French Trial of Barbie to Begin Today

PARIS--The trial of Klaus Barbie, the last Nazi likely to face French judges, which opens today will likely stir again the lingering shame, sorrow and pity which France has sought for decades to forget.

"Everything people are trying to hide from this era will have to come out," said Barbie attorney Jacques Verges, who plans to defend the 73-year-old former Lyon Gestapo chief by attacking his accusers.

Barbie threatened in a published interview to drag skeletons from closets in his defense. He said he might name some French collaborators "perhaps now enjoying positions of influence in modern France."

Verges plans to summon ghosts not only from World War II but also from France's war to keep Algeria, which ended in 1962. A blanket amnesty protects French officers accused of torture in Algeria.

It was four years ago that Barbie, known as "the Butcher of Lyon," was brought to France from Bolivia. He is accused of crimes against humanity--sending Jews and French Resistance members to death camps.

For France, the question is whether Nazi atrocities are to be underlined in red in French memories or whether, with a passing generation, they will slip into the gray of history.

Barbie insists he did only what people do in war. Verges, decrying "selective indignation," argues that Frenchmen acted similarly and the Nazis were simply an occupying force.

Serge Klarsfeld, a French Jewish lawyer who as a youngster hid in a closet listening to the Gestapo torture the neighbor's children, argues that sending innocent people to ovens is no common crime.

Government prosecutors, helped by Klarsfeld and others on behalf of victims, seek to disprove Barbie's assertion that he acted only against members of the French Resistance. He denies deporting Jews.

Polls suggest more than half of France will follow the trial closely and perhaps three-quarters of all French people think that Barbie must be judged, however embarrassing the testimony. Elie Wiesel, a Nobel laureate and a Holocaust survivor, echoed the thoughts of many French in a recent television interview: The verdict is not important, Wiesel said, but the events must be brought to light.

Simone Veil, a former French Cabinet minister and Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, agreed that the trial was a last chance for people to assess their emotions and teach their children the past.

"The individual fate of one or another Nazi seems to me beside the point," she said. "What interests me is the memory of history."

Others, however, are not so anxious for a reckoning.

German troops swept into France in 1940, occupying Paris and three-fifths of the country. A "free" zone was governed from Vichy, a health spa in south central France, under Marshal Philippe Petain.

In 1942, German forces also occupied the free zone. Barbie came with them to direct Gestapo regional headquarters at Lyon. A local French police force and a militia operated with relative independence.

Adolf Hitler boasted that the zeal of French collaborators spared him scarce manpower. Nazi records show 2200 German Gestapo agents were sent to France. Local police helped deport 79,000 Jews.

Historians estimate there were fewer than 75,000 active Resistance members, or 0.2 percent of the adult population. French newspapers under the Vichy government called them "terrorists."

Michel Thomas, a Jewish fighter in the French Resistance who was to testify in the trial, said on Israeli radio, "Major raids were carried out by the French against Jews in Vichy France."

Until the early 1980s, after Klarsfeld led an energetic campaign, hardly any French textbook even mentioned the Vichy government's treatment of Jews or its role in the deportations.

Marcel Ophuls' biting documentary, "The Sorrow and the Pity," probed deeply into the national anguish over wartime shame, but it was kept off the state-run television networks for a decade.

Verges is attempting to show that what happened in Lyon during World War II was a national shame and that Barbie was merely one of many caught up in it.

Prosecutors, Jewish leaders, and a spectrum of Frenchmen react heatedly to that line of defense. They say Verges wants to "banalise" Nazism--reduce it to the commonplace.

For many of the French, it is that issue, not Klaus Barbie, that is on trial.