By Claudia Levy
September 26, 1991
Klaus Barbie, 77, the former Gestapo official who evaded justice for four decades before being condemned to life in prison four years ago for crimes against humanity, has died of cancer in a prison hospital in Lyon, French officials announced yesterday. The announcement did not give the date of his death.
Known as "the Butcher of Lyon" for his hand in the torture, deportations and deaths of 4,000 Jews and Resistance fighters during World War II, the former German intelligence chief in Lyon was twice given the death sentence in absentia by French courts.
. . .
Barbie, quoted by the German magazine Stern in 1979 as saying, "I regret each Jew I did not kill," was accused of ordering the execution of more than 4,000 people and the deportation of 7,000 French Jews to concentration camps from 1942 to 1944. Barbie also was described by eyewitnesses as having savagely beaten the leader of the French Resistance, Jean Moulin, before sending him off on a death train to Germany. Others said Barbie tortured and beheaded victims.
. . .
He was the first person tried under a French law stating that Nazi officers and soldiers responsible for abominable crimes "should be pursued to the ends of the earth . . . . " Barbie said in court that he had acted as any German officer would have in wartime.
The prosecutors took pains to establish Barbie's personal responsibility for the specific crimes, with maimed, disfigured witnesses testifying to torture at his hands day after day. The names of all the Jewish children shipped to Auschwitz were read. Barbie, his head bowed, listened to the litany with his face pale and his features set.
. . .
After settling in Bolivia, he opened a sawmill, and later began advising Bolivian military officials and extremists in Argentina. A former Bolivian official testified at his 1987 trial that Barbie founded a rightist death squad, consorted with drug traffickers and helped right-wing leaders get intelligence and arms while in Bolivia. His cover was blown after the Klarsfelds circulated his picture to newspapers around the world.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1991/09/26/war-criminal-klaus-barbie-dies/c4556c51-6844-491a-8a4d-8ec8ca66fc49/
. . .
- click on link below for illustration of Barbie at the site of one of his favorite jobs -
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/W/MEDIAX_792452-T2/images/I/81Zelhn6yUL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg
Bolivian President, Hugo Banzer,
extreme racist ruler who needed
Klaus Barbie's services for his own
success, and control of the vast
majority of Bolivian Native Americans.
Barbie, surrounded by some of his fond admirers
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