Klaus Barbie, 77, Lyons Gestapo Chief - New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/26/world/klaus-barbie-77-l...

World
Klaus Barbie, 77, Lyons Gestapo Chief
By WOLFGANG SAXON Published: September 26, 1991

Klaus Barbie died a prisoner yesterday in Lyons, the French city where he led a reign of terror as the local Gestapo chief during World War II. The last surviving German war criminal of rank to be tried by a tribunal of justice, he was 77 years old and had been in poor health for years. Recent reports from France said that Mr. Barbie had been transferred three weeks ago to a hospital from the prison where he was serving a life term on his 1987 conviction. He was said to be suffering from cancer of the blood, spine and prostate. Mr. Barbie commanded the Gestapo in Lyons, which was the base for the Resistance and a center of French Jewry. With an SS rank equivalent to an army captain's, he ran a campaign of torture and death against Resistance leaders and caused uncounted other people, most of them Jews, to be sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Twice condemned to death in absentia, Mr. Barbie prospered in Latin America under an alias after the war. In fact, he had been all but forgotten and written off by French and West German prosecutors when a relentless Nazi hunter, Beate Klarsfeld, tracked him down in Bolivia in 1972. 11 Years of Legal Wrangling The discovery generated headlines about "the butcher of Lyons." But it took 11 years of legal wrangling and a change of Government in Bolivia to bring about his extradition to France. Through it all, the dreaded Gestapo chief of wartime Lyon remained defiant, refusing to leave his cell and face the host of witnesses who told the court of his deeds during his eight- week trial in 1987. Mr. Barbie remarked after his extradition that he had nothing to regret and that he remained proud of his service to Hitler's Third Reich. Locked up in Montluc Prison, where the Gestapo had tortured its prey 40 years earlier, he promptly proved an embarrassment not only to the French, but to official Washington. It came to light that United States Army counterintelligence had used him as a paid informer after the war, shielding him from his French pursuers and then helping him escape to South America. For the French, Mr. Barbie caused enduring agony. Back in their midst, behind bars at last, his presence weighed heavily on the national conscience. To contemplate Mr. Barbie was to face a chapter of history the French longed to forget: the Vichy France of Marshal Henri Philippe Petain. Klaus Barbie was born on Oct. 25, 1913, in Bad Godesberg, near Bonn, the son of an office worker-turned-teacher in modest circumstances. By the time he turned 20, he had joined the Hitler Youth and become an aide to a local Nazi chief. Trained for Security Service Mr. Barbie pledged himself to Hitler's Third Reich. He joined the SS in 1935 and was trained for its security service, the shadowy S.D., whose members considered themselves enforcers of Nazi doctrine and defenders of the party. By the outbreak of the war, his career in the security services was assured. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in an SS unit that followed the German Army into the Netherlands and France. Joined by Dutch collaborators, the SS savagely stamped out signs of Jewish resistance and corralled the Jews into a ghetto in Amsterdam. With the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Mr. Barbie was attached to the Gestapo. His unit beat information out of detainees, murdered suspects and their families and torched their homes. He rose in rank and was assigned to Lyons to head a Gestapo section whose domain extended far beyond the city proper. He was ultimately held responsible for the arrest and torture or death of 11,000 or 25,000 people, perhaps more. But the feat that set him apart in French eyes was his merciless hunt for Jean Moulin, a hero of the Resistance who led partisans of Gen. Charles de Gaulle and his Free French. Mr. Barbie's Gestapo officers caught Moulin and the entire leadership of his group near Lyons in June 1943. One, Rene Hardy, mysteriously escaped. Mr. Barbie was accused of killing Moulin, a charge he consistently denied. His lawyer, Jacques Verges, caused a national outcry in France when he gave Mr. Barbie's version of events, warning that he could document it in court. The contention was that Mr. Barbie, working with the local French authorities, operated a group of double agents within the Resistance; that they put Vichy police on the trail of Mr. Hardy; that Mr. Hardy was placed in Mr. Barbie's custody; that Mr. Barbie "turned" Mr. Hardy, who then told him of the impending meeting; and that Mr. Moulin killed himself, considering it the only honorable way out after rival leaders in the Resistance betrayed him. Mr. Hardy was tried twice for treason and acquitted after the war. His prosecutors questioned Mr. Barbie in 1948 while he was in American custody, but only in connection with the allegations of betrayal involving Mr. Hardy. The C.I.C., the Army's counterintelligence corps, had decided in 1947 to sign Mr. Barbie on as a paid informer, seemingly unaware of the enormity of the deeds laid to him. For $1,700 a month, he gave weekly reports on other missing Nazis, the Communists in East Germany and Eastern Europe as well as the French Communists. Communists and Usefulness The French formally asked for his whereabouts in 1950. According to a 218-page report from the United States Justice Department, which investigated the matter in 1983, C.I.C. officers said that Mr. Barbie no longer worked for them, a lie that was unwittingly passed on to the French. In reality, the C.I.C. agents reportedly decided to hide their anti-Communist operative from France because they feared that French intelligence was infiltrated by Communists and that Mr. Barbie, if handed over, might damage American intelligence by telling what he knew. But by then Mr. Barbie had served his purpose, and the Army decided to get rid of him via the "Rat Line" to South America.

1 of 2

12/7/12 1:50 PM

Klaus Barbie, 77, Lyons Gestapo Chief - New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/26/world/klaus-barbie-77-l...

For a fee, a Croatian priest in Rome produced a false passport from the International Red Cross and a Bolivian visa for Mr. Barbie, his wife, and their two children. Mr. Barbie became Klaus Altmann and sailed from Genoa in March 1951. Mr. Barbie cultivated close relations with the generals then running Bolivia, setting up a shipping concern and a lumber business. Mr. Barbie appears to have visited the United States and Europe without drawing attention. An unrepentant Nazi, he lost his standing in the German community around 1972 when he was ejected from the German Club of La Paz for giving a Nazi salute and yelling "Heil Hitler" at the West German Ambassador. The French and West German authorities had ceased to look for Mr. Barbie when, in 1971, a painstaking search by Mrs. Klarsfeld and her husband, Serge, turned up evidence that tied him to the deportation of 44 Jewish children from the village of Izieu. Witnesses and photos identified Mr. Altmann as Mr. Barbie, then living in Peru. The Munich prosecutor reopened the case but Mr. "Altmann" fled to Bolivia, where the military regime turned down repeated demands for his extradition. Throughout, Mr. Barbie admitted to his Gestapo role, insisting that he acted as an officer in wartime. A civilian government took office in La Paz in late 1982. In January 1983, the courts jailed Mr. Barbie on a 13-year-old fraud charge, for which he paid a $10,000 fine, and ordered him expelled as an undesirable alien. He arrived in France on a French military plane on Feb. 5, 1983, and French prosecutors and magistrates finally readied the case for trial. A 1964 Law on Crimes Against Humanity, designed to set aside the statute of limitations for war crimes and genocide, was invoked but changing sets of charges caused repeated delays of the trial date. In early 1985, the prosecutors dropped the matter of the death of Jean Moulin and his associates and narrowed the case to specific crimes against French Jews, including the fate of the children of Izieu. Another delay resulted in March 1986 when a higher court quashed that compromise arrangement. Mr. Barbie, who had been taken to the hospital several times, underwent prostate surgery in February 1987. His weak condition notwithstanding, the prosecution opened the trial in May. Judgment was rendered on July 4 after six hours of deliberation by a panel of three judges and nine jurors. He stood motionless and without expression as the presiding judge listed his crimes against French Jews and fighters of the Resistance. With France having abolished the death penalty in 1981, He was sentenced to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole held out for 2002, when he would have been 88 years old. Mr. Barbie's wife, Regine, died of cancer in Bolivia just before his deportation. Their son, Klaus-Georg Altmann, was killed in a hang-gliding accident near Cochabamba in 1981, leaving a wife, Francoise, and three children. His daughter, Ute Messner, is a resident of Austria.
Home Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company Times topics Member Center Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Index by Keyword

Privacy Policy

2 of 2

12/7/12 1:50 PM