A Time For Retribution

"Every Jewish family in Lyon has a loved one, a father or a grandfather who was a victim of Barbie. No one among them has forgotten."

Jacques Block, President of the Jewish Federation of Lyon "Forty years have passed...I have forgotten. If they have not forgotten, it is their business." Klaus Barbie, February 198

KLAUS BARBIE almost got away with genocide. With the Third Reich collapsed in 1945, Barbie, the notorious Gestapo chief of Lyon in occupied France, mysteriously slipped through an international dragnet and found asylum in South America, leaving behind the bodies of thousands of his victims. For thirty-two years he evaded Nazi hunters and scoffed at extradition attempts and death sentences passed in absentia by the French courts of justice. Barbie had played the war crime game-and won.

Until this month, that is, when the 69-year-old Barbie was finally handed over to French authorities in the most sensational arrest of a Nazi fugitive since the seizure of Adolf Eichmann by Israeli agents in 1962. Barbie now returns to face trial in the city he held hostage for two bloody years during the Second World War. This time, he will almost certainly not escape the law.

Barbie's story began in November 1942 with his appointment as chief of the Gestapo's Fourth sector at Lyon after serving in the Hitler Youth and the S.S. Upon his arrival in France, Barbie assembled the tools of his trade-whips, clubs and two-by-fours-and set about earning the nickname that would follow him throughout his life-the Butcher of Lyon, Raymond Aubrac, a resistance member captured during the war, remembers that "it was not sophisticated torture, just brutal...there was nothing intellectual about his methods. He just asked the same questions over and over again."

The method worked by 1944, Barbie could boast of over four thousand executions of Resistance fighters, not to mention the deportation of close to eight thousand Jews, shipped away to certain death in the Eastern European concentration camps. But Barbie's most infamous achievement was the 1943 arrest, torture and murder of the daring underground guerilla a leader, Jean Moulin. That outrage above all others came to symbolize the Nazi brand of terror, as Moulin emerged from his last harrowing session with Barbie, an eyewitness recalled that "he had been beaten terribly, he was all bruises, a leg was sort of trailing behind him. He had been very neatly destroyed."

Moulin's compatriots, of course, eventually triumphed in 1944 and Barbie, along with most occupation officers, was interned by the U.S. Army on war crime charges. What happened after that remains somewhat controversial to this day. According to France's renowned war criminal experts, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, American intelligence agents secretly recruited Barbie to conduct spying missions in eastern Germany immediately following Hitler's defeat. Barbie supposedly helped gather information on Soviet troop positions as well as on the whereabouts of other Gestapo fugitives wanted by Allied authorities; in return he was given a false identity, a home in Munich and the opportunity to get out of Germany while the Americans played dumb and refused French requests for his arrest. By 1951, the Butcher of Lyon was safely exiled in Bolivia.

SURPRISINGLY enough, Barbie led a high-profile existence in his newly adopted homeland. With the generous help of various right-wing military dictators. Barbie obtained Bolivian citizenship in 1957 and soon established a profitable external commerce company-in reality a front for an arms shipment network. The ex-Gestapo officer, appreciated for his contacts abroad, made friends in high places. As unofficial leader of a fairly large collection of exiled German war criminals hiding in Bolivia, Barbie was able to organize his cronies into a sophisticated paramilitary back-up unit for General Banzar, who took power in La Paz in 1971. Banzar, for his part, kept the French legal authorities at bay through his hand-picked Supreme Court. Barbie and friends could frequently be seen enjoying themselves at the Taverne Bavaria in Santa Cruz, where hundreds of ex-Nazis gathered for reunions, took their uniforms out of mothballs, sang S.S. apthems and even imported prostitutes from Frankfort. The whole operation was financed though drug and arms deals. As an exile, Barbie was at the height of his power and bragged in an interview with the German magazine Stern: "Every time the military needs help they call me."

What Barbie never counted on was a shift of power away from the old-style right-wing dictatorships. On October 10, 1982, Hernan Siles Zuazo, leader of a left-wing coalition, ascended to the Presidency. Barbie's Bolivian days were numbered as soon as the new government in La Paz demonstrated its intention to make amends for the past and clean up Bolivia's image as a Nazi haven. And Barbie blundered: following the death of his wife from cancer and the loss of his son in a plane crash the year before, the once nimble war criminal decided to stay put in the hope that the supreme court would continue to refuse extradition demands. He had lost the will, some said, to keep on running.

On January 25, 1983, Barbie received notification of his impending expulsion from Bolivia, and a few days later found himself abroad a C-130 transport plane headed for French Guinea. Waiting to accept the prize for France's socialist government, Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy explained to the world the reasoning behind Barbie's extradition:

The French must not forget their history. The young must know about happened in order always to be ready to safeguard the dignity of their country and even more, the dignity of man. Every man, as long as he lives, is responsible for his choices and his actions.

Barbie's return to Lyon brings back painful memories of a France torn between cowardly collaborators and dashing members of the Resistance. Many Frenchmen, particularly those on the extreme right of the political spectrum, actively assisted the Nazis in their gruesome work. Leftists today, on the other hand, still enjoy reliving their halcyon days when the communist underground inspired brave fighters to risk their lives in dangerous sabotage missions against the Germans. Thus the French socialist president Francois Mitterand, in his very first symbolic act in office, solemnly paid a visit to Moulin's tomb in the Pantheon of Paris. And now, he will have the bittersweet satisfaction of seeing Moulin's killer brought to justice.

"The Butcher's" legal defense hinges on some familiar arguments already used without success at the Nuremburg trials after the war. For example, Barbie, quoted in 1972, claimed that "to participate in a war carries risks, even if one is only doing his duty." He further noted in a more recent interview that, "I did my duty. My particular job was the war against the French Resistance...if Germany had won the war they wouldn't be bothering with my case now."

But history decided otherwise, and the people of Lyon, after almost forty years of frustration, have every right to exact revenge. Barbie's trial may take more than a year to prepare and the harshest possible verdict would be life imprisonment, since France abolished the death penalty in 1981. Yet how can one every pay enough for crime against humanity, for the thousands uprooted from their homes and sent by the trainload to Auschwitz and other camps? As Jacques Block, President of the Jewish Federation of Lyon, put it: "The crimes of this man are such that there is no penalty equal to them."