<Archive Obituaries> Klaus Barbie (September 25th 1991)
Bill Schenley
By Tom Bower
Photo:
http://www2.uol.com.br/historiaviva/imagens/materia/barbie_materia.jpg
Nikolaus (Klaus) Barbie, soldier and prison governor, born Bad
Godesberg Germany 25 October 1913, married 1940 Regine Willms (died
1982; one daughter, and one son deceased), died Lyons 25 September
1991.
Officially and unofficially, Klaus Barbie was employed by democracies
and dictatorships for 50 years. Manipulation, interrogation,
extraction, torture and murder were the services he offered and they
were purchased by governments in the full knowledge that this
nonentity had considerable experience of his trade. None expressed any
dissatisfaction.
Ambitious, loyal and dynamic, the so-called ''Butcher of Lyons'' never
sought publicity and was both surprised and genuinely outraged when,
following his sudden deportation from Bolivia to France in 1983, he
was paraded as the international symbol of Nazi evil.
Yet his death bequeaths a vacuum instead of a much-needed explanation
to illuminate why an apparently doting husband and father was
simultaneously an appalling monster. For, like most who served in
Hitler's Gestapo, Barbie, despite wielding enormous and ultimate
power, was too crude, uneducated and unintelligent to provide more
than a hint to satisfy those who demand an answer to their simple
question: ''Why?''
Barbie was born in Bad Godesberg, just south of Bonn, in 1913. His
Catholic parents married three months after his birth. The young
Barbie's frightened and unpleasant relationship with his father
undoubtedly contains the best, albeit unsatisfactory, explanation to
his subsequent career.
Apparently Klaus's first memories are of his severely wounded and
dejected father returning from Germany's defeat in 1918 to discover
that his birthplace, Trier, was under French occupation. Barbie
claimed that he suffered when his father's career as a schoolmaster
became gradually curtailed by painful wounds and regular drunkenness,
which provoked violent tirades demanding rigid obedience from his son.
The simultaneous death of his father and Hitler's appointment as
Germany's Chancellor in 1933 propelled the 20-year-old piece of
flotsam towards the one creed which offered a structured future.
Barbie joined the SS in 1935, following two years' indoctrination in
various Nazi work-camps. Having displayed efficiency and cunning as a
police officer in Berlin persecuting homosexuals and others, Barbie's
war started as a Gestapo officer in Holland in 1940. There he would
become especially remembered for his audacious and successful
deception which encouraged hundreds of Jews to report to the police,
from where they were efficiently dispatched to an extermination camp.
Reminiscing 30 years later in South America about that period, Barbie
would also recall ''three hard weeks'' of chasing defiant and
embattled Jews through Amsterdam.
Barbie's commanding officer commended his subordinate to Berlin for
having ''thrown himself energetically and intensively into SD work''.
Promotion soon followed. On 11 November 1942, Barbie arrived as the
Gestapo chief of Lyons, the centre of France's resistance. Not only
the city but 18,000 square miles of wooded countryside and mountains
were within his domain. Among his early successes was the humiliating
destruction of several British SOE networks and the effective
repression of anti-German activities in the city. His methods -
terrorising the French population to extract information, or to round
up Jews - are unlikely to have differed substantially from those of
his colleagues around Europe. Yet his repertoire left an indelible
impression. Surviving eyewitnesses describe merciless executions,
severe beatings and the most perverted array of torture conducted by a
human who seemed visibly unmoved and even stimulated to pleasure while
witnessing the pain he inflicted. ''He loved to play God,'' testified
one survivor. One who did not survive his torture was the Resistance
leader Jean Moulin, and it was that murder which distinguished Barbie
among the ranks of SS war-criminals in France.
The unanswered conundrum is whether Barbie was putty to the Nazis or
actually understood the inherent criminality which he exercised on
behalf of Hitler, who remained his hero from the time he fled Lyons in
August 1944 to his very last breath in prison.
In 1945, Barbie was included on the Allied list of wanted war
criminals, yet, amid the turbulence of post-war Germany, he remained
diligently elusive. Professionally adept, he adopted a number of
aliases and was constantly moving in a twilight world of
black-marketeering and forlorn resistance. The murderer's salvation
was the onset of the Cold War.
In 1947, desperate for information about the Communists, senior US
officers of the Counter Intelligence Corps (fore-runners of the CIA)
deliberately turned a blind eye to Barbie as a wanted murderer and
employed him as an undercover agent using a succession of aliases.
''He was a damn good intelligence officer,'' recalled one American,
''who didn't need to use any rough stuff.'' But in 1949, a Paris court
investigating Barbie's murder of Jean Moulin heard that Barbie was
working in the American zone and demanded his extradition to appear as
a witness.
Over the ensuing months, an ever-increasing number of lies were told
by an ever-increasing number of senior US officers who steadfastly
denied knowledge of Barbie's existence. Finally, under intense French
pressure, someone at the highest level of the American command (but
still unknown, because the key documents were destroyed) decided that,
despite his crimes, Barbie was ''too hot''. However, he would not be
handed over to the French. Instead he would be helped to escape. In
March 1951, the US Army financed Barbie and his family to travel down
the ''Rat Line'', a well-oiled escape route managed by a Croatian
clergyman in association with the Vatican, engaged in smuggling Nazis
out of Europe.
In April 1951 Barbie, using the American-supplied alias Klaus Altmann,
sailed into Buenos Aires with about $ 5,000 and set off for Bolivia.
Gradually Barbie emerged from poverty as an established farm manager
and, after 1964, as a key ''security adviser'' to the military
government. But, as his importance to a succession of Bolivian
military rulers as an arms dealer and murdering henchman increased,
Barbie fatally let his caution slip. In the early Fifties, a Lyons
court had twice condemned Barbie in absentia to death for murder. But,
relying upon political realities and his alias, Barbie believed
himself safe from retribution. By the mid-Sixties, his unhesitant
visibility in Bolivia and Peru as a crooked wheeler-dealer attracted
the attention of his victims, the American and French governments and,
especially, the Klarsfelds.
Unknown to Barbie, Serge Klarsfeld, a French lawyer, and his
German-born Protestant wife Beate had assumed the mantle of
Nazi-hunters dedicated to bring to justice those who had murdered
France's Jews. Barbie was targeted in particular for having ordered
the arrest of 41 Jewish children and their deportation to Auschwitz.
To overcome the opposition of reluctant and hostile governments, the
Klarsfelds mounted a succession of embarrassing and courageous public
demonstrations in Germany, France and Bolivia. In 1972, President
Pompidou was persuaded by the Klarsfelds to request Barbie's
extradition. The protesting ''Herr Altmann'' was arrested and,
although identified on French television by his victims, denied any
knowledge of Barbie. Eventually he was released and resumed with a
vengeance his services as a security officer to Bolivia's dictators.
Strutting through La Paz, Barbie was especially active in the prisons
and police headquarters when the country became a major cocaine
supplier and a haven to a motley clique of active European Fascist
terrorists.
That ended abruptly in 1982. Washington ousted the cocaine barons and
the new liberal government had strong personal connections with
President Mitterrand's administration. Encouraged by Klarsfeld, the
Elysee struck a secret deal to arrest and extradite Barbie.
His night-time arrival in Lyons and incarceration in Mont Luc, where
so many of his victims had suffered, sparked an emotional tornado
throughout France, not least by fuelling speculation that he would
expose his French collaborators, but also by the promise that he would
stage from the dock a resounding challenge to governments that he
should not stand alone in the dock.
But four years later, when the much-hyped ''historic trial'' finally
commenced, the anti-climax was depressing and overwhelming. Instead of
his defiant defence, the shrunken defendant withdrew from the
courtroom and deprived the world of either a sense of justice or an
explanation.
After conviction, he was soon forgotten but nevertheless humanity was
well served to prove that, regardless of time or obstacles, justice
will still touch those whose crimes are too monstrous to ignore.
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Photo:
http://images.encarta.msn.com/xrefmedia/sharemed/targets/images/pho/t037/T037562A.jpg---
Klaus Barbie, 77, Lyons Gestapo Chief
FROM: The New York Times (September 26th 1991) ~
By Wolfgang Saxon
Klaus Barbie died a prisoner yesterday in Lyons, the French city where
he led a reign of terror as the local Gestapo chief during World War
II. The last surviving German war criminal of rank to be tried by a
tribunal of justice, he was 77 years old and had been in poor health
for years.
Recent reports from France said that Mr. Barbie had been transferred
three weeks ago to a hospital from the prison where he was serving a
life term on his 1987 conviction. He was said to be suffering from
cancer of the blood, spine and prostate.
Mr. Barbie commanded the Gestapo in Lyons, which was the base for the
Resistance and a center of French Jewry. With an SS rank equivalent to
an army captain's, he ran a campaign of torture and death against
Resistance leaders and caused uncounted other people, most of them
Jews, to be sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
Twice condemned to death in absentia, Mr. Barbie prospered in Latin
America under an alias after the war. In fact, he had been all but
forgotten and written off by French and West German prosecutors when a
relentless Nazi hunter, Beate Klarsfeld, tracked him down in Bolivia
in 1972.
11 Years of Legal Wrangling
The discovery generated headlines about "the butcher of Lyons." But it
took 11 years of legal wrangling and a change of Government in Bolivia
to bring about his extradition to France. Through it all, the dreaded
Gestapo chief of wartime Lyon remained defiant, refusing to leave his
cell and face the host of witnesses who told the court of his deeds
during his eight- week trial in 1987.
Mr. Barbie remarked after his extradition that he had nothing to
regret and that he remained proud of his service to Hitler's Third
Reich.
Locked up in Montluc Prison, where the Gestapo had tortured its prey
40 years earlier, he promptly proved an embarrassment not only to the
French, but to official Washington. It came to light that United
States Army counterintelligence had used him as a paid informer after
the war, shielding him from his French pursuers and then helping him
escape to South America.
For the French, Mr. Barbie caused enduring agony. Back in their midst,
behind bars at last, his presence weighed heavily on the national
conscience. To contemplate Mr. Barbie was to face a chapter of history
the French longed to forget: the Vichy France of Marshal Henri
Philippe Petain.
Klaus Barbie was born on Oct. 25, 1913, in Bad Godesberg, near Bonn,
the son of an office worker-turned-teacher in modest circumstances. By
the time he turned 20, he had joined the Hitler Youth and become an
aide to a local Nazi chief.
Trained for Security Service
Mr. Barbie pledged himself to Hitler's Third Reich. He joined the SS
in 1935 and was trained for its security service, the shadowy S.D.,
whose members considered themselves enforcers of Nazi doctrine and
defenders of the party.
By the outbreak of the war, his career in the security services was
assured. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in an SS unit that
followed the German Army into the Netherlands and France. Joined by
Dutch collaborators, the SS savagely stamped out signs of Jewish
resistance and corralled the Jews into a ghetto in Amsterdam.
With the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Mr. Barbie was attached
to the Gestapo. His unit beat information out of detainees, murdered
suspects and their families and torched their homes. He rose in rank
and was assigned to Lyons to head a Gestapo section whose domain
extended far beyond the city proper.
He was ultimately held responsible for the arrest and torture or death
of 11,000 or 25,000 people, perhaps more. But the feat that set him
apart in French eyes was his merciless hunt for Jean Moulin, a hero of
the Resistance who led partisans of Gen. Charles de Gaulle and his
Free French.
Mr. Barbie's Gestapo officers caught Moulin and the entire leadership
of his group near Lyons in June 1943. One, Rene Hardy, mysteriously
escaped. Mr. Barbie was accused of killing Moulin, a charge he
consistently denied.
His lawyer, Jacques Verges, caused a national outcry in France when he
gave Mr. Barbie's version of events, warning that he could document it
in court. The contention was that Mr. Barbie, working with the local
French authorities, operated a group of double agents within the
Resistance; that they put Vichy police on the trail of Mr. Hardy; that
Mr. Hardy was placed in Mr. Barbie's custody; that Mr. Barbie "turned"
Mr. Hardy, who then told him of the impending meeting; and that Mr.
Moulin killed himself, considering it the only honorable way out after
rival leaders in the Resistance betrayed him.
Mr. Hardy was tried twice for treason and acquitted after the war. His
prosecutors questioned Mr. Barbie in 1948 while he was in American
custody, but only in connection with the allegations of betrayal
involving Mr. Hardy.
The C.I.C., the Army's counterintelligence corps, had decided in 1947
to sign Mr. Barbie on as a paid informer, seemingly unaware of the
enormity of the deeds laid to him. For $1,700 a month, he gave weekly
reports on other missing Nazis, the Communists in East Germany and
Eastern Europe as well as the French Communists.
Communists and Usefulness
The French formally asked for his whereabouts in 1950. According to a
218-page report from the United States Justice Department, which
investigated the matter in 1983, C.I.C. officers said that Mr. Barbie
no longer worked for them, a lie that was unwittingly passed on to the
French.
In reality, the C.I.C. agents reportedly decided to hide their
anti-Communist operative from France because they feared that French
intelligence was infiltrated by Communists and that Mr. Barbie, if
handed over, might damage American intelligence by telling what he
knew. But by then Mr. Barbie had served his purpose, and the Army
decided to get rid of him via the "Rat Line" to South America.
For a fee, a Croatian priest in Rome produced a false passport from
the International Red Cross and a Bolivian visa for Mr. Barbie, his
wife, and their two children. Mr. Barbie became Klaus Altmann and
sailed from Genoa in March 1951.
Mr. Barbie cultivated close relations with the generals then running
Bolivia, setting up a shipping concern and a lumber business.
Mr. Barbie appears to have visited the United States and Europe
without drawing attention. An unrepentant Nazi, he lost his standing
in the German community around 1972 when he was ejected from the
German Club of La Paz for giving a Nazi salute and yelling "Heil
Hitler" at the West German Ambassador.
The French and West German authorities had ceased to look for Mr.
Barbie when, in 1971, a painstaking search by Mrs. Klarsfeld and her
husband, Serge, turned up evidence that tied him to the deportation of
44 Jewish children from the village of Izieu. Witnesses and photos
identified Mr. Altmann as Mr. Barbie, then living in Peru.
The Munich prosecutor reopened the case but Mr. "Altmann" fled to
Bolivia, where the military regime turned down repeated demands for
his extradition. Throughout, Mr. Barbie admitted to his Gestapo role,
insisting that he acted as an officer in wartime.
A civilian government took office in La Paz in late 1982. In January
1983, the courts jailed Mr. Barbie on a 13-year-old fraud charge, for
which he paid a $10,000 fine, and ordered him expelled as an
undesirable alien.
He arrived in France on a French military plane on Feb. 5, 1983, and
French prosecutors and magistrates finally readied the case for trial.
A 1964 Law on Crimes Against Humanity, designed to set aside the
statute of limitations for war crimes and genocide, was invoked but
changing sets of charges caused repeated delays of the trial date.
In early 1985, the prosecutors dropped the matter of the death of Jean
Moulin and his associates and narrowed the case to specific crimes
against French Jews, including the fate of the children of Izieu.
Another delay resulted in March 1986 when a higher court quashed that
compromise arrangement. Mr. Barbie, who had been taken to the hospital
several times, underwent prostate surgery in February 1987.
His weak condition notwithstanding, the prosecution opened the trial
in May. Judgment was rendered on July 4 after six hours of
deliberation by a panel of three judges and nine jurors.
He stood motionless and without expression as the presiding judge
listed his crimes against French Jews and fighters of the Resistance.
With France having abolished the death penalty in 1981, He was
sentenced to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole held out
for 2002, when he would have been 88 years old.
Mr. Barbie's wife, Regine, died of cancer in Bolivia just before his
deportation. Their son, Klaus-Georg Altmann, was killed in a
hang-gliding accident near Cochabamba in 1981, leaving a wife,
Francoise, and three children. His daughter, Ute Messner, is a
resident of Austria.
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Photo:
http://www.daserste.de/kultur/beitraege/001203_2/image1.jpg