Word: klaus
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...Klaus Peter Meyer...
...hundred yards from the site of his Gestapo headquarters in Lyons during World War II. Garrulous by nature, he is prevented from speaking to anyone except his round-the-clock French guards, his lawyer and a 46-year-old daughter who visits once a month. But for Klaus Barbie, an uncomfortable isolation is about to turn into an even more uncomfortable spectacle. This week the wartime head of the Gestapo in France's third largest city, who became infamous as the "Butcher of Lyons," goes on trial for atrocities he is accused of committing from...
...ruling National Party easily holds on to power, while the far- right Conservatives become the House of Assembly' s main opposition group. -- France is set to open the trial of former Gestapo Leader Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyons." -- Reports from the Soviet and rebel sides of the Afghanistan war. -- How the new U. S. immigration law is affecting life in one Mexican town...
...Lyons will not provide a restaging of the Eichmann trial. Barbie did not make policy. He was only a regional executioner, a local hangman -- he merely participated, did what he was told. His operations only extended to Lyons and its surroundings. Yet if Klaus Barbie was not "important," his trial is. It can serve a vital purpose, for future generations and for our own. Certain witnesses have to be heard; certain truths have to be uttered, repeated. Will they clarify the mystery of what happened? It does not seem possible. The determination of the killer to kill, the passivity...
Still, we must hear the testimonies, from the victims, and from Klaus Barbie himself. For in the end they may help us to understand the deeper motivations of a Nazi killer who chose to make himself the enemy of those children and who even now thinks of himself as innocent. Was he normal, like Eichmann? Human, perhaps...