Exorcising Old Ghosts

By John Kohan

Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyon, "brings back the past

Few Nazi war criminals have been so hated in France as Klaus Barbie, the infamous "Butcher of Lyon." While serving as head of the Gestapo in Lyon from 1942 to 1944, Barbie ordered the execution of more than 4,000 people and the deportation of 7,000 French Jews to concentration camps. His hands were also stained with the blood of Jean Moulin, France's most revered Resistance leader, who is believed to have died under torture in 1943. Twice Barbie was tried in absentia for his crimes and sentenced to death by French tribunals. But for more than three decades the Nazi managed to escape punishment and, indeed, prospered in Bolivia under the alias Klaus Altmann.

Last week Barbie, 69, was back in Lyon, locked away in Montluc, the prison where he tortured and jailed thousands. The full details of his heinous past and his flight from justice have yet to be told, but when he is brought to trial a third time, a Pandora's box of incriminating evidence against a number of French collaborators may be opened. The trial could even provide embarrassing details of a U.S. scheme to enlist the former Gestapo officer as an intelligence source after World War II.

Word of Barbie's expulsion from Bolivia stunned France. BARBIE: THE GHOSTS RETURN, read the headline of Le Quotidien de Paris. An equally macabre banner was printed by Le Figaro: THE DEVILS EXHUMED. Even before Barbie's arrival in Lyon, relatives of some of his victims began to gather in front of the heavy green wooden doors of Montluc in silent vigil. "I just want to get a look at his face," said a woman who survived Dachau. In the end, there was nothing to see. Closely guarded by French security agents, the prisoner flashed I past in a blue armored police van.

France had previously demanded the return of Barbie, but Bolivian military leaders with close ties to the ex-Nazi businessman had refused. When leftist civilians took office in Bolivia last October, President Franc,ois Mitterrand's government decided to try again. This time the Bolivians agreed to cooperate. In an apparent effort to pave the way for Barbie's expulsion, Bolivian police picked him up on Jan. 25 and charged him with fraud in connection with a $10,000 loan from the state. Barbie immediately repaid the debt, plus interest, but it did him little good. Instead of releasing him, Bolivian officials put him on a plane bound for Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana. When told he had been handed over to French authorities, the Butcher of Lyon made a gesture, as if slitting his throat.

The French government did everything it could to ensure that Barbie was hustled out of Latin America without incident. The Elysee dispatched a presidential DC-8 jet to Cayenne to fly him back to France. West Germany had also sought Barbie's extradition, but the Bonn government decided to let the French have him. Cynics were quick to point out that the Mitterrand government's dogged effort to bring the Nazi to trial could only win votes for the Socialists in the French municipal elections set for next month.

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

With reporting by William Blaylock, Tala Skari This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.