Klaus Barbie

Klaus Barbie
Born	(1913-10-25)October 25, 1913 Bad Godesberg, Germany
Died	September 25, 1991(1991-09-25) (aged 77) Lyon (jail), France
Nationality	German
Other names	Butcher of Lyon
Occupation	Hauptsturmführer
Known for	Working as a Nazi Leader in France, torturing resistance members. And for being a drug lord and arms dealer in Bolivia.
Political party	National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP)

Nikolaus 'Klaus' Barbie (October 25, 1913 – September 25, 1991) was an SS-Hauptsturmführer (rank approximately equivalent to army captain), Gestapo member and war criminal. He was known as the Butcher of Lyon.

Early life

Klaus Barbie was born in Bad Godesberg, today part of Bonn, Germany. Until 1923 he went to the school where his father taught. Afterward, he attended a boarding school in Trier. In 1925, his whole family moved to Trier. In 1933, Barbie's father and brother both died. The death of his abusive, alcoholic father derailed plans for young Barbie to study theology or otherwise become an academic, as his peers had expected. While unemployed, Barbie was drafted into the Nazi labor service - Reichsarbeitsdienst.

In September 1935, he joined the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the special security branch service of the SS that acted as the intelligence-gathering arm of the Nazi Party. He was sent to serve in Amsterdam in the German occupied Netherlands. In 1942, he was sent to Dijon and in November of the same year he was sent to Lyon, where he became the head of the local Gestapo.

War crimes

He first set up camp at Hôtel Terminus in Lyon. It was his time as head of the Gestapo of Lyon that earned him the name Butcher of Lyon. Evidence suggests that he personally tortured prisoners and was responsible for the deaths of up to 4,000 people. The most infamous case is the arrest and torture of Jean Moulin, one of the highest-ranking members of the French Resistance. In April 1944, Barbie ordered the deportation to Auschwitz of a group of 44 Jewish children from an orphanage at Izieu. After his surgery in Lyon, Klaus Barbie rejoined the SIPO-SD of Lyon in Bruyeres-in-Vosges, France, where he was also responsible for a massacre in Rehaupal in September 1944.

CIA and Bolivia

In 1947, Barbie became an agent for the 66th Detachment of the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). In 1951, he fled to Juan Peron's Argentina with the help of a ratline organized by U.S. intelligence services and the Ustashi Roman Catholic priest Krunoslav Draganović. Asked by Barbie why he was going out of his way to help him escape, Draganovic responded, "We have to maintain a sort of moral reserve on which we can draw in the future." He then emigrated to Bolivia, where he lived under the alias Klaus Altmann. Testimony of Italian insurgent Stefano Delle Chiaie before the Italian Parliamentary Commission on Terrorism suggests that Barbie took part in the "Cocaine Coup" of Luis García Meza Tejada, when the regime forced its way to power in Bolivia in 1980.

Barbie was also reported to have worked as an officer for Bolivian intelligence and helped plan concentration camps, and formulate torture and repression techniques for anti-government rebels while Bolivia was under a violent dictatorship.

Che Guevara

The 2007 documentary My Enemy's Enemy, directed by Oscar-winning British director Kevin Macdonald, raises the possibility that Barbie helped the CIA orchestrate the 1967 capture and execution of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in Bolivia. In 1966 a disguised Guevara arrived in Bolivia to organise the overthrow of its military dictatorship, and according to the film, the CIA turned to Barbie for his first-hand knowledge of counter-guerrilla warfare.

According to Alvaro de Castro, a longtime confidant of Barbie interviewed for the film:

"He (Barbie) met Major Shelton, the commander of the unit from the US. (Barbie) no doubt gave him advice on how to fight this guerrilla war. He used the expertise gained doing this kind of work in World War Two. They made the most of the fact that he had this experience."

De Castro adds that Barbie "had little respect for Che Guevara", viewing him as "a pitiful adventurer." In the film, journalist Kai Hermann remarks that "He (Barbie) always boasted - though I cannot prove it - that it was he who devised the strategy for murdering Che Guevara."

Trial

Barbie was identified in Bolivia as early as 1971 by the Klarsfelds (Nazi hunters), but it was only on January 19, 1983, that the newly elected government of Hernán Siles Zuazo arrested and extradited him to France.

In 1984, Barbie was put on trial for crimes committed while he was in charge of the Gestapo in Lyon between 1942 and 1944. The trial started on May 11, 1987, in Lyon — a jury trial before the Rhône Cour d'assises. In a rare move, the court allowed the trial to be filmed because of its historical value. Also, a special court room with seating for an audience of about 700 was constructed. The head prosecutor was Pierre Truche. At the trial Barbie received support not only from Nazi apologists like François Genoud, but also from leftist lawyer Jacques Vergès.

Quite likely under Vergès' direction, Barbie caused sensations on the first days of the trial: he gave his name as Klaus Altmann (the name he had used while in Bolivia) and, claiming that his extradition was technically illegal, made the request to be excused from the trial and return to his cell at St Joseph prison. This was granted though he was brought back on the 26th of May to face some of his accusers, during which he stated that he had "nothing to say".

Vergès had a reputation for attacking the French political system, particularly in the French colonial empire. His strategy at the trial was to use it to expose war crimes committed by France since 1945. Indeed, many of the charges against Barbie were dropped, thanks to legislation that had protected people accused of crimes under the Vichy regime and in French Algeria. Vergès further argued that Barbie's actions were no worse than the ordinary actions of colonialists worldwide, and that his trial was selective prosecution. During his trial, Barbie famously stated that: "When I stand before the throne of God I shall be judged innocent".

On July 4, 1987, Barbie was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity, and died in jail in Lyon of leukemia four years later, at the age of 77.

In popular culture

Barbie is memorably referred to in the film Rat Race, when the Pear family stops at the "Barbie Museum", thinking it to be a museum of Barbie dolls. They arrive, shocked at its true subject and threatening staff of neo-nazis, who attempt to portray Klaus Barbie as a "loving husband, devoted father, wine connoisseur, and three-time ballroom dancing champion." Following their awkward departure, the Pear family finds their van destroyed and subsequently steals one of the museum's relics, Adolf Hitler's staff car.

Barbie is referred to in the song "I Saw an X-Ray of a Girl Passing Gas" on the Butthole Surfers' 1988 album Hairway to Steven.

Barbie is also referred to in the song "Sheriff Fatman" by Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine from their 1989 album 101 Damnations.

Another reference to Barbie is in the song, "You Wongled A Turd In My Tator" by Blow Your Head Off from their 2003 CD, "Lick It & Stick It To Your Thigh".

In 1986, Barbie's exposure and deportation story was adapted into a TV movie starring Tom Conti, Farrah Fawcett and Geraldine Page.

The location of Klaus Barbie is offered to the Mossad by the CIA in the spy series The Company.

Further reading

• Hilberg, Raul (1982). "Barbie (SS, Lyon)". Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden (in German) (110 ed.). Olle & Wolter. p. 453. ISBN 978-3883954318. OCLC 10125090. Case No. 77, Fn 908 KsD Lyon IV-B (gez. Ostubaf. Barbie) an BdS, Paris IV-B, 6. April 1944, RF-1235.
• Goni, Uki (2002). The Real Odessa: How Peron Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina. Granta Books. ISBN 978-1862074033. A chapter in this book also follows how top Nazis made their way to Argentina and Latin America.
• Bower, Tom (1984). Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons. New York: Pantheon Books. ISBN 978-0394533599.
• U.S. Samurais in Bruyeres Klaus Barbie found in the Vosges Mountains in Bruyeres after his surgery in Lyon. Barbie rejoins his unit the SIPO-SD of Lyon there and was responsible of the Massacre of Rehaupal in September 1944|year=1993 |publisher=Editions du CPL [1][2]

External links

• Marcel Ophuls’s Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988) at IMDb
• Kevin Macdonald’s My Enemy’s Enemy (2007) at IMDb
• L'avocat de la terreur at IMDb (English: “Terror's Advocate”)