by Bower, Tom
Hugo Banzer attempted his first coup in Bolivia in January 1971. Ill-prepared, it failed and ended in strikes and violent fights between the military and the students and workers. By June, Banzer had strengthened his position. Secretly-acquired weapons and ammunition were airlifted clandestinely from Brazil to Santa Cruz, and for the next two months, with direct American support, the Banzer forces pushed south towards the capital, killing hundreds of students and workers. On 22 August, Banzer moved into the presidential palace, proclaiming that his regime was dedicated to destroying communism and trades unions. At his disposal was a police force which rapidly developed ruthless techniques of questioning which had not been used in Bolivia before; the same type which the Germans had found useful thirty years earlier in Europe. The new junta was grateful for the help and services of ‘Don Klaus’, a man to whom they felt indebted for his supply of arms.
Professional gamblers weigh the odds before committing themselves, considering their assets and then taking a calculated risk based on their experience; those who play the game rashly are called punters, and they usually lose. Barbie’s venture into shipping falls into the latter category. By 1970, Transmaritima was 10,000,000 pesos in debt, eight-and-a-half times the initial capital. The following year, its foreign creditors became alarmed when the Bolivian government removed Barbie from the company board. To protect their debts, the creditors issued writs in Panama and Hamburg to seize the company’s assets, only to find that they were the victims of a clever confidence trick. Transmaritima had no assets. Barbie had milked the company for his own purposes, a bitter disappointment to thousands of Bolivians who had contributed to the national fund – but not enough in a country like Bolivia to put Barbie at risk. In 1969, Barbie might have been embarrassed by the investigations of three journalists in La Paz into the Transmaritima saga, but they had been mysteriously murdered. There were good reasons to suspect Barbie’s involvement, but there was no proof and his position remained unaffected.
Nevertheless, soon after the company collapsed and Banzer became President, Barbie decided to move to Lima, Peru, to continue work in the shipping business. According to Barbie, his wife was suffering from La Paz’s high altitude and they left on medical advice. Others are convinced he left for his own safety and with the President’s blessing in the wake of the Transmaritima scandal. He arrived in Lima with enough money to buy a Swiss-type chalet, with large grounds and swimming pool. The cost, he said, was $22,000.
Barbie had an acquaintance in Lima, Fritz Schwend, a former SS colonel and also a fugitive. Schwend had masterminded ‘Operation Bernhard’, Hitler’s audacious plan to flood the world with forged British currency: the notes were distributed to German agents throughout the world with orders to spend them as fast as possible. After murdering one of his accomplices in Italy, Schwend had fled Europe but, unlike Barbie, arrived in South America with considerable wealth. His presence in Peru had never been a secret. He lived in an enormous house, surrounded by a high wall which encouraged speculation that he was the financier of the Odessa network, or even the Fourth Reich, in constant communication with all the important Nazi politicians who were not killed or captured in 1945. Martin Bormann, Josef Mengele and Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller were just three of the infamous Nazi fugitives said to have passed through his home. Barbie had met him for the first time when he passed through Lima in 1968 and soon after his arrival in October 1971 he called on Schwend again.
At first the Barbies were very happy in Lima. The climate was much more pleasant and the city more cosmopolitan. Schwend was a perfect host and, over many days and nights, the two former SS men talked about the past and even planned joint business ventures for the future. Among the many entertaining people to whom Schwend introduced him was Herbert John, a collaborator of Luis Banchero Rossi, known as the ‘guano king’. Schwend was negotiating a deal with Rossi, a multi-millionaire fishing magnate and one of Peru’s richest businessmen. On New Year’s Day 1972, however, Rossi was found dead. He had been murdered and Schwend was the prime police suspect. Barbie, who was working with Schwend on the deal, was also automatically under suspicion. The Peruvian police were convinced of a Nazi conspiracy.
Barbie’s new-found happiness was suddenly clouded. He did not know that in Europe Rabl’s decision to drop his case had been vigorously challenged by a young German woman whose efficiency and fervour matched Barbie’s own, and who was determined that he should be brought back to Europe to stand trial for his crimes of forty years ago. A Protestant, born in Berlin, Beate Klarsfeld was just three years old when Barbie arrived in Lyons. The ‘Butcher’ could be forgiven for not foreseeing that, after a lifetime of manipulation, evasion, deceit and monstrous crime, he would eventually be doomed by a young woman.
THE NAZI HUNTERS
Beate Klarsfeld is an internationally mobile protester and provocateur, who has ingeniously exploited the world’s media to embarrass any government or politician who deliberately or by omission has protected Germans involved in the extermination of French Jews. Born Beate Künzel in Berlin in February 1939, ‘just three weeks before Hitler entered Prague’, she grew up suffering most of the material deprivations of defeated Germany. After her family home was bombed, she lived in cramped conditions in the countryside. Back in Berlin after the German surrender, she grew up disillusioned with the city, her parents and her secretarial job. Anxious to break away, she became an au pair in Paris. In May 1960, waiting on a platform for the metro, a Frenchman asked her whether she was English: three years later, still a Protestant, she married and became Mrs Serge Klarsfeld.
The Klarsfeld family were victims of the Holocaust. During the first three years of German occupation, Serge lived in Nice, with his parents and sister, having abandoned their home in Paris just before the German army entered the city. During the night of 30 September 1943, the Gestapo raided their house, searching for Jews. Serge’s father, anticipating the threat, had already built a false back in a cupboard to hide the family. Motionless and terrified, the four cowered in their cramped refuge, listening to the blows and screams as other Jews were grabbed and bundled into lorries waiting outside in the street. When the Gestapo burst into the Klarsfeld flat, they wilfully broke the nose of a neighbour’s young daughter, who was refusing to cooperate. To help her, and to distract the Germans’ attention from his own family, Serge’s father squeezed out of the hiding place and surrendered. He died with all the others arrested that night, in Auschwitz.
Although a Zionist, Serge Klarsfeld had not considered revenging his father’s death before he met Beate. He was naturally interested in the circumstances of the German deportations but had not considered the fate of those Germans and Frenchmen who had masterminded the operations. When he met Beate, he was just finishing his higher education at the School of Political Science and about to be employed by ORTF, the French state broadcasting corporation. Similarly, until meeting Serge, Beate had never considered Nazi Germany’s treatment of the Jews. In Berlin, it had not been mentioned either in her home or at school. Deeply in love with Serge and the Klarsfeld family, she became exceptionally ashamed of her own country’s immorality.
In early December 1966, French newspapers reported that the conservative West German politician Kurt-Georg Kiesinger, had declared himself as a candidate for Chancellor of Germany. The reports added, without details, that during the war Kiesinger had been a senior official in the Foreign Ministry responsible for Nazi propaganda broadcasts. As a young German now determined to atone for her country’s history, Beate Klarsfeld seized on the announcement as the beginning of an astonishing personal campaign to expose the total failure to denazify post-war Germany. With Serge and a few friends, she proved that Germans who had been directly and indirectly involved in mass murders were living comfortable, secure and prosperous lives in the new Federal Republic. Kiesinger was just one of many who had effortlessly buried his past and reached prominence without anyone questioning his wartime activities. Kiesinger was elected Chancellor on 12 D
ecember 1966.
To uncover Kiesinger’s wartime activities, Serge searched through Third Reich documents stored in archives in East Berlin, Washington and London. With little difficulty, but at tremendous personal cost, he discovered memoranda and orders either addressed to Kiesinger, or actually signed by Kiesinger himself, which proved conclusively that the newly-elected Chancellor was an outright supporter of Hitler and of Nazi policies, including all Himmler’s anti-Jewish measures. During the war he rose to the position of deputy head of propaganda broadcasting to foreign countries.
The next step was to publicise the results of their investigation. ‘Kiesinger the Nazi’ had the basic ingredients of a good story, yet nearly all the newspapers approached by Beate seemed uninterested. Without any training, but with enormous motivation, the Klarsfelds learnt very quickly the subtle art of news management. Essentially, it is to present journalists with an apparently original and well-researched story which they will try their best to get published. Beate’s second discovery was that, however good the story, journalists need a ‘peg’ or an event to capture not only the public’s attention but their editor’s interest. Publicity stunts, she discovered, are the recipe for launching ‘difficult’ stories. Posing as a journalist, in cooperation with a German magazine photographer, Beate Klarsfeld stalked Kiesinger from meeting to meeting, seeking the opportunity. On 7 November 1968, at the CDU Party congress in Berlin, she finally manoeuvred herself behind Kiesinger. Shouting, ‘Kiesinger, you Nazi!’, she smacked Germany’s leader across the face. This led to the first of many arrests of Beate and, as intended, huge banner headlines in newspapers around the world.
Over the next year, during West Germany’s election campaign, Beate Klarsfeld hounded Kiesinger remorselessly in towns and villages throughout the country, heckling him during his meetings with taunts about his Nazi past. His eventual defeat and disappearance into obscurity was due in part to the success of the Klarsfeld campaign. Their next targets were Germans directly associated with the Final Solution in France: the Gestapo officers and embassy staff who had organised the arrests and deportations of Jews such as Serge’s father.
Attracting media attention was the key to the Klarsfeld campaign. Newspaper and television journalists were lobbied either in person or by phone, and personally handed massive folders containing photocopies of original documents which always provided seriously incriminating evidence against their target. The Klarsfelds either called their own news conferences or infiltrated other people’s; politicians were approached, called or harassed to win their support; speeches, demonstrations and ‘incidents’ were arranged to ensure maximum publicity; no day passed without considerable expenditure on telephone calls or photocopying machines. From the outset, it was a family at war to reverse what they considered an outrageous failure of justice. Even their baby son travelled with them and joined the campaign.
After Kiesinger’s demise, their next target was Ernst Achenbach, another member of the West German parliament. During the war, Achenbach had been a member of the German embassy in Paris, directly involved in organising the Jewish deportations from France. His nomination by the German government to be the country’s representative at the European Commission in Brussels was blocked after a Klarsfeld campaign. His own campaign in the German parliament to prevent the continuation of war-crime trials, and to prevent the ratification of the 1971 Franco-German treaty which reversed the 1954 agreement, was destroyed by the Klarsfeld exposures of his past. He too was forced to retire into obscurity.
Next were Kurt Lischka, Herbert Hagen and Ernst Heinrichson – three Gestapo officers, based in Paris, who were directly involved in the arrests and deportation of French Jews to Auschwitz. None of the three had been prosecuted for these activities and all were prospering as businessmen or lawyers in Germany. The Klarsfeld campaign started in July 1971 with an unsuccessful attempt to kidnap Lischka outside his home in Cologne, for which Beate Klarsfeld was subsequently arrested and prosecuted. At her trial in 1974, the courtroom was invaded by noisy supporters and the embarrassed judge had no choice but to suspend the hearing amidst the chaos. Her subsequent conviction and imprisonment, contrasted with Lischka’s freedom, forced reluctant prosecutors to bow to media outrage and charge all three with first-degree murder. In 1979 they were convicted and imprisoned.
Just three weeks after the abortive kidnapping, the Klarsfelds heard that the Munich prosecutor proposed to drop the Barbie case. All their future campaigns would collapse if Rabl’s decision were upheld. The Klarsfeld publicity machine went into action. Energetically, the archives were scoured, eyewitnesses and survivors sought, and press dossiers collated for distribution.
Tactically, the Klarsfelds realised, the campaign was best launched in Lyons itself. On 28 July, the Lyons Progrés carried the story prominently with banner headlines. The response from the survivors of the Resistance was, predictably, outrage. Dr Frédéric Dugoujon, the owner of the Caluire villa where Moulin was arrested, wrote to the newspaper, ‘I have prayed to Heaven to give me the grace never to sit in judgement, but if I were a judge or a member of a jury, I would sentence Klaus Barbie to death.’ Other papers were filled with similar reactions. The media campaign had started. The next obvious step for the Klarsfelds was to organise a demonstration at the courthouse in Munich to get the case reopened. But despite the cause, wartime divisions had already split their potential supporters. Non-communist veterans’ groups did not want to be seen with communists, and Dugoujon and others in Lyons, while welcoming the Klarsfelds’ initiative, were unwilling to be associated visibly with aggressive, Jewish protestors. Dugoujon wanted to be part of a delegation, not a demonstration. Twenty-five years after the war, he was more concerned with Barbie’s crimes against the Resistance, not the Jews. After consultations with government and consular officials, he thanked Beate Klarsfeld for her help but implied that they would be better off without any troublemakers present. He had been reliably assured that diplomacy was the best route, not publicity stunts.
Undeterred, Klarsfeld sought out Mme Benguigui, one of the mothers of the children of Izieu. Mme Benguigui had herself been deported to Auschwitz, but lived in the hope that her three children were safe in the isolated village. In May 1944, sorting through the clothes of people recently gassed, she was shattered to see the sweater of her son, Jacques. The martyred mother, Klarsfeld felt, would be a good symbol on the Munich courthouse steps. But once in Munich, Klarsfeld found that her tactics were completely unacceptable to the Resistance veterans. In the immediate interests of unity, she momentarily accepted exclusion from the delegation visiting Manfred Ludolph, Rabl’s chief, and the department’s leading prosecutor.
Ludolph had told the forty-strong delegation before they left France that he would only reopen the case if the French could provide new evidence. The Resistance delegation had brought nothing, but vigorously protested that the Munich prosecutors had closed the case without sifting through the documentary evidence available in France, or having even questioned one single eyewitness. Ludolph greeted them politely but gave them no assurances; they returned to Lyons, criticising Beate Klarsfeld for planning a press conference. Klarsfeld, however, had already prepared a dossier containing an affidavit from Kurt Schendel, the Jewish liaison officer in Paris, who had heard Raymond Geissmann’s account of Barbie’s comment, ‘Shot or deported, there’s no difference.’ In his absence, she left it on Ludolph’s desk.
Convinced that only public protests would win the argument, at 9.00 next morning, Klarsfeld and Madame Benguigui, who was severely incapacitated after her release from Auschwitz, stood in the rain on the courthouse steps. Beate’s placard read, Prosecutor Rabl is rehabilitating war criminals. Madame Benguigui’s read, I am on hunger strike for as long as the investigation of Klaus Barbie, who murdered my children, remains closed. By the end of the day the cause was won. Ludolph agreed to meet the two women, read the dossier and promised to reopen the case if Geissmann swore an affidavit about Barbie’s aside. If tru
e, it would prove that Barbie did know the real fate of the Izieu children.
Back in Paris, the Klarsfelds successfully searched for Geissmann and secured from him an affidavit confirming what Barbie said in 1943. They flew back to Munich and obtained an official undertaking on 1 October from Ludolph that he would reopen the case into Barbie’s deportation of the Jews. ‘Once he had the affidavit, Ludolph completely changed his attitude,’ recalls Beate Klarsfeld. ‘He gave us two photographs of Barbie taken in 1943, and a photograph of a group of businessmen taken in La Paz in 1968. Pointing at one of the businessmen, he said to me, “Why don’t you help me identify this man?”’ The source of the photo was Herbert John. Ludolph had decided to work with the Klarsfelds. Meanwhile, the Resistance veterans who had shunned the Klarsfeld campaign had still not fulfilled their assurance to Ludolph that they would send him new evidence which would persuade him to reopen the case.
