On May 11, 1987, after four years of legal wrangling, Klaus Barbie, the SS officer in charge of the Gestapo in Lyon, France from November, 1942 to August, 1944, would finally attend his long overdue meeting with justice. There was little doubt that Klaus Barbie, a frail old man sitting in the defendant's box of a French courtroom, was the same Klaus Barbie who had been responsible for thousands of deaths forty years earlier. Of Barbie's hundreds of crimes, including murder, torture, rape, and deportation, only those of the gravest nature, the "crimes against humanity," would be pursued at the trial. Specifically, Barbie would be tried for his role as a perpetrator of Hitler's Final Solution and the material evidence against him was staggering.