Où est Klaus Barbie?

So asked notorious crypto-couldbe-fascist neo-folk band Death in June back in 1985, a few years before the release of this film but well after the world knew the answer. Where was SS-Hauptsturmführer Barbie, aka “the Butcher of Lyon”? Crypto-creeps might have imagined him blissed-out and bloodied in some eternal, unholy hall of heroes (or else “dans le coeur,” as DiJ sang it), but in fact he was in Bolivia, living pseudonymously but quite well and plenty smugly as a treasured asset of the right-wing military regime and a close collaborator with the SS-worshipping, leftist-disappearing “Fiancés of Death”. By 1984, after the regime protecting him collapsed, Barbie was extradited to France to finally face the macabre music.

Marcel Ophuls is a winning, witty, magisterial presence throughout this stunning work, which serves as a kind of sequel or companion piece to The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), his equally exhaustive, four-hour-plus documentary/exposé of France under Nazi occupation. Like that imposing opus, Hotel Terminus accumulates its argument(s) with inexorable precision and comprehensiveness. Ophuls had a rare gift for finding exactly the right people to talk to and for interviewing them — in several languages — with a deceptively light touch that yields often jarring insights again and again.

The United States doesn’t come out of this film, which recently screened in a fine 35mm print over at the Somerville Theatre, shining very brightly. However well you think you already know the story of post-WWII “blowback” — the recruitment by the western allies of Nazi functionaries as collaborators in the early days of the Cold War against the Soviet Union — you will learn more by watching Hotel Terminus, a brave and moving work that acknowledges complexity as it roundly condemns “realpolitik” cynicism.

Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988)
dir. Marcel Ophuls
267 minutes