France The "Butcher of Lyons" in the Dock

By William R. Doerner

For four years the old Nazi has paced his solitary, maximum-security cell in St. Joseph prison, just a few hundred yards from the site of his Gestapo headquarters in Lyons during World War II. Garrulous by nature, he is prevented from speaking to anyone except his round-the-clock French guards, his lawyer and a 46-year-old daughter who visits once a month. But for Klaus Barbie, an uncomfortable isolation is about to turn into an even more uncomfortable spectacle. This week the wartime head of the Gestapo in France's third largest city, who became infamous as the "Butcher of Lyons," goes on trial for atrocities he is accused of committing from 1942 to 1944.

Barbie's trial, which is expected to last six weeks, caps a recent round of summonses to judgment for former Nazis. In Israel, the trial of John Demjanjuk, 66, accused of being the sadistic guard "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka death camp, has entered its 13th week, with a verdict expected next fall. Last week Austrian President and former United Nations Secretary- General Kurt Waldheim, 68, recently barred from entering the U.S. on suspicion of abetting Nazi crimes, ordered a state prosecutor to file suit for slander / against Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress, for claiming that Waldheim had been "part and parcel" of the Nazi machine. Still awaiting final review of his case, although he was given the death penalty in absentia, is Karl Linnas, 67, the first naturalized American to be stripped of his citizenship and turned over to Soviet authorities for Nazi crimes. More will doubtless follow. The cases of nearly 30 other U.S. immigrants suspected of having lied about their wartime activities are pending at the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations.

Barbie, 73, has already been twice convicted in absentia, in 1952 and 1954, of an extensive list of war crimes in Vichy France, including the murder of 4,342 people and the deportation to concentration camps of 7,591 Jews, most of whom perished. His name is guaranteed to live in French infamy for one deed alone, the torture-murder of Jean Moulin, the French Resistance hero and Charles de Gaulle's representative to the underground. But because the statute of limitations has run out on many of his crimes, the career Nazi official will not stand trial for most of the outrages he is known to have committed. Instead, he is charged with four "crimes against humanity" that remain punishable indefinitely, though no longer by the death penalty, which was outlawed in 1981. The four:

-- The deportation to Auschwitz in April 1944 of 44 children and seven teachers from a school for Jewish children in the French village of Izieu, about 25 miles southwest of Lyons. A teacher was the group's lone survivor.

-- The roundup of 86 Jews at Lyons's General Union of French Israelites in February 1943. Of the 76 who were later sent to death camps, only five are known to have survived.

-- The deportation of some 300 Jews and 300 French Resistance prisoners in Lyons to Auschwitz and Buchenwald in August 1944, only days before the advancing Allies liberated the city.

-- A series of arrests, executions and deportations of Resistance fighters that the French Supreme Court says shows Barbie's "systematic persecution" of the French underground.

Barbie's success in escaping the dock for so long was in large part the doing of the U.S., which in 1983 expressed "deep regrets" for its role in the travesty. For four years after the war ended, Barbie worked for the U.S. Counter-Intelligence Corps as a spy on German Communists. When his notoriety in France threatened to become an embarrassment, the CIC arranged for Barbie and his family to slip into exile in Bolivia, where under the name Klaus Altmann he became a successful businessman and crony of a succession of military dictators. Barbie's cover was blown in 1972 by the Paris-based Nazi- hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, with the help of Ita Halaunbrenner, who lost two children at the Izieu school. But Barbie's political connections thwarted French efforts at extradition. Finally, during a brief period of civilian rule in 1983, authorities in La Paz handed him over to the French.

When it became clear that no courtroom in Lyons was large enough to accommodate the crowds expected for the Barbie trial, officials decided to move it into the huge entrance hall of Lyons's Palace of Justice. Not everyone in France is looking forward to the event. Barbie's attorney, Jacques Verges, has promised that part of his defense will be to show the extensive local collaboration with Nazi occupiers, a chapter of the war that many Frenchmen would prefer to forget. Last week, in a written interview smuggled to the London newspaper Mail on Sunday, Barbie needled his French captors for failing to charge him with the murder of his most famous victim "because they don't want the names of the traitors who gave up Jean Moulin to be known."

The trial has caused disagreements between Jewish and former Resistance leaders. Many French Jews argue that equating Barbie's campaign against the underground with his other crimes trivializes his role in the Holocaust. Says former Health Minister Simone Veil, a survivor of Auschwitz: "It is the banalization of everything that happened."

Yet for the most part France seemed ready to let Barbie make them confront the past, horrors and all. Last week Premier Jacques Chirac suggested that French high school history teachers devote at least one class this month to the study of racial and religious persecution in Vichy France. Others felt the most important lesson to be learned from the trial involved not the past but the future. "This trial is not an act of vengeance," said Theodore Klein, president of a leading Jewish group in France. "It is a warning, an appeal to the defense of democracy, justice and liberty."

With reporting by William Dowell/Paris and B.J. Phillips/Lyons