Klaus Barbie

by Bower, Tom

  Charged with new enthusiasm and new hope, the Klarsfelds realised that they now had to discover the assumed name under which Barbie was living. Paris newspapers were unwilling to publish the 1968 photograph naming the businessman as Barbie, in case there was a mistake. The next option was recourse to an anthropometric, a scientist who by minute analysis of facial features of the two photographs could determine the similarities. With customary audacity, Beate Klarsfeld doorstepped the government expert and persuaded him to carry out an immediate comparison. The result was positive. When Ludolph heard, he immediately invited Klarsfeld to return to Munich, at his expense, to discuss the case. In the meantime, he submitted the same photographs to the anthropometrical department of Munich University. German experts confirmed the French results, and a friend of Herbert John revealed to the Klarsfelds in November 1971, what Ludolph already knew, that Barbie was using the name Altmann. The next step was for the French government to ask for Barbie’s extradition. ‘I phoned an important official in the Prime Minister’s office and briefed him on the situation,’ recalls Serge. ‘But from the reply, it was obvious any response would be slow and cautious.’

  More inquiries by Klarsfeld revealed that ‘there was a blockage at the level of the Minister of Defence’ which amounted to bureaucratic lethargy. The Minister at the time was Michel Debré. As always, the Klarsfelds opted for direct action. On 19 January 1972, the Paris newspaper L’Aurore published the pictures and the story and challenged the French government to demand Barbie’s extradition. That night a French journalist rang on the door of Barbie’s home in Lima. Barbie had just returned from a weekend by the sea with his wife and the Schwends. ‘The Frenchman said he had something important to tell me,’ recalls Barbie.

  I told him to go away because we were just getting ready for bed. Then he rang a second time, and I told him that I didn’t know what he was talking about. He left saying that I would get a surprise the next day. The next morning I drove into town and bought a newspaper at a kiosk as usual and there it was, the whole front page. That was the beginning. I just don’t know if it was Schwend’s fault and all his gossip with Herbert John. I never told Schwend anything and he didn’t know me during the war.

  Barbie did not realise, even in 1979, that the first convincing confirmation about his real identity had been obtained from his own children.

  Over the next days, Barbie doggedly denied to journalists that he was anyone other than Altmann: ‘I am not Klaus Barbie, but Klaus Altmann, a former lieutenant in the Wehrmacht. I’ve never heard of Klaus Barbie, and I’ve never changed my identity.’ But just as public interest was beginning to wane, news agencies from Paris reported that Beate Klarsfeld was about to fly to Peru with the conclusive documentary evidence. According to Barbie, at 2.30 a.m. on 26 January 1972, a squad of Peruvian police burst into his house and arrested him:

  They wanted to take me to the Interior Ministry. I refused to leave the house because I was afraid that they would kidnap me. But I went with them the next morning. An official told me that a Beate Klarsfeld was coming and that there was going to be a lot of trouble, so I had to leave the country. They wanted to fly me out, but I had my car, a Volkswagon Cabriolet, and I suggested that I drive to the border, under escort.

  The ministry agreed. Barbie drove out of Lima on 27 January, heading for the Bolivian frontier, a two-day journey. Beate Klarsfeld flew in the following morning. Her first twelve hours were a continuous press conference. The next day, with Barbie still driving through Peru, Klarsfeld showed officials at police headquarters and the presidential palace the documentary proof that Altmann and Barbie were the same man, and the evidence of his crimes. It was a fight against time to convince them that Barbie should not be allowed to cross the frontier before an extradition request arrived from Paris – but the French ambassador, Albert Chambon, never received the necessary instructions from the Quai d’Orsay. Paris was more concerned to protect its fragile relationship with Lima, which had only just been patched up following Peruvian protests against the French atomic tests in the Pacific.

  As Barbie drove southwards, his escort phoned Lima regularly to report their position. In Arequipa, the last major town before the border, the police escort were handed a telegram from the Ministry of the Interior in Lima, saying that Barbie’s expulsion was annulled and he could return.

  I called my wife and asked her advice. She said, ‘No, Klaus, it’s better that you drive immediately to Bolivia. I’ve spoken to Schwend and he says the same.’ I also asked the Bolivian consul and he said that I should go to La Paz. I spent that night with the police escort getting terribly drunk, and then they took me through Puno to Desaguadero, the frontier town. There they handed me a form to sign and said to me, ‘Herr Altmann, you left Peru voluntarily, didn’t you?’ I replied, ‘If it was voluntary, why would I have needed an escort?’ But I agreed to sign in the end. I crossed the bridge into Bolivia … and there was a fifteen-man military squad under the command of Colonel Navarro waiting to greet me. They drove with me to La Paz.

  In the capital, police and Ministry-of-Interior officials advised Barbie to hide, ‘because Klarsfeld is coming’. ‘I went to my friend Hans and the fifteen soldiers came as well to protect me.’

  Back in Lima, acknowledging the setback, Beate Klarsfeld caught the next flight to La Paz. She arrived to a very cool reception, from both the Bolivian government and the French embassy. Three days after her arrival, she was arrested and then expelled; but the journey had achieved its purpose. Barbie was now an international issue and the reluctant French ambassador, Jean Louis Mandereau, on instructions from Paris, formally asked for his extradition. The Klarsfelds, having launched the Barbie issue, hoped that with headline reports on both sides of the Atlantic they could now rely on the media to maintain the momentum.

  Three days after Beate Klarsfeld left La Paz, on 6 February, Barbie was arrested by Colonel Hugo Banzer’s police on charges of failing to pay taxes. For a moment it seemed that Barbie’s apparently invulnerable position had disintegrated. Even he was momentarily uncertain and realised that, living as he did under an arbitrary regime, he would have to fight to convince Banzer that his extradition would cost more than his release. It was as part of his strategy that, two days later, he agreed to be interviewed by French television for $2,000, paid by the French consul. Having outwitted and humiliated countless Frenchmen during the war, he convinced himself that his powers of manipulation, distortion and intimidation would once again triumph. Instead, he became ensnared in the very contradictions and inconsistencies in which, in the past, he had delighted to see his victims flounder and destroy themselves. Through ignorance and conceit, he had committed a fatal mistake.

  In the interview, he completely changed the previous accounts of his life story. Admitting that he had been a member of the Waffen SS, he said that he had served in Holland, Russia and France. Pushed by the interviewer, Ladislas de Hoyos, he further admitted that he had served in Lyons, but not as Klaus Barbie. The similarities, he insisted, were extraordinary coincidences. At the outset of the interview, Barbie claimed that he could not speak French, but later he suddenly broke off from Spanish and said in fluent French, ‘I am not a murderer; I am not a torturer.’ Asked at the end, whether he had a good conscience, he replied in German, ‘Yes.’ The drama of the interview was heightened in France where four of his victims were invited to watch the transmission in the studio: Raymond Aubrac, Frédéric Dugoujon, Simone Legrange and a Lyons policeman, René Fusier. Although, tantalisingly, only Aubrac positively identified Barbie, France was utterly convinced. The following day, 9 February, two French lawyers left Munich with a suitcase of documents given to them by Ludolph, the basis of any French demand for the extradition of Barbie. It was an explicit admission by the French government of their own dismal failure to investigate the crimes commited against their own countrymen.

  France submitted its request for Barbie’s extradition on 1 February, followed four days later by a formal letter.
Officially, the government in Paris declared itself to be ‘optimistic’, but their request faced seemingly insuperable obstacles. Firstly, France had no extradition treaty with Bolivia; secondly, Barbie was either German or Bolivian, but not French; thirdly, Barbie had in the past enjoyed the protection of President Banzer. The French argued that Barbie was neither German nor Bolivian, but stateless; but any optimism that he had lost the protection was thwarted on 12 February, when, after paying $1,000 of a $4,500 debt, Barbie was released. He went into immediate hiding and persuaded his police bodyguard to ‘leak’ by a telephone call that Barbie was in Paraguay.

  Events in La Paz had become a major issue in Paris. President Pompidou felt politically compelled to intervene and sent a personal letter to Banzer. ‘Time wipes out many things,’ he wrote, ‘but not all. Unless their sense of justice is sadly tarnished, Frenchmen cannot permit crimes and sacrifices to be lumped together and then forgotten through indifference’ – sentiments which were shared by most Frenchmen, who were to be very surprised when on 23 November 1971 the same president pardoned Paul Touvier, a known murderer, member of the Lyons milice and collaborator with Barbie.

  Although France’s extradition request had been sent to the Bolivian supreme court, Banzer’s prompt reply to Pompidou was emphatically unsympathetic, ending on an unhelpful assurance that Bolivia’s independent judiciary would nevertheless consider the case. The Klarsfelds felt once again that the politicians would only respond to direct action. Beate Klarsfeld started raising money for a return trip to Bolivia and, anxious to make the protest newsworthy, began searching for another of Barbie’s Jewish victims to take with her.

  The Lyons Gestapo, and Klaus Barbie in particular, had ravaged Itta Halaunbrenner’s family. On 24 October 1943, she was living with her husband, son and three daughters under surveillance in Villeurbanne, Lyons. At 11.00 a.m, Barbie and two other Gestapo officers walked into the house to arrest her nephew. Pulling out his revolver, Barbie terrorised the family and young children for the next seven hours. When Mme Halaunbrenner’s son returned home, both he and her husband were arrested. According to the daughter Alexandre, ‘We all wept and howled, but in vain. Barbie shoved my mother aside as she was trying to yank her son and her husband back, took out his revolver again, and beat her hands with it to make her let go. But all was useless.’ M. Halaunbrenner was executed immediately. When they found his body in the morgue, it had seventeen bullets in the neck and chest. Their son Léon died in Auschwitz. Fearing for the safety of the two youngest daughters, Madame Halaunbrenner sent them to Izieu; but this was not far enough from Barbie’s grasp. Like the others, they were gassed in Auschwitz.

  With considerable difficulties, the two women finally arrived in La Paz on 24 February, to be greeted with threats to their lives from the police and an official prohibition against talking to the press. Undeterred, Beate Klarsfeld held a press conference, followed by banner headlines, arrests and an inevitable expulsion order. Having failed to engineer a confrontation between Halaunbrenner and Barbie, the only recourse was a public demonstration. Chained to a bench outside the Transmaritima offices, Klarsfeld and Madame Halaunbrenner held up a placard: Bolivians. As a mother I only claim justice. I want Barbie-Altmann, who murdered my husband and three of my children, brought to trial. Barbie had become a minor embarrassment to the regime.

  Soon after Beate Klarsfeld’s departure, Barbie was paid by a Brazilian journalist, Dantas Ferreira, to cooperate in his biography. Although notable for its distortions and omissions, it contained some astonishing confessions. In paraphrase, he told Ferreira:

  I am a convinced Nazi who admired Nazi discipline, and I am proud to have held a senior position in the SS, the most valuable troops in the Third Reich. The SS soldier is a superman whose blood is traced back four generations before being allowed to join. Any idiot can’t join the SS. I had to study law and philosophy. What I did was normal for war, and I would do it a thousand times again; for Germany and for Bolivia. I had nothing to do with concentration camps or gas chambers. I led a special squad to fight the Resistance. I can’t be compared to Bormann or Mengele, while Hitler was a genius.

  What happened in France, he explained, was excusable because it was war, and his actions were carried out as a duty to defend his country. Asked whether he had any regrets, he derided the question. ‘In time of war, everyone kills. There is neither good, nor evil.’ His confidence that the interview would not harm him in Bolivia was misplaced. The French demand for his extradition had reached the Supreme Court and, despite his connections with the President, it was felt that for appearances’ sake, Bolivia had to put on a show.

  Summoned to appear before Gaston Ledezma, the Bolivian prosecutor, he admitted that he had used the name Barbie in Lyons, but only as a cover. ‘I can’t believe,’ he told Ledezma, ‘that Bolivia is interested in what happened thirty years ago between France and Germany.’ Regretfully, Ledezma disagreed and on 2 March 1973 ordered his arrest. Cut off from the world inside the San Pedro prison, waiting for the supreme court to consider France’s extradition request, Barbie wanted both to justify himself and to earn enough money to hire a lawyer. He gave more interviews, explaining to select journalists that war crimes do not exist, just acts of war, such as the French had committed in Indo-China and Algeria, and the Americans in Vietnam. The French in 1940, he told a French interviewer, should have behaved as did the Germans in 1945 and just laid down their arms.

  His seven months in prison, he explained in 1979, were comfortable, undemanding and very unconventional. He already knew the truth of the saying, ‘beware of Chilean women and Bolivian justice’, especially if you had no influence or money. Life inside the prison was managed by the inmates, who had to pay for everything themselves. Among the rabble of common prisoners, ‘Don Klaus’ made sure that he was seen as an important personality; he bought a lock for his cell, turning the key on the inside when he went to sleep at night. His wife, who had returned from Lima, brought food every day and stayed with him in the communal grounds. To pass the time there were football and film shows, and the occasional execution. ‘One had the impression that no one in there had done anything wrong. I had a lot of laughs.’

  By July 1973, the Supreme Court still seemed hesitant about the case. If Barbie was naturalised under a false name, the judges reasoned, could he still be considered a Bolivian citizen? Their lack of political realism irritated the President. Impatient with their legal qualms, Banzer threatened to dismiss all the judges as ‘incompetents’ and appoint a completely new court. Five days later, on 5 July, the French demand was rejected on the grounds that there was no extradition treaty between the countries, that Barbie was a Bolivian citizen and that the Bolivian penal code did not recognise war crimes. Barbie’s release was ordered on 9 July; but just before he left the prison, he was rearrested. Peru were demanding his extradition on charges of currency fraud, a charge on which Schwend was already imprisoned. That demand, with Banzer’s help, was also rejected. Barbie finally left the prison on 25 October, with two bodyguards provided by the President for his safety. With little money and no home, he and Regine stayed for a short period with a friend in Cochabamba; once he had picked up the threads of his business affairs, they returned to La Paz.

  Barbie now owed a debt to the Banzer regime and the military. Its repayment over the next nine years was a pleasure. Banzer’s policies and style of government were the closest to Nazi Germany’s that Barbie could ever expect. The government’s motto or ‘holy trinity’ was, ‘Peace, Order and Work.’ Critics were brutally eliminated and, with American support, the labour force suppressed so that the government could direct the economy’s recovery without opposition. Banzer called it his revenge against ‘communist treason’. Barbie found no difficulty fitting into that atmosphere. His role was not as a permanent paid adviser, but rather as a reliable freelance consultant, always available for fast trips to Europe to deliver bits of intelligence or rumours about what people were saying, and finally as a secu
rity adviser to Bolivia’s cocaine barons. Dividing his time between his sawmill in Cochabamba, a retreat in Santa Cruz and the remnants of the shipping business in La Paz, he soon knew the country better than most – and there is no doubt that his information would have been passed automatically to the local CIA station chief, who would have known the source and his background.

  In the dusty, sloping streets of La Paz, the bald, stocky German was now regularly seen walking, even strutting, between his home and the Café Daiquiri or Confiteria La Paz, enjoying the public acknowledgement of his growing influence and position. By his side was his permanent bodyguard, the ever-faithful Alvaro de Castro, paid for by the government. Sitting at his favourite table, Barbie freely dispensed advice about the situation in Bolivia, peppering his conversation with distorted references to his wartime experiences. Concealing some of these events was no longer necessary, but to protect the legality of his naturalisation, he insisted that he was called Altmann. His sparsely furnished fourth-floor apartment was dominated by a large oil painting of Hitler, standing, dressed in a black coat with the collar turned up. By the hi-fi, were Austrian records with Hitler’s historic speeches, to which the ex-SS captain listened regularly. He was understandably obsessed with the historic events in which he had played a part – an increasingly important part, in his view, as the years passed. He read many books about the war, but was especially interested in Isser Harel’s account of how his Israeli secret service unit kidnapped Adolf Eichmann. Barbie had no fears of being the victim of a similar Israeli attempt. He seemed and felt himself to be impregnable, even to those who came to either embarrass or to kill him.

  In July 1972 René Hardy was paid by Paris Match, the French magazine, to travel to La Paz with one of their staff to confront Barbie. At their first meeting, staged in the Plaza San Francisco, Barbie did not even recognise the former Resistance man who introduced himself as an American journalist. ‘I remembered Hardy as tall and thin. There standing in front of me was a fat old man.’ Secretly photographed with Barbie, and now fearing arrest, Hardy left Bolivia with the journalist the same day. Some months later Hardy returned with a public challenge for a confrontation. Barbie claims that Banzer forbade him to meet Hardy. ‘I got the letter through the Ministry of the Interior. He said that he felt it important that it did not occur. I could not disobey the government.’ Hardy left without salvaging his reputation.