France releases the last collaborators

Press, 8 March 1984, Page 21

France releases the last collaborators

By

ROBIN SMYTH,

in Paris

As France prepares to try Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyons,” the public has learned, with surprise, that the last three Frenchmen behind bars for murder and torture in the service of the German occupation have been quietly released during the past 15 months.

Jean Barbier, Jacques Vasseur, and Albert Cortial, all aged 64, had completed their 20-year sentences. News of their release, which slipped out accidentally a few days ago, was kept secret to give them a chance of escaping the attention of former Resistance fighters who feel that their penalty has not matched the enormity of their crimes.

The three Frenchmen spent their middle-age in prison because they managed to evade capture for almost two decades after the war. If they had been caught after the liberation they would have been executed. As it was, they became the last stragglers of the second generation of jailed collaborators. It is possible that they could be called as witnesses in the war crimes trial of Klaus Barbie who was expelled from Bolivia a year ago. But it is more likely that the three men will be left to fade as best they can into normal life. Jean Barbier was a senior ber of the collaborationist’Parti Populaire Francais. He hunted

down, tortured, and executed Resistance fighters with the Gestapo in Grenoble. Lyons is close to Grenoble and the names of Barbier and Barbie were often confused. Just before the Liberation Barbier robbed a French bank of a small fortune which he took with him when he retreated with the German forces. He had the good luck to fall out with the Gestapo and be sent to Mauthausen concentration camp. “Liberated” by the allied forces, Barbier emerged in Marseilles with a new identity and even joined the French police in their hunt for collaborators. He lived under his false name until 1963. Condemned to death, his sentence was commuted by President de Gaulle in 1966. He is now reported to be beginning a new life in West Germany. Jacques Vassuer, Gestapo leader at Angers, was accused at his trial in 1962 of brutally torturing men and women members of the Resistance and sending them to concentration camps. After the war he hid Jr for 16 years in the attic of his’’ mother’s apartment.

Condemned to death in 1963 for ordering more than 300 deportations and causing more than 200 deaths, he, too, had his sentence commuted by General de Gaulle. While in jail he married a German librarian and is now living in West Germany.

Albert Cortial was condemned to death in 1966 for handing over Resistance fighters in the Lyons area to the Gestapo. His sentence was reduced by President Pompidou to a 20-year jail term.

News of the release of the three collaborators brought divided reactions from Resistance veterans. At Grenoble, Resistance fighters felt that even now summary execution by one of their commandos was the appropriate penalty for Jean Barbier.

Marc Muet, a Resistance leader in the Grenoble area, told “Le Monde”: “All our members are outraged: 20 years in jail is the penalty for a crook who has only one death on his conscience.”

Others, including the lawyer, Maitre Serge Klarsfeld, who with his wife Beate is taking a leading part in rounding up a third generation of war criminals who have been hiding in South America, feel that the three collaborators have served their sentence and there is no more to be said. Copyright — London Observer, Service.