A fascinating four-hour documentary about Klaus Barbie, the SS captain in Nazi Germany, better known as the Butcher of Lyon due to his tactics in torture and death in Vichy France.
He was known to torture men, women and children using insanely sadistic methods including sexual abuse with a dog. I don't know how that worked.
After the war, he fled to South America where he lived with little disruption despite most people knowing who he was and where he was until he was arrested 40 years after the fact and sentenced to life in prison, what little life he has left.
He spent eight years in prison for an untold amount of murders and atrocities.
The interesting parts of the film are the actual filmmaker, Marcel Ophüls. His father was the famed director Max that has a number of films on the 1,001 list himself. Max and his family fled Germany (they were Jews) and went to France and then were forced to the United States.
His son is an angry man. Marcel also directed The Sorrow and the Pity, a long documentary about the French resistance during the Nazi regime.
He takes his frustrations out on his interview subjects. He talks to former, unrepentant Nazis, French resistance, CIA operatives and people of France that survived Barbie's barbarism.
Marcel is quick to take Nazis to task for their actions and opinions about what was going on. Filmed are moments of frustration as interviewees attempt to escape the glare of the camera.
In another instance, a Holocaust survivor visits the Lyon home where she and her family were arrested. A grey-haired old lady sticks her head out of the window. She is a former neighbor of the girl and they proceed to ask her if she remembers the day of the arrest.
The survivor later notes that the old woman did nothing to hide her or her family nor did she do anything to stop her family from being arrest and eventually sent to a concentration camp.
Ophüls' documentaries are not great stories, in a sense. At least they are not presented in a very good narrative. They jump from anecdote to anecdote. Presented in chronological order, it's hodgepodge and confusing at times.
Still, right when the film starts to drag, another character pops out of the story and drags you right back in.
The most memorable is Jacques Vergès, Barbie's attorney once he was caught and brought to trial.
Vergès is a guy I'd never heard of, yet there's no one more notorious. He's a Vietnamese-French defense lawyer and a rabid anticolonialist communist. He's represented Algerian militant Djamila Bouhired, who he married, Carlos the Jackal (he's featured in the miniseries Carlos), a member of the Khmer Rouge and Barbie.
Vergès, ironically, went to England as a youth to join the French resistance against the Nazis. Also as a youngster, he met and befriended Pol Pot. Of course, he saw French colonialism in Algeria as being the same thing as the Nazis in France. Why he didn't see what Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge was doing in Cambodia as being the same of what the Nazis did in Europe is a mystery.
Also a mystery is what Vergès did between 1970-78. He left his wife and family. Disappeared. Nobody knows where he was at. Some say he was in Cambodia or in and around Europe and the Middle East among the Palestinian liberation movement groups.
Reportedly, he offered to Slobodan Milošević and Saddam Hussein. Again, how he doesn't connect the dots between one genocide and another is a mystery. However he can stick it to the west is all that matters.
He's a real asshole.
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