1. Nikolaus Barbie was a German officer of the Schutzstaffel and Sicherheitsdienst who worked in Vichy France during World War II.
37 Facts About Klaus Barbie
1. 2.
In 1983, the United States apologised to France for the US Counterintelligence Corps helping him escape to Bolivia, aiding Klaus Barbie's escape from an outstanding arrest warrant.
3.
Klaus Barbie is suspected of having had a role in the Bolivian coup d'etat orchestrated by Luis Garcia Meza in 1980.
4.
Klaus Barbie died of cancer in 1991, at age 77, in his Lyon prison.
5.
Nikolaus "Klaus" Barbie was born on 25 October 1913 in Godesberg, which is today part of Bonn.
6.
The Klaus Barbie family came from Merzig, in the Saar near the border with France.
7.
Klaus Barbie was wounded in the neck at Verdun and captured by the French, and he never recovered his health.
8.
Until 1923, when he was 10, Klaus Barbie attended the local school where his father taught.
9.
On 11 October 1940, Klaus Barbie arrested Hermannus van Tongeren, Grand Master of the Grand Orient of the Netherlands.
10.
Klaus Barbie established his headquarters at the Hotel Terminus in Lyon, where he personally tortured adult and child prisoners.
11.
Klaus Barbie arrested Jean Moulin, a high-ranking member of the French Resistance and his most prominent captive.
12.
Klaus Barbie then rejoined the SiPo-SD of Lyon in its retreat to Bruyeres, where he led an anti-partisan attack in Rehaupal in September 1944.
13.
In 1947, Klaus Barbie was recruited as an agent for the 66th Detachment of the US Army Counterintelligence Corps along with a Serbian agent of the Belgrade special police and SD, Radislav Grujicic.
14.
Specifically, they were interested in British interrogation techniques which Klaus Barbie had experienced firsthand, as well as the identities of former SS officers British intelligence agencies might be interested in recruiting.
15.
The French discovered that Barbie was in US hands; having sentenced him to death in absentia for war crimes, they made a plea to John J McCloy, US High Commissioner for Germany, to hand him over for execution, but McCloy refused.
16.
The CIC asserted that Klaus Barbie knew too much about the network of German spies the CIC had planted in various European communist organisations.
17.
In 1965, Klaus Barbie was recruited by the West German foreign intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtendienst, under the codename and the registration number V-43118.
18.
Klaus Barbie collaborated with Rene Barrientos's regime, including teaching the general's private paramilitaries named "Furmont" how torture can best be used.
19.
Klaus Barbie was strongly linked to the neo-Nazi paramilitary member Alvaro de Castro, who was his personally hired bodyguard and the two participated in criminal actions and businesses together.
20.
Klaus Barbie met with Pablo Escobar and several other high ranking members of the Medellin cartel in the late 1970s, and agreed to arrange for security of Escobar's raw coca supply, from its cultivation until it reached processing plants in Colombia.
21.
Klaus Barbie earlier carried out a large arms purchase of tanks from Austria to the Bolivian army.
22.
People who met Klaus Barbie during his time in Bolivia have said that he was a firm and fanatical believer in the Nazi ideology and an anti-Semite.
23.
Klaus Barbie was identified as being in Peru in 1971 by Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, who came across a secret document that revealed his alias.
24.
Klaus Barbie was living at Malecon 200, Chaclacayo a property owned by SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Friedrich Schwend.
25.
In Peru, Klaus Barbie provided security services to the junta of General Juan Velasco Alvarado following the military coup of 3 October 1968, including surveillance of the US diplomatic mission led by John Irwin in March 1969.
26.
The interview took place on 3 February 1972 in the Department of the Interior building and the following day, in prison, where Klaus Barbie was placed under protection by the Bolivian authorities.
27.
The testimony of Italian insurgent Stefano Delle Chiaie before the Italian Parliamentary Commission on Terrorism suggests that Klaus Barbie took part in the Roberto Suarez Gomez supported 1980 coup d'etat "cocaine coup" of Luis Garcia Meza, when the regime forced its way to power in Bolivia in 1980.
28.
In 1984, Klaus Barbie was indicted for crimes committed as Gestapo chief in Lyon between 1942 and 1944, chief among which was the Rue Sainte-Catherine Roundup.
29.
Klaus Barbie's defence was funded by Swiss pro-Nazi financier Francois Genoud and led by attorney Jacques Verges.
30.
Klaus Barbie was tried on 41 separate counts of crimes against humanity.
31.
Klaus Barbie claimed that his extradition was technically illegal and asked to be excused from the trial and returned to his cell at Prison Saint-Paul.
32.
Klaus Barbie was brought back to court on 26 May 1987 to face some of his accusers, about whose testimony he had "nothing to say".
33.
Klaus Barbie's strategy was to use the trial to talk about war crimes committed by France since 1945.
34.
Klaus Barbie got the prosecution to drop some of the charges against Barbie due to French legislation that had protected French citizens accused of the same crimes under the Vichy regime and in French Algeria.
35.
Verges argued that Klaus Barbie's actions were no worse than the supposedly ordinary actions of colonialists worldwide, and that his trial was tantamount to selective prosecution.
36.
The court rejected the defence's argument, and on 4 July 1987, Klaus Barbie was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.
37.
Klaus Barbie died in prison in Lyon four years later, at the age of 77.