Manfred Ludolph was true to his word: in 1972, Barbie’s case file was returned to the active list, but little more happened. In 1976, the Lyons prosecutors sent a complete copy of their Barbie file, totalling 3,000 pages, to the Munich prosecutors who began the laborious task of translating and examining the potential new charges not just against Barbie, but against all the surviving members of the Lyons Gestapo. In 1979, police officers were sent to interrogate Stengritt, Floreck, Bartelmus and all the other Gestapo officers who had returned from imprisonment in France. Each was warned that he faced further prosecution, and then was asked for evidence against Barbie. Only Floreck condemned his former chief outright as a brutal murderer. Despite the volumes of testimony against Barbie, there seemed to be no new charge to bring which had a living eyewitness. Then someone pulled out of an old file the sworn statement made in August 1971 by Alfons Glas, the former Wehrmacht soldier, who had actually seen the St Claude Resistance leader, Joseph Kemmler, beaten to death on Barbie’s orders. On the grounds of the Kemmler murder, the German government, in May 1982, formally but in secret submitted to the Bolivian government a new request for Barbie’s extradition. Anticipating their reaction, the Germans argued that Barbie’s Bolivian naturalisation was fraudulent and that he was therefore still a German citizen.
No one in Munich at the time expected that the request would be considered seriously. Bolivia was engulfed in an intense political crisis as the military fought desperately to prevent the liberal President-elect, Siles Zuazo, returning to form a civilian government. But for the first time, Barbie might have felt more than usually concerned about the outcome of the protracted battle for power. Waiting impatiently in exile in Peru, Zuazo had told reporters in mid-July that his government would not continue to protect the German fugitive.
One week later, the Bolivian presidency changed yet again, and General Guido Vildoso became head of state. It had been Vildoso’s soldiers who, in August 1981, on Barbie’s command, had arrested and intimidated two American journalists in Cochabamba as they attempted to interview him. Eight days after Vildoso became President, he received his first private visitor – Klaus Barbie. As he left the Palace, Barbie told bemused reporters that they had discussed ‘legal and administrative questions’ concerning Transmaritima. No one believed him. He was at the pinnacle of his influence; now matters could only get worse.
In early August, Washington intervened directly in Bolivia’s crisis. An American diplomat promised Zuazo generous loans if he returned to form a government. Shortly afterwards, the German government made public its May extradition request. Questioned about that request, Vildoso’s own Foreign Minister, Agustín Saavedra, hinted that Barbie might be extradited to Germany. European interest in Bolivian affairs increased – not, for once, in the yo-yo fortunes of its presidents, but in the fate of Barbie. Other than staying put, where else could he go?
Barbie was now living permanently in La Paz. His wife had been complaining of stomach pains for some time and examination revealed that she was suffering from terminal cancer. Having buried his son only recently in the city’s German cemetery, Barbie became depressed at the prospect of a solitary life; but he was not worried about his security. Not even the triumphant election of Zuazo as President on 6 October seemed to shake his conviction that his Bolivian citizenship gave him complete protection. Sipping coffee as usual in the Confiteria La Paz, he told journalists: ‘I’m not worried about the German extradition demand. Bolivian law rules here.’ But over at the presidential palace, the 192nd incumbent was emphatic: ‘We will extradite him. We have no interest to protect people like him.’
Zuazo had already demonstrated his urgent resolve that Bolivia should cease to be a sanctuary for neo-fascists. Just three days after taking office, he had agreed that the Italian government could fly a special commando squad from Rome to seize Italy’s two most wanted terrorists, Delle Chiaie and Pagliai. The special Alitalia DC10 arrived on 10 October, the same day that Zuazo was inaugurated. Italian anti-terrorist police, supported by Bolivian security forces, drove straight to the Italians’ home in Santa Cruz. In the spectacular shoot-out which followed, Pagliai was shot in the neck and paralysed. There was no sign of Delle Chiaie. Pagliai was immediately flown back to Italy, but died soon after his return.
Despite the swift resolution of that particular problem, Zuazo was aware that his international standing had been damaged by this willing compromise of Bolivia’s sovereignty. He was determined that Barbie’s case should be treated with ostensible legitimacy. He told the French ambassador and Mario Roncal, the special emissary from Paris, that he wanted Barbie out of the country as soon as possible but that it had to seem like an extradition, not an expulsion. Bonn’s extradition request had therefore to be subject to the Supreme Court. Not the least of the drawbacks to this solution was that the majority of the court’s twelve judges had been appointed by the generals, and they showed no intention of reversing their view that Klaus Altmann was a Bolivian citizen. Nevertheless, in early January 1983, the German request was resubmitted to the court with the support of the Bolivian public prosecutor, who put forward the spurious claim that an extradition treaty between Bolivia and Germany had been signed in 1889. By this time, with international attention focused on the country as a haven for Nazi war criminals, the government was ready to consider any strategy to ensure Barbie’s removal.
Regine Barbie died just before Christmas and was buried next to her son in the German cemetery. It was a place which Barbie had visited many times over the years – tending the graves of his friends seemed the closest he would ever come to his Fatherland, for which he had given so much. Some hundred people came to pay their last respects. Afterwards, Barbie moved back to Santa Cruz to live with Klaus’s widow and his three grandchildren; an unsatisfactory arrangement which was not to last for long.
In January 1983, Jacques Friedman, the Inspector General of France’s treasury, arrived discreetly in La Paz to establish the help his government might offer Bolivia in its efforts to reduce a massive four-billion-dollar international debt. His visit had been organised by the French cabinet’s ‘Barbie team’, coordinated by Jean Louis Bianco, the Secretary General of the Elysée. Bianco, fluent in German, was now in regular contact with Waldemar Schreckenberger, the head of the German Chancellor’s office in Bonn.
Until December, it had always been assumed by the French government that the most they would achieve would be Barbie’s extradition to Germany: legally, politically and practically, there seemed no alternative, and with this they were satisfied. Justice would take its course in Munich just as well as in Lyons. However, from the outset of their conversations, Bianco began to realise that despite their request for Barbie’s extradition the Germans were wary of the full implications of the Nazi’s return.
Aware of the French President’s personal interest in the matter, the German government feared that the fragile equilibrium between the two countries might be damaged if Barbie was awaiting trial in Germany. French newspapers would certainly begin to criticise Germany’s poor record in prosecuting Nazi war criminals. German courts could be proven, in French eyes, to have been too lenient. Several trials in Germany had degenerated into grotesque attempts by sympathetic neo-Nazi lawyers to whitewash the Third Reich and glorify their clients. Bonn was still smarting from the international criticism which had greeted the recent trial in Düsseldorf of fifteen former staff of the Maidaneck extermination camp. The trial had lasted six years and was notable for the startling claims made by the defendants’ lawyers – amongst them, that the camp’s gas chambers were not used for killing people, but for cleaning clothes. Witnesses, a few survivors of the terrible brutality, had left the courtroom in tears, complaining bitterly that their own credibility was at issue, and not the defendants’.
This was not Schreckenberger’s only concern. Chancellor Helmut Kohl was at that time leading an interim right-wing government and was committed to national elections in March. Raking over the Nazi past was always embarrassing for the conservatives and at that very moment Germany was suffocating under an avalanche of events commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler’s accession to power. With luck, any adverse effects of this would have disappeared by election time. Barbie’s return and the reawakening of past history would definitely not win the conservative government any extra support and, worse, might result in further tribulations. At the outset Schreckenberger refrained from being explicit but Bianco was sufficiently sensitive to understand that it might be worthwhile considering arrangements for an alternative destination for Barbie.
Towards the end of January, Barbie returned to La Paz. Walking in full public gaze along the capital’s main thoroughfare, the Prado, with his bodyguard Alvaro de Castro, he scotched the rumours that he had fled the country. ‘Here I am,’ he told staring reporters. The French, fearing that he had disappeared forever, were relieved when he returned. ‘It would have been so easy,’ recalls one of the Ministers, ‘for him to have disappeared into one of the enormous haciendas in Santa Cruz. The German mafia could easily have hidden him and then flown him out of the country from one of their private airstrips. But he was old, had lost his family and probably just couldn’t be bothered with precautions anymore.’ Some felt that there was even a new self-confidence about him and they were probably right.
Barbie was so sure of his position that, when he was summoned to government offices to arrange the repayment of a $10,000 debt incurred by Transmaritima in 1968, he decided not to take his lawyer. The $10,000 were claimed by Comibol, the state-owned mining corporation. Barbie told officials that he was prepared to repay the amount, but began to haggle excitedly over whether the official or black-market rate of exchange should be used to convert the Bolivian pesos. The argument was cut short by his arrest. The following day, 26 January, Barbie was charged with fraud, with contravening Bolivia’s immigration regulations and with creating a personal army.
Both the French and German governments had expected Barbie’s arrest. As arranged, the German ambassador reapplied for his extradition, and Bianco rang Schreckenberger to discuss how to get Barbie out of Bolivia. The most sensitive issue was Bolivia’s insistence that its sovereignty be protected: Barbie must leave the country on a non-Bolivian airline to give the appearance of a legal extradition. Lufthansa, the German national airline, had a twice-weekly flight out of La Paz, flying via Lima to Frankfurt. It was an ideal solution. The French expected that the Bolivians would put Barbie on the flight and Mario Roncal, the Bolivian Minister of the Interior, agreed. On 27 February, Roncal summoned the French and German chargés d’affaires and told them that the Bolivian government had decided not to await the expected adverse Supreme Court decision and wanted Barbie extradited immediately to Germany. The myth that Barbie’s fate was to be decided by rigorous examination of the law was finally exploded. But now, after weeks of prevarication, the Bonn government refused outright, under any circumstances whatsoever, to allow Barbie to return to Germany.
The Elysée was staggered. The French knew that Zuazo could not prolong Barbie’s imprisonment and that he needed to staunch the embarrassing rumours and leaks now plaguing La Paz. Puzzled and anxious, the Bolivian President urged the Europeans to settle what seemed such a simple matter. Paris urged the Germans just to take Barbie out of La Paz. ‘We just asked them to take him anywhere,’ recalls the Minister, ‘so that we could pick him up. Lima for example. They just stared at us.’ The French then proposed a compromise. Bianco suggested that Barbie be put on the Lufthansa flight from La Paz bound for Lima, and then diverted ‘for atmospheric reasons’ to Cayenne in the French colony of Guiana. On 29 February, Bonn rejected this plan outright. There was no alternative but for Barbie to be expelled to France via Cayenne. The problem now was, how to get him to Cayenne. The DGSE, the Direction Générale de la Sureté Exterieure, was alerted to draw up a rapid plan, in cooperation with the French military, for returning Barbie to French territory without compromising Bolivia’s sovereignty. If Barbie could not be extradited on a German plane, he would have to be expelled on a Bolivian one. The unacceptable alternative was that Barbie would be expelled across any border of his choice and then disappear forever.
Barbie’s expulsion was set for 1 February, but the failure of Paris and Bonn to agree cast uncertainty over arrangements once again. ‘Nobody outside realises how close we were to failure,’ is the view of one French negotiator. ‘We suddenly realised that we might lose Barbie because the situation in Bolivia became very tense.’ Zuazo’s coalition partners led by the Vice-President, Jaime Paz Zamora, began arguing that Barbie’s trial should be held in Bolivia. Some left-wing members had already withdrawn their support for the government, criticising Zuazo’s failure to tackle the paramilitary groups. With his government’s fate in doubt, Zuazo became nervous. More so the following day, when he heard that Barbie’s lawyer, Carrión Constantino, had paid the $10,000 debt and was demanding his client’s immediate release. Carrión was also complaining publicly that he had not been allowed to see his client for the previous forty-eight hours. To add to the President’s discomfort, the lawyer was asking him to explain why Bolivia, whose penal code did not recognise war crimes, was suddenly interested in culpability for ancient events in Europe. ‘It smells like money in return for my client,’ he told anyone who visited his rundown office.
For the next two days, Zuazo prevaricated. Barbie was kept in solitary confinement, not only to isolate him from the arguments about his fate, but also to prevent someone from the German community or from the cocaine trade killing him to prevent him talking. On 4 February it seemed that, again, no decision would be made. The cabinet had travelled 100 kilometres to Lake Titicaca to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the appearance of the virgin of Copacabana. Yet, that night, Bolivian television showed a short film about the Nazi extermination camps, with a picture of Barbie appearing between shots. Towards the end was a clip of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem – ‘The fate,’ said the narrator, ‘of Klaus Barbie.’ The dithering had stopped. It seemed that Barbie’s destination was still uncertain. Lima was the conventional first stop for any flight leaving La Paz for the northern hemisphere, but Aeroperu, the Peruvian national airline, had been ordered by its government not to carry Barbie under any circumstances. Lima had given the same instruction to Lufthansa. Zuazo grew increasingly nervous. International attention was forcing him to resolve the Barbie question within hours; Bolivia’s sense of national esteem demanded that Barbie leave the country on a Bolivian plane, but Bolivian pilots had launched an indefinite strike. The problem seemed insoluble. The DGSE had for some days claimed to have the answer, but the operation’s success depended upon sticking to a precise timetable.
A French military Hercules C-130 would arrive by night at El Alto Airport with its true nationality completely obliterated: instead, it would be disguised as belonging to Lloyds, a privately-owned Bolivian airline. Barbie would have to be brought from the prison just as the plane was landing, and it would take off for its return to Cayenne immediately after refuelling. Several times the Hercules had been about to leave Cayenne but had been held back at the last moment because of indecision in La Paz. Because the attempt could be made only once, the French government would only give the go-ahead when it was convinced that it would be successful. Politicians and officials on both sides of the Atlantic agree that the tension between the two countries at that moment was enormous.
At 9.00 p.m. on Friday 4 February, after several false alarms, two figures shrouded in blankets were rushed from the San Pedro prison and driven towards the airport. Barbie was finally to be expelled for obtaining Bolivian nationality with false papers and a false name. Handcuffed, he was taken to the military side of the airport. The Minister of Information, Rueda Pena, was one of the last Bolivian officials Barbie met. Standing at the foot of the stairs up to the Hercules, Pena told Barbie in German that he was being expelled to Germany. According to Pena, Barbie was quite cheerful about it: ‘He only complained that he was cold because he had not been allowed to take any belongings. I ordered a nearby policeman to hand over his parka.’
Barbie was unaware of the plane’s true destination. French agents, disguised as crew, spoke to the Bolivians in sign language. At the last moment, a Bolivian television crew had been allowed to board the plane and film Barbie’s journey back to France – an unusual privilege, explicable because Ugo Roncal, a member of the team, was the brother of the Minister of the Interior. The camera’s continuous observation of Barbie, recorded on film, reveals him as remarkably unconcerned about the return to his homeland: ‘He continuously asked questions about life in Germany, and for example the cost of a razor.’ In La Paz, the government was asked to explain the legalities of expelling him to French territory. ‘France,’ said Mario Roncal, ‘was the only country who agreed to receive him.’
After seven hours, as it prepared to land at Rochambeau airport near Cayenne, the plane was plunged into darkness. Once it landed, Barbie was taken to the doorway. Below him, in the dim light, he saw the French uniforms of local gendarmes and soldiers. It was a terrible shock. At the foot of the stairs, after a momentary pause, he was formally charged. An hour later, on a French military DC-8 often used by the President, he took off for France, now a very sullen and resentful man. ‘The expulsion was illegal,’ he told Roncal, once again filming Barbie. ‘The Supreme Court refused my extradition several years ago.’ For the remainder of the journey, Barbie reminisced about his early days in Bolivia, his first Jewish employer, and how he had always remained neutral in politics. About his service in France, he just quipped, ‘The past is the past. Woe to the vanquished.’ After some thought he added that two hundred years ago, Napoleon was condemned for his tyranny, yet ‘Now he is a hero.’ Like Napoleon, he realised, he would never again be a free man.
Long before Barbie arrived in Lyons, at the end of the non-stop trans-Atlantic flight, the Klarsfelds had alerted news agencies and journalists. As his plane landed at Orange military airport, some of his surviving victims were already giving anguished accounts of his deeds, while others rushed to the Lyons municipal airport or to the Montluc prison, seeking by their presence some small consolation for the misery he had caused them. At 10.25 p.m. on the Saturday night, a bright-blue police maria carrying Barbie sped through the crowd outside the prison. He could not have seen the simple plaque fixed near the heavy door: 10,000 imprisoned; 7,000 died. The heavy symbolism of this return to the very scene of his crimes was deliberately overladen by French television and newspapers with emotional accounts of Gestapo rule forty years earlier. Brimming over with the excitement of the moment, France’s Prime Minister, Pierre Mauroy, tried to inject a sense of historical solemnity into the event: ‘We did not do this for revenge. First we wanted justice done. And then we wanted to show fidelity to those hours of grief and struggle in which France saved its honour.’ It was a triumph for the French left. But the exultation evaporated very quickly.
A small group of lawyers and officials had been alerted about Barbie’s arrival, amongst them Christian Riss, the examining magistrate, and president of the Lyons bar association, Maître Alain Compagnon de la Servette, who had agreed, in the interests of justice, to act as Barbie’s temporary defence lawyer. In 1954, Servette had defended two Frenchmen accused in the same trial as Barbie. Servette remembers his new (non-paying) client looking ‘tired and prostrate – the effect of jet-lag on an old man. Not the man he was forty years ago.’ In a two-hour session, Barbie’s identity was formally established; he was charged with crimes against humanity and then led to a section of the prison which had been cleared of all other inmates. As he walked across the prison courtyard, he was photographed. The picture’s publication was used as an excuse by the government to transfer him later that week, as previously arranged, to an isolation block in the St Joseph prison – for his own safety.
Servette’s role was difficult. His normal practice is commercial law, but at the outset he felt honour-bound, by virtue of his position, to volunteer to serve Barbie’s interests. In an unassuming way, he enjoyed the publicity and the challenge. Gradually, as he became acquainted with his client on his twice-weekly visits, he admits that he saw a person rather than a monster. Strangely, for some time, Barbie could not come to terms with the fact that he was back in Lyons. ‘He forgot that I lived through his reign,’ says Servette. ‘He even tried to explain to me where the Hôtel Terminus was.’ The lawyer was soon the victim of hate mail and even lost clients for his pains. When he saw the case which Barbie had to answer, he realised that preparing the defence would be an enormous task. There was one consolation. Barbie confessed that he could remember very few names of those with whom he had worked, especially the collaborators. His constant threat to create fear amongst Frenchmen collapsed.
Barbie heard the full charges on 24 February. He was indicted on eight separate counts: the killing of twenty-two hostages, including women and children, in reprisal for an attack on two German policemen in 1943; the arrest and torture of nineteen people in 1943; the liquidation of the eighty-six members of the UGIF on 9 February 1943; the shooting of forty-two people, including forty Jews, during 1943 and 1944; the round-up of French railway workers at Oullins on 9 August 1944, during which two were killed and others wounded; the deportation to Auschwitz and Ravensbrück of about 650 people, half of them Jews, by the last rail convoy to leave Lyons on 11 April 1944; the shooting of seventy Jews at Bron on 17 August 1944 and the shooting of two other Jews and two Roman Catholic priests on 20 August 1944, at St Genis-Laval; and the deportation of fifty-five Jews, including fifty-two children, from Izieu in 1944 (fifty-two was the original government estimate in 1945).
According to Riss, each of the charges can be classified as a crime against humanity, a definite legal anomaly in the French penal code. The specific term, ‘crimes against humanity’, was ‘adopted’ by Allied lawyers in 1945 as one of the indictments against the leaders of the Third Reich for the main Nuremberg trial. It was a piece of blatant legalistic improvisation to render Nazi atrocities – the extermination camps for example – retrospectively illegal despite their ‘legality’ under Nazi law. Critics would argue that power had been substituted for principle. Under the Nuremberg Charter, crimes against humanity were defined as, ‘Murder, extermination, deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecution on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.’ The Allied lawyers viewed it as a suitable charge against the leaders of the Third Reich, but did not intend that it should be used for crimes committed by individual German officers in the field. These were all charged under the normal laws of warfare. After 1945, none of the Allies included crimes against humanity within their domestic law.
Towards the end of 1964, however, there was a sudden panic amongst French Resistants. According to French law, crimes can be punished only within twenty years of their commission. After that, they are prescribed and the criminal is free of all risk. That prescription was sacred to French criminal law and applied equally to all crimes, including crimes committed by the Germans during the Occupation. To their consternation, the French suddenly realised that SS officers of ‘Das Reich’ Panzer Division, who had been responsible for such massacres in France as the slaughter of 642 men, women and children in Oradour in June 1944, could in 1965 return to the scene of their crime and, with complete impunity and immunity, parade their ‘successes’ in front of their children. Under their commander, General Heinz Lammerding, who at the time was head of a construction company in Düsseldorf, they regularly held parties to celebrate their wartime years. None of them, despite being sentenced to death by French courts in their absence, had ever served any sentence. The French suddenly conjured up a revolting image of ex-SS officers, in 1965, taking coach trips to Oradour to celebrate on the spot.
In an emotional three-day debate starting on 16 December 1964, the National Assembly confronted their dilemma. The vast majority of German war criminals had not been punished and were leading prosperous lives in the new Federal Republic. The only legal tool available to maintain their criminal status was to incorporate Nuremberg’s ‘crimes against humanity’ into the French penal code and declare them exempt from the statute of limitations. The proposal was enacted on 26 December by ‘taking note’ retrospectively that crimes against humanity are imprescribable. This inevitably became the subject of interminable, intricate legal squabbles, not least because it offended the basic criterion of a crime: that it should have defined penalties.
Barbie’s lawyers will find it difficult to challenge the legality of that legislation. Paul Touvier, Barbie’s wartime collaborator, has already tried and failed. So have Maurice Papon and Jean Leguay, two former Vichy officials who allegedly collaborated with the Germans in the deportation of French Jews to Auschwitz. They were suddenly hauled from apparent respectability into the limelight by Serge Klarsfeld on charges of crimes against humanity – a category, they argue, which was intended for the prosecution of Germans, not Frenchmen. The examination of their wartime collaboration continues.
Whether, in Barbie’s case, the eight crimes can be interpreted as crimes against humanity will be open to argument. He would have to prove that those deported or killed were involved in acts of Resistance, and that deportation was not a crime against humanity because special conditions apply in wartime. Barbie’s defence, so far, has been to plead, firstly, ignorance; secondly, that he left Lyons for the last time on 17 August 1944 and never returned, and therefore cannot be responsible for anything which occurred after that date; thirdly, that he was only the third-ranking officer in the Gestapo headquarters and therefore cannot be held responsible for general commands; fourthly, that, if anyone was tortured, it was done by subordinates; and fifthly, concerning the Jews, that, in signing the two telexes to Paris, he was standing in for the specialists normally sent from Adolf Eichmann’s team. He claims that he sent the telexes as a mere administrative chore. He vehemently denies having been in Izieu; that he said, was ‘Wenzel’s responsibility’ (Wenzel died during the 26 May Allied bombing of Lyons). As proof, he argues that his name on the Izieu telegram is preceded by the letters IA, the German for ‘Im Auftrage’, meaning ‘Acting under orders’. It is a weak argument because all Gestapo officers used that format, even Adolf Eichmann. Barbie also denies that he knew the fate of any of those deported, including the children. It is an argument which a French jury will hear with some scepticism, if only because his superior, Werner Knab, was a member of an Einsatzgrüppe in the east.
‘It was only because of the children of Izieu that I chased after Barbie, and on that he’ll be convicted,’ says Serge Klarsfeld. ‘In 1944, there were lots of refugee homes for Jewish children in France, and the Gestapo knew all about them. Only two Gestapo officers in the whole of France didn’t deliberately ignore them, both because it was the end of the war, and they were after all children. That was Alois Brunner and Barbie. Barbie must be convicted because he murdered those harmless children of Izieu.’
At the beginning of June 1983, Barbie changed lawyers. The modest, uncommitted Servette was replaced by the flamboyant, left-wing Jacques Verges. Verges claims that Barbie approached him because he is famous in both Germany and France for championing unpopular causes. His former clients include Algerians fighting against the French army during their war of independence, Palestinian-backed aeroplane hijackers, and German members of the Baader-Meinhof group. Verges only started work again in France four years ago. During the previous ten years, he had disappeared; some suspect that he was in China and Albania, others say that he was in the Middle East. He refuses to reveal his whereabouts. In the early Sixties, he edited a well-financed magazine called Revolution, a pro-Chinese monthly devoted to the Third World. One of his earliest contributors was Régis Debray who wrote about the guerrillas in Venezuela. Twenty years ago, the two were comrades for the same cause. Verges does not hide his present disdain for Debray: ‘He is now an official, and I am still fighting a cause.’ He is clearly delighted at the opportunity to embarrass the unfaithful.
Verges’ first objective is to expose the deceptive Hercules flight. He is convinced that, because Barbie was expelled rather than extradited, he will have to be released. ‘The key is that the expulsion was the result of connivance between the French and Bolivian governments, and the French courts will refuse to judge a case where an expulsion or extradition is improper.’ Klarsfeld laughingly rejects Verges’ argument. The lawyers will clash about the interpretation of jurisprudence, but even Verges is realistic about the slim chance of finding a French judge who is prepared to order Barbie’s release and face the consequences. ‘To release him,’ says the Marxist, ‘would be a victory for French justice and would halt this appalling piece of theatre. Riss’s dossier against Barbie is thin and unconvincing.’ It is the natural brazenness of the lawyer for the defence. To Klarsfeld’s insistence that Barbie will be convicted for sending the Izieu children to Auschwitz, Verges answers that his client had nothing at all to do with the Jews, ‘He was just number three in the Gestapo, obeying orders.’ Klarsfeld, delighted that Barbie’s lawyer not only speaks his client’s language but even seems to believe in his defence, insists that because Barbie’s SS written record describes him as ‘the dynamo of the department’, there will be no doubt that the twelve-man jury will be convinced that Barbie was a ferocious leader rather than a meek subordinate.
On 5 March, Barbie’s daughter Ute travelled from Austria to visit him. To the press she said, ‘He is still for me my father, a very good father, not a war criminal,’ and claimed that the two-hour meeting had been ‘very moving’. But those who saw the reunion were surprised by the lack of emotion. The following day, Barbie was rushed to hospital with a strangulated intestine. The medical expert who had made the diagnosis was Dr René Guillet. In 1944, Guillet had been a young doctor in the Ain Resistance, close to both Heslop and Romans-Petit. Among the many brutalities he witnessed was an incident that resulted from a visit by a Gestapo detachment, led by Floreck, to the hospital in Nantua on 12 July. Nine patients, too wounded and sick to be evacuated, were seized and executed in a nearby village. ‘It was a shock when I walked in and saw the patient in the flesh, but then I treated him like any other sick man.’
Forty years on, the unforgettable was still unforgivable, but the society which Barbie had tried to demolish had proved that its humanitarianism had more than survived.