A plaque in the village of Izieu, in memory of 44 Jewish children arrested there and deported to their deaths in Auschwitz in April 1944 on the orders of then Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie currently on trial here for crimes against humanity, was defaced by swastikas.
The desecration, last Thursday night or early Friday, is the most serious manifestation of anti-Semitism in the region since Barbie’s trial opened a week ago. It followed a rambling statement by Barbie to the court last Wednesday in which he extolled National Socialism, insisted he was being tried illegally and demanded to be returned to his prison cell for the duration of the trial. The three-judge panel complied.
Rolland Rapport, a lawyer for one of the many civil plaintiffs in the trial, asked Friday that Barbie be brought back to court “by force if necessary to face the survivors of his crimes.” Rappaport said “Barbie may be absent but his nostalgia for Nazism is very much present.”
Magistrate Andre Cerdini, President of the court, said Barbie could stay away “for the time being,” a formulation that had legal experts guessing that he might reconsider the issue at a later stage of the trial. Both Prosecutor Andre Truche and several lawyers for plaintiffs backed Cerdini’s stand on grounds that to force Barbie to appear in court would be resorting to the methods used by the Nazis.
Most attorneys here agreed that his absence would not diminish the gravity of the charges against him but would “reduce the public impact of the trial.” One of its avowed purposes is to inform France’s younger generation of the realities of the Holocaust.
With Barbie back in St. Joseph Prison, the trial continued Friday but more than 90 percent of the journalists covering it were gone.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
