Home Up One Level What's New? Q & A Short Essays Holocaust Denial Guest Book Donations Multimedia Links

The Holocaust History Project.
The Holocaust History Project.

WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
 
 
Previous Page Back  Contents  Contents Page 259 Home Page Home Page  Forward Next Page 
     
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
    
   
 
WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
Previous Page  Back Page 259 Forward  Next Page

   

Last modified: April 9, 2008
Technical/administrative contact: [email protected]