Klaus Barbie

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Klaus Barbie

Nikolaus "Klaus" Barbie alias Klaus Altmann (* 25. October 1913 in Godesberg ; † 25. September 1991 in Lyon ) was a multi-convicted German Nazi - war criminals . From 1942 to 1944 he was Gestapo chief in Lyon; because of his cruelty he was known as the "butcher of Lyon".

Life

Childhood and youth

Barbie was born as the illegitimate son of Nikolaus Barbie and Anna Hees. The parents, both teachers, married the following year. His father returned badly wounded from the Western Front from the First World War . According to Barbie's own statement, his youth was shaped by the alcohol addiction and violent attacks of his embittered father. The younger brother Kurt died in adolescence. In 1934 Barbie graduated from the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Gymnasium in Trier , where he became a member of the Catholic sports association " Deutsche Jugendkraft ".

time of the nationalsocialism

After graduating from high school, he became a member of the Hitler Youth and personal adjutant to the local party leader. The university remained closed to Barbie because the family could not finance studies after the death of her father in 1933. Instead, he signed up for a voluntary six-month camp of the Reich Labor Service in Schleswig-Holstein. Here Barbie let herself be carried away by the ideologically heated atmosphere and developed into an unwavering supporter of the " Third Reich ". On September 26, 1935, Barbie became a member of the SS (SS no. 272.284) and from September 29, 1935 worked in the SD main office . He gained his first practical experience a. a. at the Secret State Police Office in Berlin. In addition, Barbie completed courses at the leadership school of the security service in Bernau near Berlin (formerly the federal school of the General German Trade Union Federation ) and the leadership school of the security police and the SD in Berlin-Charlottenburg . In October 1936 he took over the divisions II / 122 and II / 123 of the SD-Oberabschnitt West in Düsseldorf and then became an assistant in Division III C of the SD division Dortmund. Barbie was supposed to subvert the social democratic and communist resistance . Another task was the supervision of area III / C "cultural affairs", which mainly included religious matters. On May 1, 1937, Barbie became a member of the NSDAP ( membership number 4,583,085). On April 20, 1940, he was promoted to SS-Untersturmführer , five days later he married the 23-year-old Regine Willis.

Occupation time in the Netherlands

Immediately after the German occupation of the Netherlands , Barbie arrived in Amsterdam on May 29, 1940 . Until March 1942 he was employed in the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Amsterdam , which was subordinate to the Amsterdam field office of the Commander of the Security Police and the SD (BdS) Netherlands. Barbie and his subordinates were responsible for the persecution of resistance fighters and Jews, especially exiles from Germany. On November 9, 1940, ER was promoted to SS-Obersturmführer . Klaus Barbie was instrumental in the persecution and torture of Freemasons in the Netherlands . He personally directed attacks on lodges .

Period of occupation in France

After the Wehrmacht marched into the unoccupied southern France, which had been administered by the Vichy government , in November 1942, he took over the Gestapo from the Commander of the Security Police and the SD (KdS) as Head of Department IV with Erich Bartelmus, who was Head of Jewish Affairs. in Lyon. In the ranking in Lyon he came third after the head of the KdS, SS-Obersturmbannführer Werner Knab , and his deputy Heinz Hollert .

On site, Barbie acted with great cruelty. He had rented Suite 68 on the second floor of the Terminus Hotel in Lyon and held "orgies of unspeakably hideous meanness" (Barbie's biographer Tom Bower) there. Barbie tortured Catholic priests with electric shocks, hung them by their feet, starved children and beat them. Naked women were beaten until they passed out and raped. Barbie was responsible for the torture and murder of members of the Resistance - including Jean Moulin  - in southern France. Barbie tortured with cutting torches, red-hot poker, electric shocks, boiling water and a whole collection of whips, tools and clubs that lay on the desk in front of him during interrogation. The torture, which many of his victims did not survive, sometimes dragged on for a few days. One of his most loyal helpers here was Francis André , also known as “Gueule Tordue” (crooked mouth).

He was also charged with numerous other crimes, including the massacre in Saint-Genis-Laval , responsibility for the deportation of the children of Izieu , for the raid on Rue Sainte-Catherine and numerous shootings in Fort Montluc prison . He proceeded with great brutality and ruthlessness. The lack of documentary evidence was linked to Barbie's return to Lyon the week before the German withdrawal in August 1944, where he did "the washing up". He murdered 20 French Gestapo employees and allegedly also his French friend Antoinette "Mimiche" Murot.

Klaus Barbie's name first came to light when a list of most of Lyon's Gestapo members was compiled by Resistance fighter Dora Schaul (alias Renée Fabre) and repeatedly broadcast on London radio.

On November 9, 1944, Barbie was promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer , which corresponded to the rank of captain. By order of November 20, 1944, he was transferred back to the SD section in Dortmund in the Steinwache and held an unspecified position. Shortly before the end of the war , in mid-1945, he went into hiding in Germany .

After 1945

After the war ended, Barbie built up a network of former SS and Gestapo employees in the western zones of occupation . At the same time, he operated the black market trade and committed robberies to finance his life underground. He was briefly captured several times by the US Army and the British Field Security Section , but was able to escape again and again. From 1945 to 1955, Barbie finally enjoyed the protection of first British and then American government circles who employed him as an agent. In November 1946 he had his blood group tattoo removed by a doctor in British-occupied Hamburg . Because of his crimes, Barbie was sentenced to death for the first time in absentia in France in 1947 . In the same year he became an agent for the US secret service CIC and in this capacity was saved from extradition to France by the then High Commissioner John J. McCloy . He used his ties to other SS members in hiding in order to build up a network of informants. In particular, information about potential communist resistance fighters and agents was obtained. Barbie also spied on the activities of the French secret services in Germany on behalf of the CIC, as there was fear of infiltration by the KGB . From 1950 he recruited members in Germany for the right-wing extremist Bund Deutscher Jugend, which was later banned . With the help of the USA , Barbie emigrated to Bolivia in 1951 on the so-called Rattenlinie under the name of Klaus Altmann , where she worked as a businessman and later also became a Bolivian citizen. After the appearance of Ernesto Che Guevara in Bolivia, Barbie's knowledge of counter-partisan countermeasures was in demand again, and he worked for the Bolivian Ministry of the Interior with the rank of lieutenant colonel ad honorem as an instructor and advisor to the security forces of the dictator Hugo Banzer Suárez .

In November 1952, Barbie was tried in Lyon for atrocities against civilians and the resistance movement in the Jura , and he was sentenced to death a second time in absentia. After another trial in November 1954, Barbie was sentenced to death again for the Saint-Genis-Laval massacre and numerous shootings in Montluc prison in Lyon.

In 1966, Barbie was recruited for the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) as an informant under the code name Adler and worked for him for at least a year. He received 500 marks monthly fee, later also additional performance bonuses and delivered at least 35 reports from South America to the BND. Only a few weeks after the recruitment, Barbie acted as a representative of Gerhard Mertins ' Bonn company Merex AG , which was to sell superfluous Bundeswehr material on the world market on behalf of the BND . The agent was rated as “intelligent”, “very receptive and adaptable”, “discreet and reliable”. As evidence of his active involvement in war crimes accumulated, Barbie was fired on an excuse.

In the early 1970s, Beate and Serge Klarsfeld succeeded in tracking down Klaus Barbie in Bolivia following a tip from the Munich public prosecutor's office. In 1972, a kidnapping attempt that  had been prepared by the French revolutionary theorist Régis Debray and the German underground fighter Monika Ertl - with the knowledge of Serge Klarsfeld and the later Deputy Interior Minister Gustavo Sánchez Salazar - failed . In 1975 the Frenchman Michel Goldberg was on the verge of murdering Barbie after much preparation, but at the last moment he was unable to fire the weapon he was carrying after meeting and talking extensively with Barbie in La Paz on the pretext of a journalistic interview . Goldberg said he had planned to take personal revenge for the death of his father, who was deported from Lyon to Auschwitz as a Jew under Barbie's responsibility and murdered there in 1943.

In 1980 an attack by the Israeli secret service Mossad on Barbie and Walter Rauff also failed . That same year, Barbie helped General Luis García Meza Tejada in his coup .

Barbie trial

After a change of government and the return to a democratic government under President Hernán Siles Zuazo , the Bolivian police arrested Barbie on January 19, 1983 on charges of tax evasion. Helmut Kohl prevented extradition to the Federal Republic of Germany in order to prevent a renewed debate about guilt of war criminals in the country. On February 4, 1983, Barbie was extradited to France and put on trial there. His defense by Jacques Vergès was financed , among others, by the Swiss banker and Holocaust denier François Genoud .

The trial began on May 11, 1987, and received worldwide attention. Barbie was accused of being responsible for the raid on the headquarters of the Union générale des israélites de France on February 9, 1943 in Lyon and the associated deportation of 85 Jews. He was also charged with having been responsible for the deportation of 44 Jewish children from Izieu . In total, Klaus Barbie was made responsible for the deportation of 842 people.

On July 4, 1987, Barbie was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison .

The trial sparked heated controversy in France over collaboration with the Germans, the emergence of a new wave of anti-Semitism, and the possible blurring of the mass murder of the Jews by other Nazi crimes.

Klaus Barbie died on 25 September 1991 at the age of 77 years in French prison in Lyon on cancer .

Documentaries

  • 1988: Hôtel Terminus: Time and Life of Klaus Barbie . Documentary by Marcel Ophüls .
  • 2007: Klaus Barbie: The enemy of my enemy ( My Enemy's Enemy ). Documentary by Kevin Macdonald .
  • 2008: The hunt ( La Traque ). About the hunt, the arrest and extradition to France.
  • 2013: Nazis in the BND - new service and old comrades ; Film by Christine Rütten,
  • 2014: Operation Barbie. Horse trading. State affair. Documentary by Bertrand Delais.
  • 2015: My name is Altmann. The second life of a war criminal. Documentary by Peter F. Müller & Michael Mueller (Scientific advice: Peter Hammerschmidt). A production by the Filmfabrik in coproduction with WDR / NDR / ARTE.

literature

  • Peter Hammerschmidt: Code name Adler - Klaus Barbie and the western secret services . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2014, ISBN 978-3-10-029610-8 .
  • Peter Hammerschmidt: The mere fact that V-43 118 was SS-Hauptsturmführer does not preclude using it as a source. The Federal Intelligence Service and its agent Klaus Barbie. In: Journal of History. (ZfG), Volume 59, 4/2011. Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2011, pp. 333–349. peterhammerschmidt.de
  • Walther Fekl: Affaires Barbie / Bousquet / Touvier / Papon . In: Bernhard Schmidt, Jürgen Doll, WF, Siegfried Loewe, Fritz Taubert (Eds.): France Lexicon. 2nd Edition. Erich Schmidt, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-503-06184-3 , p. 39 ff.
  • Horst J. Andel: Collaboration and Resistance . The Barbie case. Herbig, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-7766-1508-7 . (Ullstein, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-548-33199-8 )
  • Tom Bower: Klaus Barbie. Lyon, Augsburg, La Paz. Career of a Gestapo chief. Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-88022-295-9 . (First edition: Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons. Michael Joseph, London 1984, ISBN 0-7181-2327-1 )
  • Richard J. Golsan (Ed.): Memory, the Holocaust, and French Justice. The Bousquet and Touvier Affairs. Dartmouth College, University Press of New England. (engl.)
  • Eberhard Jäckel u. a. (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust: the persecution and murder of European Jews. Argon, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-87024-300-7 .
  • Erwin Nippert: The executioner of Lyon. In: Erwin Nippert: The mask of the art dealer. Events, facts, connections. Military Publishing House of the GDR, Berlin 1983. (extended edition 1985, ISBN 3-327-00830-2 ; pp. 75–121) (originally magazine reports with photos and documents)
  • Thomas Schnitzler: Klaus Barbie in Trier - on the trail of a Nazi war criminal career: with an appendix of autobiographical documents. In: New Trierisches Jahrbuch. 45 (2005), pp. 101-126.
  • Christopher Simpson: The American Boomerang. Nazi war criminals paid by the USA . Carl Ueberreuter, Vienna 1988.
  • Paul Dreyfus: The Resistance. History of the French Resistance. Heyne, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-453-48050-3 . (journalistic; the author says he spoke to Barbie in La Paz in 1976, content of the alleged conversation. pp. 90-102)

Documentation

Web links

Commons : Klaus Barbie  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Hammerschmidt: Code name Adler - Klaus Barbie and the western secret services. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2014, ISBN 978-3-10-029610-8 . P. 26 ff.
  2. ^ Tom Bower: Klaus Barbie. Lyon, Augsburg, La Paz. Career of a Gestapo chief. Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-88022-295-9 . First edition: Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons . Michael Joseph Ltd., London 1984, ISBN 0-7181-2327-1 .
  3. ↑ Karin Urselmann, The importance of the Barbie trial for the French coming to terms with the past , Volume 16 of Modern History and Politics, P. Lang 2000, p. 101
  4. ^ Heinz Höhne: The butcher of Lyon: Klaus Barbie and the French collaboration (II) . In: Der Spiegel . No. 20 , 1987, pp. 190-213 ( online ).
  5. ↑ Heinz Höhne: The butcher of Lyon . In: Der Spiegel . No. 21 , 1987 ( online ).
  6. ^ Tom Bower: Klaus Barbie - Lyon, Augsburg, La Paz. Career of a Gestapo chief . P. 69 ff.
  7. ^ Peter Hammerschmidt: Code name Adler. S. Fischer Verlag, 2014, ISBN 978-3-10-401826-3 , p. 33. Restricted preview in the Google book search
  8. ↑ Jörg Diehl: Nazi criminal Klaus Barbie: “I came to kill”. In: Spiegel Online . July 2, 2007, accessed January 3, 2015 .
  9. ↑ Joachim Riedl: The detective in the truth labyrinth . In: Der Spiegel . No. 14 , 1989 ( online ).
  10. ^ A b Tom Bower: Klaus Barbie - Lyon, Augsburg, La Paz. Career of a Gestapo chief. P. 124f
  11. ↑ Alexander Mikaberidze, Atrocities, Massacres, and War Crimes , ABC-CLIO 2013, p. 57
  12. ^ Gerhard Leo: Germans in the French Resistance - A Way to Europe ; in: Association of Germans in the Resistance, in the armed forces of the anti-Hitler coalition and the movement “Free Germany” e. V., DRAFD Information, August 1999, pp. 1-5.
  13. ↑ Article of the HNA
  14. ↑ BACM Research (ed.): Klaus Barbie: Department of Justice, Department of State, CIA, Counter Intelligence Corps Files. Publisher Paperless Archives, Beverly Hills CA 2008 (also online); as well as McCloy's protective role for Barbie
  15. ^ Ralph Blumenthal: Ex-Chief of Gestapo in Lyon is Linked to US Intelligence. In: nytimes.com. February 8, 1983, accessed January 3, 2015 .
  16. ^ US Department of Justice: Criminal Division: Klaus Barbie and the United States Government: A Report to the Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division, US Department of Justice . Washington 1983.
  17. ↑ On the role of the CIC in Austria see James V. Milano, Patrick Brogan: Soldiers, Spies, and the Rat Line: America's Undeclared War against the Soviets . Washington 1995.
  18. ↑ Klaus Barbie goes underground - EgoBlog - The Egoists. (No longer available online.) In: egoisten.de. August 10, 2010, archived from the original on December 21, 2014 ; Retrieved January 3, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.egoisten.de
  19. ↑ Peter Hammerschmidt: Code name Adler - Klaus Barbie and the western secret services. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2014, ISBN 978-3-10-029610-8 .
  20. ↑ Jürgen Bevers: The man behind Adenauer: Hans Globke's rise from Nazi lawyer to Eminence Gray of the Bonn Republic. Ch.links Verlag, 2009, p. 139.
  21. ↑ Peter Hammerschmidt: "The fact that V-43 118 was SS-Hauptsturmführer does not preclude using it as a source." The BND and its agent Klaus Barbie. In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft 59 (2011), no. 4, pp. 333–348 / Michael Eggert: Interview with Peter Hammerschmidt on the subject of Klaus Barbie ( memento of the original from October 5, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link became automatic used and not yet tested. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 177 kB) January 8, 2011 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.egoisten.de
  22. ↑ Harald Neuber: SS man Barbie worked for BND in Bolivia. In: amerika21.de. January 17, 2011, accessed January 3, 2015 .
  23. ↑ a b Georg Bönisch, Klaus Wiegrefe : Core German convictions . In: Der Spiegel . No. 3 , 2011 ( online ).
  24. ↑ Harald Neuber: "Coming to terms with the brown past is long overdue". In: Telepolis . January 18, 2011, accessed January 3, 2015 .
  25. ↑ Harald Neuber: Klaus Barbie supplied dictatorships with weapons. In: amerika21.de. January 22, 2011, accessed January 3, 2015 .
  26. ↑ Peter Hammerschmidt: "The fact that V-43 118 was SS-Hauptsturmführer does not preclude using it as a source." The BND and its agent Klaus Barbie. In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft , 59 (2011), no. 4, pp. 333–348.
  27. ↑ a b Representation in the film Die Hetzjagd , 2008
  28. ↑ Witness: I Set Up Barbie To Kill Him, in: Philly.com, May 21, 1987, accessed September 18, 2014
  29. ↑ Michel Goldberg: Namesake. Yale University Press, New Haven 1982 (English), Chapters 1–6 (French original edition: Ecorché Juif. Hachette, Paris 1980)
  30. ^ Brother Goldberg, executioner Barbie . In: Der Spiegel . No. 10 , 1983 ( online ).
  31. ^ Yossi Melman, Dan Raviv: Why the Mossad failed to capture or kill so many fugitive Nazis. washingtonpost.com, September 22, 2017
  32. ↑ Glenn P. Hastedt, Steven W. Guerrier: Spies, Wiretaps, and Secret Operations: AJ . ABC-CLIO 2010, p. 73: "Barbie collaborated with Italian terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie in support of Luis Garcia Meza Tejada's" Cocaine Coup ", overthrowing the democratically elected government and establishing a military regime on July 17, 1980."
  33. ↑ Willi Winkler: The shadow man. From Goebbels to Carlos: The Mysterious Life of François Genoud . Rowohlt, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-87134-626-2 .
  34. ↑ Klaus Barbie, 77, Lyons Gestapo Chief . In: The New York Times , September 26, 1991; Retrieved January 10, 2012.
personal data
SURNAME Barbie, Klaus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Barbie, Nicholas; Altmann, Klaus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS-Hauptsturmführer, head of the Gestapo in Lyon
DATE OF BIRTH October 25, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Godesberg
DATE OF DEATH September 25, 1991
Place of death Lyon