Hotel Terminus: The life and Times of Klaus Barbie
For a while I thought this would be the first time I had to
give up finding a movie on the List and in a way it turned out so. Extensive search
turned up blank unless I have an American library card, which I do not, or have
access to a region 1 DVD player, which again, I do not have. I finally
succeeded in finding part 2 of “Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus
Barbie” on YouTube and that is what I had to settle with. Missing the first
half of the movie, I feel unable to give a proper review of it and this will
just be my impressions from the second half.
Klaus Barbie was known as “The Butcher of Lyon” for his
actions during the second world war. What exactly he did is a bit unclear because
it is covered by the first half of the movie, but as an SS officer with that
nickname, it cannot have been good. As the war ended Barbie avoided prosecution
for his crimes by being spirited away. This is where the second half starts in
the middle of the story of how that was possible. Something about that it was
an American intelligence agency who got him out using some underground network
that involved the Catholic church in Italy. I apologize for being obscure here,
but this part was very confusing to me.
Barbie worked in South America for various military regimes.
To begin with to fight communists, but eventually to become a power factor in
his own right, leading an organization that supplied the regimes with arms
through sale of drugs. He was particularly active in Bolivia under the name
Altman. In the seventies, his name started to surface, and a number of
individuals began to chase him down. Only in 1983 he was finally caught and
sent to France where he was, three years later, given a life sentence.
“Hotel Terminus...” is a project by French filmmaker Marcel
Ophuls. He previously made the documentary movie “The Sorrow and the Pity” and “Hotel
Terminus...” follows in the same path. Here his mission is not to find Klaus
Barbie, but try to uncover what happened with him. Not just how he was found,
but the entire environment around him. At least in the second half I watched,
we see very little of him. A few pictures and short clips from the trial, but
no interviews to speak of. Instead, Ophuls interviews the people around Barbie.
Often in small snips and cross-clipped with another interview contradicting the
first. There is no voice-over or explanatory text beyond the name and title of
the interviewed (at least that!), so as a viewer I must infer the connection
and context from the dialogue. I have a feeling that even with the first part,
this would still have left me somewhat confused.
Some of the characters being interviewed are downright
dodgy. They agreed to give interviews for a fee, but their answers are at best
useless. Others look very qualified, such as the head of the German Chamber of
Commerce to Peru, but held up against other interviews, they appear to by lying
through their noses. What is truth and what is fiction? It gives the impression
of a conspiracy working just outside our perception with threads not just to juntas
in South America but across the globe.
The final part about the trial itself focuses particularly
on two subjects: the dodgy defence lawyer who not only has an ambiguous relationship
with reality but also appears to be connected to some very unsavoury organizations
with a common goal to disrupt the western world (making this quite relevant
today), and secondly how much of the testimony against Barbie was rejected,
either because of the long time elapsed since the war or because essential
witnesses were discredited. For a while I thought this would lead up to that
Barbie went free, but alas, he did get a life sentence.
I would like to watch the first half if it ever became
available to me. Not because I am eager to watch the crimes of Klaus Barbie,
but because I feel I lack the context for the second half and the means to
fully understand it. For the same reason I do not want to offer a recommendation
for this. I simply cannot judge it fairly.
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