AFTER OUR FAILED attempt at kidnapping Barbie, we kept constant watch over him. How? It was our friend Lisa who helped us. This time, she had to go to Bolivia, approach Barbie, and try to find out whether he intended to stay in the country or not.
Her plan of action was simple: elegantly dressed, she would go to the German club in La Paz, where she would engage in conversation with one of the regulars; she would play the part of a right-wing German woman who had just visited Machu Picchu in Peru and had come to Bolivia to see Lake Titicaca. When the moment was ripe, she would mention that she’d heard that Klaus Barbie lived nearby. And that is exactly what happened. The German man she talked to, an industrialist, said that he knew Barbie well and, three days after her arrival in La Paz, Lisa was invited into the Barbie family home, where she ate dinner with them. She found out that Barbie was happy in Bolivia and felt very comfortable under Colonel Banzer’s regime. Lisa kept in touch with the Barbies, and later she would return briefly to La Paz on two occasions to make sure Barbie had not changed his mind about leaving Bolivia.
In August 1982, I publicly reproached the French courts for not yet having charged Barbie. Based on the 1964 ruling that the statute of limitations did not apply to crimes against humanity, the investigation against him had to take into account the new facts we had uncovered, which had not figured into his 1954 trial in absentia: the abduction of forty-four children in Izieu, the Rue Sainte-Catherine roundup, and the deportee convoy of August 11, 1944.
We filed charges against Barbie, supporting our case with very precise documentation of these new facts. This was necessary for France to be able to approach Bolivia once again. In fact, our protest was effective, and Barbie was charged in Lyon.
* * *
IN EARLY 1982, Lisa flew to Bolivia again to review Barbie’s situation. The country’s military regime was tottering, but Barbie did not seem overly concerned about Bolivia’s political problems, as he was focused on his personal difficulties: the death of his wife in 1982 and of his son, Klaus-Georg, just before that. His daughter, Ute, had moved to Munich, where she worked as a secretary to Hans Rudel, who had crossed our path back in 1976 at the Bürgerbräukeller.
Barbie was very active in Bolivia’s military special services during the crackdowns that followed each coup d’état or sudden change of dictator. And there was a whole series of these changes in the late 1970s and early 1980s, each new dictator basing his support on the army. Finally, the military lost all credibility, and the Bolivian people pressured Congress into naming Hernán Siles Zuazo the new president in October 1982.
That same year, a Bolivian exile told us that he was going back to Bolivia and that he would attempt to assassinate Barbie. We wished him good luck. Soon afterward, he called us from La Paz and told us that he was abandoning his plan because the dictatorship was crumbling and there was a possibility of acting legally against Barbie. Now the ball was in our court. I got back in touch with Régis Debray, who was now, along with Jacques Attali, one of President François Mitterrand’s two main advisers. In his memoir Verbatim, Attali summarized what happened next:
August 3, 1982. Serge Klarsfeld has just reminded Régis Debray of how, in 1973, the two of them attempted to abduct Barbie.
October 5, 1982. Hernán Siles Zuazo, the democratically elected president of Bolivia, is sworn into office. Klaus Barbie is perhaps accessible once again. Régis Debray continues to negotiate with the Bolivian minister of the interior, his friend Gustavo Sánchez [Salazar]. Klarsfeld has an idea: if the Bolivians deliver Barbie to Cayenne [in French Guiana], we can pick him up there.
October 27, 1982. Régis Debray meets with Serge Klarsfeld and informs the president. Klarsfeld believes that either we can obtain Barbie’s extradition or the Bolivians can expel him. The president [of France] agrees to begin proceedings.
January 26, 1983. Barbie is arrested in La Paz, as planned. Debray is working on a plan with Klarsfeld and Sánchez. The Bolivians will bring their prisoner to Cayenne, where we will take delivery of him.
February 3, 1983. Jean-Louis Bianco, general secretary of the French presidency, is organizing the French military expedition that will bring Barbie back from Cayenne. For Serge Klarsfeld, this represents ten years of struggle finally crowned with success.
* * *
IN LA PAZ, our friend Gustavo had become the state secretary for security and the Bolivian president’s trusted right-hand man. On February 4, 1983, the president appointed him vice-minister of the interior, so that he would have the authority to extradite Barbie to France. Barbie, meanwhile, was being held in San Pedro Prison for refusing to pay an old debt of ten thousand dollars. When at last he decided to settle up, he did not have enough money to cover the accumulated interest, so Gustavo was able to keep him behind bars until the moment when he was ushered directly from prison to a Hercules C-130 military airplane, which took him to Cayenne. That same day, the Bolivian cabinet had decided to expel Barbie, strip him of his Bolivian citizenship, and label him an undesirable alien.
On February 5, 1983, Barbie returned to France. Beate and I were greatly relieved after ten years of tension and the fear that we would not realize our goal.
We found ourselves in a media storm, the subject of innumerable interviews. The French president François Mitterrand granted us both the Legion of Honor in 1984, and that same year the glamorous Farrah Fawcett played Beate in an acclaimed made-for-TV movie entitled Manhunt: The Beate Klarsfeld Story. My role was played by Tom Conti. Twenty-four years later, another TV movie, The Hunt, also told our story, this time starring Franka Potente and Yvan Attal.
Despite the sense of celebration, we knew that we had to prepare meticulously for the coming trial.
* * *
I HAD BEEN asking the president’s office for some time to give me the green light to try to find the original telex regarding Izieu. Dated April 6, 1944, this document concerned the Jewish orphanage and the transfer of the children to Drancy the following day. To convict Barbie, we would need this original document.
The Izieu telex had been borrowed for the Nuremberg Trials from the archives of the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation. It had been photocopied by the court’s reprographics unit, and I had managed to obtain three authenticated copies: one in The Hague, another in Washington, D.C., and the third in Nuremberg. The original telex could not be found at the CDJC. I was given permission by the president’s office to search anywhere I liked. I tried the archives of the Foreign Ministry’s legal department, but to no avail.
At the National Archives, the director of the contemporary section allowed me to see all the archives they possessed for the years 1940 to 1944. I was dumbstruck by the sheer number of dossiers that no researcher had ever seen before, including all of the documents pertaining to the investigations that led to the trials of Bousquet, Darquier de Pellepoix, Bussière (the Paris police chief), and Hennequin (director of the municipal police). This material aided me immensely in writing Vichy-Auschwitz, enabling me to explain in detail for the first time how the Final Solution unfolded in France.
I worked feverishly for several weeks, recopying entire documents. It was a source of great satisfaction for me to become a historian again, knowing for certain just how necessary my task was. Time ceased to exist: I would enter the archives and spend whole days in 1942.
As for the original telex, I located it in early 1984, after receiving permission from the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation to search the basement, where dozens of boxes filled with various archives had been put after the CDJC had moved from a different building. Inside the second box, the CDJC’s archivist and I opened a dossier entitled “Abetz” and found inside it, in excellent condition, the Izieu telex.
What had happened? In 1949, for the trial of Otto Abetz, a historian at the CDJC had taken this document to the investigating judge to prove the nature of the German crimes perpetrated when Abetz was the ambassador in Paris. Back at the CDJC, the dossier had not been reopened, and the document had not been put back in its correct place. And when the center moved to a different building, the dossier had ended up in the basement. To me, this discovery really seemed like a miracle, and for a moment I picked up my dialogue with God, interrupted forty years before.
* * *
THE FIRST VOLUME of Vichy-Auschwitz, about the events of 1942, appeared in the spring of 1983 in France. Le Monde, in a review under the headline “Holocaust-sur-Seine,” commented: “What a shock!” The second volume, dealing with the years 1943 to 1944, was published in 1985. This volume provided the historical background to the cases of Barbie, Bousquet, Leguay, and Papon, which were all in the public eye at the same time.
* * *
ON JULY 18, 1986, at my suggestion, the mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, inaugurated the Place des Martyrs-Juifs-du-Vélodrome-d’Hiver. In his speech, Chirac quoted the concluding lines of Vichy-Auschwitz, a sentence I had spent a long time crafting: “The Jews of France will always remember that, while the Vichy regime ended in moral bankruptcy and dishonored itself with its efficient contribution to the loss of one-quarter of the Jewish population of this country, the remaining three-quarters effectively owe their survival to the compassion of the French people as a whole, and to their active solidarity from the moment they realized that the Jewish families who had fallen into German hands were doomed.”
I felt, that day, as if the monumental work of ten years had been condensed into a few lines containing a truth that contradicted the narratives of numerous other historians—a truth that would, of necessity, prevail.