Dosije Barbi. aka "The Butcher of Lyon"

[Demo(n)lisher]

For forty years he hid from justice. While his surviving victims tried to overcome the trauma of his two-year reign of terror over the city of Lyon, Klaus Barbie lived comfortably in the South American nation of Bolivia. Barbie, the SS officer in charge of the Gestapo in Lyon from November, 1942 to August, 1944, was personally responsible for thousands of deaths and countless shattered lives. In the name of Adolf Hitler and Nazi ideology, Barbie tortured résistants, raped women, murdered on a whim, and deported thousands of Jews to their near-certain deaths.1 Barbie was also personally responsible for two of the Nazis' most infamous acts on French soil. One was the torture and murder of Jean Moulin, the highest ranking member of the Resistance in France. The other was his order to "liquidate" a refuge for Jewish children in the village of Izieu by sending its forty-four young inhabitants directly to the death camps. In both crimes, Barbie did not act alone, and when the French finally brought him to trial in 1987, France's national memory was not yet ready to cope with the entire truth.

When the war ended, those who ran the Third Reich and who implemented the Final Solution were tried by the victors. During the Nuremburg trials of 1945 and 1946, it slowly became apparent that what the Nazis had done was incomparable to any other war crime in human history. The Nazis had massacred 12 million people, including 6 million Jews, in their quest to establish an ideal world for the Aryan race. The 6 million Jews whom the Nazis murdered were not soldiers but criminals under Nazi law; their very existence was the crime. As Raul Hilberg, one of the world's foremost authorities on the Holocaust, put it, the Nazis conducted two wars, one on the battlefield and the other against the Jews.2 When the Nazis began losing their war on the battlefield, they intensified their war against the Jews. Unlike normal wars, the Holocaust of the Jews had no battles or bravery because neither were required to kill unarmed civilians. It was an imaginary war, but the victims, including 1.5 million children, were real.

When the Nazi war criminals were tried at Nuremburg, they were tried for a new kind of act, a "crime against humanity." The Nazis' crimes were of such magnitude that punishment of the criminals would only be the first step in confronting their horror. Once all of those responsible were punished, then humanity could move to the next step, preventing such crimes from ever happening again. If, however, those responsible for the crime went unpunished, then the opposite would happen; people would treat genocide like any other criminal act and eventually find it an acceptable means to certain ends. The Holocaust was certainly terrible, but to accept such crimes into one's moral code is far, far worse. Thus, should genocide become an acceptable aspect of waging war or accomplishing political and economic ends, just as murder is, then the Holocaust is only the beginning. All that is needed to ensure that genocide continues forever is a single demonstration that it is somehow profitable or unimportant.

During the Nuremburg trials it was apparent that many of those responsible for the Holocaust were absent and, in their absence, they gave the illusion that genocide was merely another crime from which one could flee. Nuremburg wrote incircumscribability into the laws concerning "crimes against humanity," but it would not be until the judgment of all of those responsible for genocide that genocide itself could be judged. Among the absent was Klaus Barbie, and for forty years his freedom mocked the morals of those who wanted him brought to justice. Then, through a series of events starting with a misplaced census document and ending with Bolivian police forcing him aboard a French military transport, Klaus Barbie found himself locked in one of the same cells his own prisoners had stayed forty years before. Those who brought Barbie to France hoped that his trial would put to rest once and for all the unanswered questions of the past. Little did they know how many answers those questions had.

Unlike the prisoners locked in Montluc Prison in Lyon during 1943 and 1944, Klaus Barbie had no need to worry about torture, execution, or deportation. He was in France to be tried for the crimes for which he had never answered, but little did he know that the same passion of memory that returned him to France could also work in his defense. Barbie, it turns out, was not the only one who had not answered to the past. Like Barbie, France had not answered to its own crimes over the last forty years, and it was only during Barbie's trial that the histories of Klaus Barbie and France were dragged into the national spotlight. To quote Jacques Sommet, a résistant who was deported to Dachau, "Many would have preferred the absence of the man and silence on the case. But history is there: conscience cannot escape from it."3 Sommet thus concluded that in order to win this trial, France would have to finally do the unavoidable and try to raise the national conscience by confronting history in its entirety.4 The process would be painful and would change France and the world forever. Through the trauma of the Barbie trial, the world gained a new understanding of what a crime against humanity was, and from that new understanding, history rewrote itself. Gaining that understanding, however, would not be easy, because to do so, France needed to look both Klaus Barbie and all the other skeletons in its historical closet straight in the eye.

Like the trials of other Nazi criminals, the process of Barbie's trial was centered around crimes against humanity and because of that, it brought about many difficult questions. The process of trying Barbie and of answering the questions his trial evoked would be painful. So painful that many of those who wanted to see Klaus Barbie brought to justice were far from happy when the trial finally ended in July, 1987. What was supposed to have been an easily-won trial that should have brought national attention to the horrors of the Holocaust and the bravery of the Resistance had become a fiasco: Klaus Barbie was guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt of some of the most heinous crimes in human history, but somehow his trial had also turned into a trial of France and, in the process, became a battle of memories. The battle was intense because the prize was history itself.

As the Barbie trial transformed into a battle for history, it defied what seemed like unbreakable political limits. By the trial's end, the far ends of the political spectrum, the radical Left and the extreme Right had not only blurred, but had, at times, switched. At stake for both ends of the political spectrum was the same thing, a fundamental change in the way society viewed itself, and when they saw that the Barbie trial could bring about that common interest, the two sides merged. Fundamental change would occur, they reasoned, if they could elevate all crimes of imperialism and Western economic exploitation to the same status of the Holocaust. If the crimes of capitalistic exploitation could be given as much weight as the Holocaust, then in order for the French to condemn Klaus Barbie, they would have to accept that their own society was built on similar crimes and therefore corrupt. When people of a nation view their society as corrupt, they become disillusioned and the beneficiaries of disillusionment are almost always the political extremists. Thus, before any judgment could be made on Barbie and the Holocaust, the political extremes wanted to make sure France would have to judge itself and everything it held holy. As a consequence of the extremists' heavy involvement with the trial, the issue of Barbie and the Holocaust would become intertwined with the legacies of imperialism and racism.

On the day before the verdict of Barbie's trial, Alain Finkielkraut, one of France's foremost moderate thinkers and the son of survivors of Auschwitz could be found outside the Palais de Justice and he was visibly upset by what he saw. "Imagine," he said with more than a hint of bitter irony in his voice, "that we're in 1945, at the end of the war, and someone says, 'you'll see, in twenty or thirty years when they accuse and condemn a Nazi torturer, it'll be the 'subhumans' who will defend him.' Everyone would have laughed." 5

Finkielkraut was referring to Klaus Barbie's defense attorney Jacques Vergès, the ultra-Leftist, half-French, half-Vietnamese lawyer and radical who had single-handedly turned Barbie's trial into much more than the trial of a Nazi criminal. "This trial will hurt France," 6 promised Vergès in a newspaper interview in 1983. He was right. Over the course of the eight week trial, Vergès, by "attacking the prosecution," succeeded in putting France on trial for the same thing his client was accused of: crimes against humanity.

Vergès argued that what France had done when it was running and protecting its empire was no different from what Klaus Barbie had done for his own empire during the occupation of France. What right, he asked, did the French have to judge others for their crimes before they had judged themselves? And what right did the Jews have to call the Holocaust unique when millions of others were also victims of genocide? If Vergès had his way, then France, in order to convict Klaus Barbie, would have to acknowledge its own crimes against all of those who suffered under the oppression of French imperialism. The same night Vergès put forth his ultimatum, a jury of nine would decide Barbie's fate and much more. They were not just judging Barbie, but France, the Holocaust, and humanity itself. Whatever their decision, it would reshape the past and, in shaping history, it would shape the future.

Posle svih ovih zanimljivih informacija, nije spomenuto ono sto najvise se skriva i u svetskoj javnosti podleze na ostricu tabu teme, a to je smrt Ce Gevare. Naime Ce je upravo i zavrsio svoju revolucionarsku karijeru u Boliviju, gde je Barbi bio pod zastitom snazne nemacke porodice, koja upravo i vuce konce privrede i politike u celoj Americi (juznoj naravno) Amerikancima je bio potreban Ce, zbog svog cuvenog dnevnika gde je bilo zaista mnogo potrebnih informacija za gerilsko ratovanje u Srednjoj i Juznoj Americi, i zbog medijske kampanje za hvatanje ostalih "levicara". Ali druga struja, predvodjena Teranom i Barbijem je zelela Cea mrtvog. Uhvacen u selu Higuera 9 oktobra 1967, ranjen je i ubijen od strane Terana, koji je posle nekoliko godina ubijen od strane Kubanske obavestajne sluzbe.