BARBIE, KLAUS (1913–1991)

German Nazi leader.

The son of village schoolteachers, Klaus Barbie was born in Bad Godesberg, Germany, on 25 October 1913. He joined the Nazi youth group in April 1933. A mediocre student, he afterward devoted himself to militant activity. He joined the Schutzstaffel (SS) in September 1935 and was soon appointed to the central department of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the intelligence arm of the SS. Working in Berlin, he had the opportunity to develop his skills as an investigator at the expense of Jews, homosexuals, prostitutes, and other "criminals."

In May 1937 Barbie joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP), and, after various training and military instruction, he was promoted to the rank of Untersturmführer SS (second lieutenant) on 20 April 1940. Sent to Amsterdam, he hunted Jews and resistance fighters with such brutality and efficiency that he was awarded an Iron Cross.

At the end of May 1942, Barbie, now Obersturmführer (first lieutenant), was assigned to head the intelligence service on the Franco-Swiss border. After the Nazis occupied southern France on 11 November 1942, Barbie became chief of section IV of the Sipo-SD, the combined wartime Nazi security force. From his headquarters in the Hotel Terminus in Lyon, he organized the repression and attempted to shut down the Resistance. Known as "the butcher of Lyon" for his ferocity during interrogations, he conducted a merciless campaign not only against the Resistance but also against men who tried to evade the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO), the forced labor service, and against Jews. The arrest of the Resistance leader Jean Moulin in Caluire on 21 June 1943 was an operation that brought Barbie a First Class Cross with Swords from Hitler's own hands. Barbie also directed the raid on 6 April 1944 on the Children's Home in Izieu, about 80 kilometers from Lyon, where forty-four Jewish children, ages three to thirteen, were being sheltered. Interned first at Drancy, they were subsequently deported to Auschwitz, where all were exterminated. Barbie terrorized the region during the summer of 1944 by ordering numerous executions.

On 27 August 1944, two weeks after deporting a final convoy of several hundred Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of Lyon, Barbie, who now held the rank of captain or Hauptsturmführer, returned to Germany. In the early postwar period, from 1945 to 1951, he was protected by the United States Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), which valued him for his fanatic anticommunism and intelligence-gathering skills. The CIC subsequently helped Barbie resettle in Bolivia with his family. There, under the name Klaus Altmann, he led a comfortable life as a businessman while also playing an active role as secret police officer on behalf of that country's military regimes. In 1957 he became a Bolivian citizen.

Meanwhile, Barbie had been sentenced to death in absentia in May 1947 in France, and a military tribunal passed the same judgment in 1954. But Bolivian politics did not favor extradition, and only in February 1983 was Barbie, who had been identified in 1971 by the French lawyer and Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld (b. 1935) and his wife Beate (b. 1939), brought back to France.

On 4 July 1987 Barbie was sentenced to life in prison without parole for crimes against humanity after a two-month trial in the Rhône Court of Assizes. The trial became the first of three—Paul Touvier's in 1992 and Maurice Papon's in 1997–1998 were the others—that fueled a passionate judicial debate on the definition of "crimes against humanity," the only crime, by French law decided 6 December 1964, that carried no statute of limitations. On 20 December 1985 the Court of Appeals, asked to rule, chose to include "war crimes" in the definition of crimes against humanity, to avoid distinguishing two classes of victims, Resistance fighters and Jews. Barbie was judged as a Nazi occupier. His superiors, the SS general Carl-Albrecht Oberg, chief of the SD in France, and his assistant Helmut Knochen, had been sentenced to death in France in 1954, but in 1958 their sentences had been reduced to life in prison without parole, and in 1961 they had been discreetly freed by the president Charles de Gaulle. But by the 1980s times had changed. Barbie's trial provoked great media attention in France and sparked new interest in the "black years" of the occupation. The defense lawyer Jacques Vergès attempted to turn the tables by calling attention to colonial crimes perpetrated by the French government. But the trial also gave many of Barbie's victims the opportunity to testify and to describe the terrifying and sadistic tortures that were his speciality. Barbie died of cancer in prison on 25 September 1991.

See alsoCollaboration; France; Gestapo; Nazism; Resistance; War Crimes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Finkielkraut, Alain. Remembering in Vain: The Klaus Barbie Trial and Crimes against Humanity. Translated from French by Roxanne Lapidus with Sima Godfrey. Introduction by Alice Y. Kaplan. New York, 1992.

Jean, Jean-Paul, and Denis Salas, eds. Barbie, Touvier, Papon: Des procès pour la mémoire. Paris, 2002.

Morgan, Ted. An Uncertain Hour: The French, the Germans, the Jews, the Barbie Trial, and the City of Lyon, 1940–1945. New York, 1990.

Truche, Pierre. "Le crime contre l'humanité." Les Cahiers de la Shoah 1 (1994).

RenÉe Poznanski