Barbie, Klaus

[OCTOBER 25, 1913–SEPTEMBER 25, 1991]

German Officer, Chief of the Gestapo in France

A German officer during World War II, Klaus Barbie was the chief of the Gestapo in Lyons, France, between November 1942, when the Germans assumed control of the previously unoccupied zone, and the occupation's collapse after the Allied D-Day landings in Normandy. Subsequently known as the Butcher of Lyons for his responsibility for the wartime arrest, deportation, torture, and death of thousands, Barbie finally appeared before a French court in 1987, after having lived for three decades in South America under the assumed name Klaus Altmann. His trial was the first in France to deal explicitly with crimes against humanity.

Barbie seems to have escaped justice in the postwar period because of his work on behalf of the United States as a counterintelligence agent. In 1951 he found his way to La Paz, Bolivia, and although tried in France and sentenced to death twice in absentia, in 1952 and 1954, he virtually disappeared until discovered by the French Nazi-hunters Beata and Serge Klarsfeld in 1971. Extradited to France in 1983, Barbie was charged with crimes against humanity committed against civilians, particularly Jews—charges that gained an independent status in French law in the mid-1960s, and for which the twenty-year statute of limitations for war crimes did not apply. In a controversial decision, the Cour de cassation, the highest appeals court in France, defined crimes against humanity as those perpetrated "in the name of a state practicing a hegemonic political ideology. . . not only against persons because they belong to a racial or religious group, but also against the adversaries of this [state] policy, whatever the form of their opposition."

The two-month trial of Klaus Barbie, which opened on May 11, 1987, was a cause célèbre in France and, it has been claimed, marked a turning point in the French memory of the Holocaust and wartime resistance. Specifically, Barbie was charged, among other crimes, with having led a raid on the headquarters of the Jewish council in Lyons, with the deportation to Auschwitz of forty-three Jewish children and five adults who were seized from a place of hiding in the village of Izieu, and with the deportation of various other victims, both Jews and members of the French Resistance. Despite the efforts of Barbie's brilliant defense lawyer, Jacques Vergès, to divert attention from his client's wrongdoings to allegations of misdeeds on the part of the Resistance, France's historic complicity in war crimes in Algeria, and even Israeli policies, the extensive publicity generated by the evidence highlighted the sufferings of Barbie's victims—both Jews and the wartime resistance. In the end Barbie was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment—the maximum sentence allowed by French law. Barbie died in prison in 1991. He was the last ranking Nazi to be tried by a tribunal of justice.

SEE ALSO Crimes Against Humanity; Gestapo; Prosecution; SS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Douglas, Lawrence (2001). The Memory of Judgement: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Finkielkraut, Alain (1991). Remembering in Vain: the Klaus Barbie Trial and Crimes against Humanity, tran. Roxanne Lapidus with Sima Godfrey. New York: Columbia University Press.

Rousso, Henry (1991). The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, tran. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Michael R. Marrus