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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE © 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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Dr. Dugoujon, who was arrested at the same time as
Jean Moulin, angrily declared: "I have prayed to Heaven to give me the grace
never to sit in judgment, but if I were a judge or a member of a jury, I would
sentence Klaus Barbie to death."
Alban Vistel, who had fought for the
Liberation, said: "We who fought as volunteers in the Resistance firmly believe
there should be no time limit on the trials for war crimes."
Also on
July 29, I telephoned both Marcel Rivière, a former member of the
Resistance and the top reporter on Progrès, and the Lyon
radio-television station to say that I would be in Lyon in three days. I could
already count on the principal newspaper and the television news program of the
area to persuade the local people not only to protest but also to fight.
On Sunday evening, August 1, I arrived. I stayed with the parents of
Serge Hajdenberg, who had been with us at the Essen protest. On Monday I made a
strong bid to the radio-television people, the Progrès people,
the former Resistance people in Lyon, and Dr. Dugoujon to convince them to
organize a group to go to Munich.
Progrès headlined
Marcel Rivière's editorial: "The Klaus Barbie Case Must Be Reopened,
Says B.K." It went on to say:
Citizens of Lyon, you cannot accept the
Munich prosecutor's decision to suspend the prosecution of Klaus Barbie, the
former Gestapo chief who caused so much blood and so many tears to flow in your
city and your district. A German woman speaks to you
.
Her
proposal, emotional yet strongly supported by incontrovertible documentary
evidence, produced a singularly overwhelming response in Dr. Dugoujon's Caluire
villa, where we met her, for it was this house that Klaus Barbie's men brutally
raided on June 21, 1943, and, after savagely clubbing them, arrested several
members of Jean Moulin 's Resistance headquarters.
The papers B.K. has
given us speak for themselves. They are photocopies of orders that Klaus Barbie
signed or countersigned for the arrest and deportation of hundreds of Jews who
had been rounded up in Lyon and its environs, notably in Haute-Savoie. Still
other documents deal with arbitrary arrests, tortures, massacres, shootings,
and summary executions . . . . But more than these are needed to convince the
Munich prosecutor! Agence France Presse gave my campaign
nationwide exposure. I also contributed a full page to Combat, in which
I said:
Barbie, the chief of the Lyon Gestapo, was
born on October 25, 1913, and sentenced to death in absentia on November 22,
1954, by
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE © 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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Back |
Page 226 |
Forward |
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