Klaus Barbie

Klaus Barbie was the head of the Gestapo in Lyon from November 1942 to August 1944. He was responsible for the deportation of around 7,500 French Jews and resistance fighters from the Lyon area, the torture and murder of around 4,000 of them in his own offices, and the personal interrogation under torture of the Resistance leader Jean Moulin in June 1943. He was protected by United States military intelligence after the war, smuggled to South America in 1951, lived openly in Bolivia for thirty-two years, was eventually extradited to France in 1983, tried in Lyon in 1987, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died of cancer in a French prison hospital on 25 September 1991.

The Lyon Gestapo headquarters

Barbie ran the Lyon Gestapo from the Hotel Terminus near the Lyon-Perrache railway station, then from the École de Santé Militaire on the avenue Berthelot. The interrogation cells were in the basement. The methods Barbie used personally on prisoners are documented in detail in the Lyon trial transcripts. They included beatings, electric shocks to the genitals, dog attacks, simulated drowning, and the use of fire on the soles of the feet. He was personally present at the interrogations rather than delegating to subordinates. Survivor testimony from prisoners who had been at the École de Santé Militaire and survived consistently identified him as the lead interrogator. He earned the nickname the Butcher of Lyon during the period from this work.

Jean Moulin

Barbie’s most-cited single act was the interrogation of Jean Moulin, de Gaulle’s chief representative in occupied France and the man unifying the French Resistance under a single command. Moulin was arrested at Caluire-et-Cuire near Lyon on 21 June 1943 along with other resistance leaders. Barbie personally interrogated him. The interrogation was, by even the standards of the Lyon Gestapo, exceptionally violent. Moulin was beaten so severely that his face was unrecognisable to those who saw him afterwards. He was placed on a train to Berlin and died on the journey on or about 8 July 1943. The location of his death and the cause are uncertain because of the condition he was in by then. He never gave up the names of his colleagues. The interrogation, on the documentary record and on Barbie’s own subsequent admissions, was the moment that consolidated Barbie’s post-war reputation in France.

The Izieu children

On 6 April 1944 Barbie ordered the raid on the Maison d’Izieu, a children’s home in the village of Izieu in the Ain department where forty-four Jewish children aged from four to seventeen were being sheltered along with seven adult staff. All forty-four children and seven staff were arrested. They were sent to Drancy, then deported to Auschwitz. Forty-two of the children were murdered on arrival. The other two, aged sixteen and seventeen, were selected for labour and were murdered later. Barbie’s telex of 6 April 1944 ordering the raid survived in the captured Gestapo files and was the central piece of evidence at his Lyon trial. The Izieu raid is, in modern French Holocaust memory, one of the most-cited single acts of the German occupation.

The American protection

Barbie was captured by Allied forces in March 1947 and recruited by the United States Army Counter Intelligence Corps to work as a Cold War intelligence asset against suspected German communists and Soviet agents in occupied southern Germany. He worked for US intelligence from 1947 to 1951. The French government, by 1949, was aware that Barbie was being protected by the Americans and requested his extradition for trial. The Americans refused. In 1951, when the French request became politically difficult to deflect any further, the United States arranged Barbie’s escape to South America via the Catholic ratline operated by Bishop Alois Hudal in Rome. The US government formally apologised in 1983 for protecting Barbie. The 1983 Allan A. Ryan report to the US Department of Justice set out the full record of US complicity.

Bolivia

Barbie lived in Bolivia from 1951 to 1983, openly, under the name Klaus Altmann. He worked as a businessman, ran a shipping company, and served as an adviser to the Bolivian military government on the interrogation of political prisoners. He helped train the security forces of several South American military regimes including those of Bolivia, Argentina and Chile in interrogation techniques. He was active in the German émigré community in La Paz. He was photographed by Beate and Serge Klarsfeld in 1972 and identified publicly. The Bolivian government refused for eleven years to extradite him. After the fall of the Bolivian military government in 1982, the new democratic government in La Paz agreed to expel him.

The Lyon trial

Barbie was extradited to France on 5 February 1983 and tried in Lyon in 1987. The trial was the first French trial of a Holocaust perpetrator on the charge of crimes against humanity, a charge that under French law was not subject to the statute of limitations. The trial lasted nearly two months. Around forty Holocaust survivors gave evidence, including Lise Lesèvre, who had survived nineteen days of Barbie’s personal torture, and several relatives of the Izieu children. Barbie was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died of cancer in a Lyon prison hospital on 25 September 1991. He was 77.

What he was

Barbie is the case of the mid-level perpetrator who would have hanged at Nuremberg in 1946 had he been captured then but who lived as a free man for thirty-six years afterwards because the United States found him useful in the Cold War. The escape to South America was not the work of secret Catholic networks alone. It was made possible by the United States Army. The Lyon trial of 1987 was the moment at which the post-war French legal apparatus finally caught up with him. The Izieu telex, the Lesèvre testimony, the Moulin interrogation, all stood. He had killed and tortured systematically for two years in Lyon. He had then lived comfortably for forty years.

See also

Sources

  • Allan A. Ryan, Klaus Barbie and the United States Government, US Department of Justice, 1983
  • Marcel Ophüls, Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, documentary film, 1988
  • Lyon trial transcripts, May to July 1987
  • Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, Memorial to the Jews Deported from France, Klarsfeld Foundation, 1983
  • USHMM: Klaus Barbie