France: Exorcising Old Ghosts

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Barbie's arrest was particularly gratifying to Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, a French lawyer and his German-born wife who have specialized in tracking down Nazi criminals. When a Munich court tried to close the Barbie case in 1971, Beate Klarsfeld launched an international protest campaign that eventually turned up information on the missing SS man's whereabouts in Latin America. Largely on the basis of new evidence from the Klarsfelds, Lyon Magistrate Christian Riss decided to reopen the Barbie dossier in February 1982. This was necessary because his 1947 and 1954 convictions had lapsed as a result of France's 20-year statute of limitations on war crimes. Last November, Riss officially indicted the one time Gestapo captain for "crimes against humanity," giving the Mitterrand government legal ground for going after Barbie.

During their investigation, the Klarsfelds also concluded that Barbie might have had links to U.S. Intelligence in the years after the war. Because the Americans were using the Gestapo man to glean information on operations in Soviet-controlled areas, they allegedly refused to turn him over to French security. Erhard Dabringhaus, a language professor at Detroit's Wayne State University, worked for Army counterintelligence in 1948, and claims that he was ordered to find Barbie a safe house in Germany and pay him $1,700 a month, a sum that went a long way in postwar Europe, for his intelligence reports. When Dabringhaus found out about Barbie's checkered past, he informed his superiors. Says he: "They told me to forget it for now. When he was 'no longer useful, they would deal with him." They never did. In 1951 Barbie turned up in Genoa, Italy, before escaping to Bolivia with documents issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

More details are bound to come to light when the trial begins next year. Because of the statute of limitations much of the evidence presented previously will be inadmissible this time in court. But prosecutors have compiled a full dossier for his new trial. He will probably be charged with rounding up and shooting railway employees in Oullins, outside of Lyon, and organizing a police raid in which 86 Jews were arrested. The most poignant case against him centers on the deportation of 41 Jewish orphans, aged 3 to 13, from the village of Izieux to the Auschwitz death camp. If convicted, however, Barbie will escape the guillotine, since France abolished the death penalty in 1981.

The Barbie trial could prove a long and lacerating experience for a nation that has still not fully come to terms with its wartime past, especially if Barbie should begin to give the names of Frenchmen who collaborated with him. Says Lyon Newspaper Editor Bernard Villeneuve: "For France, this affair will be an exorcism. This has marked our political life for 40 years. While I do not want to deny the past, I do think that my generation is tired. They would like to put it behind them once and for all." It might not prove so easy. The Butcher of Lyon can no longer imprison and torture, but he still has the means to make France suffer.

—By John Kohan. Reported by William Blaylock/Paris and Tala Skari/Lyon