by Bower, Tom
Mitterrand cautioned Debray about the need for utmost secrecy, not only to avoid alarming Barbie, but also to protect the government in the event of failure. Both men knew that success depended on a sensitive approach and on delicate negotiations with both West Germany and Bolivia. The West Germans had to be consulted because, since 1975, they were empowered to prosecute Germans who had committed war crimes in France. President Zuazo had to be convinced that he should accept Germany’s recent request for Barbie’s extradition. There was no doubt in the President’s mind that Bonn would be agreeable, and France, which had always prided itself on its special understanding of Latin America, could help diplomatically.
Not all the news from La Paz in early November was encouraging. Barbie was reported suddenly to have disappeared, probably to another country. Paraguay, the reputed refuge of Josef Mengele, the infamous Auschwitz ‘doctor’, was mentioned as his likeliest destination. The Elysée was not deterred. Common sense dictated that even Nazi murderers do not abandon their dying wives. Quietly, the operation was launched. Only a handful of ministers and officials with a ‘need-to-know’ were to be alerted and included in the special team which was to be masterminded by Jean Louis Bianco, the head of the President’s personal staff. Others in the select group were the Foreign Minister, Claude Cheysson, a courageous Resistance veteran, and the Minister of Justice, Robert Badinter, whose father had been arrested in Lyons by Barbie personally in 1943, and had never returned from Auschwitz.
The first to leave for Bolivia was Antoine Blanca, France’s roving ambassador on the continent. When he arrived at the end of November, his access to Zuazo was guaranteed: the French ambassador in La Paz, Raymond Césaire, had given the Bolivian President sanctuary when his life was in danger during a coup in 1980. Blanca was immediately assured of Zuazo’s sympathy but cautioned that there were many problems. Zuazo’s reaction was telexed to the Elysée.
In Lyons, a town covered with plaques and statues commemorating the victims of Barbie’s reign of terror, Christian Riss, a thirty-six-year-old examining magistrate, had been slowly sifting through the Barbie files since February. Serge Klarsfeld had discovered, to his astonishment, in late 1981, that, because of bureaucratic incompetence, there were neither charges nor a warrant outstanding against Barbie in France. As the Elysée prepared its Barbie operation, Robert Badinter advised Riss to find, discreetly but urgently, a list of new charges and formally issue a warrant for Barbie’s arrest.
At the beginning of December, the French ambassador in Bonn called at the West German Foreign Ministry. After briefing senior officials about the French government’s assessment of the new situation in Zuazo’s Bolivia, and of its strong interest in securing Barbie’s extradition, he asked the German government to press their case immediately in La Paz. Neither he nor his government in Paris was prepared for the reply. With the authority of Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the Foreign Minister, the German officials explained that, although they had requested Barbie’s extradition, Germany felt distinctly lukewarm about his return and a trial. According to one of the French ministers, ‘When we heard the news from Bonn, we were very surprised, but when Zuazo heard about it in Bolivia, he was stunned and embarrassed. He wanted to get rid of Barbie; but it was a new, democratic government, and he wanted it done legally. Unless the Germans changed their minds, it was going to be very difficult.’
Barbie had just celebrated his sixty-ninth birthday. If he was brought back to Europe, the worst he could expect was life imprisonment. Germany had abolished the death penalty after the war and President Mitterrand’s own government had just passed the unpopular legislation dismantling the guillotine. When Barbie finally returned, outraged, to Europe, he protested not at his unjust imprisonment but at his illegal expulsion from Bolivia. After nearly fifty years of serving tyranny, the outlaw was criticising democratic governments for failing to obey the letter of international law.
THE NAZI
Nikolaus ‘Klaus’ Barbie was born on 25 October 1913 in Bad Godesberg, a small quiet town next to the Rhine, just south of Bonn. Although both his parents were Catholic, they did not marry until three months after his birth. The ceremony was held in Merzig, in the Saar, where the Barbie family had lived since the French Revolution. According to Barbie himself, his forefathers were probably called Barbier, and left France as refugees during the reign of Louis XIV.
His father, also called Nikolaus, was first an office worker and later a primary school teacher at the Noder school where Barbie himself was a pupil until the age of eleven; he died in 1933, aged forty-five, the late victim of a First World War bullet wound. Barbie claimed that his father was wounded at Verdun and, in anger at French occupation of the Rhineland, had joined the German resistance movement. Naturally, he claimed that his father’s activities were, unlike those of the French Resistance, both legal and justified. That occupation undoubtedly coloured his feelings about the French. Those who knew Barbie after the war say that he was very fond of his mother, Anna Hees. Her second son had died at eighteen, of a heart disease, and she was proud of her surviving son’s distinction although probably quite ignorant of his activities.
Barbie’s relations with his father were very strained. A heavy drinker, whose developing illness was sharply cutting into his income, his father increasingly subjected his young son to disciplinarian tirades which Barbie himself admits had a very detrimental effect on his whole life and personality. It was therefore a considerable relief when, in 1923, Barbie moved away from his family to the Friedrich-Wilhelm grammar school in Trier, initially as a boarder. ‘I was finally independent,’ is how he described his feelings in a revelatory essay written when he left in 1934. He felt liberated from the pressure of being the schoolteacher’s son: ‘It was a major aspect of my education.’ In 1925, however, the whole family moved to Trier. Once again, ‘I had to live with my mother and father. I was happy, but I was also disappointed.’ He clearly felt the effects of his unhappy home life: ‘The terrible hardships which I suffered during [those years] will be my secret forever, and have repercussions on my future … Those years made me a wise man, teaching me how bitter life can be, and how terrible destiny.’
In 1933, both his father and brother died. The Barbie family was plunged into depression and tumult at the very moment that Adolf Hitler became Germany’s Chancellor. The deaths were ‘a terrible blow for my mother and myself,’ wrote Barbie. ‘I must say that destiny, through the death of my father, has completely destroyed my most cherished hopes.’ After several attempts, Barbie finally passed his graduation exams in 1934, but with just average marks. ‘This year’s events,’ he wrote, ‘have left me restless. Like every other true German, I am attracted by the powerful national movement, and today I serve alongside all the others who follow the Führer.’
By this time, Hitler had been Chancellor for more than a year. All the alternative political ideologies had been radically suppressed. German schoolchildren had become the victims of relentless indoctrination, resisted only by those whose parents were outright opponents of the Nazis. Even then they usually had to join the Hitler Youth movement. Only those who emigrated were spared. Barbie was by then twenty. Too old for the excuse of political naivety, he positively discriminated in favour of Nazism, and was not only a member of the Hitler Youth movement but also the personal assistant of the local Party leader.
University was barred to him after graduation. With his father’s death the family had no money to finance further studies. Unemployed and without the prospect of a secure professional career, he went instead for six months to a Nazi Party voluntary work camp in Schleswig-Holstein. Willingly enthralled by the intense ideological atmosphere, he emerged a fully committed supporter of the Third Reich. He relished the life-style, comradeship and self-importance that attachment to the Party gave. As he admitted forty years later in Bolivia, he became a life-long Nazi dedicated to Hitler and German supremacy, and learnt a violent contempt for those who failed the racial and moral tests which the SS
state immortalised.
On 26 September 1935, after submitting to tests for his racial and medical purity, Barbie joined the SS. Member no. 272,284, he was destined for the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), that elite corps within the SS whose life was devoted to enforcing Nazi ideology and protecting the Party. Very few emerged from that training course as anything less than resolute Nazis.
It was during those early days of the SS that Barbie says he saw Himmler and Heydrich close up. In 1979, Barbie met Himmler’s adjutant General Karl Wolff in Bolivia and for one week reminisced about his life: ‘I once played handball with Himmler in the headquarters courtyard. He seemed very stiff, shy but very polite. One could have a normal conversation with him. He knew how to command respect. Heydrich was the intellectual. Very different.’ After he left Berlin, Barbie saw neither of his chiefs again.
His first attachment was in Berlin, as an assistant in department IV-D of the SD main office. Within weeks he was posted to police headquarters in Alexanderplatz to start that training as an investigator and interrogator which was to be so admired and exploited by different governments over the next forty-five years. After a few weeks’ attachment to the murder squad, he was transferred to the vice squad, headed, as Barbie affectionately remembered him, by ‘Uncle Karl’. It was Barbie’s first taste of power, and it left a memorably strong impression.
Berlin at this time was corrupt, corpulent, seedy, debauched and overwhelmingly decadent. As it struggled to survive the approaching inferno, the capital was a wonderland for the self-appointed morality police, and a revelation for the schoolteacher’s son. Every night, ‘Uncle Karl’ took his team out to raid bars, brothels and nightclubs:
One evening, Uncle Karl, who knew every pimp in the city said, ‘OK, lads, tonight we’re going to raid the Usambara bar.’ I’ve never experienced anything like it in my life again. We sat around the bar in plain clothes. At three in the morning, all the whores from the Friedrichstrasse and Puttkamerstrasse came in with their pimps to settle the night’s accounts. I had never seen such rows or heard such language. And then the unbelievable fights which started when the pimps began to hit the whores. It was a bizarre dream show. In the middle of it, Uncle Karl went outside and called up the blue police maria, and everyone was arrested and carted off.
On other nights, Barbie would play the innocent punter looking for a prostitute: ‘They would say to me, “Come on, titch. Two marks for a moll.” Once inside, I’d pull out my ID card and shout, “Criminal police.”’ Just reliving those moments forty years later reduced Barbie to tears of laughter. ‘I’d arrest them. They had to serve special punishment when the Olympics were on, and they didn’t like it. Nebe, the police chief, ordered them all to peel potatoes for the sportsmen. He called it, “Peeling for the Fatherland.”’
When he was not pursuing whores, Barbie was already persecuting Jews, especially those involved in the fur trade, or homosexuals. He remembers with relish an assignment with an SD squad after his transfer to Düsseldorf in 1936. Their destination was an unique homosexual club. As usual, they entered the club in disguise and sat around waiting until the chief stood up and all the men realised they were caught in a raid. Barbie was staggered by what followed. Each homosexual admitted to being a senior officer in the Nazi Party, the Hitler Youth movement, or even the SS. To Barbie’s approval, their punishment was swift and severe. All of them were physically beaten by Barbie and the other SD officers, and then jailed. ‘If I think of all those homosexuals in Germany today,’ said Barbie forty years later, ‘I think I’d hand my German passport back, if I had one.’
By the end of 1938, Barbie’s career in the security services was assured. When Party membership lists were reopened in 1937, he automatically joined, as member no. 4,583,085. In the same year he passed through the SD school at Bernau and was sent to the exclusive leadership course in Berlin’s Charlottenburg. For those chosen few, military service was a mere formality. For three months, from September 1938, he served with the 39th Infantry Regiment, before returning to Charlottenburg for his final training and exams. The first test was boxing, an experience he never forgot. His opponent was a full 30 cms taller. ‘He beat me so hard that I was sick everywhere. But I had to quickly pull myself together and do a leapfrog over eight men, and I was still feeling sick.’ He was, by his own account, not a physically tough man. On 20 April 1940, he graduated and was promoted to SS Untersturmführer (Second Lieutenant).
Five days later, he was married. The bride was Regine Willms, a stocky twenty-three-year-old daughter of a postal worker from Osburg. She had left school early, trained as a cook and then worked as a maid in Berlin. In 1937 she joined the Party and began working in Düsseldorf in a Nazi Women’s Association children’s nursery. When they met, Barbie did not have a permanent home. Unusually for the times, he moved into her apartment before they were married.
Within days of the ceremony, Barbie rejoined his SD detachment and was thrown into von Rundstedt’s two-million-strong army invading the Low Countries and France. At this time Barbie was not a member of the Gestapo, which was section IV in the SD, but was assigned to section VI, intelligence. According to Barbie, his unit got as far as the outskirts of Dunkirk, arriving some time after the last British soldiers had scurried for survival across the Channel. With the port overcrowded, the unit was ordered back to the Hague in Holland, to await ‘Operation Sealion’, the invasion of Britain. Two weeks later, in early May, the channel crossing was postponed. Barbie’s unit was put under the direct command of Willy Lages, the SD commander in the Hague, and then shortly afterwards transferred to the Zentralstelle in Amsterdam, the ‘Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration’. His responsibilities included rounding up German emigrés, freemasons and Jews.
Holland’s 140,000 Jews proved to be the most vulnerable Jewish community in Europe. Sixty per cent were concentrated in Amsterdam and after the occupation found it extremely difficult to leave the country. Only 30,000 were to survive the war. Educated and comparatively wealthy, in 1940 they were already well aware of Nazi policy towards the Jews. More than in any other European country, the Dutch Jews actually understood the full implications of the German promises to deal with the Jews. But with considerable subtlety, the Zentralstelle moved quickly to dampen those fears and gave assurances which Jewish leaders enthusiastically accepted. It was only a temporary lull; some were not deceived and there was a rash of suicides.
Barbie was at the forefront of these activities, excited by the responsibility but even more excited by the licence to manipulate and deceive. The first personal report written about him in October 1940 reflected his flair: sent from Holland to his commanding officer in Germany, it said that he had ‘thrown himself energetically and intensively into SD work’. According to his commanding officer, Barbie was a ‘disciplined, hardworking, friendly and honest officer, a faultless comrade, who was excellent at his work and an honour to the SS’. A month later, his hard work and loyalty was rewarded and he was promoted to Obersturmführer (First Lieutenant).
The Germans imposed the first of a series of discriminatory measures against the Dutch Jews in October. Jewish businesses were subjected to compulsory purchase for trivial compensation, and Jews were summarily dismissed from state employment. Soon after Christmas, anti-semitism escalated from bureaucratic harrassment to physical assault. Acting on the orders of the Zentralstelle, organised groups of Dutch Nazis began attacking Jews on the streets in Amsterdam. It followed the by then customary pattern which had been established in other European cities – humiliation followed by beatings. There was outrage, but little more. In February, the Zentralstelle ordered Dutch paramilitaries to increase the pressure.
Groups of uniformed Dutch stormtroopers began attacking Jewish homes and businesses. To their utter surprise, instead of cowed submission they met with fierce resistance. Not only did the Jews protect themselves, but non-Jews joined in the fight. The glorious defence was short-lived, but during a running battle, a stormtrooper was wounded and died.
On 12 February 1941, the German command used his death as a pretext to seal off Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter. Barbie and the SS were mobilised. Early that morning, all but one of the bridges across the canals were raised; the SS had effectively created a Jewish ghetto. ‘Three hard weeks followed,’ is how Barbie remembers the ‘raging’ battle, as the Germans and Dutch paramilitaries rampaged along the canals and through the narrow streets. ‘The Jews were upstairs in their houses, and we were in the streets.’ The intense fighting lasted for just two days and the unrest for two weeks, but the climax for Barbie occurred on 19 February, in the south of the city.
Two Jewish refugees from Germany, Cahn and Kohn, had opened a popular ice-cream parlour called Koko. Using improvised weapons and with the help of friends, they had beaten off several attacks in previous days. Their ebullient confidence and evident self-satisfaction was enough to provoke a counter-attack. Barbie and his team arrived at the parlour with strict orders, on Barbie’s own admission, only to arrest the Jews, and not to harm them. With the brazen initiative which was to characterise all his exploits throughout the war, Barbie led the charge.
As the first man to burst through the barricaded door, he threw a bicycle into the doorway to prevent anyone barring it behind him. As he turned, one of the defenders squirted ammonia into his face. Although stunned (later he was to need treatment), he rushed forward. Among the twelve Jews inside the bar, he saw Cahn. ‘He had a nice bald head. I still had enough strength to pick up an ashtray and smash him on his head. He was badly wounded.’ Everyone inside was then arrested.
In the immediate aftermath, on 22 February, SS troops stormed through the Jewish quarter with appalling brutality. Four hundred and twenty-five Jews were arrested, most of whom were subsequently deported to Mathausen concentration camp where, after considerable suffering, they died. The arrests were followed by a strike which was ineptly handled by Barbie’s commander, Sturmbannführer Wilkens; he was reprimanded and transferred. This was of little concern to Barbie, who was finding life more pleasant than he had imagined possible. The SS had, after all, won the battle, and they celebrated in royal style with members of the Dutch Nazi Party and senior police officers: ‘We drank until eight in the morning. An amazing party, marvellous comradeship. Unrepeatable. And that’s what one survives on when one’s exiled like this.’
