Barbie, Klaus

views updated May 21 2018

Klaus Barbie

Born: October 25, 1913
Bad Godesberg, Germany
Died: September 25, 1991
Lyon, France

German military leader

Klaus Barbie, known as the "Butcher of Lyon," was a leader in the Nazi group called the SS, and was head of anti-Resistance operations in France during the German occupation of World War II (193545). As a war criminal (someone who commits crimes that violate the conventions of warfare during wartime) Barbie lived in Bolivia as Klaus Altmann for thirty years before he was arrested and returned to France for trial.

Shadow of war

Klaus Barbie was born October 25, 1913, in the town of Bad Godesberg, a few miles down the Rhine River from Bonn, Germany. The son of a schoolteacher, he spent an uneventful childhood as a good but not brilliant student with a gift for languages. His father had served and had been wounded inWorld War I (191418). Klaus Barbie grew up in a Germany that had been bitterly humiliated by its defeat in the war.

Barbie's father died in 1932, leaving the family with little money. With no funds to go to college, he began working for the National Socialist Germany Workers Party (Nazi Party), the party that brought Adolf Hitler (18891945) to power in Germany.

A sinister career

Hitler became chancellor (head of the government) of Germany in 1933. Two years later, when Barbie was twenty-two, he joined the Shutzstaffel (SS), the Nazi Party's security squad that swore loyalty not to Germany but to Hitler. He served in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the intelligence and security branch of the SS, and was assigned to a number of posts in Europe for the next six years. During this time, as the German war machine swept westward, Barbie won a reputation as a shrewd, dedicated SS officer. He earned increases in his position, and admiring superiors expressed their approval of his performance.

After Germany invaded France in 1941, Barbie became head of operations to control the Resistance, the underground organization of French patriots resisting Nazi rule. He is widely believed to have been responsible for the torture and death of Jean Moulin (18991943), the secret head of France's anti-Nazi coalition. As head of the Gestapo security police in Lyon, Barbie also appears to have been responsible for a number of "actions" against innocent French Jews. Among them a raid on an orphanage in the town of Izieu, which sent over fifty boys and girls to the gas chambers at the concentration camp of Auschwitz in Poland.

Postwar activities

When the war in Europe ended in spring 1945 with the Nazis' defeat, Barbie hid from the Allies (the nations allied against Germany, including Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States) until April 1947. At this point he was recruited by the Counter Intelligence Corps of the U.S. Army in occupied Germany. Although the army had a warrant for Barbie's arrest as someone suspected of underground activities, the regional commander decided that his skills as an interrogator (someone who questions suspects or prisoners) made him more valuable as a spy than as a prisoner.

Over the next four years Barbie took on increasing responsibility for the army. At one time he ran a spy network that included scores of informants in East and West Germany and France. Barbie soon became one of the army's most trusted spies. In 1949, however, his presence became known to French war crimes investigators, who demanded that the "Butcher of Lyon" be turned over to them to stand trial for his crimes.

The U.S. army took a fateful step. It decided not to surrender Barbie to the French, fearing embarrassment by his service and worrying that he might disclose wide-ranging U.S. intelligence efforts to the French. With the aid of a Croatian priest, it delivered Barbie to Genoa, Italy, under the false name of "Klaus Altmann." There he and his wife and two young children boarded an Italian ship to Buenos Aires, Argentina. The "Altmann" family quickly moved to the mountainous city of La Paz, Bolivia, where Barbie supported himself as an auto mechanic.

Barbie's skills as a spy did not go unnoticed in the military government of Bolivia, and before long he became an associate of high-ranking generals. It is likely that he served as an adviser to Bolivia's secret security police. It is known that he became the director of Transmaritima Boliviana, a company organized to hire ships to bring supplies to land-locked Bolivia. He lived as any prosperous businessman might and was often seen in La Paz's cafes and restaurants.

True identity discovered

The past began to catch up with Barbie in 1971. Beate Klarsfeld, a German-born homemaker married to French lawyer Serge Klarsfeld, discovered from a German prosecutor's files that Barbie was living in Bolivia under the name of Altmann. In a dramatic move, she went to La Paz and chained herself to a fence, demanding that "Altmann" be tried for his crimes.

Although Klarsfeld's initial effort was unsuccessful, the spotlight of publicity was on Barbie to stay. For over a decade, "Altmann" denied that he was Barbie, but his identity was no secret to the regimes that had kept Bolivia under military rule. Finally, in 1982, a civilian government came to power. In February 1983 Barbie was arrested and turned over to French officials.

Barbie's return to France created tremendous publicity and soul-searching in the country, which had never fully come to terms with its mixed record of both collaboration with and resistance to the Nazis. Shortly after his return, the prosecutor in Lyon announced that Barbie would stand trial on several charges of "crimes against humanity." These events had consequences in America as well. Following a five-month investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice revealed Barbie's post-war role for U.S. intelligence and issued a formal apology to France for "delaying justice in Lyon" for nearly thirty-three years.

Justice served

Like nearly all the others who committed horrifying deeds under the Nazis, Barbie showed little remorse for his crimes. "There are no war crimes," he said. "There are only acts of war." When he was expelled from Bolivia, he seemed indifferent, saying, "I did my duty. I have forgotten. If they [the French] have not forgotten, that is their business."

The French had not forgotten. Nevertheless, three years after his return Barbie was still in a jail cell in Lyon, with no date set for his trial. The long awaited trial was again delayed in 1986, when the French Court of Indictments ruled that Barbie could be tried for crimes against Resistance fighters as well as for "crimes against humanity." Barbie was imprisoned for life in 1987 for crimes including the murders of at least four Jews and Resistance workers and fifteen thousand deportations to death camps. He was the last German war criminal of rank to be tried. Barbie died of cancer in a prison hospital in Lyon on September 25, 1991.

For More Information

Beattie, John. The Life and Career of Klaus Barbie: An Eyewitness Record. London: Methuen, 1984.

Murphy, Brendan. The Butcher of Lyon: The Story of Infamous Nazi Klaus Barbie. New York: Empire Books, 1983.

Klaus Barbie

views updated May 23 2018

Klaus Barbie

Klaus Barbie (1913-1991) was a Nazi SS leader who was head of anti-Resistance operations in France during its occupation by Germany in World War II. After the war, Barbie worked covertly for U.S. Army intelligence in Germany prior to his escape to Bolivia. There he lived for over 30 years as Klaus Altmann before his arrest and return to France for trial as a war criminal.

Klaus Barbie was born October 25, 1913, in the town of Bad Godesberg, a few miles down the Rhine River from Bonn. The son of a school teacher, he spent an uneventful childhood as a good but not brilliant student with a gift for languages.

Barbie Joins Nazi SS

In 1935, three years after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, the 22-year-old Barbie joined the SS (Shutzstaffel), the Nazi party's cadre that swore loyalty not to Germany but to Hitler. He served in the SD (Sicherheitsdienst), the intelligence and security branch of the SS, headed by Reinhold Heydrich.

The young Barbie was assigned to a number of posts in Europe in the next six years as the German war machine swept westward. He won a reputation as a shrewd, dedicated SS officer, earning promotions and commendations from admiring superiors.

Head of Anti-Resistance Operations in France

After Germany invaded France in 1941, Barbie became head of anti-Resistance operations there. He is widely believed to have been responsible for the torture and death of Jean Moulin, the clandestine head of France's anti-Nazi coalition. As head of the Gestapo at Lyon, Barbie also appears to have been responsible for a number of "actions" against innocent French Jews, including a raid on an orphanage in the town of Izieu which sent over 50 boys and girls to the gas chambers at the death camp of Auschwitz.

Recruited by U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps

When the war in Europe ended in the spring of 1945 with the Nazis' defeat, Barbie hid from the Allies until April 1947, when he was recruited by the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) of the U.S. Army in occupied Germany. Although the Army had a warrant for Barbie's arrest as a suspected subversive, the regional commander decided that his skills as an interrogator made him more valuable as a spy than as a prisoner, and over the next four years Barbie took on increasing responsibility for the Army, at one time running a "net" or spy network that included scores of informants in East and West Germany and France. By all accounts a crafty and skilled interrogator, Barbie soon became one of the Army's most trusted spies. In 1949, however, his presence became known to French war crimes investigators, who demanded that the "Butcher of Lyon" be turned over to them to stand trial for his crimes.

Army Hides Barbie

The Army took a fateful step. It decided not to surrender Barbie to the French, fearing that it would be embarrassed by his service and apprehensive that he might disclose wide-ranging U.S. intelligence efforts to the French. With the aid of Krunoslav Dragonovich, a shadowy Croatian priest, it placed Barbie in a so-called "rat line" that had previously been used to help Soviet and Eastern bloc citizens who had spied on behalf of the United States.

Aided by false papers that Dragonovich obtained from the International Red Cross under the name of "Klaus Altmann," the Army delivered Barbie to Genoa, Italy. Here he and his wife and two young children boarded an Italian liner to Buenos Aires, Argentina. The "Altmann" family quickly moved to the mountainous city of La Paz, Bolivia, where Barbie supported himself as an auto mechanic.

Barbie Spies For Bolivia

His skills as a spy did not go unnoticed in the military government of Bolivia, and before long Barbie became a confidant of high-ranking generals. It is likely that he served as an adviser to that country's secret police; it is known that he became the director of Transmaritima Boliviana, a company organized to charter ships to bring supplies to land-locked Bolivia. He lived openly as any prosperous businessman might and was often seen in La Paz' cafes and restaurants.

True Identity Discovered

The past began to catch up with Barbie in 1971, when Beate Klarsfeld, a German-born homemaker married to French lawyer Serge Klarsfeld, discovered from a German prosecutor's files that Barbie was living in Bolivia under the name of Altmann. In a dramatic move, she went to La Paz and chained herself to a fence, demanding that "Altmann" be tried for his crimes.

Although her initial effort was unsuccessful—she was hustled to the airport by indignant Bolivian police—the spotlight of publicity was on Barbie to stay. For over a decade, "Altmann" denied that he was Barbie, but his identity was no secret to Bolivian military regimes. Finally, in 1982, a civilian government came to power, and in February 1983 it arrested Barbie and turned him over to French officials.

Barbie's return to France created tremendous publicity and soul-searching in that country, which had never fully come to terms with its mixed record of collaboration with, and resistance to, the Nazis. Shortly after his return, the prosecutor in Lyon announced that Barbie would stand trial on several charges of "crimes against humanity"— including the deaths of the French children from Izieu.

Barbie's expulsion to France had ramifications in America as well. The U.S. Department of Justice, following a five-month investigation, revealed Barbie's post-war role for U.S. intelligence and issued a formal apology to France for "delaying justice in Lyon" for nearly 33 years.

Like nearly all others who committed horrifying atrocities under the Nazi regimes, Barbie showed little remorse for his crimes. "There are no war crimes," he said. "There are only acts of war." When he was expelled from Bolivia, he seemed indifferent: "I did my duty. I have forgotten. If they (the French) have not forgotten, that is their business."

The French had not forgotten, but three years after his return, Barbie languished in a jail cell in Lyon, with no date set for his trial. A further postponement came in 1986 when the French Court of Indictments ruled that he could be tried for crimes against resistance fighters as well as for "crimes against humanity." Barbie was imprisoned for life in 1987 for crimes including the murders of at least four Jews and Resistance Workers and 15,000 deportations to death camps. He was the last German war criminal of rank to be tried. Barbie died of cancer in a prison hospital in Lyons, France on September 25, 1991.

Further Reading

A recent biography of Barbie, which devotes considerable attention to the impact of his return on France, is Unhealed Wounds: France and the Klaus Barbie Affair, by Erna Paris (Methuen, 1985). Serge Klarsfeld's The Children of Izieu (1985) contains the full story of that tragic crime. A chapter on Barbie's affiliation with the United States is found in Quiet Neighbors: Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in America, by Allan A. Ryan, Jr. (1984). The complete Justice Department report was published in 1983 by the Government Printing Office under the title Klaus Barbie and the United States Government. See also, Voices From the Barbie Trial by Ted Morgan in the August 2, 1987 edition of the New York Times Magazine and Gestapo Chief Dies In Prison by Paul Webster in the September 26, 1991 issue of The Guardian.

Barbie, Klaus

views updated Jun 11 2018

Barbie, Klaus

[OCTOBER 25, 1913–SEPTEMBER 25, 1991]

German Officer, Chief of the Gestapo in France

A German officer during World War II, Klaus Barbie was the chief of the Gestapo in Lyons, France, between November 1942, when the Germans assumed control of the previously unoccupied zone, and the occupation's collapse after the Allied D-Day landings in Normandy. Subsequently known as the Butcher of Lyons for his responsibility for the wartime arrest, deportation, torture, and death of thousands, Barbie finally appeared before a French court in 1987, after having lived for three decades in South America under the assumed name Klaus Altmann. His trial was the first in France to deal explicitly with crimes against humanity.

Barbie seems to have escaped justice in the postwar period because of his work on behalf of the United States as a counterintelligence agent. In 1951 he found his way to La Paz, Bolivia, and although tried in France and sentenced to death twice in absentia, in 1952 and 1954, he virtually disappeared until discovered by the French Nazi-hunters Beata and Serge Klarsfeld in 1971. Extradited to France in 1983, Barbie was charged with crimes against humanity committed against civilians, particularly Jews—charges that gained an independent status in French law in the mid-1960s, and for which the twenty-year statute of limitations for war crimes did not apply. In a controversial decision, the Cour de cassation, the highest appeals court in France, defined crimes against humanity as those perpetrated "in the name of a state practicing a hegemonic political ideology. . . not only against persons because they belong to a racial or religious group, but also against the adversaries of this [state] policy, whatever the form of their opposition."

The two-month trial of Klaus Barbie, which opened on May 11, 1987, was a cause célèbre in France and, it has been claimed, marked a turning point in the French memory of the Holocaust and wartime resistance. Specifically, Barbie was charged, among other crimes, with having led a raid on the headquarters of the Jewish council in Lyons, with the deportation to Auschwitz of forty-three Jewish children and five adults who were seized from a place of hiding in the village of Izieu, and with the deportation of various other victims, both Jews and members of the French Resistance. Despite the efforts of Barbie's brilliant defense lawyer, Jacques Vergès, to divert attention from his client's wrongdoings to allegations of misdeeds on the part of the Resistance, France's historic complicity in war crimes in Algeria, and even Israeli policies, the extensive publicity generated by the evidence highlighted the sufferings of Barbie's victims—both Jews and the wartime resistance. In the end Barbie was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment—the maximum sentence allowed by French law. Barbie died in prison in 1991. He was the last ranking Nazi to be tried by a tribunal of justice.

SEE ALSO Crimes Against Humanity; Gestapo; Prosecution; SS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Douglas, Lawrence (2001). The Memory of Judgement: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Finkielkraut, Alain (1991). Remembering in Vain: the Klaus Barbie Trial and Crimes against Humanity, tran. Roxanne Lapidus with Sima Godfrey. New York: Columbia University Press.

Rousso, Henry (1991). The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, tran. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Michael R. Marrus

Barbie, Klaus

views updated May 29 2018

Barbie, Klaus (1913–91) Nazi chief of the German Gestapo in France during World War II. He was known as the ‘Butcher of Lyon’ for his persecution and murder of French Resistance fighters and Jews. Barbie sent thousands of people to Auschwitz. After the war, he worked for US counter-intelligence before escaping to Bolivia in 1951. He was captured in 1987, brought to Lyon, and sentenced to life imprisonment.