Ep. 51- Klaus Barbie and his Trial with Richard J. Golsan

Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, led a terrible and fascinating life, from Nazi torturer to advisor to brutal South American dictatorships.  However, unlike many, he was eventually brought to justice for his crimes.  

In this episode, I talk with Richard J. Golsan about the sensational trial of Klaus Barbie and its effect on the memory of the Holocaust in France.

Richard J. Golsan is University Distinguished Professor and Director of the French Institute at Texas A&M University.

Golsan, Richard J. Justice in Lyon: Klaus Barbie and France's First Trial for Crimes against Humanity (2022)

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Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:01.984)
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust history podcast. I'm your host, Quaidman Born. And today we are talking about an important trial in both the history of the Holocaust and also in history of France. And I love me a good, trial saga, trial discussion. And we're going to talk about today. The kind of the life and times and trial of Klaus Barbie, the so-called butcher of Leon, an infamous.

Nazi war criminal and have with me Richard Goulson who has written an excellent book about the trial of Klaus Barbie and and it sort of impacts and effects on France and so Richard thank you so much for coming on

Richard Golsan (00:45.602)
Thank you, it's my pleasure.

Waitman Beorn (00:47.586)
can you just start by telling us a little bit about, how you got interested in this particular topic?

Richard Golsan (00:54.67)
Well, I've been a scholar of the memory of Vichy for a long time. I got very interested in the late 80s and early 90s. And the first trials I got interested in, in fact, were the French trials that followed the Barbie trial. So I was very interested in the TuVie trial in 1994, the Papon trial, and especially the trial that never happened, which was of René Bousquet, who was the chief of police, so to speak, in France who

organized the roundup of the Ville d'Orme du Vers with Nazi officers in spring 1942. So, I'm sorry. Should we start over or can you edit that out? Okay, sorry. Okay, under any circumstances, I had worked on the Barbie, on the trials of Tuvye and Papon.

Waitman Beorn (01:37.142)
I'll just edit that out. It's fine. Just give it a pause and then go back to where you were.

Richard Golsan (01:49.484)
studied the Bousquet affair, which interests me a great deal. And then a friend of mine asked me to be on a panel about Marcel Ophuls' film Hotel Terminus, which is about Klaus Barbie and the Barbie affair. I was wanting some background on it and started looking for a book about the trial and found nothing. And then when I was in France shortly thereafter, I ran into a good friend of mine who said, there is no book on this. You need to write it. And that was right.

when the trial was or when the archives were opening. So 2017 was when the archives started to open and then I very fortuitously came came across or something came into my hands that I'd never anticipated. I have a very good friend who's a journalist in Paris who knows Serge Clarksfeld and she put me in touch with Serge Clarksfeld who was remarkably kind to me.

and in fact loaned me all of his archives of the trial and sent them to me in a huge DHL box that my wife couldn't lift and I couldn't lift. So we unloaded it file by file. But that's the background. then to be honest, it's a very it's a big topic. And I was kind of bogged down. And then when the pandemic hit and there was really, you know, that there was really nothing to do.

Waitman Beorn (02:51.853)
Now.

Richard Golsan (03:15.182)
I had done enough research to where I could more or less sit down and write the body of the book in about seven months without stopping. Every day I worked on it, I dreamed about it. So of all the things I've worked on in my career, in a lot of ways, this was the most interesting and the most dramatic and it's coming into being, so to speak.

Waitman Beorn (03:36.578)
Well, and this is something that, you know, I wasn't super familiar with, with Klaus Barbie before, you know, reading the book and looking into him more. He was sort of a name that kind of floated out there. And I know that, you know, this book isn't about him in the sense of it's not a biography of everything that, that he did. But, you know, I was mentioning somebody earlier, it was like, gosh, that guy got around. I mean, he was...

in he had his hands in all kinds of awful things like transcontinental awful things. And so I'm wondering if maybe you can just, you know, take a little bit of time just for our listeners who are maybe an expert in in his biography background history and give us sort of the rundown of the life of Klaus Barbie up until the time that he's extradited to France for this trial.

Richard Golsan (04:27.854)
I certainly agree with you that Barbie himself is fascinating. And after I wrote the book, I've been contacted by professional journalists and writers who are interested in writing another book about Barbie, not the trial. One of whom is Jake Tapper, our CNN broadcasters, very interested in this, has been asking me questions about it. But Klaus Barbie was born,

early in the 20th century. He was too young to fight in World War I. His father, however, was a soldier in World War I, was wounded badly and came home and was, by all accounts, he was a schoolteacher and an alcoholic. And Barbie and his little brother occasionally suffered the wrath of the father. So Barbie grew up in a pretty unhappy household. Early on, had

how should we put this, more white collar ambitions than to go to work for the Nazis or for the police. He aspired to various professions, I believe, including being an architect and things like that. But when he was in college or in gymnasium, think, the Nazis were coming to power and he was very well, very much taken with the Nazis. And early on became a volunteer for the Nazis in various capacities.

And one of the things that's striking about Barbie that I recall from working on just him and thinking about him was Barbie did not seem to mind being a stool pigeon. So one of the things that he did for the Nazis was kind of spy for them in groups that, you know, among his fellow classmates and things like that. So Barbie, you know, in a lot of ways, he's a bit of a victim at the same time. His natural character is

a bit dubious, let's say. There are lots of things that become clear about Barbie over time, and that I think are very clear in the book about the trial and the testimony of the witnesses. Barbie clearly had a very strong sadistic streak and was particularly violent with women. And apparently when he was training with the Gestapo and with the German police early on,

Richard Golsan (06:47.278)
had been involved in some pretty dubious activities along those lines. Anyway, Barbie is a young, ambitious officer in the SS. He is first sent to Holland after the war breaks out, is involved in the roundup of Jews there. Then in November 1942, when the southern zone of France is occupied by the Nazis, Barbie is sent to Lyon.

And although he's technically only the second in charge of the Gestapo in Lyon, by all accounts, he was the man. In Lyon, Barbie was ruthless, brutal by all accounts, equally horrendous in his dealings with Jews as with resistance fighters. If you look at the tape of the trial or read the descriptions that I provide in my book, it's very clear that

know, for Barby, any enemy of the Nazis is beneath contempt and deserving of the worst possible treatment. At the end of the war, or at the end of the occupation in 1944, in August, I believe, or early September 1944, Barby makes his way back to Germany. And there, with the aid at various points of SS colleagues, he manages to keep a low profile and not get himself

He is arrested, but he gets away. So he's floating around in Germany. But then a friend of his gets him involved as a, how should we put this, as an agent for the CIC, which is the precursor of the CIA. And what the Americans want him to do is they want him to spy on the French because they're very skeptical of the French, who they believe are infiltrated by communists. This is, of course, now the Cold War.

And that's what they use him for. And Barbie is supported by the CIC, protected by the CIC. There's a great deal of doubt as to whether he ever furnished any valuable information about the French, but then that's true of a lot of the Nazi agents that worked for the CIC. At a certain point, however, Barbie's past and his brutality in Lyon is well known in France. Barbie...

Richard Golsan (09:10.346)
was the torture and indirectly the killer of Jean Boulin, France's greatest resistance hero, among many, many other people. And so there's an effort by the French to get hold of Barbi so that he can be tried in France. The Americans don't want to turn him over because they're worried that he knows too much about the Americans and American intelligence. And so they send him down the famous rat line with his wife and kids. And he ends up

in South America. In South America, he ends up in Bolivia. He becomes a successful businessman and then is discovered, I believe in the 1970s, I believe is correct, by Sergeant Beata Clarksfeld, the famous Nazi hunters. And there are efforts made to get him back to France. He is, however, an advisor to

and a friend of many right-wing Bolivian dictators. And so they protect him. And Barbie flouts his presence in South America. He gives paid interviews. He's a bit of a celebrity. It is not clear, at least I've never been able to ascertain this for certain, it's not clear if Barbie continued to work for the CIA. But there are accounts that suggest that he did. Under any circumstances,

In 1983, the Bolivian government suddenly changes and a right wing, left wing government replaces the right wing dictatorships that had been in place there. And so the French government negotiates to get Barbie sent back to France to stand trial, which will happen in 1987. So four years after he's brought back from France, to France, from Bolivia, he's put on trial for crimes against humanity.

Barbie is convicted, dies in prison a few years later and is never released. So that's kind of a brief thumbnail sketch of Barbie's life. Barbie, of course, the trial certainly revealed this. Barbie never repented, never regretted any of the things that he did. You said you've seen Hotel Terminus.

Richard Golsan (11:34.966)
Recently, some of the people in Bolivia encountered him and he would even give Nazi salutes and there say nobody can say bad things about the Fuhrer. This is years and years after he's already down. So, Barbie remains in a lot of ways kind of the archetypal SS hatchet man, Gestapo hatchet man. He's certainly not of the level of importance in the Nazi hierarchy of

people that stood trial at Nuremberg, nor is he the level even of an adult heisman tried in Jerusalem in 1961. But he's a sharp guy. He has a very interesting past in his record of brutality and murder as such that he certainly deserved to be charged and tried and convicted for crimes against humanity.

Waitman Beorn (12:27.258)
And one of the things that I think is true of a lot of these kinds of trials, both in Germany and other countries, is that the legal process

is often a search for justice, whatever we mean by that, but it also can stand in for lots of national issues of memory and history and responsibility. so can you maybe take us back a little bit and talk about how France, know, France, of course, French doesn't have the awesome German Vagangenheitsbewältigung, you know, coming in terms of the past.

Richard Golsan (12:55.842)
Nice.

Waitman Beorn (13:10.952)
word, but can you talk a little bit about maybe how, how France is going through this process from the end of the war? Because one of the arguments you make obviously pretty clearly in the book is that the Barbie trial is obviously on the one hand is a trial of an individual for crimes, but it also is in some ways a larger statement on all kinds of larger issues in French history.

Richard Golsan (13:11.17)
Yeah.

Richard Golsan (13:30.05)
Yeah. Yeah, it's a real watershed moment. You know, the classic study of the evolution of memory in France or the memory of World War II is Henry Rousseau's the Vichy Syndrome. And I think every scholar who works in the field certainly knows that book probably backwards and forwards and adheres to the basic line that Rousseau develops. Basically, after the war in France, there's a

what Rousseau calls a Reglement de Compte, there's a period of conflict and then purging between the, know, once the country's liberated, there's a purge of collaborators and those who willingly went along with Nazis. And then there's a long period where the memory of the occupation and the conflicts and everything else is basically swept under the rug. And this includes the fact that

that France was directly involved or the Vichy regime was directly involved in the Holocaust. So it's really not until the early 70s that this memory that's been put to bed about the occupation starts to re-emerge in a lot of ways. One is, of course, around the year 1972, great films are released. One is Marcel Ophuls, The Sorrow and the Pity.

which exposes the extent to which the everyday French person was involved with collaboration or was in the wait and see mode. They weren't a nation of resistors, which had been the post-war myth. And then the other one is Louis-Malcolm Blucien, another great movie about a young boy who wants to join the resistance, is rejected by the resistance and ends up joining the German police. A very controversial film by any measure and highly recommended, I certainly recommend.

But the point of the matter is, is that by the 70s and certainly into the 80s, what's beginning to emerge is Jewish memory. That is to say that France's role in the Holocaust is becoming more and more important and visible and troubling. And so just as an example, the Barbie trial marks a bit of a watershed moment and almost a turning point as well in the sense that

Richard Golsan (15:55.95)
When Barbie's arrested in 1983, he's known as the butcher of Leon the man that killed Jean Moulin, tortured resistance fighters. It's only as the investigation continues and is, you know, what happens in the trial emerges that France's role in the German, France's participation in the German role in the Holocaust really begins to emerge. Okay. So the Barbie trial begins as the trial of this

murderer of Francis, murderer of Francis' resistance hero, and it ends up being about a lot more things. It ends up being about the Holocaust, French complicity in the Holocaust, the explicit details of the murder and deportation of Jews, French Jews, as well as foreign Jews. So it's in that sense that the Barbie trial marks this crucial moment where the recognition or coming to light, so to speak, of

of the development and evolution of this memory of the persecution of the Jews. There's another point I think is worth stressing here is that Barbie's convicted for crimes against humanity. And we can talk a little bit about the legal history at some point if you're interested. But Barbie is a Nazi, is a German. And so one of the things about the trial, of the steps that it brought, gave momentum to is, look, we can't, are...

For the French, it's easy to try a German, but we also have to be honest and try our own collaborators. So it gave momentum to investigations and then in the 1990s, prosecutions of French collaborators who had specifically been involved in the Holocaust because that was the only way that they could be tried. Can I, me, probably it's probably a good moment to go back and explain a little bit about the law because

Waitman Beorn (17:52.906)
Yeah, absolutely.

Richard Golsan (17:54.38)
So in France, when Barbie was tried first in 1952 and 1954 for absentia, in absentia for war crimes, because there are no crimes against humanity statutes on the French law books at that point in time. And the statute of limitations on that is 20 years. And any crime theoretically committed against the resistance is a war crime, because by definition, a crime against humanity

is more or less a crime committed against someone for what they are, for religious faith, whatever, not for being an enemy combatant. So the interesting thing about the Barbie trial is by the time Barbie's arrested and brought back to France in 1983, the statute of limitations on war crimes has run out. So the only way that he can be tried 40 years after the war, 40 years and more after the war, is if he's tried for crimes against humanity.

crimes against humanity are actually codified in French law in the 1960s, in the mid 1960s.

Waitman Beorn (19:00.362)
Well, this was something I just interrupt really quickly because this something that I thought was really fascinating because, you know, one of things that, I said, my first book did a lot with trials. And of course, you mentioned that this decision to basically place crime against humanity beyond statute of limitations is in some ways a response to the German debate of that same period when they were considering changing the statute of limitations on things like murder.

Richard Golsan (19:18.093)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (19:27.696)
manslaughter, which were like, again, because Germans are also not charging crimes against humanity because they see it as post facto law. I thought it was really interesting because the Germans are having this very public debate where on one side, you know, the conservatives are saying, let, let it's timed for everything to be over with and done. And the other side saying, look, we can't, we can't let everything run out in 15 years in 1960. And so there was a big, a big debate over this. And this actually influenced the French position on this.

Richard Golsan (19:29.336)
for us.

Right.

Richard Golsan (19:54.958)
Yeah, and I mean, the French law is a response to the recognition that, you know, the statute of limitations is running out on war crimes in France in 1944. So the law is passed in 1964, 20 years later. But of course, the people that it's targeting originally are not figures like Klaus Barbie. This is not the original model. And of course, the other problem with the law, as you just stated, is

It is ex post facto. We're trying people retroactively for crimes that weren't even written onto the book. So at the time that they're tried, so Barbie's lawyer, for example, his series of lawyers, in fact, made that point repeatedly. That was not the main argument in the trial itself. But Barbie, course, made this. Barbie also, like Eichmann, claimed that he was arrested illegally when he was brought back to France.

And the truth of the matter is he was abducted. So, you you've got a lot of other issues there. But the crucial thing in France is that it is a problem with all of these trials that the law concerning crimes against humanity, which has no statute of limitations, was not in existence in French law, even at the end of the war. So if I can return here to the Barbie trial, we've got a

problem then if you think about it and that is when barbie's arrested in 1983 what he's remembered for and known for is the murder of Jean Moulin and the torture and murder of resistance figures but if the statute of limitations on war crimes is run out then these individuals these resistance figures cannot be they cannot be plaintiffs in the trial

because the war crimes charges or war crimes statutes last. So that's the big legal debate that occurs between 1983 and 1987 when the trial occurs. How are we gonna manipulate the law so that it can also apply to resistance fighters and Jews? And the decision allowing for that to occur is made in 1985 in a very controversial decision. It doesn't apply to all.

Richard Golsan (22:15.342)
crimes committed against resistance fighters, but it does apply to some. So by the time the trial takes place, are, you know, the victims include resistance fighters and Jews. This created tensions in the trial, created tensions between the civil plaintiff lawyers who represented either Jews or resistance, but not both. In my own view, the decision was

justified in the sense that if you listen to the testimony and the trial of some of the experiences of Jews and of resistance fighters, they're all so horrendous that separating them out is a bit difficult. mean, that's just my view that in this case it was necessary and understandable. I mean, there are a lot of people that will disagree with that, foremost among them is Elie Wessel, who testified it.

trial and testified against the very law that allowed Jews or resistance fighters to be included among Barbie's crimes against humanity.

Waitman Beorn (23:24.302)
And so one of the things that's interesting about this, of course, you make the distinction between sort of a civil trial and a criminal trial. So is this not a criminal trial? Or is it civil trial?

Richard Golsan (23:34.166)
No, no, it's a criminal trial in France. The civil parties that we have civil trials and criminal trials. Right. And in the French system, at the Coldest Seas, the plaintiffs who have civil complaints against that can attach themselves as civil parties to the prosecution. So in the Barbie trial, there were not only the surviving plaintiffs, but representatives of organizations, lawyers who represented, for example, Charles Klossfeld represented

Waitman Beorn (23:40.533)
Right.

Richard Golsan (24:04.11)
the children of the Jews who were deported and died by Klaus Barbie. And if we bring it right up to the present to give you a sense of how this functions and how amazing it can become, I'm actually now working on the French terrorism trials. And the biggest of these trials took place a few years ago. And it was surrounding the attacks November 19th, November 2015, November 13th, where over 130 people were killed by ISIS extremists.

But for that trial, by the end, there were something like 2,300 civil parties plaintiffs who attached themselves to the prosecution and under French law, they get to testify and hire lawyers. So that's why that trial lasted 10 or 11 months.

Waitman Beorn (24:48.854)
But do they have any say on sort of the way the case is prosecuted or they are just sort of, they get a chance. No, no, I mean, they're just sort of like filing briefs in support of and they get to testify, but they can't, they don't get, they're not co-counsel, in other words. Yeah.

Richard Golsan (24:56.938)
no but they testifies yeah go ahead sorry

Richard Golsan (25:10.316)
No, they don't get to vote. In fact, one of the fascinating parts of the way the French Nacies Court operates to me is that in an American court, obviously, there's the jury who decides, right? There's the lawyers. It's an adversarial system, lawyers on both sides, the judge who's the referee. And then the jury of civilians decides, right? Most famous recent historic case probably being the O.J. Simpson trial, right? In the French system, in the Barbie trial in particular,

And you have to have in the United American system, you have to have a unanimous conviction, right? Everybody all the jurors have to be on board and the French system at the time of the Barbie trial, there was the president of the court, which we call the judge, who's much more powerful in the French system than the judges in our system and who is the primary interrogator of all the witnesses, including the accused. That judge had two assessors and then there are nine jurors.

This is the Barbie trial. And when they actually deliberate and bring back a verdict, the judges deliberate with the jurors. they do not need a majority of, you know, an absolute majority. They need an absolute majority of two thirds. I guess that's an absolute majority. But it does not have to be a unanimous conviction. From an American point of view, obviously, that's that is a bit bizarre. Right. What are the judges doing in there?

deliberating with the jurors. But from the French system, since France uses a codified law, the criminal code is huge, from the French perspective, the judges are there because they know the law. So they're also helping the jurors, the civilian jurors, understand what the law states and of which dictates what the

what the juror can actually do. But in the Barbie trial, he was found guilty on all accounts by a majority of two thirds. He could have been found guilty by more, but that was the minimum. So that's what the court reported. But now if you, and I don't mean to get off on the terrorism trials because that's just a project I'm working on now, for a lot of reasons, there are no jurors in a French terrorism trial now because it's too dangerous for the jurors. So there are literally five magistrates and you only meet a majority, not even a

Richard Golsan (27:37.996)
two thirds majority to convict. Anyway, it's one of the fascinating things to me about working on the Barbie trial was deconstructing all of this, trying to figure out how the court actually worked because until you understand that, and if you look at it from the outside, there are a lot of complaints that the Barbie trial was incredibly boring because there aren't very many confrontations, dueling arguments between lawyers. But I think that's really

misunderstanding and under appreciating the Barbie trial and all French trials.

Waitman Beorn (28:10.654)
No, that's interesting because I had the same experience with, looking at German trials because the German system is, is similar where, where in at least the judge can directly, you know, question witnesses on fact and that kind of stuff. And if you, if you have a good judge, like my, my, for my recent work, there, there was a pretty good, decent guy who was the judge and he would sometimes just call out.

Nazis and be like, you're an idiot and you're lying and I know you're lying. Can you stop lying? mean, like, it was great, you that's something you would see a judge do in the American system. But one of the things that, again, that I look comparing sort of what I've been working on in the German system, in the 60s, 70s, 80s, there were basically lawyers, defense attorneys who specialized in defending Nazis. It was kind of like a better call Saul.

Richard Golsan (28:38.606)
You

Richard Golsan (28:43.416)
Yeah.

Richard Golsan (29:01.794)
Yeah. Right. Robert Cervatius was one of them, right?

Waitman Beorn (29:04.246)
for, if you're a Nazi and you get called, yeah, there's a guy named Ashenauer. mean, their names pop up and it's almost like there's a refrigerator magnet someplace, you know? And I'm curious about the defense attorney representing Barbie, because he seems like a very sort of go-getter activist kind of guy. mean, what's the story there?

Richard Golsan (29:14.916)
Hahaha.

Richard Golsan (29:22.184)
yeah.

Richard Golsan (29:27.254)
Yes, Jacques Valjez is famous for a lot of things. Controversial is all get out. But Jacques Valjez is himself a militant, was a militant, a militant leftist, and thrived on defending the most controversial cases that he could find. also,

a very angry anti-French establishment type of figure. I mean, to give you an idea of how controversial Verges was even before the Barbie trial he defended as Algerian terrorist. After the trial, defended people who he advised to defend for Saddam Hussein and for Slobodan Milosevic. mean, you find the most reprehensible figures out there and he'll

He'll jump in and defend them all in part because it was hatred of the French bourgeois democratic system in the West as well. But Valjez himself is I think his father was French and his mother was trying to remember Southeast Asian under any circumstances. And so he always said, my mother never had to wear a yellow star. She was already yellow. So he was very aware of this.

his defense in the trial of Barbie, he was not going to argue the really argue the banal things like, well, you know, we're applying laws retroactively that have been debated. What he wanted to argue on the trial was that Klaus Barbie was a scapegoat. That is that we put, you know, we blame and prosecute the Nazis. But all of that is to shift the focus from what we the French or the

know, the colonial powers have done to peoples of color all over the world for centuries, right? And so for him, his argument was, we'll just look at Barbie so we don't have to look at the much worse crimes of colonialism. And that was the argument that he made. And he used a strategy called the trial by rupture, which was rather than, you know, argue the case explicitly, what he tried to do was turn the tables on the court and make the

Richard Golsan (31:50.126)
court itself the accused and the French prosecution and the government the accused and try to bring the French people together against this corrupt government using the vehicle of the person of Klaus Barbie. And he certainly interpreted the trial symbolically and one of the things that he did is he named his co-counsel an Algerian by the name of Nabil Bouita and then

a Congolese lawyer named Mbembe. I'm sorry, I'm blanking on his first name. So that in the courtroom, and of course the whole thing was filmed for posterity, in the courtroom you see a man of Asian descent, basically of Asian descent, then North African and then Black African, to drive the point home that we're all really the victims of the system that's.

hypocritically trying a Nazi because they don't want to try themselves for their

Waitman Beorn (32:51.816)
I that, you know, that strikes me as, as I suppose, a brilliant rhetorical approach, maybe. But I mean, how does that could you, I mean, it also just seems like, you know, the most sort of basic what about ism that, you know, that even, even if we accept that the, yeah, even if we accept that the French and imperialism, you know, is obviously a bad thing and has done bad things throughout the world.

Richard Golsan (32:59.288)
Hahaha.

Richard Golsan (33:08.812)
Yeah, Quit pro quo. or we're not quit pro quo. Tu quack what? Tu quack what?

Waitman Beorn (33:21.226)
You're still not addressing the fact that we have evidence or we are charging this particular person with also doing bad things. And the fact that other people have done bad things in history is not a defense and never has been a defense. mean, so was he just convinced he was going to lose anyway? And so he was making us a political point.

Richard Golsan (33:34.734)
No, but Barbie's po...

Yeah, I mean, you know, he wanted to turn turn the trial into a stage for his, you know, political pronouncements. mean, I don't think he seemed to personally get along quite well with Klaus Barbie. But on the other hand, you know, the problem with all this is that it was Barbie was obviously guilty of multiple crimes. The question was, you know, how do you define them? If they're crimes against humanity, he should be on trial now. If they were war crimes, he shouldn't be on trial.

So yeah, I'd say Virgés, this is what he did. was never famous for getting anybody off. Not the one I want, know.

Waitman Beorn (34:17.746)
So it's not the kind of lawyer you want to hire necessarily. So one of the things also that we should talk about is Barbie actually refuses to be present during the trial, which is a thing you can sort of do, I guess, in the French system, which I think is pretty much impossible in the American system. So can you talk a little about that? Because there's some interesting sort of story behind that.

Richard Golsan (34:37.698)
Yeah, yeah, that's the right.

Richard Golsan (34:43.362)
Well, mean, Barbie claimed from the very beginning that the trial was trumped up, that it was not legitimate for the reasons that he had been arrested in a foreign country, all of these things. he, was the coup d'etat, but you know, I'm not gonna be here for my trial. And one of the interesting parts of that is, that serve the defense or not, or the prosecution? And while it created a kind of a hole in the trial,

I remember, I believe it was Serge Clarksville told me that actually it made it easier because Barbie was shrewd and knew the facts of the case. Whereas Verges, who was more of a showboat and interested in trying to doing the thing symbolically, didn't know the dossier near as well as Barbie did. And so in terms of, you know, taking on your opposition, if the person who actually knows a lot isn't there, well, that makes it

makes it easier. yeah, he did. The court could force him back. They forced him to come back a couple of times and they forced him to come back at the end of the trial to hear the sentence and make his final statement. that, course, was one of the high points of indignity in the trial, which is that Barbe always claimed he didn't understand French and then addressed the court in French at the end of the trial.

Waitman Beorn (36:11.392)
Have

Richard Golsan (36:11.596)
He himself had a flair for the dramatic, let's say.

Waitman Beorn (36:14.134)
And there's another thing that I think it would be great to hear you talk a little about because it's something that, again, that the Germans do and I've always marveled at it, which is this confrontation where like they will, in the pretrial investigations, they will bring a Holocaust survivor and sit them across the table from, you know, a concentration camp person, guard, SS, whatever. And that kind of, I mean, it makes for...

Richard Golsan (36:29.603)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (36:42.524)
really fascinating and suspenseful like history writing. But gosh, I what a crazy sort of system. Can you talk a little about that as we move into sort of the pretrial investigation, building the case against Barbie and how they did that?

Richard Golsan (36:48.973)
Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, they, I mean, and you know that the lawyers are present, right? So the defense lawyer is present. So it gives, it gave in the case of Barby's lawyer Jacques Villages, it gave him the chance to say, to point to certain key witnesses and said, aha, that's not what you said in the pretrial investigation, which of course the audience would have no way of knowing that, the people in the courtroom. But the other thing is, is that by many accounts, the

you know, that confrontation with the accused was terrifying. So there were people who, like I say, I got the files from the case. So I read all these things. I got them from from Solskjærksvall. And it's very painful to read some of the transcripts because a lot of them were absolutely terrified of Barbie, even this little old man 50 years later or 45 years later was still terrifying to them. And Barbie used it against some of them. So the point is, some of the witnesses

Richard Golsan (37:54.114)
that or some of his victims told before the trial ever started, told the prosecution, can't do this. You know, this this I can't survive this. And so when Barbie was absent, on the other hand, there were people who wanted to confront him in court. And so when Barbie was absent from the trial, as I said, is we've said he absent in himself from the courtroom on several occasions or for most of the trial.

Some of the people who came to testify were furious that he wasn't there so that they could confront him and yell at him and had to be kind of restrained by the judge and the court. So it worked, it cut both ways, but it is a very, it's a peculiar and seems almost an inhumane habit or practice to confront these poor victims to.

with the man who had tortured them or killed their relatives or whatever. And some of the people that are in the trial, mean, anytime you write about a trial, think you probably agree, you can't write about everybody who testifies. So you have to select, but some of them, some people got up there and just literally collapsed and could not, they couldn't testify. The famous case of, always think of the case in the trial of Eichmann with Kay Zetnick, the poet who.

begins to talk about the planet Auschwitz and then gets up and collapses. And I remember reading afterwards was in the hospital for two weeks recovering from that. So that was a, that's kind of the archetypal example of that.

Waitman Beorn (39:28.51)
And so how does, how does the, prosecution proceed? because presumably they're not, they're not going to refute the fact that the imperialism was bad and, and killed people, right? They're going to, they're, they're going to sort of do their due diligence, in building a case. And I'm, I'm guessing that they are cognizant of this idea of the charge of Victor's justice and, you know, everything else. And so they want to be conscientious about.

Richard Golsan (39:52.941)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (39:56.146)
about making, about proving their point the best they can.

Richard Golsan (39:59.862)
Yeah, you know, as I said, there's this probably is a more complicated aspect of the Barbie trial and of the French AC system than what we have here, because there's the there's the prosecution right there that represent the state. And then there are the civil parties lawyer. So since the civil parties lawyers represent different interests, they would underscore different crimes committed by by Barbie. So Sausha Clarks felt.

spoke about the deportation and murder of the children of Misieux. But the main prosecutor was Pierre Trouch, who I think is one of the real heroes of the trial, and along with Clarksfeld and several others. the point about Pierre Trouch is that he was aware of this problem, that Valjez was distracting everybody. The order of the trial is such that Trouch would speak before

So he has to anticipate Valjez's arguments. But his arguments focused on the crimes that Barbie actually committed. He just simply said, the rest of this is just smoke. It's here to distract you. These are the realities. And one of the points he had for him that was important to make is that the resistance fighters were victims of crimes against humanity. do you justify saying that? He himself had opposed originally

including resistance fighters among the victims of crimes against humanity. But basically what he argued was that when Barbie would say, well, you know, I'd send these resistance fighters, you know, knock the naval, they'd be sent to Germany and I don't know what happened to them. But as Trude point out, you know, pretty logically, you know, there was no doubt in his mind that these people were going to, you know, were sent to their deaths because

The last thing, say Germany won the war, is to let all these skeletons and horrible victims come back to France after the war as advertisements for the horrors perpetrated on them by the Nazis. So his view was that these are the kinds of, and you'd know more about this than I would if you worked on the Nazis, of course they knew. But then this is the standard defense. when in the 1997, 98 trial of Moise Papon, who was a,

Richard Golsan (42:24.512)
a French bureaucrat and very high class. He said, I just sent him to, you know, I've deported the Jews, followed orders. I have no idea what happened to him. And in that case, it made more sense because he wasn't a Nazi. He wasn't part of the of the mechanism of the Holocaust other than doing what he was told to do. But it's a lot harder in the case of Barbie because he was SS Gestapo, even if he was just your average police, if he was just your average policeman on the beat. That's one thing.

But he wasn't, he was a member of the SS, so trained in the SS schools, which of course were very explicit about all this.

Waitman Beorn (43:02.208)
Well, he's also, you know, again, I mean, we all know, right, that, you know, that, that our rents, our rents theory of the banality of evil is great. She just picked the wrong guy, right? Because of course, Eichmann, you know, multiple times before he was trials said he was how happy he was to participate in the murder of Jews and, know, but I mean, Barbie also couldn't really claim to be just following orders because he seemed to sort of.

Richard Golsan (43:15.781)
You

Waitman Beorn (43:31.508)
very much go over and above what might be expected of him.

Richard Golsan (43:36.334)
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. mean, there's, you know, there are multiple examples. And that was one of the high points of the trial and the brilliance of the prosecution is that they called witnesses who made it very explicit that Barbie wasn't just trying, you know, I he I think the point was made by at least one witness that, you know, he he would beat these witnesses to the point where they couldn't testify. there was no way they were going to give him any information if they're already clinging to life at best. Right.

So, know, no, he clearly enjoyed this. have to tell you, and I wish I remember the podcast or television program I heard this on, but it's stuck with me for a long time. When Mark Namus wrote the novel, The Zone of Interest, he was interviewed on a, I think it was just a PBS program in this country, I don't remember. But he said something that has stuck with me and stuck with me even working on the terrorism trials and.

the Islamic extremists that carried out the attacks in France. And that is the appeal of sadism. Martin Amis said, never underestimate that a lot of Nazis were in fact drawn to Nazism precisely because they could do these things. They could torture, they could maim, they could do whatever they wanted, right? And that's a dimension of the

of Nazism that I always find particularly horrific to think about. And Barbie certainly enjoyed that part of things from all the testimony that was given.

Waitman Beorn (45:15.914)
Well, it's interesting because I always, I always say that, you know, at least not always, but frequently, you know, the Nazis that I come across when I'm researching and studying are people that would never have risen anywhere close to this level of sort of power and authority except in a Nazi state, right? Because they're just, they're generally people who aren't super educated. Oftentimes they're not, you know, super smart or cultured people.

Richard Golsan (45:33.176)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (45:44.683)
but only for the Nazi system, they are able to, you know, occupy an entire hotel and turn it into their headquarters where they're the master of life and death and, all this kind of thing, you know, and that, as you suggest, I would say along with sadism has its own allure, you know, there's just the absolute power being an absolutely in charge of, you know, your word is law for someone who.

Richard Golsan (45:53.09)
Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Golsan (46:02.019)
Yeah.

Richard Golsan (46:06.595)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (46:11.242)
didn't grow up with that as a sort of a given their place in society.

Richard Golsan (46:16.78)
Yeah, no, it's fascinating. remember years ago, was the French philosopher, Bulgarian French philosopher, Svetan Todorov, wrote a great essay about the hierarchy and totalitarian regimes. And he pointed out that, I mean, the Nazi regime is one example of it. But, you know, once you start up the bureaucracy and whether it's in a communist regime or the Nazi regime, you have this absolute power. So the worst thing that can happen

to you is to go, you can't go back down the chain because each step you climb is total, I'll put it below you, there's nothingness. As you climb the ladder, the rungs disappear beneath you, so you can't go back down. And I always figured that people like, and Barbie was an interesting case in the sense that he was a survivor, knew how to get along, but I mean, a lot of these people were just inept. You know, you're right, they were.

Waitman Beorn (46:55.05)
Yeah.

Richard Golsan (47:14.22)
not very well educated, not very talented, but they were given these opportunities and they grabbed it. Certainly a lot of the worst collaborators Barbie worked with and French collaborators that Barbie worked with in Lyon, as you know, from watching Hotel Terminus, that was certainly the way these characters.

Waitman Beorn (47:31.392)
Well, that's a question too. I want to talk a little about the differences and what the witnesses are saying, you know, because you sort of have, as you point out, you have people with different access to grind, so to speak, you know, you have Jewish survivors of the Holocaust whose family, whatever, had been deported by Barbie of the resistance people. But how does the trial deal with the fact that

I'm guessing, because it's a similar thought, used occupied Europe. No Barbie couldn't have done a lot of what he did without French informants and, and, you know, helpers. how, how does that come out in the trial? And then how does that sort of hit the public?

Richard Golsan (48:09.186)
Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Golsan (48:18.958)
There it's an interesting thing because you have to remember that the Barbie trial takes place in 87, so the occupation ends in Leon in 44. So you've got what, 40, 43 years there, 40. So there aren't many survivors left, first of all, and there aren't many of these collaborators left, right?

So under any circumstances, the Barbie trial really doesn't focus on these characters. There are apologists that the defense brings in who are pretty pitiful, that are bad historians or something, but it doesn't really have that dimension to it. It's there, it's understated, but it's not exactly what the defense, as we've already talked about, it's not what the defense tries to...

tries to focus on. mean, there's a lot of ways in which you can say the Jacques Valjez's two-coacquered defense was really stupid in terms of actually accomplishing anything. But then again, what was he trying to accomplish? I'm trying to remember in the testimonies. You mentioned Hotel Terminus. You see a lot more of those interviews that

Opal does with these former collaborators and they're not really brought into the trial because the trial isn't so much, it's just not about them particularly.

Waitman Beorn (49:50.467)
Right. So how does, how does the, the, you talk, I guess, a little bit about the, witnesses and the various kinds of witnesses and, the role that they play both in the trial itself, but also, suppose, you know, particularly as you mentioned with the system of having kind of a bunch of additional people adding in, it's almost like you kind of get to put yourself, your issue.

on the national stage in the form of a trial, right? Whereas of course, the Eichmann trial is very much including lots of survivors who have no real direct evidence of anything against Eichmann specifically. It's much more of an indictment of the Holocaust and a chance for survivors to speak on a national scale. Can you talk a little about sort of how that works in the context of the Barbie trial?

Richard Golsan (50:41.998)
Yeah, I mean, one thing about the Barbie trial, and there is recently an article that came out, especially that some of the women witnesses were incredibly powerful. And it happened in my view. There were two that were really overwhelmingly powerful in the trial. One was Lise de Sabre, who was a resistance fighter and was arrested and tortured by Barbie. And then the other one was Simone Cadosh-Lagrange, who was a Jewish girl who was picked up with her family and their stories, I think.

kind of summarize the trial and justified, at least in that instance, the linking of resistance to Jews and the crimes against humanity category. Because what Barbie did to Lise Leserra, who was not Jewish, obviously, and a resistance fighter, was that he told her, if you won't tell me who your boss is, I'm gonna arrest and deport your son and your husband. Which is, the worst thing you can do is threaten somebody with the life of their children for certain.

And in fact, Lisa Lacevra was both her husband and son were deported and both died in horrific ways. And then she herself described the torture she went through as her spine was shattered by by Barbie. So in terms of one one particular witness encapsulating the personal experience of horror from Barbie as a resistance person.

She was the best example. Simone Cadouche-Lagrange was, I believe, 12 or 13 when Barbie picked up Simone Cadouche-Lagrange and then her parents. And what Barbie wanted from them was where their other children were, who had been hidden away in the countryside, and the parents didn't even know where they were. So to get the parents to speak, even though they didn't know the answer, Barbie tortured Simone Cadouche, who was a 12 or 13 year old girl in front of them.

So, you know, that that nexus of those two witnesses seemed to, in a nutshell, justify everything that was being charged against Klaus Barbie. There were other witnesses that were just, you know, that were compelling that were not directly linked to Barbie. And there were some dubious, very dubious witnesses that

Richard Golsan (53:04.334)
that at the end the prosecutor said please discount their testimony. The most famous was a guy named Michel Thomas who later ran language learning centers in the United States for celebrities and clearly was made up everything. It turned out the guy was a mythomaniac and lied about a lot of things. But in terms of the witnesses overall, they're really

I'm not sure I'm answering your question from the beginning, but the power of the witness testimony and the Barbie trial carried it even where the loopholes and compromises the law seemed to fail. They were the ones who pulled the whole, stitched it together in my view.

Waitman Beorn (53:50.547)
One this interesting to you because one of things that you talk about in the book is that and again, this is why I think trials are interesting anyway, but that France had outlawed the death penalty, but that there was debate before the Barbie trial about what should we make literally? Should we just like make a little U-turn and an exception just for this one guy, which is which is crazy, but it also is interesting because it shows you like how important some people thought that this this particular moment was.

Richard Golsan (54:04.034)
Yeah.

Can't we just do him?

Richard Golsan (54:19.64)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Barbie was, you know, apart from the way he presented himself in the court, which was cold, disdainful, dismissive, the whole thing. mean, Barbie was really the symbol in France, certainly in the immediate postwar years of the absolute horror of the experience of occupation. really, you he murdered and tortured. Jean Moulin was in a lot of ways the tip of the iceberg.

So I think that the idea that this representative of absolute evil, personification of it, why don't we make an exception and, you know, take him off the face of the earth, which, you know, in a lot of ways at the end of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, that's the point made that she makes about Eichmann, right? You've chosen not to share the world with these people you killed, so we don't have to share the world with you. I'm paraphrasing very badly, but that's the gist of it.

And I think it would be legitimate to say, why should we have Barbie on our soil? You know, after I know you must know this, in Normandy, there were, how should put this, disagreements between different countries. I mean, there been calls for removing the bodies of Americans from Normandy. And certainly we learned years ago that there is a Nazi cemetery or German cemetery.

in Normandy, and one of the things that the cemetery does is it does not give the rank of the people buried there, it gives their age. And the reason for that is it's easy to recognize an SS rank and nobody in France wants any SS body buried in France. So.

Waitman Beorn (56:07.158)
Yeah, I mean, this is a complete aside, but for listeners, by the way, if you have time, you should also after you read Richard's book, you should totally watch the film because they have a guy in there who is Vafaness guy. And he says that the West owes the Vafaness basically a debt of gratitude. he's going to say, says, but I'm going to tell you which particular units you should really be thanking. And two of them are

Richard Golsan (56:25.74)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (56:35.946)
the Totenkopf division and Dossreich, which is the one that did Oredor. And then of course they say, do you know anything about Oredor? And he's like, I don't know. But, but I mean, so,

Richard Golsan (56:40.78)
Yeah.

Richard Golsan (56:45.237)
Yeah, as Barbie said, it's all just, you know, I fought my enemies loyally and now it's over. So forget it. was kind of like, what do you call loyally or, you know, legitimately?

Waitman Beorn (56:54.614)
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's also that's interesting the way that he, um, sort of phrases what he did as basically the way that Barbie puts it, at least the way that you, that you, suggest is, is he's like a counterinsurgency expert, you know, and he's basically fighting a, counterinsurgency, you know, as the, as the occupying force in the same way that, you know, occupying forces have fought counterinsurgency for.

Richard Golsan (57:13.379)
Right.

Richard Golsan (57:21.421)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (57:22.41)
for years. of course, there's the, you know, again, going back to his interesting exploits in South America, you know, he's supposedly involved in the hunt for Che Guevara. mean, again, his counterinsurgency credentials that he's building on, but then he's in the trial, he's sort of suggesting, well, this is a, it sounds like his, his defense, if he's willing to talk about it at all, is kind of a war is hell kind of defense. you know, bad things happen in war, but this is the nature of things.

Richard Golsan (57:49.55)
Yeah, well, the other thing that I think I can't remember whether it was Trusch, the chief prosecutor or one of the other lawyers, but they point out that Barbie also argued, know, my only job is to protect my fellow German troops. And it's like, well, deporting a four-year-old child, what harm could they do to a German troop?

Waitman Beorn (58:10.922)
Yeah. So, so he's convicted, sentenced to life in prison. What, what impact does this have on French memory and, and coming to terms with, or not coming to terms with all of the issues of, the occupation? Because on the one hand, I could see how

this sort of reifies the Nazis as the ultimate bad guy and kind of overshadows the role of Vichy and the role of individual informants and the role of sort of native antisemitism and all these kinds of things. But I guess it could also work the other way and sort of explode onto the scene a necessity to confront all of this. Is it any of those things or?

Richard Golsan (58:59.182)
Yeah, I mean, think, yeah, I think the first, you know, the most, most clear, what's the right word, follow up to this would be understanding, understanding the necessity to try Frenchmen who had been involved in Holocaust too. So I don't think there's any question that the prosecutions, the eventual prosecutions of, of Paul Tuvier and Mois Papon failed efforts to prosecute Rene Bousquet and a guy named

Jean Legay, is also Bousquet's right-hand man, those definitely gained momentum as a result of the Barbie conviction. think the other thing is that during the 1990s, and I think Rousseau's phrase for this is that the memory of the dark years, the occupation, it becomes more more Judeo-centric. It focuses more and more

on the crimes done to the Jews as opposed to Vichy's other crimes and inequities and all that kind of thing. So I think the Barbie trial is a watershed moment when the Holocaust first comes into view as a huge dimension of this conflict that has not been adequately addressed. And then subsequent to that, French involvement with that, especially in French efforts to come to terms with that through the prosecutions of Tuvier and Pepple.

Waitman Beorn (01:00:27.414)
I mean, it always interesting to me how, as you point out the way that a legal confrontation trial forces a country to think about something. I'm assuming that this was made the papers, but maybe if it was too boring, it wasn't, but it was something that everybody sort of fixated on during this time.

Richard Golsan (01:00:51.298)
Yeah. Well, I had a very interesting experience along those lines, which is that year, that summer, I took a student group to France of Texas A students. And the day that the first part of the trip, would took them on a tour of France and then they settled in Montpellier in the south of France. So the first day I was free, I went down to my favorite cafe, which I'd already known about in Montpellier, having spent time there, and bought all the newspapers.

and it turned out it was the day after the conviction of Barbie. So I was reading about what the implications of this was and all of that. So I was very much aware even at that point in time that the Barbie trial was something truly important and it left unresolved issues. I mean, I think even now, if you look at in this country, I always think of the O.J. Simpson trial just

It's not comparable in many, many ways, but to the degree that it riveted national attention and it brought to light certain crucial problems and divisions in the country. And it's still remembered. mean, the anniversary of it just passed. I you're living in England now, but there was a new, there new programs about it and things like that. So yeah, I think historic trials are really, really important.

another comparison that I'll give you with the trials of terrorists is that there's a wonderful book that was written by Emmanuel Carrère about the November 13th terrorist attack trial took place two or three years ago. And the book is called V13 for Vendredi 13, the day of the attack. And he begins by talking about the Barbie trial. So even, you know, even what is this now, 40 years after 40.

Waitman Beorn (01:02:39.53)
Hmph.

Richard Golsan (01:02:46.19)
plus years after the trial, it is definitely still resonating in France, certainly I think more than the others, just because Barbie was much more directly implicated in the absolute horrors of the occupation.

Waitman Beorn (01:03:05.878)
But I suspect he's also easier. I mean, because when you're, when you're talking about the Vichy people, then you have to confront French complicity in the Holocaust. And so it's, easier to say, this is going to be my last question, which is kind of like, where do we stand now? Because, and again, I'm asking you to generalize about an entire country's memory or, confrontation with the past, which is unfair for an historian. But, you know, I know, for example, in Germany, you know, the, situation generally speaking is such that

Richard Golsan (01:03:08.845)
Yeah

Richard Golsan (01:03:13.388)
Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Golsan (01:03:21.709)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:03:35.479)
At a public level, everyone obviously says that Germany was responsible for the Holocaust. It carried out the Holocaust. Holocaust was bad. The Nazis are bad, et cetera. Um, but then, and has done a lot, you know, as a government and as institutions to sort of, to, to, support that. But then, you know, the closer you get down to someone's family and what, then it becomes a little bit more nuanced and more complex and well, you know, we weren't really Nazis and that kind of stuff.

How does, what is this, what is it like in France now when you, when you, when you talk about the occupation and all that.

Richard Golsan (01:04:07.502)
Well, mean, you know, that's a really, I mean, you know, especially today, this is the day after Marine Le Pen has been blocked from running in the presidential election, which probably not stand. That's my prediction. And Marine Le Pen and the National Front were always linked to, you know, an apologist attitude towards Vichy. But I think that's. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:16.533)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:27.102)
And he was in the film too. His father was in the, was in Hotel Terminus, right? Like he's, he's, he's the guy that was like, it wasn't really that bad or whatever. Yeah.

Richard Golsan (01:04:34.542)
Yeah, yeah, and in fact, deny the Holocaust. Yeah, exactly. The minor detail in the history of World War II, that's what he described the Holocaust as. But the thing is, is that I think the more interesting part culturally is there's still so much left to explore. It doesn't create scandals anymore. mean, including the one about President Mitterrand's past back in 1995, because he'd served Vichy a lot longer than he cared to admit. And that was another

Big scandal, 1990s was just scandal after scandal about the occupation. But now there are a lot of things that are emerging that I think are really interesting that in English that Julian Jackson's book about the trial of Pita is wonderful. And that is another part of that history, especially the immediate post-war history that that book is the first one to really kind of bring together. And I don't even think it's for just foreign readers.

I studied the books about Pétain's trial when I was working on the Barbie trial in there. They were either polemical or not very well done. I mean, the other dimension of this is somebody that I well that I was a I taught French literature at Balai Tua back in 2001. And the person who's my friend and mentor and invited me to do this just published a book about the younger generation of right wing writers and fascist writers in France.

after the war. His name is Marc D'Auvergne and the book is about L'Eau-Sauce. So there's this whole dimension of post-war literary culture as well that has not really been explored because if you're, you know, if you're of my generation and most, you know, 20 years back, you think of the post-war period, think of Jean-Paul Sartre, think come here in figures like that. But it's also true that the legacy of World War II and pre-war fascism in France, that was

continuing right along. So I think now that the floodgates are open, what we're getting is, you know, all these spots are getting filled in in fascinating ways. So we understand more and more, A, what the post-war period was like, and B, what the real cultural legacies are.

Waitman Beorn (01:06:47.07)
Well, and that's, that's the nice thing about history, right? Is that there's always, there's always something out there and you know, in my mind, you know, there's always that in someone's attic, you know, there's, there's something that I would love to see because it would be, you know, it would feel another one of those holes. know, hopefully.

Richard Golsan (01:06:49.666)
Yes.

Richard Golsan (01:07:02.6)
yeah. Well, you know, I mean, in this country, we're going to be dealing. I mean, this is who knows in the current climate, but, you know, the the legacies of the Civil War very much still with us. And that's 100 more than well, almost 100 years before Vichy. So, I mean, you know, I don't.

Waitman Beorn (01:07:19.606)
I mean, the great irony there is, know, without getting too presentist, because it's actually depressing, we're already on a depressing topic enough. But, you know, the same people that say that, you know, the humanities don't matter, and you should major in economics or be a, you know, businessman are actually super, super concerned about these lefty woke ideas like memory of historical events, you know, and

this kind of thing. And I mean, they're really interested, like they really care a lot, you know, they don't understand exactly where they fit in, like, you know, the academic world, but they actually do care an awful lot. And humanities does matter an awful lot because they want to change what's being said there so much.

Richard Golsan (01:07:53.782)
Yeah, right.

Richard Golsan (01:08:01.902)
Yeah, no, I'm for professional reasons, I went over to a to a professional school at A &M, Bush School, and I'm dealing with social scientists, even though my background is in literature and, and, and history. And it's fascinating to me that, you know, people think differently, but I feel more and more comfortable that I am a humanist, because I feel like I have more possibilities of imagining things and

going down fascinating rabbit holes and most social scientists do. But that's, you I guess that makes me a snob, you know.

Waitman Beorn (01:08:34.294)
Well, no, I'm with you there. I know I'm with you there. I always sort of suggest that, know, that political science, you know, and a lot of that stuff is basically just history with a predictive element. and we don't normally, yeah, we don't, we don't normally do predictions or formulas, you know, that kind of stuff. Well, Richard's been great talking. Let me, let me close with our, our question that we normally ask, which is on this date, what is one book on the Holocaust that, that you think is

Richard Golsan (01:08:46.862)
Or a formula attached.

Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:09:04.212)
worthwhile for our listeners to read.

Richard Golsan (01:09:06.668)
Well, even though it's very controversial to me, the book that powered my imagination on this was Hen Aaron's Eichmann in Jerusalem, just because it hit on so many things. The other one that I've always loved is Yehuda Bauer's think it's Rethinking the Holocaust, which is a collection of essays. And one of the ones I remember in thinking was just wonderful was the notion of the uniqueness of the Holocaust. What does that actually mean? Right. And so those are two that sprung to mind, because when I saw that

question of that. There's a lot of great, great things that, you know, books that you've read part of or whole bits of or the whole thing. But those two stand out as the ones that just kind of really hit me in the face with the reality of the Holocaust and the reality of what happens to a culture to make something like that possible. Right. So that's one reason I really love Hannah Arendson and you to bend on this books.

Waitman Beorn (01:10:01.367)
And that's, and that's why I love the question. Cause it's, it's kind of like a Rorschach test. I'm not going to tell you the results, but you know, it's a, it's a, it's always like, it's like asking somebody what their favorite band is. You know, they're always like, it could change tomorrow. Um, I, will, I'm going to.

Richard Golsan (01:10:05.454)
No, that's okay.

Yeah. Well, listen, yeah. Well, I've enjoyed this too. I hope I'll get a chance to see it or you'll pass along a copy when it's done.

Waitman Beorn (01:10:21.462)
Oh yeah, absolutely. mean, and, and, and I'm going to do something I've never done on the podcast, but I can do it cause I'm in charge. Um, which is I'm going to recommend a book as well, uh, to go along with it. Cause I think it, it is, it pairs so well with anything about Barbie and that's, um, Jean Amariz, uh, I think it's at the mind's limits, right? Um, where he talks about, uh, his experience being tortured.

because I, I think it's just one of the most powerful and astute sort of comments. know, one of his comments is that, you the first time someone physically hits you, you are never the same again, because, because, because at that point, everything you've believed about civilization and humanity is now gone.

Richard Golsan (01:10:57.987)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:16.182)
Because we sort of, go through life and you and I today, we go through life with the basic assumption that no one is going to hit us without our permission. And, and, and that there's, and that once someone does that, he equates it to a rape in that sense that, know, you have been physically violated and that that's even, even more powerful and sort of damaging than the physical pain of the blow itself. So I'm going to add that on as a, as a book.

Richard Golsan (01:11:39.566)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're you're channeling the great Mike Tyson, the boxer, and his famous statement, everybody's got a plan until they get hit in the face.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:49.014)
I've never been accused of channeling Mike Tyson before, even when I was boxing. But again, thank you so much for our listeners. Please, if you're finding this podcast interesting, useful, informative, whatever, please leave us a comment. Send me an email if you want to suggest somebody or something like that. It's really useful. And again, Richard, thank you so much for taking the time and coming on.

Richard Golsan (01:11:52.62)
No.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Richard Golsan (01:12:18.658)
My pleasure.