Word: lyons
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Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyon, "brings back the past...
...Nazi war criminals have been so hated in France as Klaus Barbie, the infamous "Butcher of Lyon." While serving as head of the Gestapo in Lyon from 1942 to 1944, Barbie ordered the execution of more than 4,000 people and the deportation of 7,000 French Jews to concentration camps. His hands were also stained with the blood of Jean Moulin, France's most revered Resistance leader, who is believed to have died under torture in 1943. Twice Barbie was tried in absentia for his crimes and sentenced to death by French tribunals. But for more than three...
...whereabouts of other Gestapo fugitives wanted by Allied authorities; in return he was given a false identity, a home in Munich and the opportunity to get out of Germany while the Americans played dumb and refused French requests for his arrest. By 1951, the Butcher of Lyon was safely exiled in Bolivia...
Barbie's return to Lyon brings back painful memories of a France torn between cowardly collaborators and dashing members of the Resistance. Many Frenchmen, particularly those on the extreme right of the political spectrum, actively assisted the Nazis in their gruesome work. Leftists today, on the other hand, still enjoy reliving their halcyon days when the communist underground inspired brave fighters to risk their lives in dangerous sabotage missions against the Germans. Thus the French socialist president Francois Mitterand, in his very first symbolic act in office, solemnly paid a visit to Moulin's tomb in the Pantheon of Paris...
...history decided otherwise, and the people of Lyon, after almost forty years of frustration, have every right to exact revenge. Barbie's trial may take more than a year to prepare and the harshest possible verdict would be life imprisonment, since France abolished the death penalty in 1981. Yet how can one every pay enough for crime against humanity, for the thousands uprooted from their homes and sent by the trainload to Auschwitz and other camps? As Jacques Block, President of the Jewish Federation of Lyon, put it: "The crimes of this man are such that there is no penalty...