Klaus Barbie

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Klaus Barbie bigraphy, stories - SS-''Hauptsturmführer'', soldier and Gestapo member, known as the "Butcher of Lyon".

Klaus Barbie : biography

25 October 1913 – 25 September 1991

Nikolaus ‘Klaus’ Barbie (25 October 1913 – 25 September 1991) was an SS-Hauptsturmführer (rank equivalent to army captain) and Gestapo member. He was known as the "Butcher of Lyon" for having personally tortured prisoners of the Gestapo while stationed in Lyon, France. After the war, United States intelligence services employed him for anti-Marxist efforts and also helped him escape to South America. The Bundesnachrichtendienst, the German intelligence agency, recruited him, and he may have helped the CIA capture Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara in 1967. Barbie is also suspected of having a hand in the Bolivian coup d’état orchestrated by Luis García Meza Tejada in 1980. After the fall of the dictatorship, Barbie no longer had the support of the government and in 1983 was extradited to France, where he was convicted of war crimes and died in prison.

US intelligence and Bolivia

After the war ended, he was recruited by the Western Allies and worked for the British until 1947. After that, in 1947, Barbie was recruited as an agent for the 66th Detachment of the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). The U.S. used Barbie and other Nazi Party members to further anti-communist efforts in Europe. Specifically, they were interested in British interrogation techniques, which Barbie had experienced firsthand, and the identities of SS officers that the British were using for their own ends. Later, the CIC housed him in a hotel in Memmingen and he reported on French intelligence activities in the French zone of occupied Germany because they felt the French were infiltrated with Communists.

The French discovered that Barbie was in U.S. hands and having sentenced him to death in absentia for war crimes, made a plea to John J. McCloy, U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, to hand him over for execution, but McCloy refused. Instead, the CIC helped him flee to Juan Peron’s Argentina with the help of a "ratline" organized by U.S. intelligence services and the Croatian Roman Catholic priest Krunoslav Draganović. The CIC asserted that Barbie knew too much about the network of German spies CIC had planted in various European Communist organizations, but their protection of Barbie may have been as much to avoid the embarrassment of having recruited him.

Barbie emigrated to Bolivia, where he lived under the alias Klaus Altmann. In 1965 Barbie was recruited by the West German foreign intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) under the codename "Adler" (Eagle) and the registration number V-43118. He had excellent relations with high-ranking Bolivian officials and was known for his nationalist and anti-communist stance.Peter Hammerschmidt: "Die Tatsache allein, daß V-43 118 SS-Hauptsturmführer war, schließt nicht aus, ihn als Quelle zu verwenden". Der Bundesnachrichtendienst und sein Agent Klaus Barbie, in: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft (ZfG), 59. Jahrgang, 4/2011. METROPOL Verlag. Berlin 2011, S. 333–349. (Download: http://www.peterhammerschmidt.de/forschungen/publikationen/) His initial monthly salary of 500 Deutsche Mark was transferred in May 1966 to an account of the Chartered Bank of London in San Francisco. During his stint with the BND, Barbie made at least 35 reports to the BND headquarters in Pullach.

Che Guevara

Reviews of the 2007 documentary My Enemy’s Enemy, directed by the British director Kevin Macdonald, note that it suggests Barbie helped the United States’ CIA orchestrate the 1967 capture and execution in Bolivia of Che Guevara, a Marxist revolutionary who was active in Cuba and South America.", The Observer, 23 December 2007 In 1966 a disguised Guevara had arrived in Bolivia to organize the overthrow of its military dictatorship. According to the film, the CIA used Barbie for his knowledge of counter-guerrilla warfare.

Alvaro de Castro, a longtime confidant of Barbie, was interviewed for the film. He said:

De Castro added that Barbie "had little respect for Che Guevara." In the film, the journalist Kai Hermann says, "[Barbie] always boasted – though I cannot prove it – that it was he who devised the strategy for murdering Che Guevara.", The Guardian, 6 September 2010. Note: Major Shelton commanded the US unit.