Vichy France goes on trial as well

Press, 18 February 1983, Page 16

Vichy France goes on trial as well

From

"The Economist."

London

The prosecution of Mr Klaus Barbie, the wartime Gestapo chief in Lyons, who was extracted by the French from Bolivia on February 5. will illuminate an embarrassing period of French history that many Frenchmen would prefer to keep dark. It will remind the French that their compatriots who resisted the Nazis were far outnumbered by those who collaborated with them. Mr Barbie himself has already added to the suffering he had previously caused by claiming to name the informer who betrayed Jean Moulin, the head of the French resistance from 1941 to 1943. A French historian. Mr Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, has predicted that the Barbie trial will be "an enormous national psychodrama."

The French attitude to the Nazi occupation has been overlaid by myths and half-truths since 1945. The euphoria of the Liberation, and the understandable desire to salvage some national honour from the w’reckage of 1940-1944, led to an exaggeration of the size and importance of the resistance movement.

Although exact statistics have never been established, the number of people involved in resistance networks is estimated to have been a mere 75.000 in 1943 (or about 0.2 per

cent of French adults), only half of whom were directly involved in fighting the Germans. The number mushroomed to 200.000 at the time of the Liberation but. for most of the war the resistance was much smaller than was later assumed, when the Gaullists and Communists depicted it as a mass movement. On the other side, apologists for the Vichy regime argued that, unpalatable as accommodation with Hitler may have been, it saved southern France from the worst ravages of the Nazis. This may have been true in the early stages of Marshal Petain's regime, but recent historical studies make it plain that Vichy was. in many ways, just as repressive and racist as the occupying authorities running the rest of the country. French collaboration with the Nazis was a taboo subject for many years. As late as 1971. a documentary. "Le Chagrin et la Pitie." which showed how widespread collaboration or simple apathy had been during the war. was banned from French television because. according to the director of the State-run network, “myths are important in the life of a people, and certain myths must not be destroyed." A decade later, attitudes have begun to change. A former Budget Minister, Mr Maurice Papon, was charged

last month with crimes against humanity for having allegedly been involved in the deportation of Jews from the Gironde area of western France. Television has even got round to showing "Le Chagrin et la Pitie." Some Socialists see a positive value in using the Barbie case to re-examine the past. "The French." says Mr Pierre Mauroy. the Prime Minister. "must not forget their history." Inevitably, some of the Government's' more partisan supporters have been insisting that it took a Left-wing Government to bring Mr Barbie to account: there have been veiled accusations that previous conservative administrations were content to let sleeping dogs lie. For both these reasons, the Mitterrand administration takes justifiable satisfaction in having got hold of Mr Barbie. He disappeared in 1945. apparently escaping to Germany, and is said to have supplied the Americans with information about the Russians in exchange for money and protection. Two French courts sentenced him to death in his absence in the early 1950 s for 4342 killings, the deportation of 7591 Jews to concentration camps and the arrest of 14.311 people during his two years as Gestapo commander in Lyons, a centre of the French resistance. By the time those judgments were passed. Mr Barbie was in Latin

t America. ,■ In 1957 he became a Bolivian citizen and enjoyed the prolec- ? tion of successive Right-wing military regimes in that coun- > try. advising them on security i matters in return for being given refuge and a free hand for his often dubious business > dealings. The Bolivians brushed aside a French extradition request in 1972. Mr Barbie's position was so entrenched that there seemed to be little point in making fresh efforts to bring him back to France, where the death sentences had expired after 20 years. Mr Barbie’s confidence was such that he greeted the West German ambassador in La Paz with a Nazi salute at a reception and boasted of making incognito trips to France to meet wartime collaborators. The installation of a democratic Government in Bolivia last October radically changed Mr Barbie's position, though he appears to have felt that he could survive unscathed. The new civilian president. Mr Hernan Siles Zuazo. was intent on getting rid of the Nazis and other European Right-wing extremists in Bolivia, many of whom had become involved in the country's cocaine trade. Seeing their opportunity. West Germany and France put in fresh extradition requests for Mr Barbie, only to get trapped in the Bolivian legal machinery. However, the authorities in La Paz then took

the initiative and pulled in Mr Barbie on an old fraud conviction for which, he still owed $lO,OOO in fines.

His lawyers quickly raised the money. It looked as though Mr Barbie would escape, after all. Then somebody realised that he must have used false papers to get his Bolivian nationality in 1957. using the assumed name of "Altmann." That gave the Bolivians the legal excuse they needed to expel him.

On February 4, Mr Barbie was put on a Bolivian military aircraft. He thought he was being taken to Peru, but he was flown east instead of west. The aircraft landed at Cayenne. in French Guyana, where a French military DC-8 was waiting to take him across the Atlantic, watched by a posse of France's anti-terrorist police. Mr Barbie was taken to an airfield outside the Rhone valley town of Orange and then transferred to the Montluc prison in Lyons were many ol his victims were held 40 years ago.

The slick operation was organised by the French Foreign Ministry and the Elysee place. On February 6 a local magistrate. Mr Christian Riss. charged Mr Barbie with "crimes against humanity, assassinations, tortures, arrests. arbitrary detentions and kidnappings." Preparations for the Barbie trial are expected to take a

year. The number of cases tc be investigated, and the diffi eultv of tracking down witnesses 40 years after the events, will provide a formidable problem for Mr Riss and other magistrates involved in drawing up the detailed charges.

Already, a stream of people have come forward who were tortured by Mr Barbie or witnessed mass executions which he organised. There are stories that "the "butcher of Lyons' fondled young women as he beat up his victims.

The French Government has made it plain that it wants his trial to stand as a condemnation of the Nazi system as a whole, not just of Mr Barbie At the same time, as Mt Claude Cheysson. the Foreign Minister, emphasised. France is anxious that the' Barbie case should not affect todays French-German friendship.

Perhaps the most astonishing fact. 40 years after France's humiliation by Germany, is the extent to which most Frenchmen have forgotten and forgiven. A poll carried out by "L'Express" in 1979 found that three times as many Frenchmen liked West Germans as disliked them. In 1981 a Sofres poll found that 47 per cent of Frenchmen felt "very friendly' towards the Germans, while only 41 per cent felt the same about the British.