4 – Klaus Barbie
While Josef Mengele was known as the “Angel of Death”, he was far from the only Nazi with a nickname designed to inspire fear. “The Butcher of Lyon” was the epithet by which Klaus Barbie was known, a name earned by a brutal career at the head of the Gestapo in the French city. His reputation was built on a legacy of torture and murder, but his story goes further than that, with a post-war career that showed just how far sections of the victorious Allies were willing to go to gain an advantage in the nascent Cold War.
Klaus Barbie’s ascent in the Nazi Party was rapid. He was just 22 when he joined the SS and was immediately put to work in the intelligence agency of the organization, working in Dortmund and Düsseldorf to root out suspected social democrats and communists. When war began, he was transferred to the newly-conquered Netherlands, where he helped to round up Jews. As the march across Europe continued and Klaus Barbie found himself in charge of the Gestapo in Lyon at the age of just 29.
Lyon was at the time seen as a hotbed of the French resistance. Barbie’s methods in controlling the city were, even by Nazi standards, horrendous in their brutality. Children were starved and beaten, suspected resistance members – including Catholic priests – tortured with electroshocks and boiling water and women were raped, beaten and killed. He used a whole range of implements that he kept in his desk, from screwdrivers, blowtorches and whips to ammonia and even dogs. Jean Moulin, one of the heroes of the French Resistance, was tortured by having his hands broken and his nails removed with pokers before being beaten to death. Some historians believe that Barbie murdered Moulin personally.
With such a reputation, one would think that Barbie would have been high up the Allied wanted list. While he was captured, he was immediately moved to the US Army Counterintelligence Corps, who used his rabid hatred of communists to further their aims of destroying the Soviet influence in Europe. Despite being sentenced to death by a French court for war crimes, Barbie was indulged by the Americans and in 1951, smuggled along a ratline to Bolivia. It is unclear whether the Americans protected him because of what he knew – undercover agents in high positions within communist organizations in Europe – or because they wished to cover up ever having recruited him at all.
On arrival in South America, Barbie continued to live well. Under the alias of Klaus Altmann he was known within the higher echelons of Bolivian society and was suspected to have had involvement in the capture of Che Guevara in 1967. He was eventually extradited to Europe in 1983 and stood trial in France for crimes against humanity, largely based on his actions as Lyon gestapo head. He was acquitted of some of the charges – France had subsequently committed similar war crimes against Algerians and absolved their participants – but Barbie was convicted and died in prison in 1991.