After the second world war many high-ranking Nazis fled to South America. Among them was the head of the Gestapo in the French city of Lyon, a man responsible for the deportation of Jews to the death camp at Auschwitz and the torture of members of the French Resistance. Hiding in Bolivia, Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, changed his name to Klaus Altmann and made himself helpful to drug lords and dictators alike. Bolivian journalist Gustavo Sanchez explains what happened when he tracked Barbie down in 1983
Wed 10 Sep 2008 04.00 EDT
For decades here in Bolivia we had an infamous tradition of ruthless dictators. In the early 70s General Hugo Banzer siezed power. He turned to the ex-Nazi Klaus Barbie to help him with the repression. It was not the first time that Barbie, a war criminal wanted by the French and German authorities, had mingled with hardliners. Here in Bolivia he used to do big business with the drug lords. He had his own team of assassins, some from Italy and others from Argentina, called the Grooms of Death. He also sold them weapons.
American intelligence officials helped Barbie to become established in Bolivia as part of their crusade against communism. He acted as a sort of counter-intelligence official. Under the alias of Klaus Altmann he worked primarily as an interrogator and torturer. He also helped in the same way in Peru. He did the same things here as in Germany and France. For him the word communist meant "dead". Many Bolivians died during that dictatorship; one that was prolonged for more than 10 years. Barbie was in charge of the murders of many Bolivian citizens, including priests and members of the opposition.
So some of us felt that we had to do something about it. But in 1980, after General Banzer, an even bloodier dictator, Luis García Meza, rose to power in what was called the narco, or cocaine, coup. Barbie was a key aide then. He was the main ideologue of that coup; he organised absolutely everything. He was even given the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Bolivian armed forces, and was then able to move around with total impunity. Today Bolivians know all about Barbie, but for a long time many even doubted that such a criminal could be here.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/sep/10/bolivia-germany
This article links the following article:
Klaus Barbie: women testify of torture at his hands
from the Saturday, March 23, 1987 issue of The Philadelphia Inquirer
LYON, France--In 1944, when she was 13, Simone Lagrange testified yesterday, Klaus Barbie gave her a smile as thin as a knife blade, then hit her in the face as he cuddled a cat at the Gestapo headquarters in Lyon.
Lise Lesevre, 86, said Barbie tortured her for nine days in 1944, beating her, nearly drowning her in a bathtub and finally breaking one of her vertebrae with a spiked ball.
Ennat Leger, now 92, said Barbie "had the eyes of a monster. He was savage. My God, he was savage! It was unimaginable. He broke my teeth, he pulled my hair back. He put a bottle in my mouth and pushed it until the lips split from the pressure."
The three women were among seven people who took the witness stand yesterday to testify against Barbie, the former head of the Gestapo in [Paris] during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II.
Barbie, 73, is on trial in Lyon, accused of torturing Jews and members of the French Resistance and deporting them to Nazi death camps.
But he did not hear their testimony because he has refused to attend the courtroom sessions since the second day of the trial, as he may do under French law.
He has, however, denied the accusations against him and has contended that his 1983 extradition from Bolivia to France was illegal.
Several of the seven witnesses yesterday sobbed as they told of arrest, torture, rail convoys to the Drancy collection center near Paris and on to concentration camps.
They depicted Barbie as a harsh, sadistic officer ready to resort to any cruelty to extract information.
More:
https://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/barbie.html
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