by Bower, Tom
After a year’s investigation, the Kassel police concluded that Barbie had been employed in Munich by the Americans as early as 1945, under cover as a tradesman. According to their investigations, Barbie had arrived in La Paz only in 1961 or 1962, and his wife had joined him only recently. They believed that he was still employed by both the CIA and the BND, the German secret service, and that he was in direct contact in Germany not only with his mother and aunt but also with his daughter, whose address was fully enclosed. It was a lamentable piece of investigation.
After months of inactivity, the Kassel prosecutor passed the file to the Augsburg prosecutor, because that was Barbie’s last-known address; the Augsburg prosecutor decided that he could do nothing because Barbie was believed to be living in Bolivia, a country with which West Germany had no extradition treaty.
On 7 November 1963, a memorandum marked ‘secret and confidential’ and containing the results of the Kassel inquiry was sent from the French Sécurité Militaire (FSM) in West Germany to the investigation bureau at the Army Ministry in Paris. It concluded with the request that the Bureau ask the two French secret services to find Barbie in La Paz, but at the same time advise them of his use by the CIA and BND. The FSM also requested permission to intercept the Barbie family’s mail and to tap their phones. They received no positive reply. General Jaquier, then head of the French Secret Service (SDECE) in Paris, denied in 1983 that he ever saw the memorandum: ‘If I had, I would remember it.’ The following year, on 28 September, General de Gaulle paid an official three-day visit to Bolivia. Whether or not he knew that the country was harbouring the murderer of his wartime delegate to France, we do not know; but there were more important matters on his mind.
Twenty years after the war, de Gaulle’s visit reinforced Barbie’s sense of security. Despite the spectacular kidnapping in 1960 of Adolf Eichmann from Argentina by a Mossad squad sent specially from Israel, Klaus Altmann was convinced that his real identity was truly buried. When the German ambassador came in March 1966 as an honoured guest to the German club, the former Gestapo chief stood up during the toast to Germany’s continuing prosperity and shouted ‘Heil Hitler’. It was just the latest in a series of Nazi slogans and anti-semitic taunts with which he had amused the club members. But the ambassador reacted with honest horror, demanding Barbie’s immediate expulsion. As he was hustled out of the club, he is alleged to have shouted, ‘Damn you, ambassador. I was an officer of the Gestapo.’ By now, however, Barbie was too important in Bolivia to be seriously affected. After the 1964 military coup by General René Barrientos, Barbie’s relations with influential army officers rapidly intensified. He did not participate openly in military operations, but they shared a common language and shared their experiences.
Overnight, Barbie became not only influential but rich. ‘For the first time, I was a war profiteer,’ Barbie told General Wolff. The war in question was in Vietnam; Barbie’s profits came from selling chinin – a wood bark used for the manufacture of quinine – to Von Böhringer, the German chemical company in Mannheim. For Eberhard Büttner, Böhringer’s South American representative, Barbie’s sawmill in La Paz was an ideal base for stripping wild chinin trees. Büttner’s contract was with Herr Hochhauser, the mill owner, but the profits were divided with Barbie, who by then possessed considerable expertise in wood. Alone, or by mule with Büttner, Barbie drove into the Bolivian wilderness to negotiate with wood dealers for a regular supply of bark to his mill in La Paz, for shipping via Chile to Germany. As the American casualties in Vietnam increased and demand for quinine grew, Büttner returned to La Paz and suggested that Barbie and Hochhauser try to cultivate chinin trees. Seed and saplings were shipped from the Congo and planted 300 kilometres from La Paz. Barbie claims that the project was a great success – ‘Only two of the 200 trees died.’ Von Böhringer said that the project was a disastrous failure and that the plants died of disease. In the early Seventies, as American involvement in the war diminished, the chinin business slowly disappeared. Barbie’s claim that he earned ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars every week’, is derided in Mannheim but there is no doubt that substantial amounts were paid into an account which he had opened in the Bahamas. He had earned enough ‘to pay for all my legal bills’.
Unknown to Barbie, in 1965 he was also being considered for re-employment by the US Army as a special agent. The Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (OACSI) wanted to mount an intelligence-gathering operation in Washington. On the intelligence staff was someone who had been involved with Barbie in Germany, and knew that he had gone to Bolivia. After clearance with the CIA, the OACSI asked its liaison officer at the American embassy in La Paz to confirm that Klaus Altmann was in La Paz. The reply was positive. But, according to the documents so far released, Barbie had still not been approached when, in mid-1966, the prominent Jewish US Senator Jacob Javits passed on to the State Department a letter from a constituent, Sandra Zanik.
Zanik had just watched an NBC television programme in which Alfred Newton, who by then was very ill, had complained that his Gestapo torturer was now a prosperous businessman living in Munich and working as an American and French agent. Zanik asked Javits to find out ‘why a man can go free after killing and torturing. This is a very odd situation. I am wondering how many more people such as this are on the United States payroll or getting rich from us.’
The State Department asked the Army about Barbie and received a relatively honest account of the German’s background and the American connection. But the State Department’s short reply to Javits was completely deceptive, suggesting that Barbie was just one of many informants and that an investigation into his past had been found to be ‘inconclusive’. To the bureaucrats’ relief, Javits did not pursue his inquiry; but it had been a salutary warning for the CIA. As the Bolivian situation worsened over the next two years and Barbie’s importance grew, Javits’ inquiry was used by the CIA as a reason to veto the Army’s persistent interest in re-enlisting their man. But the CIA did not consider telling the US immigration service, or the French and German governments, who Klaus Altmann was and where he could be found.
By then Barbie’s second major business venture, which started in 1966, had confirmed him as a prominent Bolivian citizen and had introduced him to crime on a scale which, until then, even he had neither experienced nor imagined.
In 1879, Bolivia lost the maritime Antofagasta province in a war with neighbouring Chile and the country was suddenly landlocked. Bolivia has ceremoniously mourned this shattering consequence every year with processions and a dedication at their naval ministry, which is based on an inland lake. In 1966, President Barrientos announced that a public fund would be launched to buy a cargo ship which would fly the Bolivian flag, the only ship of its kind in the world. The presidential appeal to national pride failed to stimulate enough donations; only $50,000 were collected, while four million were needed. Suddenly a German emigrant appeared with a possible solution. Barbie described himself as a maritime engineer and said he would be proud to use his expertise to arrange the purchase of not just one boat, but a whole fleet. Relieved of the embarrassment, the President handed over to Barbie the $50,000 fund and guaranteed him a state loan. ‘Transmaritima Boliviana’ was born. Ownership was divided: 51% for the state and 49% for Barbie and his business associates. In theory Barbie was working for the state, but in practice he rapidly excluded the state representatives from supervisory control.
Even for Bolivia’s traditionally turbulent political life, the upheaval following the discovery in early 1967 that Che Guevara was at large in the Bolivian countryside, attempting to foment a Marxist revolution, was tempestuous. With the Vietnam war at its height, Washington was convinced that Fidel Castro had sent his faithful lieutenant there as part of Moscow’s planned international aggression and policy of encirclement. The CIA and an elite jungle warfare unit, the ‘Green Berets’, were rapidly deployed to hunt down and destroy the Cuban revolutionaries. In October 1967, Guevara was captu
red and killed in the Bolivian jungle, but his death plunged the already brutalised and corrupt country even further into spiralling political anarchy. Politicians disappeared or were killed, while the country’s government swung between right-wing and left-wing military dictatorships, the latter determined to remove American military and economic domination. Relations with Washington were stretched to the limit. The American government, uncertain in late 1970 about the new left-wing government led by General Torres, was suddenly hesitant about arms supplies and economic aid. The differences between left and right hardened. On the verge of civil war, factions in the army vying for power and planning a coup against the Torres government began searching for a secure and secret supply of arms.
No group was more concerned about the country’s instability than the powerful German community. Their candidate in the military was Colonel Hugo Banzer, an American-trained cavalry officer whose rich landowning family had originally emigrated from Germany. To stage his coup he needed weapons. One obvious source was the German in La Paz with a shipping company, who had often boasted of his long and distinguished military career, and whose political views were unquestionably favourable to a right-wing military group. After twenty years in the wilderness, Barbie could once again offer his services in the fight against communism.
Every businessman has a characteristic method of trading. As manager of the Transmaritima, Barbie’s was to ‘buy’ or ‘rent’ equipment, but not pay. For five years he chartered, but never bought, four cargo vessels. He appointed friends as managers and his son Klaus as company representative in Hamburg. Most important of all, as an important state employee, he secured a much prized diplomatic passport which gave him privileged facilities to travel. In quick succession he went during the late Sixties to Peru, Brazil and Argentina. More significantly, using a visa issued on 17 July 1969 by the American embassy in La Paz, he flew to Miami twice on 19 July and again on 21 January 1970. On both visits he flew for one-day trips to Freeport in the Bahamas to deposit money in secret bank accounts. Besides Miami, he is known to have visited New Orleans, Houston and San Francisco. His business in New Orleans seemed innocent – Barbie even claims that he was presented with the keys of the city by the Council in 1970. Captain William Ayres, president of the Ayres Steamship company, clearly remembers Klaus Altmann using his agency to carry general cargo between the Gulf ports and South America. The relationship lasted only a few months because of an argument with an Ayres representative. But suggestions that the cargoes were foodstuffs are derided by Barbie’s acquaintances in La Paz. George Portugal, a long-established Bolivian arms dealer, insists that Barbie had become an arms supplier to a military faction.
The international arms trade is by nature plagued by secrecy, spurious denials and especially rumour. Disentangling fiction from truth, fifteen years after the event and without eyewitnesses, is often impossible. Yet there are substantial and verifiable events to suggest that, by the late Sixties, Barbie, as general manager of Transmaritima, had established close relations with the various military leaders by offering vital services. The cheap and unmonitored supply of arms was one such service.
Amongst the arms Barbie is alleged to have imported into Bolivia over the years are 50,000 rounds of .38 calibre bullets, Ingram sub-machine-guns, Israeli-made Uzi and Galil sub-machine-guns, and German-manufactured Heckler and Koch A3 sub-machine-guns. In the Seventies he is alleged to have arranged the purchase of 100 light tanks from Austria, although both the manufacturers, Steyer, and an alleged Austrian middleman, Evelyn Krieg, deny all knowledge of the deal. The most sensational of all these arms deals is his alleged purchase in 1967 of small arms from Belgium, ostensibly for Bolivia, which were then diverted to Israel, which was, at the time, cut off from its usual sources of supply by an international arms embargo. The use by Israel of a German of uncertain origin for services concerning its very survival, is not unusual.
It was in the course of arranging these deals that Barbie, using his diplomatic passport, flew to Germany. (Sometimes he claims to have visited France and laid flowers on Moulin’s tomb, but there are grave doubts that Barbie has ever returned to France. He did, however, fly on an Air France plane in South America, spending the flight with his head hidden behind newspapers.) His visit to Hamburg ended in a bizarre mystery which led to one of many colourful but unsubstantiated allegations surrounding Barbie’s Bolivian life. The purpose of the journey was to meet representatives of Hapag-Lloyd to negotiate contracts on behalf of Transmaritima. During his stay Barbie heard that the Bolivian consul in the city, Roberto Quintanilla, had been shot dead in his office. Back in Bolivia, Quintanilla, an aggressive right-wing policeman, had investigated a series of apparently related murders following the mysterious helicopter crash in April 1969 in which President Barrientos was killed; but his notoriety stemmed from his close proximity to the hunt and murder of Guevara. Quintanilla’s assassin was Monika Ertl, the daughter of the man who had arranged Barbie’s first job and who had remained a close friend. Monika Ertl was a member of a guerrilla movement determined to avenge all those associated with Guevara’s death. It is alleged that either Barbie or his son made the arrangements and accompanied the body of the right-wing policeman back to Bolivia. On his return, Barbie was asked by her family to persuade Monika Ertl to surrender. He failed, and Ertl, when caught, was executed on the spot to avoid any diplomatic complications. Barbie used his influence to minimise the Ertl family’s suffering, pleased that he was not plagued by the same problems with his own children.
At the time, Barbie had some business problems but he found life otherwise very pleasant. Despite their long separation during the war, his relations with his wife were very good. In 1969, his daughter Ute, then twenty-seven years old, was living in Kufstein, Austria. Barbie had arranged through Manfred Rudel, a wartime pilot and infamous post-war neo-Nazi, to find her a suitable school there: he had not wanted his daughter to mix with the local boys. Later, she married an Austrian teacher and lost close contact with her family. Barbie’s son Klaus, then aged twenty-two, studied law in Barcelona but had returned to Bolivia. Neither knew about their father’s past until 1971.
On 5 June 1968, the Barbies celebrated their son’s marriage to Françoise Craxier-Roux, a French girl whom Klaus had met in Europe. To legalise the marriage according to French law, Craxier-Roux informed the French embassy in La Paz. Yet, although the French had known since 1963 that Barbie lived in La Paz, neither the embassy’s vice-consul, Dominique Colombani, nor the ambassador, Joseph Lambroschini, even considered comparing the birth-dates of Altmann and Barbie. Lambroschini says that he had never even heard of Barbie or of Altmann when he served in the embassy.
The reaction in the German consulate in summer 1969, on the other hand, when Ute applied for a visitor’s permit, was considerably different. The embassy had already been alerted by an angry Bolivian Jew that Altmann was Barbie’s cover name, and were immediately suspicious when Ute described her father as Polish. The ambassador asked Bonn to check the discrepancies in Ute’s and Klaus’s dates of birth. The reply was that, while there was no record of the birth of Ute Altmann on 30 June 1941 in Kassel, the birth of Ute Barbie was registered on the same day in Trier. Klaus-Georg Altmann was allededly born on 11 December 1946 in Kasel, near Leipzig, which had no record of his birth. Klaus-Jörg Barbie’s birth was registered on the same day in Kassel, near Frankfurt.
Comparison of their parents’ details also produced remarkable similarities. Klaus Altmann was born on 25 October 1915, whereas Barbie’s date of birth was 13 October 1913. There was also a similar coincidence about Mrs Altmann’s maiden name, given as Regina Wilhelms. Barbie’s wife’s name was Regine Willms.
On 20 September 1969, the West German foreign minister sent his colleague, the minister of justice, a short summary of Altmann-Barbie’s post-war history. It concluded, ‘We advise you to make only discreet inquiries, because Klaus Altmann has close relations to important people in the Bolivian government, and to former Nazis n
ow living in South America, such as Fritz Schwend in Lima.’ Attached to the note was a photo of Altmann, published in a Bolivian newspaper, showing him as a prosperous businessman in the centre of a group of similar people. It had been sent through an intermediary the previous year to a German public prosecutor by Herbert John, a German journalist and publisher living in Lima, who believed that Altmann was in fact another Nazi war criminal, Theodore Dannecker.
Dr Wolfgang Rabl, the public prosecutor in Munich, had inherited the Barbie file from Augsburg in 1971 when the Bavarian state government decided to concentrate all Nazi war-crime prosecutions in the state capital. Rabl did not try to hide his lack of interest in war-crime prosecutions, and, despite the initial evidence of Barbie’s possible address, was disinclined to take the matter further. After perusing the file he noted simply that the case should be dropped. His reasons, he felt, were legally justifiable. He ignored the possibility of public repercussions.
Rabl knew that German courts could not try cases involving Nazi crimes against the French. According to a 1954 agreement between the Allies and the new German government, German courts could not prosecute Germans for war crimes while a prosecution was still pending in France. The French negotiators had insisted on this provision, fearing that German courts would be too lenient with their own countrymen, but they had ignored the provision in the new West German constitution which forbade the extradition of German nationals to stand trial in any other country. The ‘catch-22’ was finally acknowledged by the two governments to be benefiting only Nazi criminals living in safety in West Germany, but negotiating a new agreement was proving difficult. Rabl wanted to hand the case over to the French.
Rabl’s second reason for wanting to drop the case was also, in his view, legally sound. The only alleged crime with which Barbie could still be charged was the arrest and deportation of the children from Izieu. It was the only known crime for which he had not yet been tried. Some would consider the case quite watertight. Barbie’s name was on the telex to Paris and the text was unambiguous. But Rabl was not convinced that the telex alone was sufficient evidence for a successful prosecution: ‘The mere fact that, on 6 April 1944, the defendant arrested forty-one children who were obviously not destined for the labour camps and had them shipped to the concentration camp at Drancy, cannot be interpreted to mean that he knew the eventual destination of those children. Not one sure piece of evidence of his subjective interpretation of his act can be produced.’ Rabl doubted whether anyone could prove conclusively that Barbie actually knew that he was sending the children to be murdered. He believed that in 1944 Barbie was either still completely unaware of the Final Solution or that his knowledge could not be proven. On 22 June 1971 he formally submitted his summaries to Manfred Ludolph, his departmental chief, suggesting the case be dropped. Ludolph nodded his assent.
