Klaus Barbie
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Klaus Barbie in Army NCO Uniform |
Klaus Barbie, the
Butcher of Lyon (
October 25,
1913 –
September 25,
1991) was a
German war criminal. 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, working for the British and the
CIA, and 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.
Barbie was born in 1913 in Bad Godesberg into a catholic family. His parents were both teachers. Until 1923 he went to the school where his father worked as a teacher. From 1923 he attened a boarding school in Trier. In 1925 however his whole family moved to Trier. In 1933 Barbie's father and brother both died.
In September 1935 he joined the
SD or Sicherheitsdienst (security service), a special branch of the
SS. Soon he was sent to serve in the Netherlands. In 1942 he was sent to Dijon and November of the same year he was sent to Lyon where he became the head of
Gestapo. He first set up camp at
Hôtel Terminus.From 1945 to 1955, he was protected and employed by
British, and then ,
intelligence agents, who used his
counter-insurgency skills to suppress the
leftist resistance to the American and British occupations in Germany, France,
Greece, and Italy .
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 early as 1971 by the
Klarsfelds (Nazi hunters), but it was only on
January 19,
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 d'Assises. 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 claimed that Barbie's actions were no worse than the ordinary actions of
colonialists worldwide, and that his trial was selective prosecution making a difference between victims. The head prosecutor was
Pierre Truche.
On
July 4,
1987, Barbie was sentenced to
life imprisonment for
crimes against humanity, and died in
prison of
cancer four years later at the age of 77.
In
1984 Klaus Barbie was put on trial for crimes committed while he was in charge of the
Gestapo in
Lyon between
1942 and
1944. As the trial opened
Philip A. Potter, a Caribbean pastor, described Barbie in an interview in the February 11th, 1984
Le Monde as the last product of the
Enlightenment, which, he claimed, had produced four things: "the
Industrial Revolution, which subordinated man to the machine; the founding of the
United States on a
declaration of independence where liberty and equality were applied to all men - except for blacks and Indians; - the
French Revolution of 1789 where liberty, brotherhood, and equality were indeed claimed by the bourgeoisie; and imperialism based on racism".
At the trial Barbie received support not only from Nazi apologists like
François Genoud, but also from leftist lawyer
Jacques Vergès. He had a reputation for attacking the French political system, particularly in French colonial territories. In 1960 he extracted a confession of torture from
Paul Teitgen, secretary general of the police in Algiers. Vergès' strategy at the trial was to use the trial to expose war crimes committed by France since
1945. Indeed, many of the charges against Barbie were dropped, thanks to legislation that had protected people accused of crimes under the
Vichy regime and in French Algeria.
Vergès argued that the Nazi crimes were no different in nature from those committed by French imperialism, and thus the French courts were in no position to try Barbie.
Nabil Bouaita, an Algerian lawyer, and
Jean-Martin M'Bemba, a Congolese lawyer, joined the defense team. "Does crime against humanity only force emotion or merit commemoration if it hurt Europeans?" Vergès asked. B'Memba gave an account of how 8,000 Africans died building 140 kilometres of railway in French colonial Africa. Bouaita discussed
Sabra and Shatila.
In the end Barbie was found guilty, but Vergès' defense had changed the terms of debate about crimes against humanity. This has led to the term
New World Negationism to describe the denial or trivialisation of
crimes against humanity such as
genocide and
slavery that were perpetrated by
Europeans in the
New World (i.e. North and South America).
ISBN 3-88395-431-4, > Barbie (SS, Lyon), p. 453 Fn, O&W ed. 110 case No. 77, Fn 908 KsD Lyon IV-B (gez. Ostubaf. Barbie) an BdS, Paris IV-B, 6. April 1944, RF-1235
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.
The ex-CIC, Erhard Dabringhaus, who worked against the Soviets during the
Cold War, recognized Barbie in TV and wrote a book about the contribution of him to the USA.
*
The trial of Klaus Barbie*
Father Dragonovic
