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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE © 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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and called a doctor. I had no night clothes with me,
for I had planned to leave Munich that evening by plane. The doctor charged me
forty marks for telling me that I had food poisoning and prescribing the same
pills I had just bought.
That afternoon, looking wan and haggard, I
went to Ludolph's office and told him that Greminger wanted copies of the birth
certificates of the four Barbies, proof that during the war Barbie was
officially a police officer and not a soldier, and specimens of Barbie's
handwriting.
The French magistrates had not come yet, so we worked
until 7 P.M.
Unfortunately, Ludolph was no longer entitled to give me
photocopies of the data, for from now on he had to give them to the French
military tribunal. Otherwise, I would have been back in La Paz with them on
Thursday, February 10, and they would have been of great help to the people who
did not want Barbie out of jail. The only official means of getting the
documents to La Paz would take ten days at least. Barbie was freed on February
12.
About noon on the following day I translated for Ludolph the
questions the French television newscasters wanted him to answer, and his
replies. The two magistrates from the military tribunals of Lyon and Paris had
spent the morning with him, and he had prepared for each of them two
photocopies of selected documents. He had invited me to lunch, and I expected
the two judges to join us.
"When I told them that all four of us would
lunch together," Ludolph told me, "they declined the invitation." He seemed
astonished at their reaction, for, as he himself said, I had done their work
for them.
There was a lot of talk in Paris about the Barbie case.
Ladislas de Hoyos had managed to interview Barbie in jail, which had cost him a
great deal of trouble and cost the ORTF $2,000. The French consul had paid the
money over to an executive of the Ministry of the Interior while Barbie and his
two lawyers were in an adjoining office.
Now that they could see their
abuser on television, Barbie's victims recognized him in spite of the
intervening years. What luck! Thereafter, so far as the French were concerned,
Altmann was indeed Barbie. I was both happy and furious over that;
incontrovertible evidence was hardly taken into consideration, while
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE © 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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Page 259 |
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