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BBC News
30-06-2025
- BBC News
'It is the role of justice to deal with this man': How the trial of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie shook the world
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." More like this:• How music saved a cellist's life in Auschwitz• The fake Hitler diaries that fooled the press• How Oskar Schindler saved 1,200 Jewish people 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. -- For more stories and never-before-published radio scripts to your inbox, sign up to the In History newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights twice a week. For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
The Guardian
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Marcel Ophuls obituary
Although Marcel Ophuls, who has died aged 97, became a film director like his prodigious father, Max, he managed to avoid comparisons by taking the route of documentaries rather than fiction. Certainly, The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), his documentary on the behaviour of the citizens of the French city of Clermont-Ferrand during the second world war, and the Oscar-winning Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988), a detailed biography of the notorious Gestapo chief, put Ophuls on a level that made any reference to his father an irrelevance. Yet the cosmopolitan Max, who made his exquisite films in Germany, France, Hollywood and Italy, had a great influence on the life and personality of his son, if not the films. When Hans Marcel Oppenheimer was born in Frankfurt, his father was the creative director of the prestigious Burgtheater in Vienna, and his mother, Hilde (Hildegard) Wall, was one of the leading players in the company. 'It was inevitable that I should follow them into show business. I was born under the shadow of genius,' said Marcel, who took on his father's pseudonym, later dropping the umlaut. (The Jewish Max had borrowed the name Ophüls from an aristocratic German family.) In early 1933, after the Reichstag fire, the family fled to France, while Max's first big film success, Liebelei (Playing At Love), was showing in Berlin. Max continued to direct in France, while Marcel attended a local school, only for the family to go on the run again after the Germans occupied France in 1940. The family finally arrived in Hollywood, where Marcel went to Hollywood high while his father was working for the studios during the 1940s. Some of the friends of his parents he remembered meeting were Preston Sturges, Bertolt Brecht (with whose daughter he went to school), Louis Jourdan, Marlene Dietrich and Charles Laughton. At the age of 19, Marcel volunteered to serve with the US occupying forces in Japan, after which he rejoined his parents, who had settled in Paris. His first film job came as assistant to John Huston on Moulin Rouge (1952); he was given the task of making film tests of Zsa Zsa Gabor. He was then credited as assistant director ('essentially making the coffee') on films by Julien Duvivier (Marianne de Ma Jeunesse, 1955) and his father (Lola Montès, 1955), on which he used the name Marcel Wall to avoid accusations of nepotism. After making a 20-minute black-and-white short, Matisse Ou le Talent de Bonheur (1960), Ophuls, on the suggestion of his friend François Truffaut, was offered the chance to direct and write his first fiction film, the German segment of the five-part portmanteau picture Love at Twenty (1962). The novice director's rather touching piece about a womanising business executive who falls in love with a woman after she has had his child stood comparison with the efforts of Renzo Rossellini, another son of a famous director father also making his debut, though the sketches by Truffaut, Andrzej Wajda and Shintarô Ishihara were more memorable. Keen to follow his father as a director of fiction films, Ophuls made Banana Peel (1963), a lightweight comedy thriller with a nouvelle vague touch starring Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo. It caused a minor ripple at the box office, but his second feature, Faites Vos Jeux, Mesdames (Fire at Will, 1965), starring Eddie Constantine, sank completely. It was his last venture into fiction, except for a couple of plays for German television in 1970: Zwei Ganze Tage, an adaptation of Sacha Guitry's Faisons Un Rêve, and Goethe's Clavigo. Ophuls then joined ORTF, the French national television station, where he made Munich, Ou la Paix pour Cent Ans (Munich, Or Peace in Our Time, 1967), a 172-minute documentary on the Munich crisis, juxtaposing newsreels, movie clips and interviews, a technique he continued throughout his subsequent work. 'Documentary is a sufficiently narrow form that was in a kind of corset. From my first reportage for ORTF, I tried to emancipate it. I realised that it was useless to prepare the questions in advance, even when you are going to shoot a difficult interview. The importance is to choose a first question that will stimulate the interlocutor. Without spontaneity, there is no point in making a documentary.' In The Sorrow and the Pity, 251 minutes of footage and interviews with inhabitants of Clermont-Ferrand who lived through the war, Ophuls proved himself a probing, incisive and fluent interviewer, ruthlessly exposing the degree of collaboration among the French citizenry. He also talked to members of the resistance and some of the Nazi occupiers, intercutting archive material of Adolf Hitler in Paris and famous figures of the day going about their business – for example, French film stars blithely setting off to tour Germany. The soundtrack of songs is a masterpiece in setting period and ironically counterpointing the realities of the subject. Commissioned by ORTF, who declined to show it, the film went on cinema release in France, where its ugly revelations courted both acclaim and bitter controversy. In finally uncovering the still unwelcome topic of collaboration, Ophuls opened the way for film-makers to re-examine the period of German occupation. He then went to the German broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk, for which he made The Harvest of My Lai (1970), a scathing inquiry into the massacre perpetrated by American troops in the Vietnamese village in March 1968, and its repercussions in the US. The BBC rejected A Sense of Loss (1972), Ophuls's examination of the problems of Northern Ireland. Taking a firm partisan position – Catholics good, Protestants bad – the film failed to shed much light on the subject. Much more impressive and enlightening was the 278-minute The Memory of Justice (1976), which compares German war crimes with the French and American tactics in Algeria and Vietnam respectively. Using the Nuremberg trials as a starting point, Ophuls, through effective montage technique, intercutting newsreel footage and contemporary interviews, makes the film a personal search for truth. This monumental film, of which Ophuls was most proud, was almost destroyed by the BBC, one of the producers. It balked at the pubic hair seen in a sauna sequence, among other things, and another director was brought in to recut the footage. Happily, the film was rescued by an intrepid production assistant, who stole a print and smuggled it to the US, where it was premiered in its intended form. Hotel Terminus, Ophuls's investigation into the life of Barbie, the 'Butcher of Lyon', was, he claimed, structured along the lines of Columbo, with the interviewer as the TV detective in the old raincoat. Ophuls, who never feigned impartiality in his films, is still able to try to understand Nazis such as Barbie or Albert Speer, and expose what Hannah Arendt famously called 'the banality of evil'. In November Days (1991), Ophuls was at his most Columbo-like, chipping away at East Germans' recollections of living in the GDR, and their reactions to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and reunification. Veillées d'Arme (The Troubles We've Seen: The History of Journalism in Wartime, 1994) took Ophuls to Bosnia, where he begins an almost four-hour merciless inquiry into the relationship between war and the media, with multiple interviews, sometimes set against clips from films (including Lola Montès) for ironic effect. In 2013, he summed up his life and career in a film memoir, Ain't Misbehavin' (Un Voyageur), in which he revisited many of the places and people of his past. He showed a particular delight at the scene in the film Annie Hall in which Woody Allen and Diane Keaton queue to see The Sorrow and the Pity. For some years before his death he worked on a documentary about Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories, titled Des Vérités Désagréables (Unpleasant Truths). In 1956 he married Regina Ackermann. She survives him, along with three daughters and three grandchildren. Marcel Ophuls (Hans Marcel Oppenheimer), film-maker, born 1 November 1927; died 24 May 2025 This obituary has been revised since Ronald Bergan's death in 2020.
BreakingNews.ie
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BreakingNews.ie
Marcel Ophuls, filmmaker who forced France to face wartime past, dies aged 97
Marcel Ophuls, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker whose landmark 1969 documentary The Sorrow And The Pity shattered the comforting myth that most of France had resisted the Nazis during the Second World War, has died aged 97. The German-born filmmaker, who was the son of legendary filmmaker Max Ophuls, died on Saturday at his home in southwest France of natural causes, his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert told The Hollywood Reporter. Advertisement Though Ophuls would later win an Oscar for Hotel Terminus, (1988), his searing portrait of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, it was The Sorrow And The Pity that marked a turning point, not only in his career, but in the way France confronted its past. Deemed too provocative, too divisive, it was banned from French television for more than a decade. French broadcast executives said it 'destroyed the myths the French still need'. It would not air nationally until 1981. Advertisement Simone Veil, Holocaust survivor and moral conscience of postwar France, refused to support it. But for a younger generation in a country still recovering physically and psychologically from the aftermath of the atrocities, the movie was a revelation, an unflinching historical reckoning that challenged both national memory and national identity. Jean Paul Belmondo, Jeanne Moreau and director Marcel Ophuls on the set of Banana Skin in 1963 (Pierre Godot/AP) The myth it punctured had been carefully constructed by Charles de Gaulle, the wartime general who led Free French forces from exile and later became president. In the aftermath of France's liberation in 1944, de Gaulle promoted a version of events in which the French had resisted Nazi occupation as one people, united in dignity and defiance. Advertisement Collaboration was portrayed as the work of a few traitors. The French Republic, he insisted, had never ceased to exist. The Sorrow And The Pity, which was nominated for the 1972 Oscar for Best Documentary, told a different story. Filmed in stark black and white and stretching over four and a half hours, the documentary turned its lens on Clermont-Ferrand, a provincial town at the heart of France. Through long, unvarnished interviews with farmers, shopkeepers, teachers, collaborators, members of the French Resistance, even the town's former Nazi commander, Ophuls laid bare the moral ambiguities of life under occupation. Advertisement There was no narrator, no music, no guiding hand to shape the audience's emotions. Just people, speaking plainly, awkwardly, sometimes defensively. They remembered, justified and hesitated. And in those silences and contradictions, the film delivered its most devastating message: that France's wartime story was not one of widespread resistance, but of ordinary compromise, driven by fear, self-preservation, opportunism and, at times, quiet complicity. The film revealed how French police had aided in the deportation of Jews. How neighbours stayed silent. How teachers claimed not to recall missing colleagues. How many had simply got by. Resistance, The Sorrow And The Pity seemed to say, was the exception not the rule. Advertisement It was, in effect, the cinematic undoing of de Gaulle's patriotic myth, that France had resisted as one, and that collaboration was the betrayal of a few. Ophuls showed instead a nation morally divided and unready to confront its own reflection. In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, Ophuls bristled at the charge that he had made the film to accuse. 'It doesn't attempt to prosecute the French,' he said. 'Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?' Born in Frankfurt on November 1, 1927, Marcel Ophuls was the son of legendary German-Jewish filmmaker Max Ophuls, director of La Ronde, Letter From An Unknown Woman, and Lola Montes. When Hitler came to power in 1933, the family fled Germany for France. In 1940, as Nazi troops approached Paris, they fled again, across the Pyrenees into Spain, and on to the United States. Marcel became an American citizen and later served as a US army GI in occupied Japan. But it was his father's towering legacy that shaped his early path. 'I was born under the shadow of a genius,' Ophuls said in 2004. 'I don't have an inferiority complex, I am inferior.' He returned to France in the 1950s hoping to direct fiction, like his father. But after several poorly received features, including Banana Peel (1963), an Ernst Lubitsch-style caper starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau, his path shifted. 'I didn't choose to make documentaries,' he told The Guardian. 'There was no vocation. Each one was an assignment.' That reluctant shift changed cinema. After The Sorrow And The Pity, Ophuls followed with The Memory Of Justice (1976), a sweeping meditation on war crimes that examined Nuremberg but also drew uncomfortable parallels with atrocities in Algeria and Vietnam. In Hotel Terminus (1988), he spent five years tracking the life of Klaus Barbie, the so-called 'Butcher of Lyon', exposing not just his Nazi crimes but the role western governments played in protecting him after the war. The film won him his Academy Award for Best Documentary but, overwhelmed by its darkness, French media reported that he attempted suicide during production. In The Troubles We've Seen (1994), he turned his camera on journalists covering the war in Bosnia, and on the media's uneasy relationship with suffering and spectacle. Despite living in France for most of his life, he often felt like an outsider. 'Most of them still think of me as a German Jew,' he said in 2004, 'an obsessive German Jew who wants to bash France.' He was a man of contradictions: a Jewish exile married to a German woman who had once belonged to the Hitler Youth; a French citizen never fully embraced; a filmmaker who adored Hollywood, but changed European cinema by telling truths others would not. He is survived by his wife, Regine, their three daughters and three grandchildren.
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Marcel Ophuls, filmmaker who forced France to face wartime past, dies aged 97
Marcel Ophuls, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker whose landmark 1969 documentary The Sorrow And The Pity shattered the comforting myth that most of France had resisted the Nazis during the Second World War, has died aged 97. The German-born filmmaker, who was the son of legendary filmmaker Max Ophuls, died on Saturday at his home in southwest France of natural causes, his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert told The Hollywood Reporter. Though Ophuls would later win an Oscar for Hotel Terminus, (1988), his searing portrait of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, it was The Sorrow And The Pity that marked a turning point, not only in his career, but in the way France confronted its past. Deemed too provocative, too divisive, it was banned from French television for more than a decade. French broadcast executives said it 'destroyed the myths the French still need'. It would not air nationally until 1981. Simone Veil, Holocaust survivor and moral conscience of postwar France, refused to support it. But for a younger generation in a country still recovering physically and psychologically from the aftermath of the atrocities, the movie was a revelation, an unflinching historical reckoning that challenged both national memory and national identity. The myth it punctured had been carefully constructed by Charles de Gaulle, the wartime general who led Free French forces from exile and later became president. In the aftermath of France's liberation in 1944, de Gaulle promoted a version of events in which the French had resisted Nazi occupation as one people, united in dignity and defiance. Collaboration was portrayed as the work of a few traitors. The French Republic, he insisted, had never ceased to exist. The Sorrow And The Pity, which was nominated for the 1972 Oscar for Best Documentary, told a different story. Filmed in stark black and white and stretching over four and a half hours, the documentary turned its lens on Clermont-Ferrand, a provincial town at the heart of France. Through long, unvarnished interviews with farmers, shopkeepers, teachers, collaborators, members of the French Resistance, even the town's former Nazi commander, Ophuls laid bare the moral ambiguities of life under occupation. There was no narrator, no music, no guiding hand to shape the audience's emotions. Just people, speaking plainly, awkwardly, sometimes defensively. They remembered, justified and hesitated. And in those silences and contradictions, the film delivered its most devastating message: that France's wartime story was not one of widespread resistance, but of ordinary compromise, driven by fear, self-preservation, opportunism and, at times, quiet complicity. The film revealed how French police had aided in the deportation of Jews. How neighbours stayed silent. How teachers claimed not to recall missing colleagues. How many had simply got by. Resistance, The Sorrow And The Pity seemed to say, was the exception not the rule. It was, in effect, the cinematic undoing of de Gaulle's patriotic myth, that France had resisted as one, and that collaboration was the betrayal of a few. Ophuls showed instead a nation morally divided and unready to confront its own reflection. In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, Ophuls bristled at the charge that he had made the film to accuse. 'It doesn't attempt to prosecute the French,' he said. 'Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?' Born in Frankfurt on November 1, 1927, Marcel Ophuls was the son of legendary German-Jewish filmmaker Max Ophuls, director of La Ronde, Letter From An Unknown Woman, and Lola Montes. When Hitler came to power in 1933, the family fled Germany for France. In 1940, as Nazi troops approached Paris, they fled again, across the Pyrenees into Spain, and on to the United States. Marcel became an American citizen and later served as a US army GI in occupied Japan. But it was his father's towering legacy that shaped his early path. 'I was born under the shadow of a genius,' Ophuls said in 2004. 'I don't have an inferiority complex, I am inferior.' He returned to France in the 1950s hoping to direct fiction, like his father. But after several poorly received features, including Banana Peel (1963), an Ernst Lubitsch-style caper starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau, his path shifted. 'I didn't choose to make documentaries,' he told The Guardian. 'There was no vocation. Each one was an assignment.' That reluctant shift changed cinema. After The Sorrow And The Pity, Ophuls followed with The Memory Of Justice (1976), a sweeping meditation on war crimes that examined Nuremberg but also drew uncomfortable parallels with atrocities in Algeria and Vietnam. In Hotel Terminus (1988), he spent five years tracking the life of Klaus Barbie, the so-called 'Butcher of Lyon', exposing not just his Nazi crimes but the role western governments played in protecting him after the war. The film won him his Academy Award for Best Documentary but, overwhelmed by its darkness, French media reported that he attempted suicide during production. In The Troubles We've Seen (1994), he turned his camera on journalists covering the war in Bosnia, and on the media's uneasy relationship with suffering and spectacle. Despite living in France for most of his life, he often felt like an outsider. 'Most of them still think of me as a German Jew,' he said in 2004, 'an obsessive German Jew who wants to bash France.' He was a man of contradictions: a Jewish exile married to a German woman who had once belonged to the Hitler Youth; a French citizen never fully embraced; a filmmaker who adored Hollywood, but changed European cinema by telling truths others would not. He is survived by his wife, Regine, their three daughters and three grandchildren.
The Independent
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Marcel Ophuls, the Oscar-winning filmmaker who forced France to face its WWII past, is dead at 97
Marcel Ophuls, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker whose landmark 1969 documentary 'The Sorrow and the Pity' shattered the comforting myth that most of France had resisted the Nazis during World War II — has died at 97. The German-born filmmaker, who was the son of legendary filmmaker Max Ophuls, died Saturday at his home in southwest France of natural causes, his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert told The Hollywood Reporter. Though Ophuls would later win an Oscar for 'Hôtel Terminus' (1988), his searing portrait of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, it was 'The Sorrow and the Pity' that marked a turning point — not only in his career, but in how France confronted its past. Deemed too provocative, too divisive, it was banned from French television for over a decade. French broadcast executives said it 'destroyed the myths the French still need.' It would not air nationally until 1981. Simone Veil, Holocaust survivor and moral conscience of postwar France, refused to support it. But for a younger generation in a country still recovering physically and psychologically from the aftermath of the atrocities, the movie was a revelation — an unflinching historical reckoning that challenged both national memory and national identity. The myth it punctured had been carefully constructed by Charles de Gaulle, the wartime general who led Free French forces from exile and later became president. In the aftermath of France's liberation in 1944, de Gaulle promoted a version of events in which the French had resisted Nazi occupation as one people, united in dignity and defiance. Collaboration was portrayed as the work of a few traitors. The French Republic, he insisted, had never ceased to exist. 'The Sorrow and the Pity,' which was nominated for the 1972 Oscar for Best Documentary, told a different story: Filmed in stark black and white and stretching over four and a half hours, the documentary turned its lens on Clermont-Ferrand, a provincial town at the heart of France. Through long, unvarnished interviews with farmers, shopkeepers, teachers, collaborators, members of the French Resistance — even the town's former Nazi commander — Ophuls laid bare the moral ambiguities of life under occupation. There was no narrator, no music, no guiding hand to shape the audience's emotions. Just people — speaking plainly, awkwardly, sometimes defensively. They remembered, justified and hesitated. And in those silences and contradictions, the film delivered its most devastating message: that France's wartime story was not one of widespread resistance, but of ordinary compromise — driven by fear, self-preservation, opportunism, and, at times, quiet complicity. The film revealed how French police had aided in the deportation of Jews. How neighbors stayed silent. How teachers claimed not to recall missing colleagues. How many had simply gotten by. Resistance, 'The Sorrow and the Pity' seemed to say, was the exception — not the rule. It was, in effect, the cinematic undoing of de Gaulle's patriotic myth — that France had resisted as one, and that collaboration was the betrayal of a few. Ophuls showed instead a nation morally divided and unready to confront its own reflection. Even beyond France, 'The Sorrow and the Pity' became legendary. For cinephiles, its most famous cameo may be in Woody Allen's 'Annie Hall': Alvy Singer (Allen) drags his reluctant girlfriend to a screening, and, in the film's bittersweet coda, she takes her new boyfriend to see it too — a nod to the documentary's singular place in film history. In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, Ophuls bristled at the charge that he had made the film to accuse. 'It doesn't attempt to prosecute the French,' he said. 'Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?' Born in Frankfurt on Nov. 1, 1927, Marcel Ophuls was the son of legendary German-Jewish filmmaker Max Ophuls, director of 'La Ronde,' 'Letter from an Unknown Woman', and 'Lola Montès.' When Hitler came to power in 1933, the family fled Germany for France. In 1940, as Nazi troops approached Paris, they fled again — across the Pyrenees into Spain, and on to the United States. Marcel became an American citizen and later served as a U.S. Army GI in occupied Japan. But it was his father's towering legacy that shaped his early path. 'I was born under the shadow of a genius,' Ophuls said in 2004. 'I don't have an inferiority complex — I am inferior.' He returned to France in the 1950s hoping to direct fiction, like his father. But after several poorly received features — including 'Banana Peel' (1963), an Ernst Lubitsch-style caper starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau — his path shifted. 'I didn't choose to make documentaries,' he told The Guardian. 'There was no vocation. Each one was an assignment.' That reluctant pivot changed cinema. After 'The Sorrow and the Pity,' Ophuls followed with 'The Memory of Justice' (1976), a sweeping meditation on war crimes that examined Nuremberg but also drew uncomfortable parallels to atrocities in Algeria and Vietnam. In 'Hôtel Terminus' (1988), he spent five years tracking the life of Klaus Barbie, the so-called 'Butcher of Lyon,' exposing not just his Nazi crimes but the role Western governments played in protecting him after the war. The film won him his Academy Award for Best Documentary but, overwhelmed by its darkness, French media reported that he attempted suicide during production. In 'The Troubles We've Seen' (1994), he turned his camera on journalists covering the war in Bosnia, and on the media's uneasy relationship with suffering and spectacle. Despite living in France for most of his life, he often felt like an outsider. 'Most of them still think of me as a German Jew,' he said in 2004, 'an obsessive German Jew who wants to bash France.' He was a man of contradictions: a Jewish exile married to a German woman who had once belonged to the Hitler Youth; a French citizen never fully embraced; a filmmaker who adored Hollywood, but changed European cinema by telling truths others wouldn't. He is survived by his wife, Régine, their three daughters, and three grandchildren.
