Klaus Barbie
Encyclopedia : K : KL : KLA : Klaus Barbie
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.
Life
Barbie was born in 1913, and until 1923 he went to the school where his father worked as a teacher. For high-school he moved to another town, Trier, to go to boarding school. He described it as finally being independent. In 1925 however his whole family moved to Trier. He moved back in with them. Later he said, “I was happy, but I was also disappointed.” He lost his independence, but he was with his family once more. In 1933 Barbie’s father and brother both died. His father died of a WWI bullet-wound, which Klaus believed was received in France. This is thought to have changed his perceptions of the French.After leaving school Barbie wasn’t able to go to university, so with few other professions open to him, he went to a Nazi Party “voluntary work camp”. He came out of the camp a whole-hearted follower of the National Socialists. In September 1935 he went to Berlin, and he joined the SS. There he learned his skills as an investigator and an interrogator. He did a range of things while in Berlin, including raiding bars, brothels and nightclubs with a large group of SS. In 1940 he married, and days after this he went to France with von Rundstedt’s “two-million-strong army” as part of “section VI”, the intelligence division. Soon he was sent to Amsterdam to the “Zentralstelle” or the “Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration”.
From 1945 to 1955, he was protected and employed by British, and then American, 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.
Trial
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 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).
Guilt - Proofs
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-1235References
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.
External links
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.