'It is the role of justice to deal with this man': How the trial of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie shook the world

BBC News

30-06-2025

In July 1987, 38 years ago this week, a Nazi war criminal, the "Butcher of Lyon", was sentenced to life in prison by a French court for crimes against humanity. Four years earlier, in 1983, the BBC reported on how France felt about this reckoning with its dark past.
Klaus Barbie was known as the "Butcher of Lyon". As the Gestapo chief in Lyon, France, during World War Two, he had been tasked with shattering the French Resistance and ridding the German-occupied city of its Jewish population. He became notorious for his cruelty and sadism, often taking a personal role in torturing and killing prisoners. He sent some 7,500 French Jews and Resistance fighters to concentration camps and executed 4,000 more.
Warning: This article contains details of torture that some may find upsetting.
When the war ended, despite being wanted by French authorities for his horrific war crimes, he was hired by US intelligence as an informant on communist networks. They shielded him, allowing him to live in the US zone of occupied Germany under a false identity. In 1951, Barbie managed to escape prosecution by fleeing to South America via "The Ratline" that the US used to smuggle Nazis out of postwar Europe. He lived openly in Bolivia for decades until he was tracked down by a Nazi-hunting couple, Serge Klarsfeld and his wife Beate. In 1983, France finally managed to extradite him to face justice. And in July 1987, 38 years ago this week, he was finally sentenced to life in prison.
But Barbie's prosecution was far from a straightforward matter for France. The Nazi's return raised questions of guilt and complicity, focusing the nation's attention on the choices its citizens had made while living under German occupation. In 1983, four years before Barbie was sentenced, BBC reporter Bernard Falk travelled to Lyon to talk to people "whose lives were touched by the Gestapo commander's savagery" and the complicated and painful issues the forthcoming Barbie trial had resurfaced.
"The presence of Klaus Barbie back on French soil has also aroused genuine fear that it may evoke old memories, the ghosts of 40 years ago," said Falk. "A time when Frenchmen betrayed Frenchmen and the country was divided into those who fought the Germans, the Resistance, and those who collaborated with them, and the bulk of the population who passively accepted their presence."
Resistance fighter Raymond Basset reflected on this legacy: "At the time of the liberation of Lyon, there were about 6,000 members of the Resistance movement in the area. Three days afterwards, there was 110,000. That probably explains a lot of things about French life today. Why? Because they only became patriots when there is no more risk attached to it. That's all."
When France surrendered to Germany in June 1940, the city of Lyon became a centre for the underground Resistance movement. Basset and radio operator Marcel Bidault were two of the young men who joined early to fight the Nazi occupation. "Basset ran a Resistance group responsible for smuggling shot-down Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain," said Falk. "Four thousand British, American and Commonwealth servicemen owe their lives to Basset's unit."
But for every person who actively resisted the Nazis, many more tried to keep their heads down, hoping they would survive. Meanwhile, others welcomed the Nazis, even forming militia to participate as they terrorised the city's residents. Basset discovered this firsthand when he was arrested and then brutally interrogated while having his teeth pulled out. "Captured by the Gestapo, he was tortured to reveal the names of his couriers," said Falk. "The two men who mutilated him were both Frenchmen working for the Germans." Basset's co-conspirator, Bidault, "was captured by the French militia collaborating with the Nazis. He escaped before his own countrymen could hand him over to the Gestapo."
Following France's liberation in 1944, people thought to be French collaborators were rounded up. Many were publicly humiliated. Women who had consorted with German soldiers had their heads shaved or were stripped and daubed with tar. People who had cooperated with the Gestapo were beaten in the streets, and some were tried and shot, including the men who had brutalised Basset. "I killed them, of course, we killed them at the liberation, there is no point in giving you their names," the 75-year-old Basset told the BBC in 1983. "They had retired with vast quantities of money, stolen from the Jews."
Naming the collaborators
But in the decades since the war, the German occupation and the scars it had created within French society had not been forgotten. Many of Lyon's residents were still haunted by what had happened during that time. "For the old, for those who suffered, Barbie never really went away. It's all still here. The battleground where the Resistance fought the occupying German army through the alleyways of the old city. The same streets, the same buildings," said Falk.
With the "Butcher of Lyon" back in the country for trial, Basset was keen that France should acknowledge and reckon with its past. He told the BBC that the Gestapo chief should be made to name the French people who collaborated with the Nazis and escaped judgement. "I think the interrogation of Barbie will create many problems because there are most certainly men who were implicated with him," said Basset. He also told Falk of his desire for revenge. He wished that he had a chance to interrogate Barbie, and to mete out the punishment that he had suffered.
In particular, the survivors wanted to know "the name of the person who betrayed Jean Moulin, the greatest of all the French Resistance leaders, who was arrested in Lyon after a tip-off", said Falk. Moulin was a crucial figure during the war who united the scattered elements of resistance into a co-ordinated force against their Nazi occupiers. He was viciously tortured by Barbie and died as a result of his injuries on 8 July 1943 on a train taking him to Germany.
"During the occupation, there were lots of French who actually fought, but most of them spent their time looking for food. Now that Barbie is here, people will try to get him for all sorts of reasons," Basset told Falk, "but what should be done is simply to find out the name of who betrayed Jean Moulin. Once that has been done, he should be trodden on like a bedbug. He's a filthy animal who shouldn't be allowed to live. If you call that hate, it's hate."
After his return, Barbie remained unrepentant for the atrocities he committed. Some felt that the Nazi simply could not be trusted to tell the truth and would use the trial for his own ends. "Opening up this Barbie case is pretty dramatic in the sense that you are going to have names coming up that, if Barbie does decide to talk, he could smear an awful a lot of people," said Jeremy Nicklin, chairman of Lyon's RAF Association, where many of the families of former Resistance fighters would regularly meet.
"It doesn't matter what names he uses, if he is rather cunning about it, he can use any name, the mud will stick and what people are slightly frightened about in one sense is that he will sling a lot of mud because he's got nothing left to lose," said Nicklin.
Basset's fellow Resistance fighter Bidault agreed that the Nazi's testimony couldn't all be believed, but it was now the job of the court to take over, sift through the evidence and see that justice was done. "I regret that he didn't die before, 40 years is a long time. What is he going to say, who is he going to denounce, if he denounces someone how can you prove that Barbie is right," Bidault asked the BBC in 1983. "I would have personally killed him 35 years ago. Now it is the role of justice to deal with this man. It's not my job."
A national reckoning
The trial would be a painful process for France; the wounds caused by Barbie and the Nazis were within living memory. Andre Signol had been only seven when his father Michel was arrested for being part of the Resistance. "He was beaten with bullwhips, he was half drowned in tubs of icy water. Barbie pulled out finger and toenails. It went on for four days. Michel wouldn't talk, he wouldn't betray his comrades," said Falk. Signol's father would be posthumously awarded the Legion of Honour.
But Signol believed, despite the distress the trial would cause and his own need for vengeance, that having Barbie in court was vital to illustrate to young people what had taken place. "As far as Klaus Barbie goes, I think this man should be dead," said Signol. "He has never expressed any regret at all for his actions, so he goes on enjoying life and he has hope. That is completely abnormal. The trial is absolutely necessary to teach the younger generation about what happened."
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In the 1950s, Barbie had been tried twice for his war crimes by France and sentenced to death "in absentia", but by the time the Nazi returned to the country in 1983, both convictions had lapsed. His new trial began in 1987 and its extensive media coverage gripped the French public. The harrowing testimony from those of Barbie's victims who had survived, and the relatives of those who didn't, laid bare the scale and savagery of the "Butcher of Lyon" atrocities. Although Barbie never revealed who had betrayed Jean Moulin to him, the proceedings did detail the sickening violence he had personally participated in, and the thousands of killings he was responsible for, including one incident in which 44 Jewish children were rounded up from a farmhouse at Izieu in Lyon, and sent to their deaths.
Barbie's trial became a focus of national reckoning for the country as it recounted both France's wartime collusion with and resistance to its German occupiers. The proceedings also served to highlight how Western governments' pursuit of their own political goals had enabled Barbie and other Nazis to escape accountability for their crimes for so long. The fact that Barbie had prospered in South America, while working for various intelligence agencies and engaging in political projects, cast a spotlight on Western governments' complicity and their willingness to ignore violence to civilians and human rights violations in the face of geopolitical calculations.
The Gestapo leader was found guilty of 341 separate crimes against humanity, reaffirming that, legally, individuals are responsible for their actions, even if they are following orders. He was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison, where he died in 1991. In 1983, the US formally apologised to France for hiring Barbie and protecting him against prosecutions. In 1995 the French President Jacques Chirac officially recognised the French state's responsibility in the deportation of Jews. "These dark hours forever sully our history and are an insult to our past and our traditions," he said.
The "Butcher of Lyon" prosecution proved to be a landmark in the pursuit of crimes regarded as some of the gravest in international law – war crimes and crimes against humanity. Its success would trigger the indictments of such French collaborators as former cabinet minister Maurice Papon and former police chief Rene Bousquet, for acts they had committed during WW2. Barbie's conviction would illustrate to the global community the imperative of recognising the atrocities that take place during war, and, even if it takes decades, holding their perpetrators to account.
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