KLAUS BARBIE WAS the epitome of the Nazi criminal: the man who arrested and tortured the famous French Resistance hero Jean Moulin, who sent the forty-four Jewish children in Izieu to their deaths, who fled to the ends of the earth to avoid capture. It took us sixteen years to bring him to justice.
So long after the events, the question of punishing criminals convicted in France appeared pointless to some people, inspired only by a desire for vengeance, even futile. This was absolutely untrue. It was not a question of turning back to the past but of expressing a country’s democratic will.
Even after the Barbie affair entered our lives, we did not give up our systematic protests against desk killers such as Lischka and Hagen. On January 13, 1972, we went to Herbert Hagen’s comfortable house in Warstein, accompanied by five young people, one former deportee, and several journalists. Armed with flyers summarizing his career, showing his photograph, and giving his address, we plastered the entire house with the leaflets. The police arrived soon after we began, but they did not intervene. In the afternoon, we went around town, handing out the flyers and engaging in lively discussions with the citizens of Warstein. Some of them approved of our actions; others thought it was “ancient history” and should be left alone. But all of them were made aware of Hagen’s past, as were thousands of other people when the protest was broadcast on television and radio and covered in newspapers. Thanks to what was known as die Klarsfeld-Gruppe, Herbert Hagen’s SS secrets were brought to light.
Meanwhile, I was feeling a great material strain: there were four of us living in a two-room apartment, its floors covered in dossiers; the future was uncertain and the present filled with threats of violence, almost on a daily basis. But if Serge and I gave up, who would oppose the Nazi criminals’ rehabilitation? We had to overcome the obstacle of our poverty, and so we did.
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OUR CONFRONTATION WITH Klaus Barbie began on July 25, 1971. I was doing research at the CDJC that day, trying to work out a precise organization chart for the German intelligence departments in occupied France, when the center’s director, Mr. Mazor, handed me a document he had just received: “I think you might find this interesting.” It was a photocopy of the decision rendered on June 22, 1971, by the Munich prosecutor Dr. Wolfgang Rabl to close the Klaus Barbie file. This decision had not been made public. As I read the ten-page explanation for closing the file on the “Butcher of Lyon,” twice sentenced to death by Lyon’s military tribunal, I gradually realized the consequences of this act. The German courts, aware that the Franco-German legal agreement of February 2, 1971, threatened all the former Nazis now living peacefully in West Germany, aimed to use the Barbie case to set a legal precedent; it was also a way of testing the French people’s determination to pursue Nazi criminals. If they let Barbie be rehabilitated, then all the other Nazis who had terrorized France would undoubtedly follow suit.
It was a flagship case, and we had to fight relentlessly to have the case reopened in Munich.
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I TRANSLATED THE ten pages of the prosecutor’s argument that night; this would constitute the first element in our case file. Serge and I decided to base our campaign on three approaches: gathering and disseminating the most complete documentation possible on Barbie; using this dossier to mobilize public opinion in France and West Germany; and using the reactions in the Lyon region to the closing of the file to confront the Munich prosecutor with his error of judgment and force him to rethink it.
After a few days of intense research, I had put together a solid file of sixty pages. This dossier was then sent to the international press agencies, all the main German and French newspapers and magazines, the Resistance groups in Lyon, and the relevant authorities in both countries.
It was imperative that we kick up a storm in Lyon. If Rabl’s decision did not provoke angry protests in the city where Barbie had committed his crimes, the Germans would think that the people of France shared the Munich prosecutor’s opinion of the case.
On July 27, I went to the Parisian offices of the Lyon newspaper Progrès and informed the journalist André Severac about the case. The next day, the paper ran a large article headlined “German Prosecutor Abandons the Case Against Klaus Barbie, Head of the Gestapo in Lyon and Torturer of Jean Moulin.”
There were numerous follow-up stories in the following days, with local groups as well as prominent figures expressing their indignation. On August 1, I went to Lyon to persuade the people there not only to protest but to fight. An article in Progrès appeared the next day, quoting me:
“You, the people of Lyon, must not accept the decision of Munich’s prosecutor to suspend the case against Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo chief who shed so much blood and so many tears in your city and the region around it. And I, a German woman, am telling you this…” The documents given to us by B.K. speak for themselves. They are photocopies of orders signed and countersigned by Klaus Barbie regarding the arrests and deportations of hundreds of Jews rounded up in Lyon and its surrounding region.
“But if the German witnesses have lost their memory of events back then, here there are men and women who bear the scars of those cruel, unfading memories. They can testify, and not based on hearsay. There are, alas, very few survivors from the sinister cellars on Avenue Berthelot or the deportation camps. “Those survivors,” B.K. says, “those people who were tortured by Klaus Barbie, must come forward and tell their stories. The case against him has only been suspended. If we can gather enough precise witness testimony, we can have it reopened.”
In the following weeks, articles began to appear in the Parisian press, too, climaxing in a piece in Le Monde on August 17, which concluded: “The recently publicized decision by the Munich prosecutor to close the case file on Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo chief in Lyon, has provoked numerous protests in France. In a press release, LICA described the “profound emotion” its members had felt on learning of the decision and called on all organizations associated with the Resistance to join together in a large protest march on September 3 and 4 in Lyon. A delegation of former Resistance fighters and deportees will also travel to Munich early next month.”
The Barbie campaign was under way in France.
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NEXT, I HARASSED the Parisian correspondents of the big German daily newspapers and took particular care to inform the Munich press about the case. A long article appeared in the Frankfurter Rundschau under the headline “German Justice Again Seen in a Bad Light: Outrage in France at Decision to Discharge Barbie”: “The Munich prosecutor’s office can expect a turbulent next few weeks. In the French press—on the right and the left—questions are once again being asked about the genuineness of West Germany’s desire for justice to be served on a sad chapter in the Franco-German past.”
I returned to Lyon on August 21 to push for progress on the Munich delegation. The date was set for September 13, and several of the delegates would have their expenses paid by LICA.
While I was in the region, I went to visit my son, who was at a summer camp in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a town famous for having protected fleeing Jews during the Second World War. With Arno, the sunshine, and the kind people of that town, it felt like paradise regained after the purgatory of running a campaign, with all its frustrations and dead ends and its constant fear of failure.
On August 24, Serge came across a document for the deportation convoy of August 11, 1944, drawn up by the research department of the International Red Cross: this convoy took to Auschwitz the last Jews in Lyon to have escaped deportation or execution. Three hundred and eight names were on that list, alongside the forty-two names of Jews summarily killed in the Gestapo’s cellars, with the dates of each execution. Barbie was directly responsible for the fate of all these Jews. The Lyon newspaper Progrès published the lists in their entirety.
The delegation took shape on September 3 during a meeting at a Resistance organization. It wasn’t easy, as many of the potential delegates were facing practical problems of finance and organization, but I did my best to raise enough money to pay for their travel expenses. I pointed out that the impact of this protest was likely to be all the more powerful, as it would occur the day before a Franco-German legal symposium in Bonn, attended by the French minister of justice René Pleven, to whom I had written asking him to raise the issue with his German counterpart.
During my speech, one of the Resistance members stood up and addressed the others: “Wake up, will you? When a German has to tell you to do your duty, there’s something wrong!”
In Munich, the prosecutor’s office, prompted by the prospect of this delegation, announced that, if new evidence could be produced, the dossier could still be reopened. Serge and I began meticulously researching Barbie’s past at the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation.
Many of our leads turned out to be dead ends, but we did eventually find a more promising one. Serge noted that the General Union of Israelites in France—the organization created at Kurt Lischka’s instigation, to represent the Jewish population with the French and occupying authorities—had a liaison office with the Gestapo’s Jewish Affairs Department. In 1943 and 1944, this liaison office was run by a Jewish former lawyer from Berlin, Kurt Schendel. His was an unpleasant job, as it involved direct contact with the two supervisors of the Final Solution in France: SS Heinz Röthke, head of the Gestapo’s Jewish Affairs Department, and Alois Brunner, Eichmann’s assistant. Brunner ran a special commando tasked with accelerating the rate of arrests and deportations, and Röthke took care of the administrative aspects of the work.
Alois Brunner disappeared in 1945. As for Heinz Röthke, who was just as active and responsible, he died a natural death in 1968, after a prosperous career as a legal adviser in Wolfsburg, West Germany, despite being sentenced to death in absentia in France. Röthke did not spend a single minute of his life in prison.
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WE THOUGHT THAT the former lawyer Schendel, with his SS contacts like Brunner and Röthke, would be able to provide information on Barbie and on how much the regional Gestapo leaders knew about the fate of the Jews sent to Auschwitz. Prosecutor Rabl had concluded that there was nothing to prove that Barbie knew what would happen to those Jews he sent to Drancy. This was the official version of the Final Solution, limiting those who knew the truth about the Jewish genocide to a microscopic minority of Nazi dignitaries and thus absolving the German people as a whole.
We found Kurt Schendel’s phone number in the Paris directory. We called several times but got no answer. Not until September 6, when the voice on the other end of the line confirmed that, yes, he was that Kurt Schendel, and he had just returned from vacation. And, yes, he remembered Klaus Barbie, even if he had never met him.
We met Dr. Schendel, and on September 8, he made a statement in German:
My observations during the year I spent around department IV-B and the numerous conversations I had with all those people, as well as the insinuations of other German departments, gave me the irrefutable conviction that all the heads of department IV-B, except perhaps those at the very bottom of the ladder—in other words, certainly Röthke, Brunner, and the heads of the Jewish sections in the Sipo-SD’s regional Kommandos—knew exactly what fate awaited the deported Jews.
I saw reports in which Barbie pursued the Jews with particular zeal. In late 1943 or early 1944, I was present at a meeting with the UGIF’s board of directors for the southern zone. There was much talk at this meeting about the executions of Jews arrested by Barbie and later shot without a trial. One of the delegates said they had constantly tried to intervene in favor of the arrested Jews so that they would, at least, not be shot. Barbie responded to this request with the words: “Shot or deported—what’s the difference?” This remained in my memory: at the time, we could not understand those words, but our anxiety about the fate of the deportees was certainly heightened. Brunner sent his assistant, SS-Oberscharführer Weiszel, to Lyon for a few months, and Weiszel—who had been a member of Brunner’s special Kommando in Thessaloníki—could have given Barbie eyewitness reports on what happened to the Jews who were deported to the east.
This statement seemed to us a significant document. But we had to find the UGIF director to whom Barbie had said, “Shot or deported—what’s the difference?” Because, in this precise instance, Dr. Schendel’s testimony was only hearsay.
Serge looked at all the minutes for the UGIF’s board of directors, checked the list of directors’ names, and made a lot of phone calls to try to find out what had become of them all. But twenty-eight years had passed …
* * *
IN THE MEANTIME, I found out that the organizers of the trip to Munich had gone to see the German consul in Lyon. On hearing that I was involved in the protest, the consul had recommended that they limit the number of their delegates to twelve and that they keep their distance from me so as not to be compromised by proximity to a scandalous woman. From the embarrassed voices of the organizers on the phone, I guessed that they had been persuaded of this and that they would adopt an extremely respectful attitude toward the German authorities.
I had already organized everything in Munich, called all the region’s newspapers, television channels, and radio stations, alerted the anti-fascist associations, so that there would be a big welcoming committee at the airport when we arrived. The Germans were expecting the “French Resistance”: a group of people who would demand justice. They were expecting flags, medals, anger, and determination, not just a dozen French people who looked like any other group of tourists. Given the delegation’s state of mind, I now believed that the trip’s likely repercussions were very limited. In a confrontation like that, only a show of strength could make the prosecutor change his mind. And this was shaping up to be more of a show of weakness.
Once again, the archives of the CDJC proved a precious source of help. Among the children arrested by Barbie in the Jewish orphanage at Izieu, there were three brothers: Jacques, Richard, and Jean-Claude Benguigui, aged thirteen, six, and five, respectively. They were immediately transferred to Drancy, as Barbie indicated in a telex on April 6, 1944, to IV-B in Paris: “In the early hours of the morning today, the Jewish children from the orphanage in Izieu were deported. In total, forty-one children were arrested, aged between three and thirteen. Furthermore, the arrest of the entirety of the Jewish staff was successful; this comprised ten people, five of them women. No cash or other valuable objects were recovered. The transportation to Drancy took place on April 7, 1944.”
I found the names of the Benguigui children on the list for the convoy of April 13, 1944, to Auschwitz, where they were murdered. We found the name of Alexandre Halaunbrenner—the brother of some other children from the orphanage, deported by Barbie—in the directory. He knew Fortunée Benguigui, the mother of the three boys. She lived on Rue des Franc-Bourgeois, in Le Marais. I went to see her. Mrs. Benguigui had herself been deported to Auschwitz on July 31, 1943, where she was horribly tortured in the medical experiments block. While she was in the camp, she had harbored the hope that her children were safe in that secret orphanage, but, in the spring of 1944, she saw a pile of clothes discarded by people who had then been gassed and recognized a sweater belonging to her son Jacques, knitted for him by his grandmother in Algeria.
I explained to Mrs. Benguigui that the man responsible for the deaths of her children had had his charges dropped in Germany, and I asked her if she felt strong enough to go to Munich with me. She did.
So there would be a show of strength in Munich after all.
* * *
A FEW DAYS before our departure, Laure Moulin, sister of the Resistance hero Jean, sent me a letter that encouraged me: “I don’t know how to express my admiration for the unswerving courage you have shown in your battle to ensure that your country acknowledges the Nazis’ errors and crimes, and that it sends them to prison forever.”