National Socialism and Colonialism: The Barbie Trial as a Primal Scene of Competing Memories

Jan Gerber offers a historical account of the trial against former Gestapo chief of Lyon, Klaus Barbie, in 1987, the decisions that lead to the trial as well as its aftermath in regard to the public understanding of the nature of the Shoa. Drawing from historical sources Gerber describes societal and political changes that disintegrated the knowledge and recognition of the extermination of the European Jews already at the peak of Shoa remembrance. His analysis shows that the identification of the Shoa as the main event of the Nazi rule was a struggle between relativization and the insistence of its particularity, with the Barbie-trial functioning as battle ground for re-interpretations of notions of victimhood, martyrdom, and national guilt—as well as a marker for the emergence of postcolonial defense strategies as a mode of political relativizations of crimes against humanity.