Klaus Barbie Biography

Of course I am proud of what I did during the war. If it hadn't been for me, France would be a Soviet Socialist Republic by now. -- Klaus Barbie during an interview in 1974 in La Paz, Bolivia

Nikolaus "Klaus" Barbie was born in the village of Bad Godesberg, a quiet town on the Rhine, on October 25, 1913. Barbie was born out of wedlock; his parents, Nikolaus Barbie and Anna Hees, both Catholic and both village school teachers, were not married until the following January. According to Barbie himself, his surname was derived from the French name Barbier; his forefathers were probably called Barbier, and they fled France as refugees during the reign of Louis XIV.

Until he was 11, Klaus Barbie attended the Noder school, where his father was a teacher. In class and at home, the elder Barbie, a veteran of the First World War, subjected his young son disciplinarian tirades, ones that Klaus Barbie admitted were detrimental to his own personality. The Barbie family had Klaus Barbie's father Barbie got his first taste of independence when he moved to Trier and entered the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium in the spring of 1923. The independence did not last long; the rest of the Barbie family moved to Trier in 1925 and Barbie had to live with his parents again. In school, Barbie was a mediocre or poor student in all fields except for languages. Barbie spoke German, French, and Spanish fleuntly and had a strong grasp of many other European languages; this skill would prove invaluable to him when terrorized Lyon and when he fled to Bolivia.

1933 was a watershed year for Klaus Barbie. That year Barbie's father and brother died. His father died of complications from a World War One bullet wound he had acquired (according to Barbie) in the battle of Verdun. Shortly thereafter, Barbie's younger brother died at age 18 of a heart condition. This double tragedy plunged Barbie and his mother into deep despair and ruined Barbie's fairly bourgeois aspirations of attending University and becoming some sort of professional. Barbie's already slipshod perfomance in school suffered and it took him several attempts to pass his degree exam, which he finally did in 1934 earning average marks.

After he earned his degree Barbie found himself broke and unemployed, but he was not living in an ordinary time, the Nazi Party had come to power in Germany.

As Barbie struggled with family loss and academic failure he found solace in the ideology and comraderie of the Nazi party. On April 2, 1933 Barbie joined the Hitler Youth and soon became enthralled by party ideology. Upon graduation from school, the unemployed Barbie fully devoted himself to the Party by volunteering for six months of hard labor at the Party's work camp of Schleswig-Holstein. It was at the labor camp that Barbie developed his Nazi fanaticism and his undying commitment to the Party.

For Barbie mere association with the Nazi Party was not enough; he wanted to fight. In 1934 he got his chance when he joing the German resistance movement in the French-occupied Rhineland. Although Barbie joined the Rhineland resistance for ideological reasons he found himself fighting for personal ones. Barbie blamed the French for his father's death and his own lost dreams, so he had developed a special hatred for the French, a hatred that would re-emerge in the form of his sadistic cruelties towards the French citizens of Lyon a decade later.

In 1935, after submitting to test for his racial and medical purity, Barbie joined Himmler's SS and shortly thereafter proved himself a zealous enough Nazi to became a member of the elite SD (Sicherheitsdienst) security service. Barbie's first assignment in the SD was as an investigator in Berlin; it was in Berlin that Barbie was trained as an investigator and interrogator. 1937 Berlin was, by the Nazis' standards, a very dirty city; it teemed with Jews, prostitutes, homosexuals, and the ordinary sorts criminals found in any large, economically depressed city. Barbie's SD unit had the task of "clensing Berlin" and Barbie soon specialized in undercover work. As an SD undercover agent, Barbie infiltrated whorehouses and homosexual nightclubs, an experience that left him a rabid misogynist and homophobe even forty years later.

Oddly, Barbie did not officially become a member of the NSDAP (Nazi party) until 1937 when he was automatically enrolled. By the end of that year, Barbie had determined to become a career SD officer and in September of that year was selected to attend the SD's exclusive leadership course in Berlin's Charlottenberg. In 1938, Barbie had to fulfill his obligatory military service and spent three months in an infantry regiment. Barbie, who was not a physically tough man, did not like the infantry service, nor did he enjoy the intense SS training which followed. Despite struggling with some of the physical aspects of his training, Barbie graduated on April 20, 1940 and was promoted SS Untersturmfuhrer (Second Lieutenant).

Five days after officially becoming an SS officer, Barbie married Regine Willis, a stocky 23-year-old daughter of a postal worker.

In 1940, Barbie traveled to the Hague to gather information about the Jewish "situation" in that city. Then he went to Amsterdam, where he was responsible for rounding up and deporting that city's Jewish population. In Amsterdam, Barbie earned a reputation for excessive brutality, even by the Gestapo's standards; he was awarded his first Iron Cross for bludgeoning to death an "enemy of the Reich" (actually a German-Jewish ice cream peddler) in full public view because the man refused salute him properly. Barbie was promoted after proved his adeptness in combating resistance cells and rooting out hidden Jews in Amsterdam.

When the Germans occupied Lyon in 1943, the city was a stronghold of the French Resistance and a hiding place for many fleeing the Nazis. The SS wanted to "clense" Lyon as quickly as possible and assigned Barbie to the task because they knew he would not flinch at killing large numbers of civilians. While other German units in southern France saw little action and were highly ineffective, Barbie's Section IV (Gestapo) deported thousands of Jews to the death camps and killed hundreds of French civilians suspected of aiding the Resistance. A dedicated sadist, Barbie would often pluck random civilians off the street and whisk them away to Hotel Terminus, his headquarters, and torture these hapless people until one of them revealed something interesting or he got bored.

Although responsible for many individual atrocities, including the capture and deportation to Auschwitz of forty-four Jewish children hidden in the village of Izieu, Barbie owed his postwar notoriety primarily to one of his "cases," the arrest, torture, and death of Jean Moulin, the highest ranking member of the French Resistance ever captured by the Nazis. For Moulin's death, Barbie was awarded, by Hitler himself, the "First Class Iron Cross with Swords." After the war Barbie often bragged that he had singlehandely halted the advance of communism in France when he killed Moulin, who had leftist political views.

Just before Lyon was liberated, Barbie fled to Germany and hid there until the war ended, at which point he vanished. Although Barbie had disappeared, the French goverment sentenced him to death in abstentia on two occassions.

Where did Barbie go? During the immediate postwar period (1945-1951) he was protected and employed by the American Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) because his "police skills" and anti-Communist zeal were a valuable asset in protecting Cold War West Germany. With the CIC's protection, Barbie, together with his wife and children, escaped to Latin America, where he enjoyed a long and prosperous career. Barbie eventually established residence in Bolivia, where he obtained citizenship in 1957. He lived there several years under the alias Klaus Altmann, working primarily as an interrogator and torturer for dictatorships both in Peru and in Bolivia. He helped the Luis Garcia Meza narco-coup in Bolivia in 1980. Between stints in the Bolivian police Barbie and his family enjoyed long vacations, including one to Paris in the 1960s.

Meanwhile, the "Butcher of Lyon" was a wanted man in France; he was responsible for the torture and death of more than 26,000 people, among them French Resistance leader Jean Moulin.

In 1971 Barbie was positively identified by Serge and Beatte Klarsfeld (a husband-wife team of Nazi hunters) but the rightist Bolivian goverment refused to extradite Barbie on the grounds that he was technically a Bolivian citizen. The real reason that the Bolivian goverment refused to give Barbie to France immediately was that they hoped to get something in exchange for their fugitive. Meanwhile the conservative French goverment of the 1970s had enough Vichy collaborators in its ranks to want to avoid having Barbie back in France pointing his finger at ministers and declaring, "Hey, I know that guy, he helped me during the war." It was only in 1983 that Barbie, left unprotected by the rise of a moderate leftist government in Bolivia and the ascension of the leftist Mitterand administration in France, was deported to France. Even then, France paid a high price for Barbie; surely it is not a coincidence that just three days after Barbie arrived back in France, the French sent a cargo plane loaded with weapons and cash to La Paz.

In 1987, he was tried in Lyon and sentenced to life imprisonment for his crimes against humanity. Barbie died of cancer in prison in 1991.

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