By now we seem inured to documentaries about WWII, as well we might. Whatever else it is, Holocaust culture has proven to be a force as big as history itself - 65 years hence, it is still possible, inevitable even, to be shocked at the scope of the Nazi disaster. How could a mere political ideology and its mobilized goon-squad violence, running full bore for less than seven years, have encompassed so many extraordinary stories, devastated so many lives, generated so many images? However much you or I have seen and/or read, we haven't scratched the surface. But exhausted as we might be by year after year of Oscar®-winning, Holocaust-themed documentaries, none of us would even privately suggest that such films should no longer be produced and distributed. In fact, they should be produced more often, and distributed as a form of compulsory public education. The legacy of Nazism is our greatest modern morality lesson, the yardstick against which all national behaviors are measured, and it would serve us well to keep it front of brain, no matter how many years have passed.

Marcel Ophuls has probably done more than any other individual to make the Holocaust documentary a vital and indispensable cultural institution, starting in 1969 with The Sorrow and the Pity, his famous interview-epic about the Resistance, and more or less culminating with 1988's Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie. The latter film, released on DVD for the first time, is a rambling, discursive, inquisitive gargantua (running four and a quarter hours) devoted to the career and ramifications of a single, low-level Gestapo officer, Klaus Barbie, notorious in the '80s because that was when he was finally captured and brought to trial for war crimes. But he became more famous because of Ophuls's movie, which uses Barbie's case as a cudgel to demonstrate the various failures of the Western legal systems, and the complicity of governments and societies whose handling of Barbie amounts to an endorsement of his actions.

Which were outlandish - as the head Gestapo man in Lyon, Barbie kept a medieval torture chamber (complete with spiked manacles), mutilated and killed scores of Jews and Resistance fighters, and shipped untold crowds off to the camps. But his crimes are merely the ignition for Ophuls's weave narrative, which follows Barbie from his postwar disappearance (when he was working for American intelligence agencies) to his escape from Europe by way of the infamous "Rat Line" (organized for ex-Nazis by the Catholic Church) to the trials of 1954 (where he was convicted in absentia) to the discovery of Barbie in the '70s living comfortably in Peru and Bolivia, under the protection of those governments. If it were merely an exhaustive examination of a minor Gestapo thug's career, Hotel Terminus would merely be unique, and historically important.

But Ophuls paints this picture not as a narrative line, because his concern is not with Barbie - it is with Barbie's victims, employers, prosecutors, defenders, acquaintances and neighbors, the entire world around Barbie, reacting to his living affront and the mess of ethical questions it raises. Ophuls always constructs his films as mottled collages, chaotic webs of conflicting viewpoints, and here, stories do not run parallel but criss-cross, double back, detour and stall. Details accumulate like autumn leaves. History is a tumult, after all, not a simply told tale. Barbie is the center of this cyclone, a mysterious and sadistic figure (uninterviewed) highlighting the establishment's priority of self-interest over justice, again and again.

Always the tough-minded moralist, Ophuls takes the Gestapo villain's guilt as a given, and piece by piece reveals a postwar world a good deal more tolerant and encouraging of Nazis than we'd all like to admit. While one German after another displays more scorn toward Ophuls than Barbie, for not letting dead dogs lie, the American spymasters interviewed - all of them flabby, amiable old men in cardigans now - have little or no compunction about using Barbie despite his past or about letting him evade the Nuremberg trials. Impatient and often sardonic with his subjects, Ophuls can hardly be bothered to light his interviews nicely; for him, the individuals and their recounted reality is all that matters. Once the espionage flim-flam around Barbie's final trial really gets going in the film's last hour, between the U.S., England and France, the cross-purposes and multiple interpretations offered up are allowed to crash-pile into absurdity. What seems so simple - prosecute a Nazi for recorded crimes - becomes a babel of lies, prevarications, justifications, excuses and ethical chicanery. In effect, it's a talking-heads portrait of the new world order, all politics and no sense of right or wrong.

The Icarus DVD set comes with a booklet of lucid historical background, reviews, and a statement by Ophuls from the original Cannes press kit, in which he ponders at length the boots-on-the-ground problem of resistance, collaboration and the abyss - non-action - between them.

For more information about Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, visit Icarus Films. To order Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, go to TCM Shopping.

by Michael Atkinson