Klaus Barbie
Nikolaus Barbie (25 October 1913 – 25 September 1991) was a German officer of the Schutzstaffel and Sicherheitsdienst who worked in Vichy France during World War II.
After the war, United States intelligence services employed him for his anti-communist efforts and aided his escape to Bolivia, where he advised the dictatorial regime on how to repress opposition through torture.
On 1 April, Barbie summoned van Tongeren's daughter, Charlotte, to SD headquarters and informed her that her father had died of an infection in both ears and had been cremated.
As a direct result of that action, Klaus Barbie did not stand trial in France in 1950; he spent 33 years as a free man and a fugitive from justice.The French discovered that Barbie was in U.S. hands; having sentenced him to death in absentia for war crimes, they made a plea to John J. McCloy, US High Commissioner for Germany, to hand him over for execution, but McCloy refused.
[20] Instead, the CIC helped him flee to Bolivia assisted by "ratlines" organised by US intelligence services,[22] as well as by Croatian Roman Catholic clergy, including Krunoslav Draganović.
[18] Other authors have suggested that the anticommunist element of Italian fascism and the protection of the Vatican allowed Klaus Barbie and other Nazis to flee to Bolivia.
His initial monthly salary of 500 Deutsche Marks was transferred in May 1966 to an account of the Chartered Bank of London in San Francisco.
[27] Barbie collaborated with René Barrientos's regime, including teaching the general's private paramilitaries named "Furmont" how torture can best be used.
The regime's political repression against leftist groups was helped by Barbie's knowledge about intelligence work, torture and interrogations.
In 1972 under General Banzer (with whom Barbie collaborated even more openly), he assisted in illegal arrests, interrogations and murders of opposition and progressive groups.
Journalists and activists who wrote or spoke about the regime's crimes against human rights were arrested and many fell victim to so-called "disappearances", the state's secret murders and abductions of leftists.
[28][29][30][31] Barbie was strongly linked to the neo-Nazi paramilitary member Álvaro de Castro, who was his personally hired bodyguard and the two participated in criminal actions and businesses together.
[28][29][30][32] According to various reports, after the emergence of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1966, Barbie's anti-partisan skills were in demand again, and he worked for the Bolivian Interior Ministry with the rank of Lieutenant as an instructor and adviser to the security forces.
[28][29][30][31][32] Barbie was identified as being in Peru in 1971 by Serge and Beate Klarsfeld (Nazi hunters from France), who came across a secret document that revealed his alias.
On 19 January 1972, this information was published in the French newspaper L'Aurore, along with a photograph of Altmann which the Klarsfelds obtained from a German expatriate living in Lima, Peru.
[37] In Peru, Barbie provided security services to the junta of General Juan Velasco Alvarado following the military coup of 3 October 1968, including surveillance of the U.S. diplomatic mission led by John Irwin in March 1969.
[38] Led by Beate Klarsfeld, French journalist Ladislas de Hoyos and cameraman Christian van Ryswyck flew to La Paz in January 1972 in order to find and interview Barbie posing as his alias, Klaus Altmann.
Ladislas de Hoyos gave him photos of members of Resistance he had tortured, asking him if he recognized their faces, and, while he returned them in denial, his fingerprints unmistakably betrayed him.
[citation needed]) The testimony of Italian insurgent Stefano Delle Chiaie before the Italian Parliamentary Commission on Terrorism suggests that Barbie took part in the Roberto Suárez Gómez supported 1980 coup d'état "cocaine coup" of Luis García Meza, when the regime forced its way to power in Bolivia in 1980.
After those atrocities became well publicised, however, Ryan regarded it as indefensible for CIC personnel to lie to higher U.S. authorities and help Barbie escape Europe to Bolivia rather than honour an outstanding French warrant for his arrest.
[46]: p.203 As a result of Ryan's report and personal recommendation, the U.S. government made a formal apology to France for enabling Barbie to escape French justice for 33 years.
[49][better source needed] One witness at the trial was Michel Thomas, a Polish polyglot Jew, who had narrowly escaped arrest by Barbie in Lyon during World War II, an account of which appears in Christopher Robbins' biography, Test of Courage.
[50][page needed] Barbie's defence was funded by Swiss pro-Nazi financier François Genoud and led by attorney Jacques Vergès.
Barbie was tried on 41 separate counts of crimes against humanity, based on the depositions of 730 Jews and French Resistance survivors who described how he tortured and murdered prisoners.
[51][page needed] The father of French Minister for Justice Robert Badinter had died in Sobibor after being deported from Lyon during Barbie's tenure.
[4] In 1983, Françoise Croizier, Klaus Barbie's French daughter-in-law, said in an interview that the CIA kidnapped Klaus-Georg in 1946 to make sure that his father carried out intelligence missions for the agency.
