Klaus Barbie

by Bower, Tom

  The Counsellor for Judicial Affairs at the French High Commission in Baden-Baden, M. Lebegue, sent two letters at the beginning of March emphatically establishing the French demand. On 2 March he wrote to Elizabeth Lange in HICOG’s justice division, setting out at length Barbie’s wartime crimes and French efforts for his extradition. He concluded, ‘Public opinion in France, and especially in Lyons and its vicinity, is now aware of the presence of Barbie in the US zone, and if this individual were not brought to trial, it would not fail to create a strong and legitimate emotion among the population.’ In his second letter, on 6 March, to Robert Bowie, HICOG’s general counsel working in McCloy’s office, Lebegue emphasised the importance the French now attached to the issue and asked Bowie to use his influence to find a solution. The initial American reaction was to disbelieve the French assumption of Barbie’s presence in the American zone. The allegation was, wrote James McGraw, the Chief of HICOG’s Public Safety Branch, rashly, ‘unjustified and unwarranted’. He refused to initiate any inquiries without more information. A draft order alerting all American law enforcement agencies to arrest Barbie was left unsigned by Bowie. The only concession Lebegue won was that HICOG was prepared to consider the application, without the French providing Barbie’s address. It was clearly a near-worthless concession. On 25 April the chief of the justice division replied to Baden-Baden asking in whose office Barbie had been interrogated by the French in 1946 (sic), the names of the Americans present and information about Barbie’s address and his date and place of birth.

  The unsatisfactory American reply arrived in the middle of the Hardy trial. Maurice Garçon, Hardy’s lawyer, had just launched an emotional attack against the Americans for protecting Barbie and preventing him personally giving evidence in the court. The French press immediately demanded an explanation from EUCOM, the American army command in Heidelberg which was in overall command of the CIC. EUCOM did not know about Barbie at the time. It was natural that it should fall to Joe Vidal to give EUCOM’s press office a ‘Top Secret’ background briefing. He knew more about Barbie than anyone else.

  After explaining that Barbie had ceased to be employed by the CIC as an informant exactly a year earlier (which was untrue), he summarised Barbie’s career, and the series of French interrogations of Barbie which had been willingly arranged by the CIC, and concluded that Gançon’s accusation that the American army was protecting Barbie was, ‘a malicious distortion of fact’. The same day, 3 May, Vidal handed Colonel Erskine a detailed five-page history of Barbie’s relationship with the CIC. After again criticising Garçon’s distortions, he suggested that Barbie could be extradited to France without endangering American operations because his network in the French zone had been liquidated. The following day, Vidal’s recommendation was rejected by Erskine at a top-level CIC meeting. Erskine decided that Barbie should remain under American protection. As far as he was aware, after all, the French had still not asked for his extradition and he comforted himself with the suspicion that they feared that on his return he would denounce important Frenchmen as collaborators.

  Until then, the CIC had been relatively immune from direct pressure, but only the previous day, 2 May, HICOG was suddenly faced with demands from the American embassy in Paris for help and information. HICOG replied the same day that the French accusations of American protection were ‘unjustified and unwarranted’. Yet, the very next day, HICOG sent another urgent cable to Paris stating that new information had been discovered which made the previous day’s cable ‘possibly … inaccurate or incomplete’. Clearly someone at HICOG had spoken to an informant at Army headquarters, EUCOM, and heard that there was some truth in the French allegations. At issue now was, what should HICOG say to the French government and press. HICOG’s files for the days immediately after 3 May contain urgently redrafted letters to Lebegue referring to ‘recently received clues which may enable us to find him’. But the letters were not sent.

  Politicians in Paris were now concerned that the irksome failure of the authorities in Baden-Baden might reflect on them. Summaries of French attempts to locate Barbie were submitted and considered, but there still seemed to be no easy solution other than to find Barbie, despite American protection. A final effort by the war-crimes bureau in Baden-Baden was attempted at the end of May but the agent’s terse and coded telegram report from Munich spelled failure, Durand not found. Incompetently, the French investigators had failed to exploit another lead from a sympathetic American: the address of Barbie’s mother in the French zone itself.

  Fearing that the formal request for extradition would once again be ignored by HICOG, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs decided to submit the application at the beginning of June through their embassy in Washington. But once again they were stonewalled. The hapless Bonnet reported to Schumann on 21 June that the State Department, ‘have just replied that they do not have in their possession any new information permitting the discovery of the present residence of the party concerned. But they have contacted the American High Commission requesting any new information.’ The French could now draw only one conclusion: not only were the Americans lying to them, they were also lying to one another.

  What remains uncertain is whether HICOG was ever told the complete truth of Barbie’s relationship with the CIC until, or even after, 3 May. According to the official documents so far declassified and produced by the US Department of Justice in 1983, HICOG officials were told that the CIC’s relationship with Barbie was completely broken on 28 April, the date when negotiations for Barbie’s possible return to France as a witness collapsed. HICOG officials, according to the Department of Justice report, unquestioningly believed the CIC’s account that the agency had lost all contact with Barbie after that date. It is an assumption based solely on the absence of documentary evidence to prove the contrary. It deliberately excludes any possibility of verbal agreements which were not recorded. Considering the disappearance and loss of other equally crucial documents, the report’s conclusions that HICOG was innocent of any participation in a cover-up, and that the CIC was exclusively culpable, raised more questions than it answered – principally, whether HICOG officials were so naive and incompetent as to believe that the CIC would lose complete contact with an agent whom the CIC admitted was better informed than most about its operations, and an agent whom they had long feared as a possible cause of considerable embarrassment. Relying on flimsy documentary evidence, the report assumes that HICOG officials unquestionably accepted that, after a three-year relationship, CIC officials had simply lost contact with Barbie after a few days. Even James McGraw, HICOG’s Chief Public Safety Officer, did not believe that and decided on 5 May 1950 to renounce all responsibility for the case. There is no evidence, either oral or documentary, that any of McGraw’s agents actually went to the CIC in Region XII and asked Kolb or Bechtold about Barbie’s whereabouts. McGraw’s legacy was that the only available explanation which HICOG’s political and legal sections could give the French was that Barbie had ‘disappeared’ from his last known address.

  The ultimate responsibility for Barbie’s protection is John McCloy’s. He was the senior American official in the zone and his office indisputably dealt with the problem. But both McCloy and his assistant, John Bross, not surprisingly deny any recollection of the French demands: there were, they claim, thousands of telegrams and files passing through the High Commissioner’s office daily. Nonetheless, the policy guidelines for handling a case such as Barbie’s had been very carefully set out by McCloy. On his arrival in 1949, he had inherited from Clay the problem of reviewing the convictions of 104 defendants at the subsequent trials in Nuremberg. Among them were some of the architects of the Final Solution – the leaders of murder squads, senior officers from concentration camps, some of Germany’s most prominent industrialists and the SS officers who had ordered the execution of the American POWs at Malmédy. McCloy had arrived in Germany with an attitude of antagonism towards the already deep-rooted German desire to minimise responsibility
and even dispute the occurrence of atrocities. Yet within a year German pressure, the intense division of Europe, the fear of a communist coup in Italy and the developing threat of war in Korea had forced him to adopt a more pragmatic approach. The West now urgently needed the support of German industry and its military experience. The price McCloy would have to pay included the reprieve and release of most of the 104 Nazi mass murderers. In that context, the French demand for a Gestapo captain who was obtaining useful information about the communists, would not be pursued with excessive energy.

  In June, McCloy was under pressure both from Washington and Paris to produce some answers. Ben Schute, director of HICOG’s Office of Intelligence, was ordered to ‘smoke EUCOM out’. McCloy wanted a full account of the Barbie saga from Brigadier General Robert Taylor, EUCOM’s Director of Intelligence. Schute met Taylor and Browning’s successor, Major Wilson, on 16 June. He was allegedly told that Barbie’s employment with the CIC had ceased on 24 May 1949 (on Browning’s orders), and that the CIC had lost contact with Barbie in late April 1950. Schute’s report was written five days after the meeting. He claimed in 1983 to have completely forgotten his involvement in the affair: ‘I probably just wrote down whatever Taylor told me.’ The Department of Justice Report states that Taylor and Wilson lied outright to Schute and that Schute, in his honest ignorance, simply accepted their assurances. It would, however, be quite ridiculous for HICOG’s Director of Intelligence not to have queried the extraordinary coincidence of Barbie’s disappearance just days before the sensational attack at the Hardy trial. But there was apparently no pressure on him from either McCloy’s office or HICOG’s political section to look into the glaring inconsistencies. On the contrary, in June 1950, Allan Lightner, the deputy political director (who ignorantly persisted in referring to Barbie as ‘Barbier’), proposed to continue the inactivity in the ‘hope that the whole business will blow over’. That inactivity included an undocumented but nevertheless official veto on any actual search for Barbie.

  Confirmation of Schute’s and HICOG’s implicit awareness and approval of the CIC conspiracy to protect Barbie surfaced on 30 August. The CIC had received what seemed a routine request from HICOG asking whether it objected to Barbie’s extradition, if found. The CIC knew the French were pressing for extradition but believed that the result of the meeting with Schute was that Barbie would not be handed over. Joe Vidal, who had heard about the ‘agreement’ from either Erskine or Wilson, queried this request with his superiors; but, after rapid consultation, the CIC headquarters realised that while it was important to be seen to agree to Barbie’s extradition, it would in practice be meaningless.

  At the top governmental level there was little more that could be done. When Schute reported to McCloy that the American army had lost all trace of Barbie, McCloy passed the message on to Washington, and in turn to the French ambassador. As a polite palliative, he was also told that the search for Barbie was continuing.

  Those officers in army headquarters in Heidelberg who had allegedly given Schute the deliberately blurred ‘negative’ answer were now growing concerned at the stream of inquiries about Barbie. They were irritated by reports that a senior CIC officer in Stuttgart had become drunk at a Saturday night party and loudly declared to his French guests that he would never surrender Barbie. A senior official in McCloy’s office told the army that HICOG were now finding it practically and politically impossible to resist telling Washington the truth. Something had to be done so that everyone was covered. The message was passed down and reached Kolb that Barbie should be ‘taken off the books’. When he queried the order, Kolb was told that Barbie should still be used, but that his name and fees should be laundered through another agent’s file. ‘I told them it was ridiculous, and it was ignored.’ Bechtold had been told in June that he was to be reassigned. The reason, which he was ordered not to pass on to his friend, was that Barbie’s career with the Americans was coming to an end. With very little notice, Bechtold handed Barbie over to Lieutenant Joe Strange and an apprentice agent, Leo Hecht. A few weeks later, Bechtold phoned Hecht and asked about Barbie. ‘The whole family,’ replied Hecht, ‘are learning Spanish.’

  During the autumn of 1950, Barbie continued to ply his trade, obtaining information on the Bavarian KPD and passing it on to Strange. CIC positive-intelligence operations were by then being taken over gradually by the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency. With the CIC acting as temporary agent for the CIA, Barbie had two masters, the CIA vetting all his work at Stuttgart headquarters. The targets, however, remained the same. Nevertheless, it was now just a matter of time. Fearing a French snatch, even Barbie wanted to leave for South America. Shortly before Kolb left Augsburg at Christmas, he took an urgent phone call from Stuttgart: ‘Get rid of Barbie. No more contacts.’ French pressure, says Kolb, had become too strong. ‘It was an absolutely sudden reversal, a reversal in just a space of a week or two. It must have come because of high-level pressure from headquarters.’ Although still an asset, Barbie had become a liability. The escape plan had already been finalised; Kolb bid Barbie goodbye, believing that he would never hear about him again. Meanwhile, HICOG’s Legal Division wrote several polite letters to the French, regurgitating yet again the various listings of Barbie as a wanted man, and in the meantime ponderously arranged a formal extradition hearing, concluding with a letter on 31 January 1951, ‘… concerning Klaus Barbie, whose extradition to France as a war criminal is desired. We take this opportunity to advise you that continuous efforts to locate Barbie are being made. Very truly yours …’ Five weeks later Barbie and his family had left Augsburg, escorted by George Neagoy, who was about to join the Central Intelligence Agency.

  THE RAT LINE

  Barbie and his family escaped from Europe down the ‘Rat Line’, an efficient, well-funded route, established with official approval by the US Army’s 430 CIC in Austria. The Rat Line had been set up in 1947 by Jim Milano and Paul Lyon, to help American agents and sympathisers out of the Russian zone in Vienna down to safety in Salzburg in the American zone. The ‘shipments’ were mostly Russian defectors and valuable contacts who had worked for the Americans in Soviet-occupied Europe and were suddenly vulnerable. According to Milano, ‘As a reward for services, we settled them in different parts of the world.’

  Once in Salzburg, Milano and his three-man team would put the ‘body’ in a safe house, known as the ‘rat house’, and set about processing. Invariably the safest destination for the ‘body’ was South America, especially certain countries with ports – Chile, Peru, Brazil and Colombia. The only potential obstacles were the documents, passports and visas necessary for safe passage through the many checkpoints and borders of Europe and thence into South America. But these were not a problem for Milano. At his disposal was a laboratory where his experts forged and altered documents, passports and identity cards of every nationality, including American. Milano is insistent that forgery was not always necessary: ‘documents could be bought. One of our good sources was in the Italian State department. Bribery was a key element in this business.’ Another important supplier in Rome was an American diplomat in the International Refugee Office who eventually became an alcoholic and an embarrassing liability. Finance was supplied to Milano, with his superiors’ approval, from the intelligence fund.

  Every Rat Line operation was meticulously rehearsed, step by step, to prevent any embarrassment to the American government. ‘We would never let a Rat Line product out of our sight,’ says Milano. When the paperwork was completed, his three-man team, with the ‘body’ dressed in an American uniform, drove in an army jeep down to Bad Gastein and proceeded, with the jeep, by train through the Alps to the Italian border. There a ‘friendly’ customs official waved the party through and the four headed for either Naples or Genoa, depending on the availability of the next ship across the Atlantic.

  The contact in Genoa was Krunosla Draganovic, a Croatian priest whom Milano called ‘the good Father’. Draganovic had been discovered by Ly
on on one of the earliest Rat Line operations in Trieste and had proved to be enormously valuable for the American operation, not least through his good contacts with displaced persons organisations managing quotas for emigration to South America. At the time, the South American countries were eager to attract skilled labour. Draganovic briefed the Rat Line team on the particular skills needed by each country: it was then a simple matter of filling in the ‘body’s’ profession on the documents. Draganovic’s fee was about $1,000 per person (half-price for children) and there was a special rate of $1,400 for VIP treatment. Invariably there were delays in the port, so a small hotel was selected where no questions would be asked: ‘The escort would babysit in the hotel, not letting the shipment out of sight until the ship’s departure. Then we would walk him right up to the gangplank, turn him over to somebody aboard the ship who knew that this was a special person who had to be taken care of, and that was the end of the Rat Line.’ No one left Europe with less than $1,000 and some left with as much as $8,000, in recognition of their services and to help them start their new life. Barbie is said to have been given $5,000, although he was later to admit to the Bolivians that he possessed only $850.