Klaus Barbie headed Section IV of the Gestapo for the Lyon region from November 1942 until the German withdrawal from the city in August 1944. In 1987, forty-three years later, the Cour d'assises du Rhône convicted him of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to life imprisonment, the heaviest penalty then available in French law. The trial, which opened on May 11, 1987 and ended with the verdict of July 4, 1987, lasted nine weeks.
The path to that courtroom was unusually long. Barbie had already been sentenced to death in absentia by a French military tribunal in 1952 and again in 1954, but those sentences were for war crimes, and the ten-year limitation period for war crimes had expired by the time he was found. What made a trial possible was a separate legal category: crimes against humanity, which French law, following the Nuremberg Statute, treated as having no limitation period. Between 1983 and 1988 the Cour de cassation, France's highest court of ordinary jurisdiction, ruled repeatedly on what that category covered and whether Barbie could be tried under it. The case also produced an official United States inquiry, because between 1947 and 1951 he had worked for the US Army's Counter Intelligence Corps, which helped him leave Europe.
Nikolaus Barbie, known as Klaus, was born on October 25, 1913 in Bad Godesberg, near Bonn. He joined the Hitler Youth on April 1, 1933, passed his Abitur in 1934 and entered the SS on September 25, 1935, moving to the SS intelligence service, the SD, first in Berlin and then in Düsseldorf. He joined the Nazi Party on May 1, 1937. After the German invasion of the Netherlands he was posted to the SD's section for Jewish affairs in The Hague, from May 25, 1940, and he received the Iron Cross, Second Class, in April 1941.
On May 21, 1942 he took command of the SD detachment at Gex, in the Ain, near the Swiss border. He was assigned to Lyon later that year, and in November 1942 he was appointed head of Section IV of the Gestapo for the Lyon region. In May 1943 he also became deputy to the head of the German police in the region while continuing to run Section IV. Gestapo men under his command arrested a representative of General de Gaulle in France and six other Resistance leaders at Caluire on June 21, 1943; that arrest was not among the acts for which he was later charged. He received the Iron Cross, First Class, on November 9, 1943. Arrests, roundups and deportations ordered from his section extended beyond Lyon to the Jura, Grenoble and the Hautes-Alpes. He left Lyon in August 1944, about a month before United States forces took the city, and served in Germany until the end of the war.
The case against him concerned acts committed in 1943 and 1944 while he led the Gestapo in Lyon.
France tried Barbie in absentia twice. The Lyon military tribunal sentenced him to death in 1952 and again in 1954, in both cases for war crimes. He could not be extradited from West Germany, which does not hand over its own nationals, and he disappeared from view in the years that followed. The limitation period for war crimes ran out, and when the case was reopened in the 1980s the prosecution had to rest on a different offense.
After the war Barbie lived in Germany under a false name and was not identified, although his name appeared on Allied lists of wanted men. In February 1947 the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) made him a target: its operation selection board listed him as the former head of the Lyon Gestapo section, and a raid on February 23 failed to find him. In March 1947 a new Allied listing named him as wanted by France for murder. In April 1947 an informant of the CIC brought him back into contact with a CIC agent in Memmingen, and the agent and the commander of the CIC's regional office decided to use him as an informant instead of arresting him. The agent argued in May and June 1947 that "his value as an informant infinitely outweighs any use he may have in prison"; the regional office forwarded the request on June 3, and CIC headquarters never answered.
Barbie became chief assistant in an informant network that, by the report's account, supplied much of the region's intelligence on former SS circles, French intelligence services and Soviet and anti-communist activity in the American zone. On October 29, 1947 headquarters ordered him arrested and sent to the European Command Intelligence Center for questioning, over the protests of the regional office. He was arrested on December 11, 1947 and questioned until early 1948, but the center decided against holding him because his knowledge of CIC operations was "too great"; on May 10, 1948 it recorded that he was "of no further CI interest" and returned him to the CIC. The report observes that the CIC's own index card identified him as head of the Lyon Gestapo section and concludes that the corps' interest in that background was "distinctly subordinate" to its interest in using him.
In June 1948 the network moved to Augsburg. Headquarters decided on October 25, 1948 that it should be dropped as a unit, but the regional office resisted, and on April 11, 1949 headquarters formally disapproved its continuation while leaving Barbie employed to recruit informants. On May 24, 1949, after allegations about him appeared in a Paris newspaper, headquarters ordered him dropped administratively as an informant while relations were "maintained as in the past." A regional office replied on July 20, 1949 that he had been dropped. The report finds that he was not, and that the CIC went on using him through 1950.
A French letter of June 7, 1949 was the first to describe Barbie as wanted for war crimes; American police inquiries found no address for him. On November 7, 1949 the French Embassy in Washington asked for his surrender. The State Department passed the request to the American High Commission in Germany, which had no record of him.
In the spring of 1950 evidence about him was read at a trial in Paris, the press wrote that American authorities were protecting him, and the CIC recognized that a demand for extradition was likely. A French liaison officer's proposal that Barbie testify in Paris and be returned afterwards was dropped on April 28, 1950, when the officer said he would be arrested if he appeared. On May 3, 1950 a CIC officer wrote to the commander of the corps that it saw "no reason for denying the French the extradition of Barbie" if it were requested. On May 4, 1950 a CIC meeting decided that "Barbie should not be placed in [the] hands of [the] French." The report calls this decision the turning point of the affair; the officers present later did not recall the meeting.
On June 16, 1950 the High Commission's director of intelligence met representatives of the US European Command and the CIC. He was told that the CIC had ended Barbie's employment in May 1949 and had lost contact with him in April 1950. The report concludes that both statements were false, since the CIC kept using and paying him until March 1951. The High Commission's own officials, including its general counsel, did not know that he remained in CIC hands; several of the letters it drafted to the French in May 1950 were never sent. On July 1, 1950 the State Department's legal adviser told the High Commission that refusing an extradition would be "difficult" if Barbie were found. When the High Commission asked for formal clearance on August 21, 1950, the CIC told the European Command on September 14 that it had "no objections" and that Barbie was "no longer under control" of the CIC. The report finds no evidence that he had been transferred to any other agency, and it describes that statement as false as well.
In December 1950 the CIC unit in Bavaria learned of a clandestine emigration operation run by another CIC detachment in Austria, later called the "rat line." A captain's review that month urged the unit to "completely and with all finality sever all relations" with Barbie. The decision taken instead was to send him through the rat line. By January 25, 1951 a request to that effect had reached the European Command, and some thirteen documents from this period are missing from the files. Under the name Klaus Altmann, Barbie, his wife and their children left Europe in March 1951 and arrived in South America in April, with travel documents and an immigrant visa to Bolivia arranged for them. The CIC closed its case in April 1951. The report found no evidence that the Central Intelligence Agency or any other agency took part, and it found no other case of a suspected Nazi war criminal placed in the rat line.
The United States Department of Justice examined the episode after Barbie's return to France. Its report, "Klaus Barbie and the United States Government," was written for the Attorney General by a special assistant to the head of the Criminal Division and is dated August 1983, with a transmittal letter of August 2; it ran to 216 pages, with more than 600 pages of supporting documents, and was released at a Justice Department press conference on August 16, 1983. It states that "from April 1947, when Barbie was first recruited by CIC, until March 1951, when he departed for South America, CIC knew where Barbie was at all times." The transmittal memorandum says that the officers involved were acting within their official duties and that "the United States government cannot disclaim responsibility for their actions." It also says that Barbie "spent 33 years as a free man and a fugitive from justice."
The report separates two periods. It concludes that the corps' use of Barbie from 1947 to 1949 was defensible, since the CIC had no reliable indication of war crimes until May 1949, and that its handling in 1949 and 1950 was indecisive. Its decision of May 4, 1950 and its statements of June 16, 1950 are another matter: "responsible officials of the Army interfered with the lawful and proper administration of justice" and "knowingly obstructed the bona fide efforts" of the High Commission to pursue his extradition. The report calls the 1950 response to the High Commission a calculated and indefensible concealment. It gives the motives as embarrassment and the risk of exposing the corps' operations, and it describes the rat line as operating "on the edge of the law." Had the CIC disclosed what it knew, the report adds, the High Commission could have given France the information needed to complete its extradition request.
The report found no United States government relationship with Barbie after 1951. It describes a proposal by the Army in 1966 to 1968 to reactivate him, which was dropped, and two visits he made to the United States in 1969 and 1970, which it found unconnected to any government activity; it examined allegations of drug trafficking and arms dealing and found no reliable evidence for them. It did not weigh his guilt. Its author considered a criminal prosecution of the officers moot because the five-year limitation period (18 U.S.C. 3282) had run, found no workable legislative remedy, and recommended that the United States "express to the government of France its regret for its responsibility in delaying the due process of law." The State Department delivered a note of regret to the French Embassy in the week before the report was released.
Barbie settled in La Paz as Klaus Altmann with his family and built a business there, in shipping and trading, that brought him close to Bolivia's governing circles. By February 1972 French officials believed that Altmann, a naturalized Bolivian businessman, was Barbie; a French Nazi-hunting couple had identified him and traced him to Peru in 1971. Altmann, on his return to La Paz, said on Bolivian television that he had served with the SS in France, Holland and on the eastern front, but that he was not Barbie. France asked for his extradition in 1972, and on December 13, 1974 the Bolivian Supreme Court refused, because there was no extradition treaty between Bolivia and France.
The position changed only after a change of government in Bolivia in autumn 1982. West Germany also sought his extradition in 1982, and France then agreed to accept him if Bolivia expelled him instead.
On February 5, 1983 Bolivia expelled Barbie to French Guiana, where gendarmes met him on arrival at Cayenne. He was brought before an investigating judge, charged with crimes against humanity and ordered detained, and was then brought to France and held in Lyon. The French government had accepted him on the basis that Bolivia would expel rather than extradite him.
On June 7, 1983 his counsel applied for his release, arguing that the detention was a disguised extradition; the application was rejected on June 10, and on July 8, 1983 the Chambre d'accusation of the Court of Appeal of Lyon upheld that order, reasoning that crimes against humanity fall under an international repressive order that recognizes neither borders nor the rules of extradition. The investigation by the investigating judge in Lyon ran from February 1983 until October 1985. It took that long to find witnesses some forty years after the events and to decide which acts were war crimes and which were crimes against humanity. During the inquiry the telex in which Barbie reported the deportation of the children of Izieu to the Gestapo headquarters in Paris was found in the archives of the Contemporary Jewish Documentation Centre, and it became one of the principal pieces of evidence for the Izieu count.
Barbie's defense challenged both the manner of his return and the offense he was charged with. On October 6, 1983 the criminal chamber of the Cour de cassation (case no. 83-93194) held that the expulsion procedure was not null and that nothing barred the prosecution. It added that "crimes against humanity are subject not only to internal French law but also to an international repressive order," citing the Nuremberg Statute and a United Nations resolution of February 13, 1946, which require states to punish such crimes and to return suspects to the countries where they were committed. On October 28, 1983 the Chambre d'accusation of the Court of Appeal of Lyon held that no limitation period applied to crimes against humanity.
On January 26, 1984 the Cour de cassation (case no. 83-94425) rejected Barbie's appeal against that ruling. It held that statutes of limitation do not apply to crimes against humanity. Barbie had argued that the Law of December 26, 1964, which removed limitation periods for these crimes, was retroactive; the court rejected the argument, relying on the Foreign Minister's reading of the Nuremberg Statute under which "crimes against humanity are never extinct," and on Article 7(2) of the European Convention on Human Rights, which permits prosecution for acts criminal under the general principles of law recognized by civilized nations.
The second round turned on the dividing line between war crimes and crimes against humanity. On October 4, 1985 the Chambre d'accusation of the Court of Appeal of Lyon classified the charges as war crimes, subject to the ten-year limitation period, and held the proceedings barred. The civil parties appealed. On December 20, 1985 the Cour de cassation (case no. 85-95166) upheld the ten-year period for war crimes, reasoning that war crimes arise in the context of hostilities between states and that after hostilities end "time erases the acts committed during this time." It held, however, that the same conduct can amount to both a war crime and a crime against humanity, so that the Lyon tribunal's 1952 and 1954 death sentences in absentia could support new proceedings for crimes against humanity, which are not time-barred under the Law of December 26, 1964. It set out the test: persecution is a crime against humanity when it targets non-combatants and results from a deliberate state policy motivated by race, religion or politics, and a war crime when it serves the conduct of the war. The case was sent to the Cour d'assises to examine the persecution of Jews as crimes against humanity in view of the "Final Solution."
A further ruling of November 25, 1986 (case no. 86-92714) concerned a woman member of the Resistance, arrested in March 1944, who had applied to join the case as a civil party. The public prosecutor had declared her application inadmissible on December 19, 1985 because her complaint concerned war crimes, and the Court of Appeal of Lyon upheld that decision on April 25, 1986. The Cour de cassation overturned the Lyon ruling and sent that part of the case to the Court of Appeal of Paris. It held that crimes against humanity are inhuman acts and acts of persecution committed in a systematic manner on behalf of a state pursuing a policy of ideological hegemony, against people because of their membership of a group or their opposition to that policy; that the same facts may constitute both crimes against humanity and war crimes; and that "neither the motives of the victims nor their eventual quality as combatants or hostages" excludes the offense.
The investigation first retained three counts: the roundup of February 9, 1943 ("la rafle de l'UGIF"), the arrest of the children of the children's home at Izieu on April 6, 1944, and the last convoy to leave Lyon, on August 11, 1944. At the request of the civil parties a fourth count was added, covering the individual arrest and deportation of Jews and resisters. The Izieu count concerned Jewish children and their carers living at the children's home in the village of Izieu: forty-four children and seven carers were taken from it on April 6, 1944.
The fourth count named Jews and resisters. In its decision of June 3, 1988 the Cour de cassation described the crimes as acts committed "de façon systématique au nom d'un Etat" in pursuit of such a policy. The Ministry of Justice records that Barbie was found guilty of 17 crimes against humanity.
The trial opened on May 11, 1987 before the Cour d'assises du Rhône in Lyon. The hearings were held in the "salle des mille pas" of the Lyon courthouse, which had been refitted for the purpose, and about 800 journalists attended the opening. Thirty-nine lawyers represented 113 associations and other civil parties, and 106 witnesses were to testify. The presiding judge led a three-judge bench, and the prosecution was conducted by the Attorney General. A jury of five men and four women was sworn in.
The first legal question of the day was a request by a civil party's lawyer to reinstate the 1952 death sentence, which the court rejected. The prosecution opposed the request, arguing that the war crimes for which he had first been sentenced were time-barred; the maximum penalty was now life imprisonment. Asked his name at the opening, Barbie replied "Klaus Altmann, a Bolivian businessman," and said that he had been illegally kidnapped and brought to France. The presiding judge addressed him as "Monsieur Barbie" throughout. His lawyer did not try to show that he was innocent of the acts. He challenged France's right to prosecute crimes against humanity at all, referring in his pleading to French colonial history, and he argued that the procedure by which his client had reached France was a kidnapping and not an extradition.
On May 13, 1987, the second day, Barbie asked to be returned to the cells under a French provision that allows an accused to be absent from his trial, and said "Legally I consider myself absent." The court decided that his presence was needed so that former victims, who had not attended the pre-trial hearings, could identify him, and ordered him brought back; French law allows the court to compel an accused to appear, by force if necessary. He offered no physical resistance but at first refused to leave the court's cells, until the presiding judge ordered him to the dock. On May 26, 1987 six witnesses identified him, and to each of the questions that followed he answered in German, "I have nothing to say, Mr. President." Lawyers for the civil parties had differed on whether he should be required to attend, some wanting him to face the witnesses and others fearing that he would draw public sympathy. After that day he was absent from the hearings until the verdict, and the trial continued without him.
Three hearings, from May 27 to June 2, 1987, dealt with the raid on the children's home at Izieu. The witnesses included the founder of the home, who testified at the thirteenth hearing on May 27 and rejected Barbie's claim that he had targeted only resisters, asking whether the children were fighters and stating that they were innocent; a carer who was the sole survivor of those deported from the home; the home's doctor; teachers and carers; mothers and a brother of children who were taken; former residents of the home; an eyewitness to the raid; and the mayors of Izieu and of the neighbouring commune. The civil parties were represented by lawyers who spoke for the founder, for an association of the sons and daughters of Jews deported from France, for the doctor and for the families, among them the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism.
In the eighth and final week the prosecution asked the court to sentence Barbie to life imprisonment, "the maximum penalty allowed by French law," and described him as a man who "showed no pity while he was this city's Gestapo chief and no remorse during his trial." The prosecutor linked him personally to the arrest and deportation of the children of Izieu and to the deportation of hundreds of others, mostly Jews and resisters. The defense argued in two lines. First, under a provision of French criminal law that only the heaviest of several sentences is served, the 1952 death sentence absorbed any lesser penalty, and since France had abolished the death penalty in 1981 and the sentence had lapsed, Barbie, it was said, had "technically" paid his debt and should be released whatever the verdict. The presiding judge rejected that plea at the start of the session, ruling that a valid sentence cannot be superseded by one that is now invalid. Second, the defense challenged the reliability of the evidence and described key documents as forgeries.
The jury retired on Friday July 3 and returned its answers on July 4, 1987 after a little over six hours of deliberation. Prosecutors and civil parties had feared that jurors might give weight to Barbie's age and to the forty-three years that had passed; most of the jurors had been born after the war. The court ordered Barbie brought from custody to hear the verdict. The foreman announced each guilty finding, and the courtroom answered with applause. The court found Klaus Barbie guilty of crimes against humanity ("reconnu coupable de crimes contre l'humanité") and sentenced him to life imprisonment ("réclusion à perpétuité"). The jury granted no mitigating circumstances.
Barbie stood and listened to the German translation. Asked whether he had anything to say, he denied having had authority over deportations.
The trial was the first in France to be recorded in full. Recording of hearings had been forbidden since 1881 and photographing of trial scenes since 1954; the Minister of Justice used the Law of July 11, 1985 to authorize an exception for a trial of historic significance and argued that to keep no record of this one could not be justified for the sake of memory. A control room was set up inside the courtroom, and four cameras filmed the whole of the hearings from May 11 to July 4, 1987. The recordings were deposited with the National Archives. A later order of the Ministry of Justice (no. 96-2025) authorized their broadcast; the conditions of the 1985 law allow reproduction and broadcast of such a recording, in whole or in part, once the proceedings have ended and the decision is final.
Barbie appealed to the Cour de cassation, arguing among other points that he should not have been tried a second time after the earlier proceedings. The criminal chamber began its examination on June 2, 1988; the appeal is automatic under French law, no witnesses are heard and the accused is not brought to court. On June 3, 1988 (case no. 87-84240) the Cour de cassation dismissed his appeal in its entirety and upheld the conviction and sentence, finding that "la procédure est régulière et que la peine a été légalement appliquée aux faits déclarés constants par la Cour et le jury."
Barbie's counsel had raised fourteen grounds. On limitation, the court held that the principle derived from the Statute of the Nuremberg tribunal prevents any domestic rule from allowing a person found guilty of such a crime to escape justice through the passage of time, whether counted from the acts or from an earlier conviction, so long as, as in this case, no sentence had been served; the death sentence of 1954 therefore could not be merged with the new one. On the presiding judge's presentation of a brochure and a photograph album to the jury at the start of the testimony, it held that the document came from the case file, had been debated by the parties, and revealed no opinion on guilt. On the service of the prosecution's submissions on an accused who was absent, it held that the statutory requirement had been met and that Barbie had "volontairement privé du droit d'intervenir personnellement aux débats" by refusing to appear; an objection to the ruling that the trial should go on despite his refusal was inadmissible for lack of interest. On the questions put to the jury, it held that participation in a concerted plan is an essential element of the crime against humanity and not a separate offense, and that the final question on the plan sufficiently established the victims' racial, religious or political status. On the claim that superior orders should have been put to the jury under Article 8 of the Nuremberg Charter, it held that the jury's negative answer on mitigating circumstances covered the point, since the defense had not asked for a separate question on excuse. Among the counts the court cited were the removal of about forty-four minors from the children's home at Izieu on April 6, 1944 "en raison de leur origine juive," the deportation of twenty-two people of Jewish origin, and complicity in premeditated murders, all framed as acts committed within "un plan concerté."
Barbie remained in custody in France after the verdict and died in Lyon on September 25, 1991, four years after the verdict, while serving the life sentence. He was the first person sentenced in France for crimes of the Second World War to die in custody.
The Cour de cassation of October 6, 1983 treated the 1983 transfer from Bolivia as an expulsion and held the procedure valid. Barbie denied the allegations at trial, including the one concerning the children of Izieu, and in 1987 gave his name as Klaus Altmann.
October 25, 1913: born in Bad Godesberg, Germany.
September 25, 1935: enters the SS; May 1, 1937: joins the Nazi Party.
1942: assigned to France, first to Gex, then to Lyon; November 1942 appointed head of Section IV of the Gestapo in the Lyon region.
February 9, 1943: roundup in Lyon, the first count of the later indictment.
May 1943: also becomes deputy to the head of the German police in the region.
June 21, 1943: arrests at Caluire (not among the later charges).
April 6, 1944: the children's home at Izieu, the second count.
August 11, 1944: last convoy to leave Lyon, the third count.
August 1944: leaves Lyon.
April 1947: recruited by the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps.
December 11, 1947: arrested by the Army and questioned; returned to the Corps on May 10, 1948.
November 7, 1949: French Embassy in Washington asks for his surrender.
May 4, 1950: CIC meeting decides he should not be handed to the French.
June 16, 1950: false statements to the American High Commission.
March 1951: leaves Europe for South America (arrives April).
1952 and 1954: sentenced to death in absentia by the Lyon military tribunal for war crimes.
February 14, 1972: French officials said to believe that Klaus Altmann in Bolivia is Barbie.
December 13, 1974: Bolivian Supreme Court refuses France's extradition request.
Autumn 1982: change of government in Bolivia.
February 5, 1983: expelled from Bolivia to French Guiana, charged and detained.
August 2, 1983: transmittal of the US Department of Justice report; August 16, 1983: report released.
October 6, 1983: Cour de cassation holds the expulsion valid.
January 26, 1984: Cour de cassation holds that no limitation period applies to crimes against humanity.
December 20, 1985: Cour de cassation holds that war crimes and crimes against humanity can overlap and remands the case.
November 25, 1986: Cour de cassation ruling on a civil-party application.
May 11, 1987: trial opens in Lyon; May 13: he asks to be absent; May 26: ordered back, identified by six witnesses.
May 27 to June 2, 1987: hearings on Izieu.
July 4, 1987: verdict: crimes against humanity; "réclusion à perpétuité."
June 3, 1988: Cour de cassation dismisses the appeal.
September 25, 1991: dies in Lyon.