MY ENEMY’S ENEMY
France, 2007, 87 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Kevin Macdonald.
A documentary to catch particularly if one is interested in the stories of Nazis who committed atrocities and their escape to another life after the war (especially in Latin America) and dreamed and/or plotted for the rise of a Fourth Reich. It is the history of Klaus Barbie.
For someone who remembered a little of the treatment of Barbie in 1987 for his crimes against humanity as ‘the Butcher of Lyon’, it came as something of a shock to learn of his being protected and being used as a source of information by anti-Communist US secret agencies, let alone his 30 years in Bolivia, his contacts with ex-Nazis in hiding (though not unknown to authorities) and his part in the 1979 coup in Bolivia.
The film uses a great deal of interesting archival footage and intercuts a series of interviews from historians and journalists who investigated Barbie.
When his trial is shown, we hear some harrowing stories and see Barbie’s calm exterior and presence in the dock and his short address to the court urging them to forget and leave the past in the past.
Any account of Nazi cruelty and torture is disturbing but this portrait and study of Barbie is intelligently forceful. And for those of us (despite Ludlum, Forsythe and Jack Higgins) find it still hard to believe that government agencies in the real world are corrupt, manipulative and believe the end justifies the means, the stories of governments (especially the US government) using war criminals with impunity is still shocking and scandalous. But, then what about Saddam against Iran, Pinochet against Allende, the Taliban against the Russians in Afghanistan?
The film (basically a French production in French) was directed by top documentary maker, Kevin Macdonald (One Day in September, Touching the Void) who moved into feature film-making with The Last King of Scotland.
The extraordinary defence lawyer (who has to be heard to be believed but who makes many valid criticisms of governments) is Jaques Verges whose long and strange career defending the almost indefensible is the subject of Barbet Schroder’s must-see documentary, Terror’s Advocate.
