Klaus Barbie
Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon (October 25, 1913 – September 25, 1991) was a Nazi war criminal and drug trafficker. He held the rank of Hauptsturmführer in the German SS and the Gestapo (secret police) during the Nazi regime. He took part in intelligence activities after the war, then went hiding in Bolivia, in 1955. There, he used the alias Klaus Altmann. In 1980, he took part in the 'Cocaine Coup' of Luis García Meza Tejada. Arrested in 1983, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in July 1987, and died in 1991.
Leben
Barbie was born in Bad Godesberg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany and was educated at the Friedrich-Wilhelm Institute. He joined the SS in 1934, immediately after his graduation from the university, and became a member of the NSDAP in 1937.
In 1941, Barbie was posted to the Bureau of Jewish Affairs and sent to Amsterdam and later, in May 1942, to Lyon — there, he earned the sobriquet "Butcher of Lyon" as head of the local Gestapo. He committed a number of war crimes, including the capture and deportation of forty-four Jewish children hidden in the village of Izieu and the torture murder of Jean Moulin, the highest ranking member of the French Resistance ever captured. All told, the deportation of 7,500 people, 4,342 murders, and the arrest and torture of 14,311 resistance fighters were in some way attributed to his actions or commands.
From 1945 to 1955, he was protected and employed by British and then American intelligence agents, who used his police skills to suppress the leftist resistance to the American and British occupations in Germany.
In 1955, after the Americans and British were no longer in need of his services, Barbie, together with his wife and children, moved with American help to Bolivia. He lived in La Paz, Bolivia under the alias Klaus Altmann, where he became a drug lord and narcotrafficker. With Italian terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie, he took part in the 'Cocaine Coup' of Luis García Meza Tejada, when a notoriously corrupt military regime forced its way to power in Bolivia in 1980.
He was identified in Bolivia as soon as 1971 by the Klarsfelds (Nazi hunters), but it was only on January 18, 1983, that a new moderate government arrested and deported him to France.
His trial started on May 11, 1987, in Lyon – a jury trial before the Rhône Court of Assizes. In a rare move, the authorization was granted to film the trial, for its high historical value. The lead defense attorney was Jacques Vergès, who tried to plead that Barbie's actions were no worse than the ordinary actions of colonialists worldwide, including the French, most of which are never prosecuted, and thus that his trial was selective prosecution which made an arbitrary difference between the victims. The head prosecutor was Pierre Truche. On July 4 of that year, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity, and later died in prison of cancer at the age of 77.
Trivia
He is humorously referred to in the 2001 comedy film Rat Race, in which a young girl sees a signpost reading "The Barbie Museum" along the highway, expecting it to showcase the popular Mattel doll, Barbie. Upon entering, the (seemingly) Jewish family finds it a memorial to Klaus Barbie, and full of skinheads and neo-Nazis.
In the novel The Runner, he is working for the United States army to track down Erich Seyss, a Nazi war criminal. According to Lucie Aubrac's memoirs, Barbie would engage in "amorous activities" with his secretary while he waited for his victims to regain consciousness. The character Sturmbannführer Ludwig Kessler in the BBC TV series Secret Army was loosely based on Barbie.
References
A documentary film on Barbie's life during and after World War II is available under the title Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie. The film was directed by Marcel Ophuls and amounts to four and a half hours of investigative journalism; it won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature in 1989.