Volume 32, Number 11 · June 27, 1985
The Progress of Klaus Barbie
By Francine du Plessix Gray
The Nazi Legacy: Klaus Barbie and the International Fascist Connection
by Magnus Linklater, by Isabel Hilton, by Neal Ascherson
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 355 pp., $17.95
Klaus Barbie
by Ladislas de Hoyos, translated by Nicholas Courtin
W.H. Allen (London), 310 pp., £10.95
The Children of Izieu
edited by Serge Klarsfeld
Harry N. Abrams, 128 pp., $9.95 (paper)
For well over two years former SS Hauptsturmführer Klaus Barbie, indicted for crimes against humanity committed during World War II, has been confined in Lyons' St. Joseph Prison, close to the former Gestapo headquarters where he conducted his tortures. Every few months a brief story in the French press reports on the prisoner's fluctuating health (he was recently slipped a dose of floorcleaning compound instead of his daily medicine, and suffered mouth burns), and surmises that his trial will probably take place this fall. But no court date has officially been set, and the euphoria that swept France at the time of Barbie's extradition from Bolivia has been replaced by a wary indifference. There has been a growing sense that life imprisonment is sufficient punishment; that the seventytwo-year-old former SS man should be allowed to live out his last years in his cell, untried, rather than awaken the bitterness of the occupation years in a court of law.
Review, 5494 words
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