BARBIE LEAVES THE BOX
Sam White questions how much
France has to fear from the revelations of Klaus Barbie
Paris `FRANCE'S shame' was the headline the Guardian newspaper chose to put on its report of the opening day of the trial of Klaus Barbie in Lyon, before the charges had even been read or a witness had spoken. This assumption that the trial of this Gestapo chief in war-time France would turn to France's discredit and even to the discredit of the French Resistance was also shared by the New York Times, the Washington Post and the organ of the extreme Right in France, Minute.
Minute's leading columnist, Francois Brigneau, a war-time admirer of Petain and now equally fervent admirer of Jean- Marie Le Pen, the leader of the National Front, found it hard to restrain his glee at the approaching Barbie trial and the trail of exposure he hoped it would provide of treachery and double-dealing in the ranks of the Resistance. What made the prospect all the more delectable, he wrote, was that by insisting on Barbie's extradition from Bolivia the French government had fallen into a trap of its own making. So much for this view of the Barbie trial shared oddly by liberal opinion abroad and reactionary opinion in France. So much too for liberal and left-wing illusions about war-time France in the immediate post-war years. These have come full circle and France, from being a nation of Resistance fighters betrayed by a handful of collaborators, has become a nation of collaborators re- deemed by a handful of Resistance heroes.
Both views are of course grotesque, because only a minority of the nation engaged actively either in collaboration or resistance but the base of the resistance both broadened and deepened as the pros- pect of Allied victory became more ob- vious. It was in those circumstances that Barbie came to Lyon when the Germans crossed into the formerly unoccupied zone of France, following the Allied landings in North Africa and when defeat already stared them in the face. Their anti- Resistance terror grew worse as they them- selves grew more and more terrified.
Barbie, in charge of the local Gestapo, was in fact the forefront of what looked more and more like a desperate rearguard action. Hence, coupled with such serious business as tracking down Resistance oper- ators who would threaten the German army's inevitable retreat, such seemingly lunatic preoccupations as rounding up elderly Jews and Jewish schoolchildren for deportation to Auschwitz. This lunacy was carried to such a point that, even as the American armies were advancing on Lyon, room had to be found on the already grossly-overcrowded last German convoy out of the city for 600 Jews and a sprinkling of Resistance prisoners. The merciless logic of the Nazis required that if they had to leave Lyon they would at least leave it Juden frei.
It was Barbie's participation in the round-up of the Jews which sealed his fate, for it gave the French the excuse of trying hilt not for war crimes for which there was a statute of limitations but 'crimes against humanity' which the Nuremberg court had defined and for which the French had deliberately legislated a limitless code. That was the excuse, but the zest for the pursuit of Barbie was provided by his arrest and torture of Jean Moulin, General de Gaulle's representative to the various and often rival Resistance movements in France. Moulin died as a result of the treatment he received at Barbie's hands without betraying a name, as one knows by the long list of his close associates who survived his arrest. Moulin was of course betrayed, and it is this which gives a modicum of plausibility to Barbie's claim that he committed suicide on learning the name of the man who had betrayed him. This is one of the 'secrets' which Barbie's counsel, Maitre Verges, threatens to reveal in court, but in fact the full story has been gathering dust on French bookshelves for very nearly the past 40 years.
There are some who were themselves deported during the war, such as Madame Simone Veil and the writer, Joseph Rovan, who object to the Barbie trial not on the specious grounds that 'it will open up old wounds' but on higher issues. Thus Madame Weil considers it rather absurd to apply the charge of 'crimes against human- ity' to so small a cog in the Gestapo machine as Barbie was at the time, espe- cially as his superiors in France have long been freed, and M. Rovan feels uneasy about applying retrospective laws which were a favourite resort of the Vichy regime even to Nazi war criminals.
At the same time, it is worth noting that many in France and abroad, including incidentally Maitre Verges himself, who thought that no French government would allow the trial of Barbie to take place for fear of the wartime secrets he might reveal about collaboration by present-day digni- taries have been proved wrong. The gov- ernment has in effect challenged the ac- cused and.his defender to do their worst in the way of slander and insinuation.
In this respect incidentally Maitre Verges, who politically is of the far Left, is using much the same tactics as those his far Right predecessors, such as Maitre Jean- Louis Tixier-Vignancourt and Maitre Jac- ques Isorni, when they were defending clients like Petain and General Salan, of Secret Army fame, during the Algerian war. The parallel even extends to advising the accused to leave the court after making a preliminary statement. This is what Verges has done with Barbie — he did the same with his previous client, the Lebanese terrorist Georges Abdallah — to the great frustration of lawyers, witnesses and the press.
The departure of Barbie from the box however is probably the best indication that Verges does not have any dire secrets to reveal. As someone shrewdly noted: 'In the name of the extreme Left, Verges attacks democracy with the tactics of the extreme Right.' The best this one-time friend of the unspeakable Pol Pot of Cambodia can probably do will be in his final speech to draw a parallel between the conduct of the Germans in France and the French in Algeria during the Algerian war. This will no doubt prove embarrassing but only superficially so.
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