After the German
conquest and
occupation of the Netherlands, Barbie was assigned to Amsterdam. He had been pre-assigned to
Adolf Eichmann's Amt (Department) IV/B-4. This department was responsible for the identification, roundup, and deportation of Dutch Communists, Jews and
Freemasons. On 11 October 1940, Barbie arrested ,
Grand Master of the
Grand Orient of the Netherlands. In March 1941, van Tongeren was transported to
Sachsenhausen concentration camp where, in freezing conditions, he died two weeks later. On 1 April, Barbie summoned van Tongeren's daughter, Charlotte, to SD headquarters and informed her that her father had died of an infection in both ears and had been cremated. In 1942, he was sent to
Dijon, in the
Occupied Zone of France. In November of the same year, at the age of 29, he was assigned to Lyon as the head of the local
Gestapo. He established his headquarters at the
Hôtel Terminus in Lyon, where he personally tortured adult and child prisoners. He became known as the "Butcher of Lyon". The daughter of a
French Resistance leader based in Lyon said her father was beaten and his skin torn, and that his head was immersed in buckets of ammonia and cold water; he could not sit or stand and died three days later from burns to his skin. It has been estimated that Barbie was directly responsible for the deportation of up to 14,000 Jews and resistance fighters, personally participating in roundups such as the
Rue Sainte-Catherine Roundup, which saw 84 people arrested in a single day. He arrested
Jean Moulin, a high-ranking member of the
French Resistance and his most prominent captive. In 1943, he was awarded the
Iron Cross (First Class) by
Adolf Hitler for his campaign against the French Resistance and the capture of Moulin. In April 1944, Barbie ordered the
deportation to
Auschwitz of a group of 44 Jewish children from an orphanage at
Izieu. He then rejoined the
SiPo-SD of Lyon in its retreat to
Bruyères, where he led an anti-partisan attack in
Rehaupal in September 1944.
US intelligence work in post-War Europe In 1947, Barbie was recruited as an agent for the 66th Detachment of the
US Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) along with a Serbian agent of the
Belgrade special police and SD, Radislav Grujičić. The US used Barbie and other Nazi Party members to further
anti-communist efforts in Europe. Specifically, they were interested in British interrogation techniques which Barbie had experienced firsthand, as well as the identities of former SS officers
British intelligence agencies might be interested in recruiting. Later, the CIC housed him in a hotel in
Memmingen; he reported on French intelligence activities in the
French zone of occupied Germany because they suspected that the French had been infiltrated by the
KGB and
GPU. The US Department of Justice report to the US Senate in 1983 opens with the summary paragraph: As the investigation of Klaus Barbie has shown, officers of the United States government were directly responsible for protecting a person wanted by the government of France on criminal charges and in arranging his escape from the law. As a direct result of that action, Klaus Barbie did not stand trial in France in 1950; he spent 33 years as a free man and a fugitive from justice. The French discovered that Barbie was in U.S. hands; having sentenced him to death
in absentia for
war crimes, they made a plea to
John J. McCloy,
US High Commissioner for Germany, to hand him over for execution, but McCloy refused. as well as by Croatian Roman Catholic clergy, including
Krunoslav Draganović. The CIC asserted that Barbie knew too much about the network of German spies the CIC had planted in various European communist organisations. It was suspicious of communist influence within the Government of France, but their protection of Barbie may have been as much to avoid the embarrassment of having recruited him in the first place. In 1965, Barbie was recruited by the West German foreign intelligence agency
Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), under the codename and the registration number V-43118. His initial monthly salary of 500
Deutsche Marks was transferred in May 1966 to an account of the
Chartered Bank of London in
San Francisco. During his time with the BND, Barbie made at least 35 reports to the BND headquarters in
Pullach.
Bolivia Barbie emigrated to Bolivia in 1951, where he lived well for 30 years in
Cochabamba, under the alias Klaus Altmann. It was easier and less embarrassing for him to find employment there than in Europe; he enjoyed excellent relations with high-ranking Bolivian officials, including Bolivian dictators
Hugo Banzer and
Luis García Meza. "Altmann" was known for his
German nationalist and
anti-communist stances. While engaged in arms-trade operations in Bolivia, he was appointed to the rank of lieutenant colonel within the
Bolivian Armed Forces. Barbie collaborated with
René Barrientos's regime, including teaching the general's private paramilitaries named "Furmont" how torture can best be used. The regime's political repression against leftist groups was helped by Barbie's knowledge about intelligence work, torture and interrogations. In 1972 under General Banzer (with whom Barbie collaborated even more openly), he assisted in illegal arrests, interrogations and murders of opposition and progressive groups. Journalists and activists who wrote or spoke about the regime's crimes against human rights were arrested and many fell victim to so-called "
disappearances", the state's secret murders and abductions of leftists. Barbie actively participated in the regime's oppression of opponents. Barbie was strongly linked to the neo-Nazi paramilitary member Álvaro de Castro, who was his personally hired bodyguard and the two participated in criminal actions and businesses together. De Castro had connections with powerful drug barons and the illegal drug trade and, together with Barbie (under the name Altmann) and an Austrian company, sold weapons to the drug cartels. When De Castro was arrested he admitted in interviews that he had earlier worked for drug lords in the country. Other sources say Barbie most likely also had connections with these organizations. Initially, he worked for
Roberto Suárez Gómez who eventually introduced him to Colombian traffickers. Barbie met with
Pablo Escobar and several other high ranking members of the
Medellín cartel in the late 1970s, and agreed to arrange for security of Escobar's
raw coca supply, from its cultivation until it reached processing plants in Colombia. In exchange, Escobar agreed to fund Barbie's anti-communist activities. De Castro continued to correspond with Barbie when Barbie was later under arrest. During an interview for the 2007 documentary film ''
My Enemy's Enemy'', journalist Kai Hermann told the film-makers that Barbie constantly "boasted that it was he who devised the strategy for murdering Che Guevara". People who met Barbie during his time in Bolivia have said that he was a firm and fanatical believer in the
Nazi ideology and an
anti-Semite. Barbie and De Castro reportedly talked about the cases and searches for
Josef Mengele and
Adolf Eichmann, whom Barbie supported and wanted to assist in remaining on the run.
Manhunt Barbie was identified as being in
Peru in 1971 by
Serge and
Beate Klarsfeld (
Nazi hunters from France), who came across a secret document that revealed his alias. Barbie was living at Malecon 200, Chaclacayo () a property owned by SS-
Sturmbannführer Friedrich Schwend. On 19 January 1972, this information was published in the French newspaper ''
L'Aurore'', along with a photograph of Altmann which the Klarsfelds obtained from a German expatriate living in Lima, Peru. There, Barbie provided security services to the
junta of General
Juan Velasco Alvarado following the
military coup of 3 October 1968, including surveillance of the
U.S. diplomatic mission led by John Irwin in March 1969. Led by
Beate Klarsfeld, French journalist
Ladislas de Hoyos and cameraman Christian van Ryswyck flew to La Paz in January 1972 in order to find and interview Barbie posing as his alias, Klaus Altmann. The interview took place on 3 February 1972 in the Department of the Interior building and the following day in prison, where Barbie was placed under protection by the Bolivian authorities. Barbie told de Hoyos that he did not know French and agreed to take questions in German or Spanish. Part way through the interview, de Hoyos asked him in French whether he had ever been to Lyon; Barbie quickly responded in German that he had not. De Hoyos then handed him photographs of Resistance members he had tortured, asking if he recognized them. He denied this as well, unaware that the question was a ruse to get his fingerprints. Upon finishing the interview, with Barbie's Bolivian minders clearly annoyed, de Hoyos took his film and the photographs directly to the French embassy for shipment in a
diplomatic bag. When the interview was later broadcast on
Antenne 2, Resistance member Simone Lagrange recognized Barbie, who had tortured him in 1944. The testimony of Italian insurgent
Stefano Delle Chiaie before the Italian Parliamentary Commission on Terrorism suggests that Barbie took part in the 1980 "
cocaine coup" that saw
Luis García Meza's regime, backed by drug lord
Roberto Suárez Gómez, force its way to power in Bolivia. ==Extradition, trial, and death==