Remembering in Vain: The Klaus Barbie Trial and Crimes Against Humanity (review)

98 SHOFAR Summer 1994 Vol. 12, No.4 increasingly virulent antisemitic laws of the government. Also, by 1943 many Jews in France were active in the French resistance movement. Overall Zuccotti provides the reader with a passionate account of how Jews in France responded to the Holocaust. In her analysis she captures all of the ambiguities of the French situation where you had a government that took antisemitic initiatives on its own, collaborated with the Nazis in the round-up ofJews, yet also resisted the Nazis' efforts to persecute Jews of French origin. She shows a French population that harbored antisemitic attitudes but showed some resistance to increasingly overt forms of antisemitism on the part of the government. In this respect, Zuccotti's book captures the complexity of antisemitism and the Holocaust in France. The "banality of evil" did not become routinized but remained closely connected to the contradictory beliefs of the French about their national identity and the place ofJews in it. Dwayne Woods Department of Political Science Purdue University Remembering in Vain: The Klaus Barbie Trial and Crimes Against HUlllanity, by Alain Finkielkraut. Introduction by Alice Kaplan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. 102 pp. $19.50. Shortly after the recent Gulf War, President George Bush gave many assurances that Saddam Hussein would pay dearly for committing crimes of war, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity. In a similar vein, Senator Al Gore, now Vice President, called for establishment of a formal war crimes tribunal to prosecute the Iraqi leader for "cruel, inhuman, unthinkable repression." Justifying such a tribunal, Gore said that it would "perform a sacred duty to the dead whose blood, as the Bible says, cries out from the earth on which it was spilled." The tribunal, of course, was never established. Nuremberg expectations notwithstanding, all of the terrible crimes inflicted upon Iraqis, Kuwaitis, Israelis, Saudis, Americans, and others have gone unpunished. Significantly, the world has sometimes been more conscientious in seeking out and prosecuting Nazi crimes, but these prosecutions, even when they end in conviction, often fail to produce justice. Remembering in Vain: The Klaus Barbie Trial and Crimes Against Humanity is a thoughtful and extremely critical account of one such prosecution, the 1988 trial, in France, of the notorious "Butcher of Lyons." Book Reviews 99 The Barbie trial took place between May 11 and July 4, 1987. Although found guilty and sentenced to life in prison (there was no longer a death penalty in France), Barbie and his lawyers succeeded in reconceptualizing the charge of "crimes against humanity." The resultant "blurring" of this charge, says Finkielkraut, defiled the very memory of justice. For the most part, the author is right on the mark. But, while he is not a lawyer or legal scholar and therefore not to be evaluated strictly along jurisprudential criteria, Finkielkraut has not always done his most elementary jurisprudential homework with complete care. Returning to the London Charter of August 8, 1945, the documentary source of the French incorporation and indictment, he claims that purely tactical considerations by the prosecuting authorities will have had long-term negative consequences for justice. Because, he alleges, crimes of war have a statute of limitations, and crimes against humanity contain no such statute, the prosecution chose to treat all of Barbie's cruelties-deportation-related crimes and crimes against the Resistance-as qualitatively indistinguishable. In reporting the French court's differential treatment of statutory limitations for crimes of war and crimes against humanity, Finkielkraut is entirely accurate. I What he fails to understand, however, and consequently to reveal to his readers, is that the French court acted incorrectly in accepting such differentiation. According to the Convention on the NonApplicability ofStatutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, "... there is no period of limitation for war crimes and crimes against humanity."2 But the author does deal most satisfactorily, even elegantly, with what he calls "the irreducible specificity of crimes against humanity." After the War, France received survivors and victims of the Resistance as heroes, but generally tried to ignore those who were known as the "racially deported," the ones in "zebra" clothes, the Jews. This sharp dichotomy went so far as 'See Le...