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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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hostile to Barbie, we had to make use of them and
help them as soon as possible by giving the Bolivian courts as much data as we
could that would serve to discomfit Barbie.
French judicial machinery,
which at last was beginning to move, is slow and ponderous, for it has to work
with diplomats and because Spanish documents would have to be translated, and
the La Paz embassy – as I had learned when I was there – had no
experts on its staff who could handle such work. These considerations indicated
that I would have to go back to La Paz with two trump cards. First, the
documents that I could get from the Munich prosecutor that would complete the
proof that Altmann was Barbie. These were official documents that I would
transmit unofficially because I could represent only the LICA and myself, but
these documents would be taken into consideration by the Bolivian authorities
and especially by public opinion. Second, I had seen that so far as the
Peruvians and the Bolivians were concerned, former Nazis were only political
refugees like any others. Scarcely anyone in South America knew about the
Gestapo's work of extermination. They had to be shown in a dramatic way that
Barbie was not what he said he was: "only a soldier who had done his duty."
Barbie had told a reporter for Pueblo: "During the war I acted
like any other officer of an army in battle, just like the Bolivian army
officers fighting Che Guevara's guerrillas." A great deal of emphasis,
therefore, had to be put on the massacres of civilians and the liquidation of
Jews.
It occurred to me that Mme. Benguigui would be conclusive proof
of those atrocities. The Bolivians had to see something more than documents and
photographs. They had to come into direct contact with some of the evils of
Nazism by encountering someone whom Barbie himself had caused to suffer. All
that was needed was enough money for plane tickets and expenses – plus the
individual herself, whom I would have to persuade to go with me.
I
spent several hours in Strasbourg on Monday, the day on which I was to lecture.
At 3 A.M. I got back on the train, and spent an awful night tripping back and
forth between my berth – which, as is always the case at such times, was
an upper one – and the toilet at the end of the car. The ORTF crew that
met me at the Munich railway station saw emerge from the compartment a mere rag
of a woman with but one thought in mind: to lie down in a hotel room. I bought
some pills, went to the nearest hotel, fell into bed,
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
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