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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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providing there is no objection to his
promotion, it is recommended that he be advanced, starting November 9, 1944,
from S.S.-Obersturmführer to S.S.-Hauptsturmführer.
The deportation of French civilians from Villeurbanne on March
1, 1943, is a typical example of Barbie's work. Paul Chabert, the mayor of the
town, described that tragedy at the trial of Oberg and Knochen:
On March 1, 1943, German troops surrounded
a block of houses in Villeurbanne . . . . After classifying its thousand
residents, they herded a hundred and fifty of them to a spot near the railway
station. I intervened with Commander Hollert and his deputy, Lieutenant Barbie,
but we could get nothing from those German officers, and the hundred and fifty
Villeurbanne men were loaded into cattle cars bound for Compiègne in the
month of March – that is, when temperatures were quite low . . . . We
asked Barbie for permission to go to Compiègne to take clothing and food
to the unfortunate prisoners, for they had been dragged from their homes almost
naked. Barbie finally granted it . . . . The commander of the camp told us:
"Lieutenant Barbie did telephone me that you were coming, but he definitely
instructed me to forbid you to see the prisoners." Sometime later we learned
that the men from Villeurbanne had been deported from Compiègne to
Germany. Only thirty came back.
Another example of the summary
executions Barbie ordered, one of unimaginable savagery, was described by
Superintendent Adrien Richard. Richard was deputy chief of the Lyon police
detectives, and he witnessed what went on in the cellar of Barbie's Gestapo:
On January 10, 1944, I learned of a
round-up by the Germans on Quai Sainte Claire following the death of two German
policemen who had been killed in circumstances the police did not solve.
About 1 A.M. the following morning, I received a telephone call at my
house asking me to accompany my division superintendent to the military
hospital that served as Gestapo headquarters, on a mission the purpose of which
was not known to me.
At the hospital an officer tried to explain to us
the execution of prisoners of the Germans who had allegedly revolted. To set
things straight, I should say that we were received by a German officer, not by
Barbie, who was head of the department. The officer asked us to follow two
non-coms to the cellar to identify the corpses. Two non-coms preceded us and
two followed us, all four armed with sub-machine guns, as we went down into the
cellar. When we got into the corridor we were overpowered by an unmistakable
odor of warm blood. We
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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Page 220 |
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