In the 1950s, Barbie had been tried twice for his war crimes by France and sentenced to death “in absentia”, but by the time the Nazi returned to the country in 1983, both convictions had lapsed. His new trial began in 1987 and its extensive media coverage gripped the French public. The harrowing testimony from those of Barbie’s victims who had survived, and the relatives of those who didn’t, laid bare the scale and savagery of the “Butcher of Lyon” atrocities. Although Barbie never revealed who had betrayed Jean Moulin to him, the proceedings did detail the sickening violence he had personally participated in, and the thousands of killings he was responsible for, including one incident in which 44 Jewish children were rounded up from a farmhouse at Izieu in Lyon, and sent to their deaths.
