Books in Brief: The Nazi Legacy

The Nazi Legacy: Klaus Barbie and the International Fascist Connection, by Magnus Linklater, Isabel Hilton, and Neal Ascherson (Holt, Rinehart, 354 pp., $17.95)

There have already been at least two full-length books on this subject, and a third is due soon. Is there really any justification for yet another memorial in the Holocaust Hall of Infamy? The Eichmann case has rendered the scenario all too familiar: criminal behavior, long-nursed outrage by recipients, tentative tracing of escapee, eventual capture, triumphant return with prize to the court of world opinion. If the scenario does in fact still hold appeal, then this well-paced treatment could hardly be bettered. The joint effort of a group of English journalists, it tracks Barbie’s spoor meticulously from his birth all the way to his current prison cell in Lyons, France, and does so against a skillfully limned background of international affairs. Despite the book’s subtitle, “Fascism” is never defined (its essence frets the academicians, too); but the authors do seem to have found no essential distinction among it, Nazism, and Communism—a conclusion many citizens arrived at years ago. Suffice it to close with this vignette: After massively interrogating a certain prisoner, “Barbie strolled over to a piano a few steps away and, with his gloved and bloody hands, played a few bars of the song, ‘Parlez-moi d’amour.’ “

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Curtis Carroll Davis

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The Nazi Legacy: Klaus Barbie and the International Fascist Connection, by Magnus Linklater, Isabel Hilton, and Neal Ascherson (Holt, Rinehart, 354 pp., $17.95)

There have already been at least two full-length books on this subject, and a third is due soon. Is there really any justification for yet another memorial in the Holocaust Hall of Infamy? The Eichmann case has rendered the scenario all too familiar: criminal behavior, long-nursed outrage by recipients, tentative tracing of escapee, eventual capture, triumphant return with prize to the court of world opinion. If the scenario does in fact still hold appeal, then this well-paced treatment could hardly be bettered. The joint effort of a group of English journalists, it tracks Barbie’s spoor meticulously from his birth all the way to his current prison cell in Lyons, France, and does so against a skillfully limned background of international affairs. Despite the book’s subtitle, “Fascism” is never defined (its essence frets the academicians, too); but the authors do seem to have found no essential distinction among it, Nazism, and Communism—a conclusion many citizens arrived at years ago. Suffice it to close with this vignette: After massively interrogating a certain prisoner, “Barbie strolled over to a piano a few steps away and, with his gloved and bloody hands, played a few bars of the song, ‘Parlez-moi d’amour.’ “