1944.
The Gestapo HQ in the French city of Lyon.
A bloodied young woman, her teeth broken, her face black and
blue, is strapped to chair.
Her interrogator enters the room, as usual; he’s holding his
beloved cat in his arms.
It’s time for the next round of torture.
“You will talk to me today, Simone,” he says smiling.
He puts his cat on a chair and walks over to a toolbox.
Simone will live with this day for the rest of her life.
The man, who sounds something like a James Bond villain, is
Klaus Barbie, aka, “The Butcher of Lyon”.
His crimes would go on for decades.
The atrocities he committed with the Nazis were just the
beginning of a long career as an interrogator and torturer.
And what’s more disturbing is the fact he managed to stay
out of the clutches of the law because he had some help from the apparent good
guys, perhaps the best help a man could have.
His benefactor was none other than the government of the USA.
You heard that right.
And if that surprises you, this same man was also once
friends with the king of cocaine, Pablo Escobar, not to mention some of the
most rotten dictators the world has ever seen.
Yes, this is a complicated tale and one that sounds like
fiction, but we’ve done our research.
It’s true, and it’s such a shocking expose, that there were
a fair few people that hoped the story would never come out.
The woman in that intro was named Simone Lagrange.
She was just 13 when she endured eight days of torture at
the hands of Barbie, something she would later testify to.
Suspected to be a member of the French Resistance, Barbie
beat her within an inch of her life hoping she might give up her friends.
Each day he’d enter the room where she was tied up, often
carrying his pet cat.
She later said he seemed to take great pleasure in the
torture, saying his smile was like knife blade.
He was a sadist, a maniac, armed with a toolbox of weapons.
Lagrange said he busted her up good, one time breaking a
vertebra in her back with a spiked ball on the end of a stick.
She wasn’t the only one to suffer at the hands of this mad
man.
A French Jew named Lies Lievre later testified that she was
interrogated and tortured forays on end before being sent to Ravens bruck concentration
camp.
″Barbie took pleasure, a pleasure that was as tounding, in
torturing, ″ she said, adding that he hung her up by her wrists for 10 days
while doing the unimaginable to her.
To make matters worse, both her husband and son were gassed
by the Nazis at the Auschwitz death camp.
Enact Leger met him, too, in France.
She later testified, “He had the eyes of monster.
He was savage.
My God, he was savage! It was unimaginable.
He broke my teeth; he pulled my hair back.
He put a bottle in my mouth and pushed it until the lips
split from the pressure. “She said she could never forget those eyes, which
were imprinted in her mind forever.
She actually later lost the use of her sights she starred in
a Nazi death camp.
How does a man end up this way? We hear the word “monster”
but we are also familiar with the term “the banality of evil. “The Butcher of
Lyon had once been a kid.
He, like everyone else, had played in the park, ridden his
bicycle with his friends, celebrated Christmas with his family, but somewhere
along the line, he became as closet evil as one can imagine.
What happened? He was born in Goldenberg, Germany, on
October25, 1913.
Some of his first memories were of his father, also named Nicolaus;
coming back from fighting in World War I. Nicolaus had been through hell of his
own, first being severely wounded in the neck on the battlefield and later being
captured by the French army.
Nicolaus barely survived the war, but his injuries were not
just physical.
Germany had been humiliated.
He had been humiliated.
He came back with that look in his eyes, what you might call
the thousand-yard stare.
He took straight to the bottle, beating his wife, Klaus, and
his brother, screaming anthem about how much he detested the French.
Suffice to say, this had a profound impact on Klaus junior.
Nonetheless, Klaus did ok in school.
He excelled in languages and had dreams of studying
theology, perhaps one day working as an academic himself, but then in 1993,
when he was 20, everything fell apart.
First, his brother Kurt died after struggling with a chronic
illness.
A few months later, his alcoholic father passed away.
This was in 1933, the same year that Adolf Hitler became the
chancellor of Germany.
Klaus’s family were now destitute, Justas many Germans were,
and it was this man, Adolf Hitler, that promised to bring prosperity back to
the country.
So, with hope in his heart, and a fair bit of anger, at age
22 Barbie started working for the “Reichsar be its idents”, a kindof Nazi labor
service that promised to saveyoung men like Klaus from the ravages of what had
become widespread poverty.
But as things went, to be employed there meant embracing
hateful Nazi ideology.
Barbie welcomed that with open arms.
Soon he joined the SS, member 272,284, and that led to him
signing up for the Nazi intelligence service the “Sicherhe tidiest”, a sister
organization of the sinister Gestapo.
In 1937, he joined the Nazi Party, member4, 583,085.
That’s how the career began for a man who would devote his
entire life to committing crimes against humanity.
Following the German occupation of the Netherlands, Barbie
worked under Adolf Eichmann.
Eichmann would become one of the major players in the
Genocide committed by the Nazis, what we now call the Holocaust.
He was very fond of Barbie, who quite early in his career
made a name for himself locating Dutch Jews and Freemasons.
Little is said about how the Nazis persecuted the Masons,
which they said were “hostile to the state. “Lodges were closed down, members
were hounded, valuables were stolen or burned, and even if they weren’t Jewish,
they were often accused of conspiring with the Jews.
Thousands of them were sent to the camps.
As was Hermann’s van Torgersen, the Grand Master of the
Grand Orient of the Netherlands, captured by none other than Klaus Barbie.
He went to the Sachsenhausen camp, where after two weeks of
enduring freezing temperatures, he died.
He was just one victim who’d been captured by the
hardworking Barbie.
For his efforts, commended by many in the Nazi party, Barbie
was then sent to Dijon, France, where again he was tasked with tracking down
anyone the Nazis believed was their enemy.
Barbie soon ended up in Lyon, not far from Dijon, and there
he became the head of the Gestapo, whose headquarters were at the famedl'hôtel
Terminus, quite an apt name for palace where people were tortured and killed.
It was there that Barbie’s work was mainly focused on
finding members of the French Resistance.
This was a collection of underground organizations that
close to the end of the war had started becoming quite effective in upsetting the
Nazis and the collaborating Vichy government.
These brave people used guerrilla warfare against the Nazis
and provided the Allies with extremely valuable intelligence.
They were diverse in terms of religion, politics, wealth,
ethnicity, and age.
Their unifying cause was to fight against the Nazis, for
which they were hunted like animals.
Many French people at the start of the occupation had just
got on with things; many were evenantisemitic and welcomed the Nazis, embracing
the constant propaganda in the media that included daily anti-British,
antisemitic, and anti-communist sentiment.
Every day propagandistic articles would talk about this
wonderful collaboration of two countries, stating that one day they would
become the New Order in Europe.
There was a climate of fear, to say the least, and if you
were French and anti-Nazi you lived daily knowing that there was a good chance
you might end up in a chair with a hood over your head, tortured, and then
killed.
Just to give you an example of how imperiled these times
were the anti-Nazi French, in1944, the Germans marched into the village of Orator-sur-Glance
in Nazi-occupied France.
It had been rumored that a Waffen-SS officer had earlier
been taken hostage in the village and killed.
When the army arrived, they demanded everyone go to the
village square.
This even included six people who’d been passing through the
village on bicycles.
The adult males were then sent to a barn and shot with
machine guns.
Those still breathing died in the flames after the Nazis set
fire to the place.
Only one man survived to tell the story.
The women and children had been sent to church at this
point, which was then fired upon by Nazi machine guns.
247 innocent women and 205 children died, with only one
woman escaping.
Of the remaining people, some who tried Torun from the
village, they were also gunned down; man, woman, and child.
642 people were killed in total.
This was what French resistance fighters were up against.
One of them named Gisele Guillemot later explained: “Some
days I would be seized by irrepressible anxiety.
The fleeting vision of a man in a trench coat through the
reflection of a shop window would instantly plunge me into a state of total
panic.
A suspicious noise on the staircase and I would think I was
about to be arrested, taken to the Gestapo and tortured. “The torturer was
often Mr. Barbie.
In that hotel, men, women, and children were sent to him for
interrogation.
These bloody interviews were never over quickly, with the
resistance – if they even were resistance – always reluctant to give up names.
It was the same with the people accused of being communists
or Jews.
But what’s perplexing is the delight that Barbie seemed to
take in torturing people, perhaps partly a consequence of his own violent
father hating the French.
For anyone being tortured by him, it was the wickedness of
his smile that made them consider what you could call the total depravity of
man.
As that woman in the intro said later, “Hews caressing the cat!
And me, a kid 13 years old, I could not imagine that he could be evil because
he loved animals.
I was tortured by him for eight days. “She added, “He always
came with his thin smile like a knife blade…Then he smashed my face. “Jean
Moulin, one of the heroes of the French Resistance and a friend to the future President
of France, Charles de Gaulle, was strung upend beaten with sticks until his
arms, legs, and ribs were broken.
His knuckles were smashed in a doorframe and hot needles
were placed under his fingernails.
Another prisoner, Christian Pineal, said Moulin never talked
through all of his.
Pineal explained what Moulin looked like after the torture
sessions, saying, he was “unconscious, his eyes dug in as though they had been punched
through his head.
An ugly blue wound scarred his temple.
A mute rattle came out of his swollen lips. “His face was
bloated to the extreme, which is why Barbie sadistically ordered Pine auto
shave Moulin.
Pineal later said: “I couldn’t understand why they wanted to
put on this macabre performance for a dying man…When I’d finished I just sat
next to him.
Suddenly Moulin asked for some water.
I gave him a drink, and then he spoke in a croaking voice a
few words in English which I didn’t understand.
Soon after he lost consciousness, I just sat with him, a
sort of ‘death watch’ until was taken back to my cell. Moulin died soon after,
having not told Barbie anything.
If you find it hard to understand why Barbie would ask a
prisoner to shave a dying man, Pineau also explained this: “Looking back, I
sometimes even think that he wasn’t that interested in getting any information.
Fundamentally he was a sadist who enjoyed causing pain and
proving his power.
He had an extraordinary fund of violence.
Cashes, clubs, and whips lay on his desk, and he used them a
lot. “Lies Lievre, whom we also mentioned earlier, was hung up and beaten with
a bar.
One day, Barbie ordered her to strip, and then forced her
into a bathtub full of ice.
He pushed her head in the water for as long as she could
take it, and he smiled as he did it.
He left her there, freezing, with her legs tied over a pipe
at the end of the tub.
She held out and never spoke, with Barbie becoming more
frustrated every day.
He seemed to be after a certain man, asking her time and
again, “Who is Didier, whereas Didier!?”After he’d literally broken her, he seemed
to almost give up.
She testified later, “He told me, 'I admire you, but in the
end, everybody talks…What you have done is magnificent, my dear.
Nobody has held out as long as you.
It’s nearly over now.
I’m very upset.
But let’s finish.
Go on, a little effort.
Who is Didier? “She didn’t say anything, not even after
she’d seen him beat others to death.
The last thing she ever heard Barbie say was, “Liquidate her.
I don't want to see her anymore. “On February 9, 1943,
Barbie was behind something that would later become known as the Rue Sainte-Catherine
Roundup.
This was a day when the Gestapo knew there would be Jewish
people on Sainte-Catherine Street in Lyon.
Jewish refugees were going there that day to receive
assistance from some kindhearted local folks.
86 Jewish men and women were rounded up, with83 of them
being sent to death camps.
At one point, Barbie had scores of people in one room, each
of them not knowing how much time they had left on this earth.
Some people convinced Barbie that they weren’t in fact
Jewish.
They were subsequently let go, but many years later they
would speak at a trial and explain how Barbie was the main man in the roundup.
The others were put in two trucks and sent to a temporary
prison, and from the 83 that ended up in the extermination camps, only three
survived to tell the story.
Adolf Hitler, saw this as a great achievement.
For the roundup and for the capture of Moulin, Hitler
awarded Barbie the “First Class Iron. “It’s hard to say how many people were killed
by Barbie or died because of him, but the number has been put at 4,000, 44 of
whom were Jewish kids taken from an orphanage in the town of Izzie.
A witness, who saw the Nazi truck arrive and Barbie and his
men get out, escaped by jumping through a window.
She later recalled, “I heard the cries of the children that
were being kidnapped and heard the shouts of the Nazis who were carrying them
away...They threw the children into the trucks like they were sacks of potatoes.
Most of them were crying, terrorized. “They were put on
trains heading to the death camp, and not one of them returned.
A survivor later talked about seeing the kids arrive at the
camp.
At that time, he wasn’t aware of what was happening, and he
asked another prisoner what the Nazis would do with a bunch of kids.
After all, they were too young to work.
This was the reply he got: “You see that chimney, the one
smoke never stops coming out of…you smell that odor of burned flesh…”The Izzie
orphanage would one day come back to haunt Barbie, but much would happen in the
meantime.
All these people would likely have survived the war, had
Barbie not found them.
Witnesses later said when he did discover them he’d
sometimes say to them, “Have you heard of the Gestapo kitchens? “He also liked
to say, “Where you are goings worse than death. “This was a man that took great
pleasure from seeing people’s fear.
As you know, Germany lost the war.
The Russians walked into Berlin and somewhere in a bunker,
Adolf Hitler was having his secretary take down his final words.
On April 30, 1945, Hitler was a dead man, as were many
high-ranking Nazis.
Some, though, went into hiding.
The war in Europe was over, and Japan soon surrendered after
two devastating atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In the region of 75 million people had died because of this
war.
People hoped that now the nightmare was over…but new
nightmare was just beginning.
As people were still in recovery from the war, officials in
the west were talking about the new threat of Communism.
At the time, higher-ranking Nazis were busy trying to avoid
detection, but Klaus Barbie’s name was already in the hands of the French
authorities.
Barbie had seen to it that many people who had firsthand
knowledge of his crimes were killed, but there were still many people whose
testimony would result in him hanging by arose.
He fled from France to Germany, whereupon it seems at first,
he was recruited by British Intelligence.
That was after taking a beating, and for once, him being on
the other end of an interrogation.
What he told the Brits was useful information, such as which
SS officers might be of use to them.
Remember, Barbie knew who was who in Germany and France, including
who the secret Communists were.
This made him a prized asset.
It seems his activities with the British were short-lived,
and soon he was working with the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC)
after being captured during Operation Selection Board.
He may have been working for both the American sand the
British, it’s hard to say, but his relationship with the US would span decades.
These different agencies already knew somethings about his
war activities, but it was decided it was better for them if Barbie worked as a
spy than give him to the French.
US officials told him if he worked for them, he would live
“very comfortably” and get “hundreds of dollars” for his anti-communist work.
He was secretly housed by the CIC and asked to spy on people
the Americans thought might be working for the Soviet agencies, the Kuban GPU.
On April 1, 1950, his name appeared on a Search and Arrest
List that had been given to the German Police.
Barbie was informed about this by a friend who was a German
cop, so he went to the American sand aired his concern.
He said something along the lines of, “Hey, I’m working for
you now.
Make my name disappear. A file in the US National Archives
says, “Suspending his activities, they nevertheless kept him on the payroll in
order to keep him under control and undercover while a frantic debate went on
as to his disposition. “But soon the French Ministry of Interior was on the
case and telling the Americans they wanted this man for war crimes.
It seems at this point, the Americans were in a bit of a
conundrum, according to that National Archives file.
Barbie already knew too much about German spies who American
Intelligence had planted in communist organizations all over Europe.
If they were to hand Barbie over, he might perhaps talk a
bit too much and ruin some precious operations.
It was also a bit of an embarrassment to thus that they’d
hired a war criminal.
The file explains what happened next, stating, “In 1951 the
CIC sponsored his escape to South America via a ‘ratline’ operating through Italy.
“Ratlines were the escape routes that many Nazi war criminals used after the
war, including big names such as Josef Mengele, aka, the Angel of Death.
The ratline for Barbie was partly created by US intelligence.
They also got some help, from another tyrant on their
payroll.
In the meantime, the French were not happy at all, telling
the Americans to hand Barbie over to be executed.
They had sentenced Barbie for his crimes inessential,
meaning he was absent at the sentencing.
Things got political, with the French telling John J.
McCloy, the U.S.
High Commissioner for Germany, this was not what countries
should do.
McCloy refused to budge.
If you’re wondering how such a thing could happen, it was
basically because in the grand scheme of things one man hanging from a rope in
France didn’t mean much to the US, but having a valuable spy talking about American
intelligence activities was extremely important.
Years later, the US admitted what its intelligence services
had done following an investigation by the Justice Department.
In a statement, the Do wrote: “They were acting within the
scope of their official duties.
Their actions were taken not for personal gain, or to shield
them personally from liability or discipline, but to protect what they believed
to be the interests of the United States Armand the United States government.
“Keeping Barbie away from the clutches of the French was for the so-called
greater good…You might disagree with this when you see what this monster went
on to do, which you’ll have to admit was pretty extreme even compared to his
Nazi career.
By the way, the Justice Department admitted that while US
Intelligence had acted in the interest of the country, what had happened was
still wrong.
The Do also said, “It is a principle of democracy and the
rule of law that justice delayed is justice denied.
If we are to be faithful to that principle- and we should be
faithful to it - we cannot pretend that it applies only within our borders and
nowhere else. “The department said the US expressed regret and it should be a
priority now to help France get Barbie.
As the saying goes, too little, too late.
So, Barbie needed to get out of Germany.
To do that, US intelligence contacted a Croatian priest
named Dr. Krunoslav Draganovic.
Draganovic helped hundreds of Nazi war criminals escape to
South America via ratlines.
He was also working for the US Counterintelligence Corps.
He was a murderous fascist and a member of the Upstage, a
Croatian fascist organization that was responsible for the deaths of hundreds
of thousands of people, mostly Orthodox Serbs but also Jews.
The US knew this, but with Draganovic being so rabidly
anti-communist, he was an asset.
He was employed by the CIC and later the Cato help America
fight communism.
After many years of working together, theca eventually cut
ties with Draganovic, stating that he was “not amenable to control, too
knowledgeable of unit personnel and activity, demanded outrageous monetary
tribute and U.S.
Support of Croat organizations. “If you were to ask a US
intelligence agent about his job, he’d say, “It’s complicated. “Things might
seem less complicated when we tell you that as part of something called
Operation Bloodstone, the CIA covertly hired quite a lot of high-ranking Nazi intelligence
agents to work for the agency all over the world.
They’d committed war crimes, of course, but when on the US
payroll, they needed protecting.
There is even a CIC memo that talked about the cost of
sending Nazis and other war criminals through the ratlines.
It goes: “The 430th CIC Detachment has been operating what
they term a 'Ratline' evacuation system to Central and South America without serious
repercussions during the past three years.
At the cost of approximately $1,000 each adult, 430th CIC is
transferring evacuees to Italy where they are provided with legal documentation
obtained through devious means there. “So, off Barbie went for a grand, destination
Bolivia, where he settled in a lovely little city called Cochabamba at the foot
of the Andes Mountains.
Known as the “City of Eternal Spring “this was a wonderful
place to lay your hat compared to war-torn Germany.
Barbie had landed on his feet, that are for sure, and my God
would he play a big role in shaping his new home.
His history of violence and spying made human attractive
prospect for ungodly future employers.
What we mean to say is, Barbie became a friend to dictators
and drug lords.
It should be known, that during this paranoid period in
history, the US was always willing to give a helping hand to any human rights-violating
dictator, if, of course, that helped stop the rising tide of communism.
It seems that Barbie rubbed shoulders with the
ultra-right-wing of Bolivia, winning favourswith them by occasionally teaching
such men how to properly spy, interrogate and torture.
So, in a way, Barbie was once again working on the side of
the US.
He did just that under the extremely oppressive government
of René Barrientos, who was in power twice from 1964 to 1966 and from 1966to
1969, after first becoming leader by way of a military-backed coup.
Barrientos was no fan of leftist ideology, and he was more
than willing to violently oppose anyone who went against him, such as the
Argentine Marxist revolutionary named him Guevara, a man whom Barbie would later
brag he helped the Americans hunt.
Guevara had been trying to overthrow the military
dictatorship in Bolivia, which made him threat not only to the tyrants in power
but also a threat to the US.
On October 8, 1969, the Bolivian forces, backed by the
Americans, fought with Guevara and his guerilla army.
Guevara was dead a day later, his hands removed, and his
body buried in an unmarked grave.
The Americans were happy, but we can only speculate if the
CIA knew Barbie had had anything to do with it – if Barbie’s bragging had been
based on reality.
The documentary film “My Enemy's Enemy “suggests the capture
had actually been orchestrated by Barbie and the CIA working in collaboration.
The film asserts that indeed, the CIA had once again asked
for Barbie’s help, but that’s never been admitted in an official capacity.
The filmmaker said he’d done his investigating, telling a
British newspaper, “The Chee claim came from several sources.
I think it makes total sense when you understand what Barbie
was doing and who he was working for in the Bolivian military, and how they
admired him as a Nazi officer and what head done in the war. “So, Barbie was
right at home in Bolivia, hunting down leftists just as he’d hunted down Jews
and resistance fighters during the war, at times torturing leftists and
sometimes teaching the general's private paramilitaries how to interrogate
Nazi-style.
We should also say that Barbie had another gig working as a
spy for West Germany.
They paid him 500 Deutsche marks a month to do
anti-communist reconnaissance in Bolivia.
This too didn’t look good when it finally came out.
West Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service described
Barbie, agent 43118, as “intelligent, very receptive and adaptable, discreet and
reliable. “In 1966, they parted ways with Barbie, “to avoid later complications
and difficulties. “That happened anyway…It seems Barbie never gave up his love for
the Nazi party.
In 1966, he was drinking in the German Cubin La Paz and was
kicked out for screaming at the top of his voice, “Heli Hitler”.
Another person in the club at the time waste West German
ambassador, who let’s say felt a bit embarrassed.
People close to Barbie later backed this up; saying he never
fully gave up being a Nazianz always expressed that given the chance he’d like
to help Mengele and Eichmann.
Mengele died in a swimming pool in 1979 INS Paulo, but Nazi
hunters did eventually get Eichmann, who was hanged in Israel in1962.
As you can see, the butcher of Lyon was Avery useful asset
to many different organizations, but he was really close to the next Bolivian
dictator, Hugo Banker.
This was a time of massive bloodshed in Bolivia and all over
South America, thanks in part to the US secretly helping tyrants to gain power
through Operation Condor.
It was a time of utter terror featuring dictators who were
only too happy to remove the eyes of anyone who started talking about improving
conditions for peasant farmers and the working classes.
It was through Operation Condor that Banzerviolently raised
to power after deposing the left-wing leader Juan José Torres.
Torres wasn’t a communist, but he did talk about unions,
inequality, that kind of thing.
That might have sounded a bit too commie for the US’s liking.
Torres had to go, and he went with some brutality, later
being assassinated while in exile – likely part of Operation Condor.
As you can now understand, Barbie was more than made up
about Banker coming to power.
Together they formed a lasting relationship, oppressing and
sometimes “disappearing “activists, journalists, anyone who talked about lefty
stuff.
Documents also show that to help with these right-wing
coups, Barbie arranged to bring weapons, including tanks, from Europe to
Bolivia.
He was useful indeed, but makes no mistake; it wasn’t a real
friendship with Banker.
It was just the dirty, rotten business of politics.
One document states that Banker considered selling Barbie to
France, which he thought would gain him “political leverage, money, and weapons.
“Moving on, Barbie then teamed up with a neo-Nazi paramilitary guy named Álvaro
de Castro.
When Castro was arrested some years later, he admitted that
he and Barbie had done abet of drug trafficking and had also trafficked weapons
from Europe to Bolivian drug lords.
At this point in the 70s, the USA’s hunger for cocaine had
created one of the biggest businesses on the planet.
If only Barbie had been given up earlier…Bathe wasn’t done
yet.
Being as connected as he was and so well-versed in extreme
violence, Barbie did some business with Bolivia’s biggest drug lord at the time,
Roberto Suárez Gómez, aka, “The King of Cocaine. “This guy made hundreds of
millions of dollars from getting peasant farmers to grow cocaine for pennies,
after which, he sold it to the Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel, who then
shipped it to the US.
Gómez was considered to be the biggest coke producer on the
planet, so big he later financed yet another coup in Bolivia, this one becoming
known as the “Cocaine Coup. Barbie worked for such drug lords doing security,
and you have to admit, he certainly had tithe resume.
The Escobar’s and Gomez have of this world been continually
hunting for their enemies, Beit other traffickers, grasses, or spies.
They often tortured suspects, so you could say a former Nazi
chief interrogator was pretty good man to have on your team.
Moving on again, Barbie became close to Escobar when he
started doing his security for the transportation of Bolivian-grown coke to
Colombia.
For that, Escobar, a man with limitless cash, funded
Barbie’s anti-communist work.
In a way, this even made Escobar a US friend, not just
Barbie.
All this time, not many people knew Barbie by his real name.
He’d been using the alias Klaus Altman.
But then in 1971, it seems his identity was revealed, and
later some documents were discovered by French Nazi hunters.
Soon a photo of Barbie appeared in the French media.
Well, well, well, if it isn’t the Butcher of Lyon said a lot
of people.
Barbie was subsequently held in a Bolivian prison for his
own protection, and this time, no one was there to help.
Still, there had to be more proof.
Was this guy really the butcher? Some French journalists
went to Bolivia to interview him.
He denied the charges and when shown photographs of some of
the people he’d tortured, he denied he’d ever seen them.
This went out on French TV in 1971 and at that point some of
the people he’d hurt still were alive and well.
“It is him! “Thought Simone Lagrange, as she watched this
clip in horror.
That was the beast.
She could never forget his face.
Still, Bolivia wouldn’t extradite him, not that they could
anyway as he still denied who he really was.
And you can be sure, the US, West Germany, and the UK were
keeping their mouths shut about all this.
Here was an embarrassment in the making.
The New York Times even turned up at his house, with the
journalists later being asked nicely by a bunch of armed men if they could quietly
leave.
Remember, Barbie wasn’t just friends with the world’s most
powerful drug lords, but he’d also helped monstrous tyrants get into power and
keep power.
It wasn’t going to be easy sending him back to Europe.
The years passed, and then in 1983, a democratic government
won in Bolivia.
These people were no friends to Nazi criminals.
Barbie was arrested, allegedly for some money he owed, but
much to his shock he was soon sitting on a plane in handcuffs heading back to
France.
On February 7, 1983, the newspaper, Le Mondrian the headline
on its front page, “Heist going to pay, at last! “Angry crowds were there to
meet him at the airport, with reports stating some people had gone there to
kill him.
A woman who he’d sent to the Drancy internment camp had
bought a 22-caliber rifle for his arrival, but it seems her shot missed.
The New York Times wrote at the time, “At Lyons airport,
where a crowd had gathered in expectation of Mr. Barbie's arrival, the police
arrested a 44-year-old woman carrying carbine under a white sheet.
The police did not identify her, but said they understood
that she had spent time in concentration camp during World War II.”That is when
the Justice Department started investigating the situation, and you already
know the outcome of that.
‘Sorry France, we messed up.
Commies, c’mon, those damn commies.”It also turned out that
the FBI had 85 pages of files from 1972 to 1987 on a man not named Klaus Altman
but Klaus Barbie.
So, they knew who he was all along.
Many of the firsthand stories you’ve heard in this show were
taken from the trial.
He maintained throughout that they’d got the wrong man and
he was Klaus Altman.
On 26 May 1987, he went face to face with some of his
victims, after which he said, “I have nothing to say. “A journalist wrote about
one particular moment during the trial, saying, “Her eyewitness account made
the courtroom cry. “This was a woman who said Barbie had forced her to watch as
he ordered his men to breather father to death.
After that, she was sent to a death camp.
The prosecution had a long list of atrocities that Barbie
had been involved in, including capturing those orphans, a massacre of 22hostages
in a basement of a Gestapo building, an execution of 42 people who’d been involved
in an uprising, and of course all the torture he’d done to people.
But there was a problem.
France had a statute of limitations, and for that reason,
all the charges could be dropped.
He was no longer officially guilty of the crimes for which
he was convicted in absinthial those years ago.
Too much time had passed.
There was one thing the prosecution could do, though, and
that was charge him not for individual offenses or murder and such but for
committing crimes against humanity.
There was no statute of limitations in France for that, but
now the prosecution had a much harder job on its hands.
Auschwitz survivor and Nobel Peace Prize-winning writer Ely
Wiesel took the stand and was first asked to talk about the nature of the
Holocaust.
Barbie’s French lawyer, Jacques Vergès, defending the
indefensible, later asked Wiesel what he thought about the Algerian kids that
had died in French internment camps.
Wasn’t that a crime against humanity, or was it just war?
After all, no French generals had been hanged for that for war crimes.
Wiesel told Verges that he knew nothing about the French
camps; he’d been in the US when that happened, to which Verges roared, “I
conclude from it that the deaths of these children were silent, their cries did
not cross the Atlantic let alone the Mediterranean...You are an American
citizen, what do you think of the fate of the children of Mai Lai, of whom the
murderer is today still free? “If you didn’t know, US troops committed various
war crimes in Vietnam and one was what we now call the Mai Lai massacre.
No one was put to death because of it, or barely even
punished.
Even if those crimes were a form of inhuman brutality, it
didn’t mean Barbie wasn’t war criminal.
Then, people started whispering.
If one atrocity isn’t a war crime, then does that mean the
other thing isn’t, legally speaking anyway? Could Barbie the smiling torturer
be innocent of “crimes against humanity” in view of what France had done to
people, or even what the US had done to people, during wartime? One writer
asked, “Was imperialism a crime against humanity? “On the last day, in his
final statement, Verges said, “Does crime against humanity only force emotion
or merit commemoration if it hurt Europeans? Would there be in death a
hierarchy that made the distinction between the dead dignified by memory and
those dignified by being forgotten? “This is a question some people have been asking
ever since about various other bloody brutal conflicts, but was it going to
work for Barbie? At the end of the trial, Barbie said, “I have some words to
say.
I did not commit the raid in Izzie.
I fought the Resistance and that was the war and today the
war is over.
Thank you. “It took six hours for the jury to come toe
decision.
Yes, they agreed, Barbie was a war criminal and he’d had a
major role in one of the most inhumane things that has ever taken place on this
planet.
He was found guilty of crimes against humanity, and the
judge told him he’d be spending the rest of his days behind bars.
He didn’t spend too long there, dying imprison four years
later, aged 77, from leukemia and spine and prostate cancer.