Since I grew up in the US when network television still broadcast serious documentaries in prime time, I have somewhat of an aversion to paying to see a nonfiction film in the cinema. But I do it sometimes, because otherwise I would have missed classics like "Iraq in Fragments," which we just saw in Brussels during an Arab film festival, though the film maker is American.
This time the documentary just released in Belgium is "Mon Meilleur Ennemi," given the French title because of the producers, though the director is Kevin MacDonald of "The Last King of Scotland." The title is taken from the adage, "the enemy of my enemy... is my friend."
Robert Koehler in Variety provides an excellent review, from "My Enemy's Enemy" showing at the Telluride Film Festival:
As with other Nazis who managed to slip through Allied hands at the end of WWII, Barbie found he could bargain with Western nations by providing potentially valuable intelligence on East German and other European communists, whom the West -- rightly or wrongly -- deemed the new, post-Hitler enemy. Such a bargaining chip made him useful (confirmed here by several retired CIA men), though Macdonald tellingly leaves unexamined the uses of such Nazis by Western European spy agencies.
Actually, the Americans are veterans of the CIC, the US Army's Counter Intelligence Corps. Barbie was useful because he could "get things done," said one veteran. Barbie, who is later helped by a Vatican (yes) sympathizer to escape arrest by the French, proceeds to spend decades in Latin America. In Bolivia, he is there to help "advise" the military junta in interrogation techniques (see Andrew Sullivan for a discussion of the Gestapo "verschaerfte Vernehmung" antecedents of "enhanced interrogation").
The film is as gripping as any thriller, though there's never any doubt as to "who done it." Barbie was long sought (by Nazi hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld) as the torturer/murderer of French Resistance leader Jean Moulin, and the Nazi responsible for sending 44 Jewish children to their deaths in the gas chambers. MacDonald weaves recent interviews, documentary footage from Germany to France to Bolivia, and excerpts from the 1987 trial of Barbie in Lyon, where he was confronted by aging victims of the "Butcher of Lyon."
You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see what former Congresswoman (and former Brooklyn District Attorney) Elizabeth Holtzman sees as parallels between the American use of Barbie and other Nazis at the outset of the Cold War, and the arming of the Islamist mujahidin in Afghanistan in the twilight of the Cold War. Same enemy - Soviet Communism - different "friend." But the blowback for our expedient embrace of Usama bin Laden and his fellow jihadists is likely to be more deadly - and enduring - than the moral hazard for our hiring ex-Gestapo agents.
The enemy of my enemy...