‘Crimes Against Humanity’ Charged : France’s Past an Issue as Barbie Trial Opens Today

Klaus Barbie, a 73-year-old former Gestapo lieutenant known as “the Butcher of Lyon,” will go on trial here today for “crimes against humanity” in a case that comes out of one of the darkest, most unsavory periods in French history.

Barbie’s defense attorney, Jacques Verges, has vowed to put France itself on trial for its World War II record, but the limited scope of the proceedings may make this difficult.

Serge Klarsfeld, a lawyer for the families of some of the alleged victims of Barbie and the husband of Beate Klarsfeld, the German-born woman who disclosed that Barbie was living under an assumed name in Bolivia, said in an interview on the eve of the trial:

“We are not going to tell the story of French collaboration at this trial. We are not putting Nazi ideology on trial. We are making sure that an injustice is punished.”

Throughout France, Barbie is usually denounced as the Lyon Gestapo chief who arrested the French Resistance leader Jean Moulin in 1943 and allegedly tortured him to death. But he will not face any charges in connection with this.

Under French law, the killing of Moulin is regarded as a war crime, and prosecution for war crimes must be undertaken within 10 years. But there is no time limit for what French law defines as “crimes against humanity.” As a result, most of the charges against Barbie grow out of the arrest and deportation of Jews from the Lyon area to the gas chambers of Nazi extermination camps.

Among other things, Barbie is charged with ordering the roundup on April 6, 1944, of 44 Jewish children from a dormitory in the village of Izieu in a mountainous area 40 miles east of Lyon. The children were living there because their parents had been transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. All the Izieu children followed their parents to Auschwitz and died there.

Barbie has denied ordering the roundup of these children, or other Jews, and insists that a telex message signed by him ordering the Izieu arrests is a forgery.

The trial of Barbie will echo with embarrassment for the United States as well, for American officials are largely responsible for his avoiding French justice for 40 years. The U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps harbored him in Germany after World War II, considering him a specialist in the struggle against communism. When French demands for him became incessant, U.S. Army officers provided him with a false passport, under the pseudonym Klaus Altmann, and helped him and his family settle in Bolivia in 1951.

Twenty years later, the Klarsfelds, dogged Nazi hunters, identified Altmann as Barbie. Beate Klarsfeld flew to Bolivia in 1972 to proclaim the identification and demand that Barbie be extradited to France. But under the protection of right-wing military governments, Barbie continued to live comfortably and with impunity in Bolivia.

Barbie was trapped by the combination of a Socialist government coming to power in France in 1981 and a democratic, leftist government coming to power in Bolivia in 1982. Bolivian authorities arrested Barbie in 1983 and expelled him to French Guiana. French officials there took him into custody and returned him to Lyon.

French Wartime Collaboration

The trial will focus attention on an epoch that many French find difficult to assess and accept. During World War II, France was administered by a collaborationist, fascistic government in Vichy led by Marshal Philippe Petain. Many scholars agree that the Vichy government, which had a great deal of popular support, enacted anti-Semitic legislation even before the Germans asked for it. Barbie could not have run his Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei --Secret State Police) operation in Lyon without French collaborators.

France was then a bitterly divided nation, and even today television discussion programs about the role of the French during the war tend to end in angry, arm-waving, shouting matches.

Taking advantage of the interest in the trial, Premier Jacques Chirac has ordered all French public schools to have special classes this month on the measures taken by the Vichy government against Jews.

“I hope that young people will be informed of a certain number of facts that occurred and which were so profoundly opposed to human rights and respect for human beings,” Chirac said.

Other Charges Against Barbie

Aside from the roundup of the children from Izieu, Barbie is charged with:

--Ordering a 1943 raid on the Lyon headquarters of the General Union of French Israelites and the deportation of 86 Jews after the raid.

--Ordering the deportation of 650 people on the last train to leave Lyon for the extermination camps before the liberation of the city in August, 1944.

--Torturing and deporting individual Jews in 1943 and 1944.

--Torturing and deporting individual Resistance fighters during the same period.

Much attention has been focused on Barbie’s lawyer, the 62-year-old Verges, who has a long record of defending unpopular causes. Asked about his reasons for taking the case, Verges replied recently: “That’s my job. I do not have to defend Albert Schweitzer, Mother Teresa or Elie Wiesel. They do not have any need for me.”

Verges appears determined to shift the focus of the trial and the guilt from Barbie to France. Barbie, according to Verges, will deny all the charges, insisting that he neither tortured prisoners nor ordered the deportation of Jews.

But the defense will go beyond mere denial. Verges told a group of foreign correspondents recently that he will explore the questionable record of France during the war.

‘Fascination with Fascism’

“French society had a fascination with fascism,” said Verges, the son of a French diplomat and a Vietnamese mother. “France installed a collaborationist government during World War II freely, not because of any coup. We had a very complex reality in World War II that, until now, has not been examined carefully. France lives with an official truth that is an official lie.

“In France, you are free to argue about anything--the purity of Joan of Arc, the genius of Napoleon, the research techniques of Pasteur--but you cannot discuss what happened between 1940 and 1945.”

On top of this, Verges, who defended Algerian rebels during the Algerian war of independence and worked in Algeria afterward, wants to use the French record in the Algerian war as an argument against trying Barbie. Verges said that a million Algerians died in the war, which ended in 1962, but a French amnesty prohibits the prosecution now of any French soldier accused of committing war crimes there.

“France has the singular audacity,” Verges said, “to pardon those responsible in Algeria and put Klaus Barbie on trial.”

In contrast, Serge Klarsfeld, a 51-year-old Jewish lawyer whose father died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz, maintains that the trial will focus on the charges against Barbie and will not seek to judge the French people. Under French law, the families of victims may be represented by lawyers in court, and Klarsfeld is the most prominent of the 35 lawyers representing the families of the victims at the Barbie trial.

Fate of French Jews

Klarsfeld believes that the trial may tell France more about what happened to French Jews during the war. Otherwise, he said, “we are not going to learn anything from this trial.”

“All France knows what the Gestapo did,” he said. “There have been enough books, movies, television shows and newspaper articles to tell us. . . . There are editorialists and thinkers who believe that the Barbie trial can be a trial about collaboration. But I do not agree with them.”

Elaborate preparations have been made for the trial. The government, expecting about 700 journalists from many countries to be on hand for the trial, has refurbished a huge hall of the Palace of Justice in Lyon into a courtroom. A witness box shielded by bullet-proof glass has been provided for Barbie.

The government has decided to videotape the proceedings but only for history--the tapes will not be shown for 20 years.