-Caveat Lector-
excerpts from:
Unhealed Wounds - France and the Klaus Barbie Affair
Erna Paris©1985 All Rights Reserved
ISBN 0-394-55390-X
Grove Press, Inc.
196 West Houston St.
New York, NY 10014
Methuen Publications, Canada(1985)
252pps. - first edition - out-of-print
--[1]--
-2-
THE EARLY LIFE AND TIMES OF KLAUS BARBIE
No document of the early Nazi years conveyed the mesmerizing influence of
Adolf Hitler with greater immediacy than Leni Riefenstahl's dazzling film,
Triumph of the Will. Riefenstahl is fond of calling her work a documentary,
but in reality it is one of the most significant propaganda films ever made.
Financed by the Nazis and produced with the direct approval of both Hitler
and Goebbels, Triumph of the Will is a precise and accurate representation of
the mood, the ambiance and the message the Nazi movement wished to convey to
the German people in 1934.
Triumph of the Will represents a radical transformation of history into
theater.[1] Riefenstahl went to Nuremberg with 30 cameras and 121
technicians, and the plans for the rally itself were coordinated with plans
for the film. When original footage was accidentally spoiled, Julius
Streicher, Alfred Rosenberg, Rudolf Hess and Hans Frank were ordered to
reconsecrate themselves to Hitler the following week, without an audience.
(They replayed their parts with appropriate histrionics.) Significantly,
however, the delay did not matter, for the pageant at Nuremberg was conceived
to straddle the worlds of fantasy and reality and to conjure up echoes of
other collectively ecstatic events in the history of mankind. To watch
thousands move and march as one, then pledge their loyalty in a single
roaring voice -the voice of the "nation" raised in joyous submission to the
triumphant will of the nation's leader — is, even now, to experience other
images from the past: a medieval pageant in pomp and riotous color, banners
waving in symbolic homage to the glory of God; or a swell of collective
rapture as believers pledge themselves to a holy crusade against the infidel.
Our movement is "a holy order" cries Hitler to the faithful who listen with
rapturous attention. "I believe I am acting in accordance with the will of
the Almighty Creator; by defending myself against the Jew I am fighting for
the work of the Lord," he had written in Mein Kampf, establishing the
all-important religious metaphor.
Triumph of the Will presented a central ideal of the Nazi movement: the
iron-willed individual whose strength of character, self-control and personal
discipline were such that he was able to overcome individualism and offer
himself in submission to a greater power. This idea struck a sympathetic
chord with a Christian population. Hitler attempted to build a non-Christian,
neo-pagan form of religion using the symbols of a remote Teutonic past, but
it was his reliance on the familiar forms of Christianity that made the new
"faith" so comfortable for so many.
Although it has been fashionable (both inside and outside of Germany) to
think of the Nazi movement as a short aberration in the life of an
ultracivilized country, nazism was, in reality, a direct product of a century
of German cultural history; for although German Kultur had come to represent
a pinnacle of artistic achievement, particularly in the realm of music, it
had also focused on images and ideas that favored the development of Aryan
ideology. The intellectual bedrock for such ideas came initially from the
writings of the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), who has
subsequently been called both the father of German nationalism and the father
of German anti-Semitism. Much of Fichte's thinking was inspired by Germany's
bitter defeat during the Napoleonic Wars, after which both Napoleon and
France came to represent everything modern and evil. The French ideals of
liberty, equality and fraternity that inspired the 1789 French Revolution
were anathema and, more serious still, un-German. German thought took another
direction altogether; it set its sights on the past, the remote past of
mythic heroes and grandeur, and rejected the modern world as envisioned by
the Enlightenment.
In defeat, Fichte glorified Germans and Germanness.
Among all modern peoples it is you in whom the seed of human perfection most
decidedly lies, and you who are charged with progress in human development.
If you perish in this your essential nature, then there perishes together
with you every hope of the whole human race for salvation from the depths of
its miseries.[2]
As for the Jews within Germany, Fichte had been opposed to their emancipation
at least since 1793, when he argued that they were a destructive state within
a state and that their ideas were as disreputable as French ideas. (Few
things were worse in Germany than being compared to the French.)
Fichte set a tone that was adopted by leaders in several spheres. For
example, after Bismarck's victory over France in the Franco-Prussian war of
1870, it was widely believed that the battle had been won be- cause of German
moral superiority. Superior arms and tactics were simply taken for granted.
One contemporary pundit described the event as "a divine judgment ...
inscribed in letters of fire upon the tablets of
history."[3]
The renowned philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) also had
an important impact on German political thinking. At the center of Hegelian
thought was an all-embracing mind or spirit that was the same as, and made
concrete in, the political state. Individuals had political existence only
insofar as they participated in this spirit or belonged to the state. As a
direct consequence, the king or emperor, who represented mind, spirit and
divinity, included and subsumed the individuality of his subjects.
The philosophical conceits of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) were
different in substance, but not totally dissimilar in their conclusions.
Nietzsche was an isolated visionary who eventually went mad, but his
iconoclastic, romantic ideas precipitated a veritable cult in
late-nineteenth-century Germany that was rivalled only by the cult of the
Kaiser himself.
According to Nietzsche, man becomes heroic through the proper use of the
will. His theory of a superior class of Ubermenschen, with its echoes of
Plato's Philosopher King and a ruling elite whose role it is to lead mankind
along the road to social and moral perfection, struck just the right chord in
fin de siecle Germany, where antiliberal, antidemocratic, pro-national
sentiments had been evolving for decades. Nietzsche considered democracy a
barrier to the establishment of his ideal state, calling the attitudes of the
masses a "slave morality." Leaders must aspire to live by another ethos
altogether, a "master morality" that extended beyond the boundaries of
tradition. Unlike the Philosopher King of Plato's Republic, who was obliged
to adhere to the same laws as ordinary people but with even greater
vigilance, Nietzsche's superman was held to be under no such constraints. He
lived beyond the so-called good and evil of ordinary men. The superman was
duty bound to create his own laws. The moral shackles of history were not for
him.
Many Germans (unlike the French) took Nietzsche literally. The idea that the
strong had innate rights over the weak was appealing; indeed, it seemed
self-evident to many that the supreme Ubermensch was already in their midst.
The energetic Kaiser was clearly the embodiment of the Nietzschean (and
Hegelian) ideal. Kaiser Wilhelm II was not one to dispute this flattering
notion, and he certainly did nothing to discourage the hero worship that
followed in its wake. Indeed, he believed firmly in the divine right of
kings. The Kaiser's main interests seemed to be clothes and military parades,
in which he loved to strut in full regalia accompanied by stirring martial
music. He was fun-loving and given to practical jokes, but he also advocated
expansionism and enjoyed saber rattling, which made his neighbors exceedingly
nervous.
Kaiser Wilhelm made a special point of supporting the arts. Kultur, he
believed, ought to contribute to the moral fiber of the nation. The arts must
represent the Ideal, which "only the German people" could preserve. Indeed,
art that chose to represent the unlovely aspects of life sinned "against the
German people," he pronounced.[4]
Major artists reflected such views. The mythological heroes and heroines of
Richard Wagner carried within their bodies the seed of the future German
race, a race of flaxen-haired Nordic gods and demigods. And the composer
Richard Strauss actually proposed himself (indirectly) for the title of
Nietzsche's superman when his musical autobiography, A Hero's Life, was
premiered on March 3, 1893.
Nineteenth-century German nationalism also gave rise to the mystical concept
of Volk. Volk meant more than a people bound together by common ties of
language, territory and custom; it conveyed something quite deliberately
unspecified, something transcendent that touched upon the inner essence of
the group, both collectively and individually. Through membership in the
Volk, men and women hoped to overcome the sense of separateness and
alienation that is inherent in the human condition.
The role of the Volk was elaborated as early as 1810: "A state without Volk
is nothing, a soulless artifice; a Volk without a state is nothing, a
bodiless airy phantom, like the Gypsies and the Jews. Only state and Volk
together can form a Reich, and such a Reich cannot be preserved without
Volkdom," wrote one of the originators of the idea.[5] More than a century
later, the centralized, spiritual universe of Hegel in combination with
Nietzsche's Ubermenschen and the ineffable mysteries of Volk did indeed
produce a particular world-view that Hitler needed only to draw upon and
develop.
Jews and Gypsies were excluded from participation in the mystical state of
being and, by implication, from the political state as well. As the
nineteenth century progressed, Jewishness as an abstract principle became the
antagonist of Germanness as an abstract principle, a negative measuring stick
of one's right to belong to the German Volk.
Until the 1870s, hatred of Jews had expressed itself primarily through myths
that had been propagated over the centuries (not least by the lower Christian
clergy) and incorporated in a collective consciousness. Jews were accused of
poisoning wells, baking the blood of Christian children into Passover matzohs
and other like abominations. But the nineteenth century ushered in a
frightening new world of industrialization that threatened a centuries-old
traditional way of life. Peasants left their fields and headed for the cities
to work in factories, capital assumed a new importance and the rise of a new
bourgeoisie filled the old landed classes with fear.
In 1873, a financial crash rocked Germany, and anti-Semitism (which had been
dormant since the 1820s) assumed a new political dimension. Jews were
identified with that frightening new arbiter of people's lives, the stock
market, and with a presumed domination of unearned capital. In 1875 an
article appeared linking Jews and liberals, to the great satisfaction of
those who despised both.[6] And the myth of "the Jewish conspiracy" made an
appearance on the political scene. The myth originated without a Jewish
context in an 1864 French novel purporting to retail a dialogue between
Machiavelli and Montesquieu[7] and became a "Jewish story" four years later
in a German novel called Biarritz.[8] At the end of the century, this latter
work was the source for the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which
was fabricated in Czarist Russia; and in the 1920s, the Protocols, in turn,
became a piece de resistance of Hitler's anti-Semitic ideology.[9]
In November 1879, Heinrich von Treitschke, professor of history at the
university of Berlin, penned a phrase that would echo widely in the years to
come. "The Jews are our national misfortune," he wrote. The following year, a
second author suggested that Berlin be renamed the capital of the Jewish
Reich;[10] and an "Anti-Semites' Petition" was circulated and addressed to
Bismarck.[11]
As one historian with a descriptive flair has put it, anti-Semitism after
1873 soon functioned "like a political magic rabbit."[12] When a candidate
pulled it out of his hat, voter support increased. Whole towns were
occasionally embroiled in anti-Semitic controversy, as when the citizens of
Dusseldorf debated whether to honor their famous son, Heinrich Heine, in
spite of his Jewish birth. (They decided not to.) But nineteenth-century
anti-Semitism was not yet specifically racial in nature. Jews were described
as alien non-participants in the Volk, as controlling the press and as a
subversive element within the Reich; but the focus was on conversion, and
Jews who heeded this advice were assured that they might then become good
German patriots.
Hitler had a German legacy of more than one hundred years of pro-Aryan,
anti-Semitic ideology to draw upon as he stood before an enraptured crowd in
the Nuremberg stadium; and, at their core, the ideas he espoused were
comfortably familiar to those who paid homage on that day. "Our movement will
not die so long as one of us has breath," he cried to the believers. They
answered with a terrible, unified roar. But it was Goebbels who touched the
nerve center of truth that September afternoon: "In order to last, a movement
must reach the hearts of men — their minds, yes, but especially their
hearts," he said. It was an accurate psychological insight. And in September
1934, one of those overjoyed hearts beat in the breast of the young Klaus
Barbie, a recent graduate from the Friedrich Wilhelms Gymnasium in Trier.
. Nikolaus (Klaus) Barbie was born on October 25, 1913, in the little
Rhineland town of Bad Godesberg, near Bonn. The Barbie family came from
Merzig, in the Saar. In origin, they were probably a French Catholic family
called Barbier that had left France as refugees at the time of the
Revolution. Ironically, it was precisely this group of refugees, along with
the Huguenots and the Jews, who formed a cultural and economic elite in a
developing modern Germany and who had helped raise Berlin, for example, into
a metropolis of international stature.
In spite of flamboyant patriotism and chauvinism, growing anti-Semitism and a
monarch who was inspired with his own divinity, Germany in the year of Klaus
Barbie's birth remained a highly civilized country, the proud birthplace of
Goethe, Beethoven, Bach, Kant, Zweig and Heine. The arts and the universities
flourished. The Jews, though disliked, were fully acculturated and highly
assimilated. (Roughly one-third of those born Jews intermarried, and many
others had been baptized or were Jews in name only.) Among those who
continued to practice their religion, it was a cliche to speak of being "a
Jew at home and a German in the street." But the year of 1914 was a
watershed. Before young Klaus Barbie was one year old, war erupted, his
father went off to battle, and nothing was ever the same again in the
household, or, indeed, in the country. The elder Barbie returned an angry,
bitter man. He had been wounded in the neck at Verdun and taken prisoner by
the French, whom he hated. He never recovered his health. And his son never
forgave.
. . .
pps. 30-36
--[notes]--
Chapter 2
1. Susan Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism," in A Susan Sontag Reader (New York:
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1982).
2. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Reden an die Deutsche Nation, Berlin, 19 ' 08, p.
488, quoted, in Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews: 1933-194S (New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), p. 34.
3. Gordon A. Craig, Germany: 1866-194S (New York: Oxford University Press,
1978).
4. Quoted in Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World
Before the War, 1890-1914 (New York: Macmillan, 1966). p. 357.
5. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, Deutsches Volkstum, 1810, quoted in Dawidowicz,
The War Against the Jews p. 35.
6. Kreuzzeitung, June 1875, quoted in Craig, Germany: 1866-1945, p. 84.
7. Maurice Joly, Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.
8. By Sir John Radcliffe (pseudonym for Herman Goedsche).
9. For a fascinating account of the history of the Protocols, I refer the
reader to Herman Bernstein, The Truth About "The Protocols of Zion" (New
York: Ktav, 1935,1971).
10. Craig, Germany: 1866-1945, p. 103.
11. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, p. 47.
12. Ibid.
=====
. . .
It was June 15, 1983. Jacques Verges had become Klaus Barbie's sole legal
counsel.
Verges merely smiled mys[t]eriously when asked who was paying his fees and
his expenses for trips to faraway places like La Paz, Bolivia, to collect
evidence and interview witnesses. Francois Genoud, on the other hand, was
slightly less reticent. In an interview with Stern magazine, he said that he
would "neither confirm nor deny" his involvement in the Barbie affair, adding
that "Everyone has his hobbies."[6] Among Verges's acquaintances, however,
the answer seemed evident. "If Jacques needs money these days he has only to
go to Switzerland," confided a friend.
It has long been known in various European circles that "a Swiss citizen who
lives in Lausanne" has managed the Nazi treasury since the fall of the Third
Reich.[7] The money, most of which was stolen from European Jews, was
deposited in numbered bank accounts through a clandestine club of former SS
officers called Die Spinne (the Spider), the successor to the ODESSA
organization. In March 1965, Le Monde indirectly identified this individual
as Francois Genoud.[8] In 1969, the Centre d'information et de documentation
moyen-orient in Brussels confirmed the identification.
Francois Genoud personifies a hybrid of ultra-Left and neo-Nazi extremism
that first appeared on the international scene after the last war. One might
even say he created the type along with a handful of others. His nazism came
first. Genoud was born in Lausanne in 1915 into a bourgeois family that
appreciated "law and order." In the early 1930s, before Hitler came to power,
his parents sent him to Germany in the hope that he would pick up some of the
discipline of the emerging new regime. During his stay, Genoud was introduced
to Hitler and actually shook his hand. He read Hitler's writings and found
them "very relevant."[9] The teenager was an instant convert. Francois Genoud
returned to Switzerland a convinced Nazi, and he has never lost his faith.
Back in Switzerland, Genoud made contact with Georges Oltramare, head of the
Swiss fascist party, L'Union Nationale. According to his own account,
however, Genoud preferred the pro-Nazi Front National, which he joined in
1934.[10] In 1936 he travelled to Palestine, where he met an individual who,
like himself, would eventually combine the presumably polar opposites of
fascism and extreme left-wing nationalism. Haj Amin el Hussein was the
ex-Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and he was to become one of Genoud's links to
the Arab world.
In 1940, the military attache at the French embassy in Berne, Switzerland,
noted that Genoud was involved in disseminating anti-French propaganda. Also
around this time, Genoud was contacted by an agent of the Abwehr for work in
the German intelligence service, and during the course of the year he
disappeared from Switzerland to travel through Germany, Czechoslovakia,
Hungary and Belgium. During this period (and immediately following the end of
the war) Genoud made the acquaintance of several extremely prominent Nazis,
including SS General Karl Wolff. Wolff was Himmler's personal adjutant as far
back as 1933, and in 1939 he became Himmler's liaison officer in the Fuhrer's
headquarters. In 1943, Wolff was Supreme SS and Police Leader in the Italian
campaign, and it was he who negotiated surrender on April 29, 1945. He was
also part of Hitler's plan (later abandoned) to kidnap Pope Pius XII in
September 1943 (after the fall of Mussolini) with a special regiment of 2,000
men.
Wolff was a consummate Nazi. According to a document submitted to the court
at Nuremburg in 1946, he had greeted "with particular joy" the information
that "for two weeks now a train has been carrying every day five thousand
members of the Chosen People" from Warsaw to the killing center of
Treblinka.[11]
In 1984, just before his death at the age of eighty-four, Wolff gave an
interview to a Swiss journalist[12] in which he spoke of how much former
Nazis everywhere owed to Francois Genoud. After the war, while they were in
prison or in hiding, Genoud acted as an intermediary, Wolff said. In
particular, he was involved in bringing aid to German soldiers and officers
who were being held in French prisons.
Genoud claims that he was not involved in helping Nazis escape from
Europe, but only "because the occasion did not present itself."[13] On
another occasion he explained himself further, this time with re-gard to
Klaus Barbie. "I did not help Mr. Barbie escape," he declared. "It would not
have been a dishonor to help National Socialists flee, but as it happens, I
did not ."[14]
As part of his ongoing commitment to the ideology of the Third Reich, Genoud
became a publisher of important Nazi materials. He holds all posthumous
rights to the writings of Hitler, Martin Bormann and the Nazi propaganda
minister, Joseph Goebbels, according to a financial agreement concluded with
members of all three families in 1945 and 1946. In 1952, representing himself
as an agent of the Hitler family, Genoud brought charges against a Paris
publishing house that had produced Bormann's account of Hitler's
conversations without his permission, and won.[15] And in 1956 a court in
Cologne agreed that he owned the rights to the posthumous works of Goebbels,
causing a scandal among people who claimed that the royalties from such
writings ought to be in the public domain to compensate Hitler's victims.
In 1973, Genoud sold the rights to the Goebbels diary (a 16,000-page
manuscript with a baroque history of its own) to Albrecht Knaus, the director
of Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, a Hamburg publishing house; and in 1981, Knaus,
who by then had his own publishing house in Hamburg, brought out Hitler's
Political Testament as purportedly dictated to Martin Bormann. The preface to
the book explained that Genoud had acquired the document in 1946 at the time
of the Nuremburg Trials. It seems that ex-SS Captain Hans Reichenberg, who
had the document, went to the Nuremburg Trials to act as an adviser for the
defense. There, through his former superior, General Hermann Ramcke, he met
Francois Genoud, a friend of Ramcke. During the course of a developing
friendship, he confided to Genoud his photocopies of eighteen chapters of the
book.
By 1955, Genoud's second career as adviser, researcher and banker to the
cause of Arab nationalism had begun. One of the keys to that seemingly
unlikely transition can be found in Hitler's Political Testament. In the
preface, Genoud explained that he planned to have the book translated into
Arabic and Swahili because, in the body of the text, Hitler invited the
people of the Third World to carry on the work of the Thousand Year Reich.
In 1955, Genoud was in Tangiers, one of the ports where Nazis seeking to
escape European justice took refuge. He was also frequently in Cairo, where
he worked in the Egyptian intelligence service under Nasser. (Cairo under
Nasser had been the center of the Pan-Arab movement since 1945.) These were
important years, the years in which nazism and the developing ultra-Left
began to merge: and Francois Genoud was at the center of events. With his
friend Hans Reichenberg, who also had discovered a new outlet for his career
in the Arab world, Genoud created an import-export company called
Arabo-Afrika. The business was primarily a cover for the export of
anti-Semitic and antiIsraeli propaganda[16] and the delivery of weapons to
the Algerian FLN movement.[17] Genoud made financial investments for various
friends, Reichenberg and Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler's finance minister,
among them. Genoud also renewed his friendship with Karl Wolff, who had found
his way to Nasser's Egypt.
Cairo in the 1950s was paradise for Nazis with nowhere to go and nowhere to
apply their carefully honed talents. In the emerging world of Arab
nationalism, they found a new outlet for their profound anti-Semitism and
their propaganda skills.
It was in this milieu that Francois Genoud first met the nine leaders of the
nascent Algerian insurrection. Ahmed Ben Bella, Mohammed Khider, Alt Ahmet,
Mohammed Boudiaf and their colleagues had formed the provisional government
of Algeria. Genoud's skills as a financier made him infinitely valuable, and
before the end of the decade he had established bank accounts in Switzerland
on behalf of the North African liberation armies of Morocco, Tunisia and
Algeria. The system he used involved multiple signatures-just like the system
that was already in use for the secret Nazi funds.[18]
Francois Genoud has never attempted to hide his loyalties, and they have not
weakened over the decades. In 1964, his Lausanne apartment still looked like
a Hitlerian museum, with Nazi flags and portraits of the Fuhrer decorating
the walls.[19] "I am a quiet and modest man," he declared to the Lausanne
magazine L'Hebdo in March 1982.[20] "My only crime is that I have never been
a turncoat and I have never repudiated my ideas." His ideas were summed up in
the following statement: "Nationalism Socialism was a unique phenomenon in
history, and it found solutions for the important mutations that took place
in the twentieth century. The movement was able to establish the union of an
[entire] people in a common ideal. At the time, tens of thousands of
Europeans thought as I do. Since then I sometimes think I'm alone ."[21]
Unfortunately, Genoud is not alone; however, he may be the only proud
Nazi alive who vigorously denies that he is an anti-Semite. He is very clear
on this point. He is merely an anti-Zionist. "It is the Zion-ists that are
anti-Semitic," he explained, picking up on a theme that has been in wide
circulation in the Soviet Union and extremist Arab and neo-Nazi circles since
the 1950s. Indeed, Francois Genoud has harsh words for the Nazi system of
cataloging people according to their racial origin ("That's a Zionist idea,"
he volunteered) because Hitler's persecution of the Jews "involuntarily
provided an enormous help to Zionism. " As for the Holocaust, he is careful
to minimize its extent by employing neo-Nazi arguments that have been put
forward by Robert Faurisson in France, James Keegstra and Ernst Zundel in
Canada, and others in Britain, Germany, the United States and, more recently,
Russia. "The numbers were exaggerated and the documents are false," claimed
Genoud. "There were horrible occurrences on both sides; but there was never a
systematic attempt to exterminate any people."
Genoud gave the L'Hebdo interview to defend himself against a story about his
activities published in Le Monde and picked up by other French
publications.[22] His response to the articles was predictable. "They [the
journalists] are part of a Zionist coterie that is trying to get even," he
explained.
The major significance of revisionist history of this sort is that it has
been adopted by extremists on both the Left and the Right of the political
spectrum. In 1983, Soviet anti-Zionist literature began to question the
number of Jews destroyed in the Holocaust.[23] Until then that particular
aspect of Holocaust revisionism had been advanced primarily by the neo-Nazi
Right. The following year in Britain, Nationalism Today, the paper of the
neo-Nazi National Front, announced that it would soon have an "anti-Zionist
supplement."
Genoud's activities since the 195Os have been nothing short of baroque. In
October 1956, when a plane carrying four members of the Algerian provisional
government was intercepted and the leaders imprisoned in France, he became
the guardian of the children of one of the men, Mohammed Boudiaf. As such he
was able to maintain the liaison between the provisional government and
Nasser's information services by accompanying the children on their visits to
their father in prison.[24] At about the same time, Genoud claims to have
rescued Belgian Nazi leader, SS General Leon Degrelle, by spiriting him
across the Spanish border in the trunk of his car.[25]
When Algerian independence was proclaimed in 1962, Francois Genoud was
rewarded for his services. He became the director of the Banque Populaire
Arabe in Algiers and brought Hitler's former finance minister, Dr. Schacht,
to Algiers as well. But in 1964 Genoud was arrested and charged with having
transferred $15 million Of FLN "war treasury" money to a Swiss bank in the
name of Mohammed Khider. Khider was a former leader of the Algerian
revolution who had subsequently had a falling out with the new president, Ben
Bella, and been forced to take refuge in Spain. Genoud was never tried on the
charges because Nasser personally interceded on his behalf. As a result,
Genoud obtained permission "to visit a sick relative" back in Switzerland.
Needless to say, he never returned to Algeria.
In 1958, Genoud created the Banque Commerciale Arabe in Geneva in partnership
with a Syrian named Zouheir Mardam. According to a study produced in Brussels
in 1969, the bank was established "to transfer money from various Arab
countries with a view to financing political intervention on behalf of these
countries."[26] One of the financial consultants was, of course, Dr. Schacht,
who was quoted as saying that National Socialism would conquer the world
without having to wage another war.[27]
For fifteen years, the Algerian government fought to regain the money through
the hierarchy of the Swiss courts. Finally, in 1979, the FLN "treasure" was
returned to Algeria.
The Algerian War ended in 1962, but terrorism in the cause of Arab
nationalism was just beginning. In November 1969, Genoud turned up in
Winterthur, Switzerland, at the trial of three Palestinian terrorists from
Dr. George Habbash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) who
had blown up an El Al plane in Zurich. Genoud explained that he was an
"adviser" to the defense, one of his favorite ways of describing his
activities. Seated next to him was none other than Jacques Verges. The Swiss
government had refused to allow Verge's to plead and he, too, was present in
an advisory capacity.
The defendants refused to answer any questions during their trial. Their act
was not criminal, but political, they said.
Francois Genoud and Jacques Verge's first met in Algeria in the late 1950s
through mutual friends in the FLN. Each man was tormented by his own demons,
but the spinning out of separate, equally fantastic dreams linked their
careers. Each man publicly defended political ter-rorism. "Everyone has a
role to play," said Genoud in 1982. "Person-ally, I don't know how to use a
weapon, but I do understand that when one is a victim of terrorism, there is
no solution but counterterrorism ... "[28] Each man would have links to the
terrorist dramas that shocked the world through the decades of the 1960s and
1970s and into the 1980s.
Jacques Verge's is no ordinary lawyer for hire, although some of his
acquaintances do enjoy describing him as a publicity seeker whose only real
interest is the glorification of Jacques Verges. Most people, however, see
him as a man with a mission who was politicized decades ago to a position far
to the left of the familiar political streams of modern France, and who
continues to fight the battles of the Third World through his legal practice.
It is in part this disdain for the current Mitterrand government, which he
despises as pro-American, "Zionist" and composed of sellouts who opposed
independence for Algeria, that inspired Verge's to take on the defense of
Klaus Barbie. The Barbie affair would allow him to pry open a few closed
doors — doors that contain skeletons from the Occupation and the war in
Algeria that the
French government might prefer to keep under lock and key. There was also the
interesting fact that Barbie himself had also been involved in the merger of
Left and Right. In 1979 he held a long tete-a-tete with representatives of a
PLO delegation that had been invited to La Paz by the national leftist
parties, much to the discomfort of the latter groups, who had long been
demanding Altmann-Barbie's extradition to France. Barbie was also considered
to have been a friend of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the Italian millionaire who
was one of the first to call for armed guerrilla warfare in Europe (on behalf
of the Palestinians) in the 1960s. (An Italian paper named Barbie as
Feltrinelli's arms supplier from Bolivia.)[29]
Jacques Verge's seemed to command a healthy degree of respect. Some of his
acquaintances refused to be interviewed; others insisted on remaining
anonymous. But their common theory about Verges's specific interest in Klaus
Barbie was borne out by Verge's himself. Within six months of taking on the
Barbie defense, he published a quickie book in which he attacked several
national heroes of the French Resistance as traitors, described his courtroom
"strategy of disruption," a technique with which he planned to put Barbie on
the offensive and the prosecution on the defensive, and promised to drag
France and its government into the dock along with his client.[30]
The initial hoopla that had accompanied Klaus Barbie's return to France was
definitely turning sour.
pps. 139-146
=====
-8-
THE MAKING OF A RADICAL
Jacques Verges and his twin brother, Paul, were born on March 5, 1925, in
Thailand, when it was still the Kingdom of Siam. Their father was a French
medical doctor from an old colonial family on the island of Reunion and,
until his marriage to their mother, a diplomat with the French embassy. The
marriage ended the elder Verges's diplomatic career. Raymond Verges's wife
was Vietnamese; and in 1925 Frenchmen simply did not marry Asian women.
So the lives of the Verge's brothers began with a racial scandal.
The hatred that accompanied the very circumstances of their birth marked them
deeply, and their father as well.
Raymond Verges gathered his family around him and crossed the Mekong River to
Laos where he resumed his practice of medicine; but by 1928 he had had
enough, and the family returned "home," to Reunion Island. Shortly
thereafter, his young wife died of an infected abscess. The boys were three
years old.
The year 1914 had marked the apogee of western colonialism, with Britain,
France and the United States extending tentacles into almost every corner of
the globe (Reunion Island, a tropical enclave in the Indian Ocean, had been
exploited by French commercial interests since the seventeenth century); but
by the mid-1920s the system was beginning to show signs of wear. The Russian
Revolution of 1917, the communist and nationalist victories in China during
the 1920s and 1930s and the new, radical nationalism of Kemal Ataturk in
Turkey, all gave credibility to the growing political movements that were
opposed to colonialism. The stage was set for the development of a new,
left-wing nationalism, and during the 1930s, '40s and '50s, the politics of
revolutionary Marxism influenced the thinking of thousands of men and women
in the colonized world. . . .
p.147
--[notes]--
6. Quoted in Le Monde, October 1, 1983.
7. Nationalzeitung, Basel, November 7, 1964.
8. Le Monde, March 20, 1965; cf. Centre d'information et de documentation
moyen-orient, Brussels, December 15, 1969.
9. Quoted in L'Hebdo, Lausanne, March 19, 1982.
10. L'Hebdo, Lausanne, March 19, 1982; cf. sworn testimony by Genoud,
Septem-ber 13, 1982.
11. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: The Viking Press, 1963),
p. 15.
12. Frank Garbely.
13. Le Matin, Lausanne, March 12, 1982.
14. Sworn testimony, December 12, 1983.
15. Le Monde, March 20, 1965.
16. Centre d'information et de documentation moyen-orient, Brussels,
Decem-ber 15, 1969.
17. Television documentary, "L'Espion qui vient de l'extreme droite," Antenne
2, April 26, 1984.
18. Archives, Comite d'action de la resistance, January 6, 1966.
19. Nationalzeitung, Basel, November 7, 1964.
20. L'Hebdo, Lausanne, March 19, 1982.
21. Ibid.
22. At the time of writing, a trial for libel was pending in Switzerland
against Le
Monde and L'Express.
23. Lev Korneiev, Along the Path of Aggression and Racism, see Leon Poliakov,
De Moscou ~ Beyrouthe: Essai sur la desinformation (Paris: Calmann-Levy,
1983), p. 75; and cf. also Le Monde, June 16, 1983.
24. Centre d'information et de documentation moyen-orient.
25. Source a former collaborator. On February 14, 1985, Simon Wiesenthal
confirmed that Degrelle was still alive and well and living in Spain.
26. Centre d'information et de documentation moyen-orient, December 15,
1969.
27. Ibid.
28. Le Matin, Lausanne, March 12, 1982.
29. Il Mattino, Naples, n.d., quoted in Wilson, Confessions of Klaus Barbie,
p. 36.
30. Jacques Verges, Pour en finir avec Ponce Pilate (Paris: Le Pre aux
Clercs, 1983).
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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