Hotel Terminus – The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (no 20)

(France 1988 267m) not on DVD

Aka. Hôtel Terminus: Klaus Barbie, sa vie et son temps

We are part of the continent

p  Marcel Ophuls  d/w  Marcel Ophuls  ph  Michael Davis, Pierre Boffety, Ruben Aaronson, Wilhelm Rosing, Lionel Legros, Daniel Chabert, Paul Gonon  ed  Albert Jurgenson, Catherine Zins  narrator  Jeanne Moreau

A problematic film in many ways, Hotel Terminus was the last of the three canonical documentaries about World War II made by Marcel Ophuls in the space of twenty crusading years, following trail-blazing resistance documentary The Sorrow and the Pity and its successor The Memory of Justice.  At the third time of asking, Ophuls won his Oscar, and if the award itself is irrelevant to true film scholars, it was long overdue.  Without Ophuls, it’s difficult to imagine the terrain of modern documentary film-making; would Shoah and Gulag, two kindred spirit works also in this selection, have been made but for Ophuls’ success?  Would debate about his subjects have intensified to such a degree without them?  The answer to both questions is surely no. 

            The title refers to the hotel where Barbie’s Gestapo had their headquarters in occupied France during the war.  It could also, in a sick, twisted way, seem in retrospect a perfect euphemism for the death camps that awaited his victims.  In his time as head of the Gestapo in Lyon, he personally tortured several thousand people, and famously captured and executed the Resistance leader Jean Moulin in 1943.  More infamously still was his deportation of dozens of Jewish children in 1944.  The first film covers Barbie’s crimes in the form of interviews with both survivors and those living in the modern environs, who are asked their opinions on Barbie and his capture and trial.

            Part two essentially details his escape, via what became known as the Monastery Route, through the help of Nazi-symapthiser extreme Catholics, to South America, where he joined and met up with the likes of Eichmann and Mengele.  Even there he is exposed for nefarious, if less deadly practices, swindling people out of fortunes and then accusing them of treason for unmasking him.  People in and around La Paz in Bolivia are asked about the man they knew as Klaus Altmann – and what they felt about his crimes. 

Ophuls’ bravest decision was to have the film virtually entirely free of photos and film footage of the actual atrocities.  In retrospect one wonders whether it was influenced by Lanzmann’s decision to do exactly the same in Shoah a few years earlier.  Lanzmann was interested in testimony.  The footage was well-known and had lost much of its impact due to overexposure in the forty years since the war.  Perhaps Ophuls felt the same way, and his film is likewise a testimony, and yet it is more besides.  It’s also a piece of investigative journalism.  There are occasions where one feels Ophuls begin to adopt an almost Paxmanesque stance to those he is questioning, one is almost tempted to say interrogating.  Not that he shouldn’t, of course, it’s entirely justified, and one does get inner satisfaction at watching some of the collaborators – both in France and in South America – squirming in their seats to avoid the question at hand, but it comes a little close to a Michael Moore polemic for comfort on occasions.  The big difference being that Moore uses his encounters to illustrate a pre-conceived stance, whereas Ophuls is crusading after the truth, and in approaching people’s doors or crossing their property, he often comes across as an avuncular, benevolent landlord figure.  One doesn’t get any closer to understanding Barbie the man, for how can we?  But, in that famous interview with Barbie which is featured here, one does get a glimpse into the mindset of dispassionate, unrepentant evil.  An evil which is all the more shocking because Barbie conforms to an almost cliché of modern evil, so that whenever people are interviewed about killers who lived near to them, they reply “he looked like an ordinary man.”  Indeed, several commentators have recalled Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil”, and without wishing to seem unoriginal, it was never better illustrated than here.