Claims Accusers Exaggerate His WWII Role : He Wasn’t ‘Master of Lyon,’ Barbie Says

In an unexpected outburst, Klaus Barbie, the former Nazi Gestapo lieutenant, arose in court Tuesday to charge his accusers with exaggerating his role in World War II and painting him falsely as “the master of Lyon.”

Barbie, 73, on the second day of his trial for “crimes against humanity,” described himself as only one person in the 120-member Gestapo unit on duty in the Lyon region and not as the officer responsible for everything that went on.

“From all I have heard yesterday and today,” Barbie said, “you would think that this was the Nuremberg war crimes trial.”

After World War II, the Allied governments tried Nazi Germany’s leading war criminals at Nuremberg, and Barbie was making it clear that he does not put himself in the same category.

“I would have been a madman to have done the things I am accused of,” he said, gesturing for emphasis. “But I was only one man in a commando of 120. I was not the master of Lyon. I was not the person responsible. We were dependent on orders from the army.”

Judge Andre Cerdini then stopped him for making his defense plea at the wrong moment.

The outburst came at the end of a long wrangle between the defense and prosecution over the court’s authority to try the case. Cerdini had turned to Barbie to ask him if he had any comment on the procedural issue.

Perhaps because he misunderstood, Barbie rose and delivered his denunciation.

After a few minutes, the judge stopped Barbie and told him that he had not been asked to discuss the case as a whole but only the legal issue that his lawyer, Jacques Verges, had raised. Barbie, saying he agreed with his lawyer, sat down.

Barbie is charged with ordering the deportation of Jews and Resistance fighters to Nazi extermination camps. Verges insisted that the court is violating the law by trying him twice for the same crimes.

Hid in Bolivia

Barbie, who escaped French justice by hiding in Bolivia from 1951 until he was extradited to France in 1983, was tried here in absentia in 1952 and again in 1954. He was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death, but under French law a sentence lapses after 20 years.

Verges said that Barbie had been tried for all the political murders committed in the Lyon region under German occupation and that the court is now trying him again for the same crimes.

The prosecutor, Pierre Truche, told the court that while the law protects a defendant from a double trial, none of the crimes for which Barbie is now on trial was included in the charges against him in 1952 and 1954.

Judge Cerdini did not rule immediately on the Verges motion to halt the trial, but Verges has lost the same argument before in the long series of procedures that led up to the trial.

In his speech, Verges, who has vowed to put France itself on trial, derided the French government for trying a German Gestapo chief while never punishing the police chiefs of the collaborationist wartime Vichy government or the soldiers who tortured Algerian prisoners during the Algerian war of the late 1950s.

After the judge reserved his ruling on the Verges motion, he questioned Barbie about his personal life, a French procedure in which the court tries to establish the personality of the defendant.

During the questioning, Barbie acknowledged that when he was a young officer of the secret security service of the Nazi Party, his superiors were right to describe him, as they did in an official evaluation, as a militant of “irreproachable conduct of commitment to national socialism (Nazism).”

Asked to elaborate on his commitment, Barbie told Judge Cerdini, “It would take two weeks to explain what national socialism is. I cannot do it in two words.”