Klaus Barbie
Klaus Barbie began working for the SS intelligence service in 1937 at the age of twenty-two. He would quickly rise up through its wartime ranks, serving in occupied Holland and France before taking a position as head of the Lyon Gestapo. In Lyon he pursued the French underground aggressively, using torture – which he personally administered – to extract confessions and information from suspected members of the Resistance. These gruesome interrogations, which usually involved beatings and sometimes more macabre techniques such as electrocution or skinning a prisoner alive, resulted in the arrest and eventual deal of 14,000 people and earned Barbie the moniker the “Butcher of Lyon.”
After the war Barbie did not go into hiding. Instead the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps, fearing a communist revolution in France, actively recruited him in order to take advantage of his knowledge of French communist rings. When the French government discovered that the United States was harboring Barbie they requested that he be turned over to them for execution. Fearing that Barbie might expose other German spies working for the United States, the Counterintelligence Corp put Barbie in contact with a “Ratline” which helped him escape to Bolivia.
Barbie’s covert activity did not end with his arrival in Bolivia. He established connections with the Bolivian army, helping them with arms deals and acting as a liaison between the government and prominent drug cartels, include that of Pablo Escobar. In 1967 he would collaborate with the CIA to track down Che Guevara, who was then leading a guerilla force in Bolivia.
The French government, aware of Barbie’s presence in Bolivia, had requested his extradition to France several times. Barbie, with his connections to the drug cartels and counterrevolutionary activity, was simply too valuable to the military dictatorship running Bolivia for them to simply turn him over. In 1983 that dictatorship collapsed and the new government gave in to French demands. He was indicted for war crimes the following year, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. He died of leukemia in 1991.