by Bower, Tom
Michel Goldberg wrote that he too made the long journey to La Paz to avenge Barbie’s deeds. His father, Joseph Goldberg, was one of the eighty-six Jews who were arrested and deported by Barbie in Febuary 1943. Plagued by an identity crisis, an anguished victim of anti-semitism, Goldberg says that he intended to shoot Barbie in a La Paz street: he would thus not only revenge his father’s death, but also reassert his own French citizenship. There are serious doubts about his claim that he intended to shoot Barbie but the sentiments are expressed in eloquent prose. Goldberg claims to have sat on a park bench, watching Barbie, a few yards away, talking animatedly to another man; under his poncho he held a fully-loaded gun. He wrote later of the thoughts which passed through his mind at that moment:
There he stands, the presumed instrument of my liberation, of my rebirth, waiting … I can kill Barbie almost without risk … Something now tells me that to kill is not the right solution … Obviously justice will never be done. The man responsible for the death of some ten thousand men, women and children, usually in hideous circumstances, cannot be punished for his crimes … What does a quick death mean to a purveyor of slow death? No, justice will never be done.
He left, one of many Jews and others who over the years have threatened loudly to avenge their families’ suffering but have always failed to match their words.
Barbie read Goldberg’s widely-publicised account some years later. His inevitable reaction was contempt for someone whose ‘weakness’ precluded killing, and double contempt because the would-be assassin was Jewish (Barbie insists that he has only become an anti-semite since the war). Had he been killed, he was convinced the government would never have allowed Goldberg to leave the country alive. Barbie believed himself to be indestructible. ‘I’ve seen death so often in my life that I haven’t cared about my own safety, but only thought about my family, about my wife and my children’ – natural sentiments which he did not expect his victims to share.
With Banzer’s protection indisputably confirmed, French interest in Barbie disappeared. Even the Klarsfelds acknowledged that, unless they kidnapped or killed him, their campaign was paralysed. In 1976, reports from Bolivia mentioned that a government commission, established to persuade 150,000 white immigrants from southern Africa to settle and farm in the country, included Barbie on its panel. Despite international criticism, bureaux were established in Rhodesia and South Africa. Barbie’s role was obvious: as a German, and one who understood the politics of racism, he better than anyone in Bolivia would know how to approach the whites. But despite his advice, the scheme quickly collapsed because the proposed sites did not offer the whites the pleasures and profits to which they had become accustomed.
In July 1978, Banzer was forced to resign amidst political chaos and strikes, and fled the country. Over the next two years, Bolivia was perpetually on the verge of civil war, enduring no less than three elections, three coups and six presidents. Amongst those physically denied office by the military, despite his election victory, was the ex-President, Hernán Siles Zuazo. Despite Banzer’s disappearance, Barbie was so firmly established within the inner circles of power that, far from suffering, he actually profited. Exploiting the turmoil, he developed a close relationship with the most ruthless and determinedly right-wing military group who were intent on reversing the various attempts to return to democracy. Just as in wartime Lyons, although this time he was the servant rather than the master, he was associated with a criminal fraternity who were plotting to take over the government of the country. Their purpose was to exploit the fast-growing demand for cocaine in the United States.
Until fashionable New York and Hollywood socialites discovered the use of cocaine as a stimulant in 1977, most of Bolivia’s coca crop was used legally in Bolivia, often as part payment of wages for peasants and workers, who chewed the leaf as a normal but essential part of everyday life. The remainder of the crop was illegally exported to Colombia where it was converted in laboratories from paste to white powder, before being smuggled to the northern hemisphere. The potential of the sudden American demand was first recognised by a rich Bolivian landowner and part-time smuggler, Roberto Suárez. He had both aeroplanes and the right connections within the Bolivian military and police to establish himself as the middleman between the growers, the laboratories in Colombia and the importers in America. Building rough airstrips in the remote wooded hinterland around Santa Cruz, he developed, within five years, a business which was estimated in 1982 by the US government to be annually worth no less than $400,000,000. Barbie’s contribution to Suárez’s boom was the provision of a team of bodyguards.
Joachim Fiebelkorn arrived in Santa Cruz from Paraguay in mid-1978. Then aged thirty-one, he had led a very chequered life. After deserting from the West German army, he joined the Spanish foreign legion and then returned to Germany as a pimp in Frankfurt. He arrived in South America with Nazi uniforms and medals and a fanatical obsession with the glories of the Third Reich. Over a short period, eight other mostly neo-Nazi Germans, all aimless wanderers with squalid military backgrounds seeking excitement and fortune, joined him in Santa Cruz. As the price of cocaine soared, Santa Cruz was transformed into a mixture of Wild West Klondike and Las Vegas. Exuberant lawlessness mixed with vast new riches oozed all over the town. Fiebelkorn and his group sat in the town’s Bavaria bar, armed with pistols, shooting into the ceiling, singing Nazi songs and advertising themselves as available mercenaries. Their first client was General Echeverria, a local commander, who needed help in procuring and maintaining his weapons. Echeverria was already deeply involved with Suárez in the cocaine trade. Both had become concerned about their inability to prevent consignments being snatched without payment by Colombian purchasers on the airstrips. They needed a private army for protection and Echeverria suggested to Fiebelkorn that his group might consider the proposition. For the Germans, it was like a gift from heaven.
Suárez gave them a luxury villa, cars, guns and lots of money. They became feared in the town as the German mafia, enjoying free drinks and free women. Other fascists in Europe soon heard about this wonderland sanctuary and the wealth that the Germans were enjoying in Bolivia. Among the new arrivals in 1979 were two important and very violent Italian fascists, Stefano Delle Chiaie and Pierluigi Pagliai. Over past years, both had been involved in numerous conspiracies, bombings and brutal murders in Italy. Their most notorious crime was to plan the bombing of the Bologna railway station on 2 August 1980 which killed eighty-five people and seriously injured about 200 more. Amongst those charged with that mass murder by the Italian magistrate was Joachim Fiebelkorn who is believed to have travelled from Bolivia to Italy expressly to plant the bomb in the station.
All these post-war fascists were understandably very impressed by Barbie, a man who had been on the front line, fighting their cause with methods they so much admired. According to one member of Fiebelkorn’s group, Barbie visited them in Santa Cruz in late spring 1980 in the midst of Bolivia’s turbulent political chaos. ‘He was then security adviser to the Bolivian Ministry of the Interior. He said, “The time has come; we must make this government move before this country is turned into an enormous Cuba. With our other foreign friends [i.e. Delle Chiaie and Pagliai] we are putting together a security force. We want you to help, but naturally you have to prove yourselves first.”’
Barbie was inviting the German and Italian fascists to help General Garcia Meza to overthrow President Lidia Gueiler and install himself as the President. Meza was a close friend and ally of Roberto Suárez. Overwhelmed by the billions of dollars flooding into the country, Suárez and some of the generals had become greedy. They wanted the money and no more irritating government interference. That meant taking over the government. Barbie’s test for the Germans was the tedious task of acting as guards at meetings. As soon as he was satisfied, Dr Adolfo Ustares, Banzer’s lawyer, arranged for Fiebelkorn’s group to be given extra military training, shooting practice and new weapons, including a half-track tank.
> On 17 July 1980, Fiebelkorn’s group took up positions in Santa Cruz, ready to shoot anyone who challenged Bolivia’s 189th coup. Unlike other towns, where there was fierce shooting and considerable bloodshed, Santa Cruz was quiet. As the reward for their services, Barbie arranged for the Germans to be hired permanently by the new government, based in a special building near Santa Cruz’s airport.
‘Our big breakthrough,’ according to one of the Germans, ‘was at the end of 1980 when Klaus Altmann rang us from La Paz and said that three of us should come to the capital. The President and the Minister of the Interior, Colonel Luis Arce Gómez, wanted to speak to us. Altmann took them to a brick house next to the West German embassy where the Minister of the Interior was waiting for them.’ Barbie had a very close relationship with Arce Gómez, who described Barbie to one French journalist as, ‘my teacher’. According to a French diplomat, Barbie was even seen at police headquarters in La Paz during Gómez’s reign giving orders to interrogators about the questioning of political prisoners, students and labour leaders.
A heavyweight with a round chubby face, Arce Gómez is Roberto Suárez’s cousin. His jocular appearance belies his record of brutality and violence. Superficially, it also conceals his notoriously keen interest in the cocaine trade which earned him the epithet, ‘Minister of Cocaine’. With his help, Bolivia’s cocaine crop tripled in just three years. According to the US Drug Enforcement Agency, he took a hefty commission on each bale of coca leaves that was illegally exported. In Barbie’s presence, Arce Gómez asked Fiebelkorn whether his group could carry out ‘special, risky assignments’. All three at the meeting jumped up and pulled out their revolvers. Arce Gómez paled and then laughed, ‘You’re our kind.’ Their task was to end the cocaine operation of about 140 small dealers. Arce Gómez’s motive was to re-establish friendly relations with Washington, which had been seriously damaged both by the coup and the phenomenal spread of cocaine use in America. No Bolivian government can survive for long without Washington’s approval, and the US administration had both refused to recognise the Meza regime and withheld economic aid. Arce Gómez’s task was to convince Washington that the new Bolivian government was cooperating in ending cocaine exports to the United States. Barbie’s neo-Nazi recruits were hired for that task.
After a meeting with President Meza, the three returned to Santa Cruz and celebrated their appointment in style. Fiebelkorn dressed up in a black Nazi uniform and, to choruses of ‘Heil’, christened the newly enlarged group, ‘The Fiancés of Death’. Their style of operation was, not surprisingly, reminiscent of Gestapo raids forty years earlier in Lyons. ‘In the first months of 1981, we stood Santa Cruz on its head. We burst into one house after another, grabbing hostages. From them we got more names and they were handed over for questioning. But the interrogations were done by Bolivians. Most of us did not like getting involved in those things.’ Their profits and pleasure were enormous, but short-lived.
Exposed by American CBS television as intimately involved in the cocaine trade, Arce Gómez was forced to resign on 30 March 1981. Five months later, American pressure forced President Meza himself to resign. Both of them fled with millions of dollars to asylum in Argentina. Fiebelkorn and the ‘Fiancés of Death’ were forced to leave just weeks later. Bolivia was once again plunged into political turmoil. Klaus Barbie, however, had sufficiently close contacts with others in the army to feel relatively secure, although his personal life was soon shattered.
On 1 May 1981 he left Cochabamba with his wife to watch their son hang-gliding in Tunari. Both had been very concerned when their son Klaus had taken up the sport and Regine had pleaded that it was too dangerous. On the Labour Day holiday, they were watching their son floating in the air when a sudden gust of wind pushed him uncontrollably earthwards, causing him to crash fatally just yards from where they stood. Barbie’s problems were now to multiply.
THE RETRIBUTION
Manfred Ludolph was true to his word: in 1972, Barbie’s case file was returned to the active list, but little more happened. In 1976, the Lyons prosecutors sent a complete copy of their Barbie file, totalling 3,000 pages, to the Munich prosecutors who began the laborious task of translating and examining the potential new charges not just against Barbie, but against all the surviving members of the Lyons Gestapo. In 1979, police officers were sent to interrogate Stengritt, Floreck, Bartelmus and all the other Gestapo officers who had returned from imprisonment in France. Each was warned that he faced further prosecution, and then was asked for evidence against Barbie. Only Floreck condemned his former chief outright as a brutal murderer. Despite the volumes of testimony against Barbie, there seemed to be no new charge to bring which had a living eyewitness. Then someone pulled out of an old file the sworn statement made in August 1971 by Alfons Glas, the former Wehrmacht soldier, who had actually seen the St Claude Resistance leader, Joseph Kemmler, beaten to death on Barbie’s orders. On the grounds of the Kemmler murder, the German government, in May 1982, formally but in secret submitted to the Bolivian government a new request for Barbie’s extradition. Anticipating their reaction, the Germans argued that Barbie’s Bolivian naturalisation was fraudulent and that he was therefore still a German citizen.
No one in Munich at the time expected that the request would be considered seriously. Bolivia was engulfed in an intense political crisis as the military fought desperately to prevent the liberal President-elect, Siles Zuazo, returning to form a civilian government. But for the first time, Barbie might have felt more than usually concerned about the outcome of the protracted battle for power. Waiting impatiently in exile in Peru, Zuazo had told reporters in mid-July that his government would not continue to protect the German fugitive.
One week later, the Bolivian presidency changed yet again, and General Guido Vildoso became head of state. It had been Vildoso’s soldiers who, in August 1981, on Barbie’s command, had arrested and intimidated two American journalists in Cochabamba as they attempted to interview him. Eight days after Vildoso became President, he received his first private visitor – Klaus Barbie. As he left the Palace, Barbie told bemused reporters that they had discussed ‘legal and administrative questions’ concerning Transmaritima. No one believed him. He was at the pinnacle of his influence; now matters could only get worse.
In early August, Washington intervened directly in Bolivia’s crisis. An American diplomat promised Zuazo generous loans if he returned to form a government. Shortly afterwards, the German government made public its May extradition request. Questioned about that request, Vildoso’s own Foreign Minister, Agustín Saavedra, hinted that Barbie might be extradited to Germany. European interest in Bolivian affairs increased – not, for once, in the yo-yo fortunes of its presidents, but in the fate of Barbie. Other than staying put, where else could he go?
Barbie was now living permanently in La Paz. His wife had been complaining of stomach pains for some time and examination revealed that she was suffering from terminal cancer. Having buried his son only recently in the city’s German cemetery, Barbie became depressed at the prospect of a solitary life; but he was not worried about his security. Not even the triumphant election of Zuazo as President on 6 October seemed to shake his conviction that his Bolivian citizenship gave him complete protection. Sipping coffee as usual in the Confiteria La Paz, he told journalists: ‘I’m not worried about the German extradition demand. Bolivian law rules here.’ But over at the presidential palace, the 192nd incumbent was emphatic: ‘We will extradite him. We have no interest to protect people like him.’
Zuazo had already demonstrated his urgent resolve that Bolivia should cease to be a sanctuary for neo-fascists. Just three days after taking office, he had agreed that the Italian government could fly a special commando squad from Rome to seize Italy’s two most wanted terrorists, Delle Chiaie and Pagliai. The special Alitalia DC10 arrived on 10 October, the same day that Zuazo was inaugurated. Italian anti-terrorist police, supported by Bolivian security forces, drove straight to the Italians’ hom
e in Santa Cruz. In the spectacular shoot-out which followed, Pagliai was shot in the neck and paralysed. There was no sign of Delle Chiaie. Pagliai was immediately flown back to Italy, but died soon after his return.
Despite the swift resolution of that particular problem, Zuazo was aware that his international standing had been damaged by this willing compromise of Bolivia’s sovereignty. He was determined that Barbie’s case should be treated with ostensible legitimacy. He told the French ambassador and Mario Roncal, the special emissary from Paris, that he wanted Barbie out of the country as soon as possible but that it had to seem like an extradition, not an expulsion. Bonn’s extradition request had therefore to be subject to the Supreme Court. Not the least of the drawbacks to this solution was that the majority of the court’s twelve judges had been appointed by the generals, and they showed no intention of reversing their view that Klaus Altmann was a Bolivian citizen. Nevertheless, in early January 1983, the German request was resubmitted to the court with the support of the Bolivian public prosecutor, who put forward the spurious claim that an extradition treaty between Bolivia and Germany had been signed in 1889. By this time, with international attention focused on the country as a haven for Nazi war criminals, the government was ready to consider any strategy to ensure Barbie’s removal.
