Hôtel Terminus

Marcel Ophuls' mammoth four-and-one-half hour-long portrait of Gestapo commandant Klaus Barbie, the notorious Butcher of Lyon, is more than just a biography of another Nazi mass murderer. The film also provides a meticulous study of the forces which allowed him to survive for so long, from wartime anti-Semitism to post-war Communist paranoia to a prevailing what's-done-is-done attitude of retroactive amnesia. Ophuls is not so complacent, and makes no apologies for his sometimes confrontational approach to the subject. In his mind those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, and the sheer volume of verbal testimony, from enemies and friends alike, is only the director's way of ensuring we neither forgive nor forget. The scope of the film is vast, covering over forty years and spanning several continents, but the scale is intimate: one voice, one detail at a time, making it an exhaustive but hardly exhausting account of one monstrous but admittedly small cog in an evil machine, pieces of which are still well-oiled and operating even today.

This is a riveting film from start to finish. Marcel Ophuls very personal and wry take on the unfolding horror of Nazi Klaus Barbie's long and unimpeded criminal career exerts a powerful hold. The movie exudes a weird, creepy humor throughout, beginning with its title, the actual name of the French hotel which was the location of Barbie's headquarters in Lyons. "Hotel Terminus" is filled with unforgettably bizarre, real life characters. The voices of Barbie's torture victims and pursuers are given equal time alongside those of his collaborators and defenders. This is an important movie. It stands as one of the best documentaries of the twentieth century and of all time. The film is as much or more about French history as well as American and German. The United States ugly,collaborative role in Barbie's eluding of justice for so many years is revealed in terms like "ratline". The ratline was a transportation corridor set up by the CIA to funnel Nazi war criminals safely out of Europe to South America. This operation functioned with the help of the Vatican.It was fueled by the turn of the political tide after World War Two when fear of Communist takeover took hold over Europe and the West, and the Nazis were seen as specialists in their ability to ferret out Communists. There are numerous subtitles throughout, especially in Part one, but these do not detract from the film's unstoppable momentum. Parts of this true story seem almost unbelievable. Hannah Arendt's observation and comment on the banality of evil is again and again underscored in Ophuls extraordinary film.

I have always been fascinated by history as a subject and just cannot understand why so few people show any interest in it. I have no illusions, Marcel Ophüls' long documentary about the life and times of Klaus Barbie, a brutally efficient German police chief in occupied France in World War Two, will hardly convert anyone into an avid historian. But I think it is a collective testimony that will outlive the present and could be used in history classes in a number of countries all over the world. Today and tomorrow.

The director, who throughout the movie appears as an interviewer, is an angry man. He acts accordingly and knows what he wants from the faces he encounters during the making of Hôtel Terminus. And he has an almost uncanny talent to get from the interviewed what he wants. But it feels real and I am positive that Hôtel Terminus is a frank and biased documentary. Its main aim is to convey information about facts and human nature. No one will ever be able to use it for any kind of indoctrination.

Basically, the movie is a biography of Barbie, from the beginnings in provincial Germany up to his trial in the late eighties in Lyon. Ophüls visits – apparently within a very short stretch of time - the places where Barbie lived: in Germany, France and Bolivia. He talks to people there. Some have to say something about Barbie and what he did, some have not – or do not want to. A wide range of statements and non-statements is artfully woven into a tissue that shows how concerned respectively unconcerned humanity as a whole can be about past events, however terrible they are. Shots of landscapes, short sequences of documentary footage and excerpts of local folkloric or popular tunes are cleverly inserted into that texture and give the statements additional emotional weight.

The movie is very concerned about two particular incidents. This maybe constitutes a weakness because the attention is directed away from Barbie. It probes deeply into the arrest and the disappearance of legendary French resistance leader Jean Moulin and into the abduction of the «enfants d'Isieux», Jewish children who found shelter in an isolated boarding school and were betrayed to the German forces of occupation. The point here is, that Barbie as the man held responsible for the two incidents had to count on French collaborators. There were suspicions that the French authorities were for a long time not very anxious to bring Barbie to trial as he had inside knowledge that would tarnish the official history of France during World War Two. The two «sub chapters» feel as if they were made specifically for a French audience, especially in the intricate Moulin affair it is difficult for an outsider to follow.

The most striking result of Hôtel Terminus is that it shows the brutal banality of terror in a totalitarian regime. Barbie, basically a public servant with a sadistic streak who executes orders he was given, does not really become alive as a character. Somehow he gradually vanishes further and further into the background. He does not play the chief villain in this movie but is used as an example of one of many ruthless henchmen of a tyranny. The message of Hôtel Terminus is, as I see it, that only the complicity or the indifference of the "general public" made Barbie's career and the atrocities he was capable of possible.

The film is very good but sags in the third hour. However, you must stay with it. Take a break, have some coffee, and come back. I saw this film a good five years ago, but the final few sentences were so moving I remember them still, word for word. It must be seen. We're talking hot tears and goosebumps.

Marcel Ophuls is an obnoxious jackass (think of a European Michael Moore), and he is overly obtrusive in this film, but it is a must-see nonetheless. We all know what Barbie did, but the role of the US government in shielding him from French authorities after the war is not so commonly known. This film leaves no stone unturned, and the bittersweet conclusion--Barbie finally was imprisoned, but only for four years, and after he had already lived free and wealthy for forty years--is sobering.