The reckoning is still under way.
The third was to demonstrate that the long Nazi-hunting work of figures like the Klarsfelds could produce, even decades after the war, a court conviction in a major Western democracy. The Barbie trial encouraged the subsequent prosecutions in Germany, Israel, the United States, France, and elsewhere. It established that the obligation to bring perpetrators to court was not extinguished by the passage of time, by the political inconvenience of doing so, or by the age of the defendant. Barbie’s seventy-three years did not save him. The principle survived him. It is part of the law of every country that takes international criminal law seriously.
See also
- Serge and Beate Klarsfeld
- Crimes Against Humanity, a New Concept in International Law
- Vichy France
- Klaus Barbie
Sources
- Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, Hunting the Truth: Memoirs of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, Piatkus, 2018
- Allan A. Ryan, Klaus Barbie and the United States Government, U.S. Department of Justice, 1983
- Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds: France and the Klaus Barbie Affair, Methuen, 1985
- Tom Bower, Klaus Barbie: The Butcher of Lyons, Pantheon, 1984
- Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, Harvard University Press, 1991
- Marcel Ophüls, dir, Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, documentary film, 1988
- Guy Walters, Hunting Evil: The Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped and the Quest to Bring Them to Justice, Bantam, 2009