Jean Barbier, one of France’s last unarrested Nazi war criminals who was seized here on Sunday on charges of murdering Jews, has been released on bail, police reported today. They declined to give any details.
Barbier had been sentenced to death in absentia after France was liberated. Among the charges was the murder of three Jewish children in one family whom he threw into the Isac River from a bridge only a few days before the Allies liberated Grenoble. He also was charged with personally shooting 12 Jews he had found hiding in the city.
Although a Frenchman, Barbier had been a member of the German Gestapo. He disappeared with the retreating Germans but, it was later learned, he returned to Grenoble about 10 years ago under an assumed name and had lived there since. Had he managed to escape arrest for two more years, he would have been free under the French statute of limitations for such crimes.
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