THE BUTCHER'S TRACKS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP85M00364R001602730079-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 8, 2010
• Sequence Number: 79
• Publication Date: February 21, 1983
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
WASHINGTON, D,C. 20505
18 February 1983
NOTE FOR THE DIRECTOR
This is a devastating
an ey Sp6rkin
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Exclusive world copyright ?Daniel Houpline{ihierry E ch-Paris-Match/George earris.USA
Barbie (white hair, carrying a coat) goes to jail in Lyons: The intelligence chief compiled a record that was a model of Third Reich savagery
FRANCE
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er!)n,r'; .9 Traciz
Klaus Barbie returns to face justice where he dis-
pensed terror-and the case opens old wounds of war.
T J he old man settled quietly into a prison
.. cell in Lyons last week, reading Ger-
man magazines and French newspapers,
obediently mucking out his quarters like
any common criminal. But Klaus Barbie's
past was uncommon-and the memories he
summoned up were almost too repugnant to
be true. There was the "Butcher of Lyons,"
a Nazi sadist who could dandle a whore on
his knee as he ordered a victim alternately
beaten then dunked into ice water; the SS
strongman who could snatch a Jewish baby
from his mother's arms and put the child on
the train to Auschwitz; the Gestapo thug
who could lock 100 teen-agers into their
schoolhouse, then burn and dynamite it. At
69, Barbie was to face justice back where he
had dispensed terror. His case raised awk-
ward questions about who had helped him
escape and reopened some old and ugly
wounds of war.
Barbie's record was a model of Third
Reich savagery. While serving as a decorat-
ed German intelligence chief in Lyons be-
tween the winter of 1942 and the summer of
1944 he had a hand in 4,342 murders and
ordered 7,591 deportations to death camps,
by French count. French courts have twice
convicted him in absentia and sentenced
him to die. Yet Barbie managed to escape in
the chaos of postwar Europe-shielded at
one point by U.S. intelligence agents who
valued his information on the Soviets, war
partners turned adversaries. He fled to
South America and built a career flattering
strongmen and chumming with other Nazis
on the run. When Bolivia's new civilian
government finally turned on him and
handed him over to France two weeks ago,
Barbie was as unrepentant as ever. "What is
there to regret?" he told an interviewer after
two decades in exile. "I am a convinced
Nazi ... and if I had to be born a thousand
times, I would be a thousand times what I
have been."
Old Ghosts: Barbie brought more than his
insolence back to France. Old Nazi ghosts
came back to haunt the resisters and Jewish
families who had felt his boot in Lyons (page
42). The French press revived the World
War It occupation as front-page news. A
chorus of fresh accusers dredged out the
long-buried cases of opportunists suspected
of collaborating with the Germans. In
Washington the administration and the
Senate began investigating any U.S. connec-
tion in Barbie's postwar escape. "The U.S.
was extremely powerful in those days and
also arrogant," said French Nazi hunter
Serge Klarsfeld. "There were 20 [French
requests) urging the U.S. authorities in Mu-
nich to surrender him to the French au-
thorities. They remained unanswered."
I3arbie was a Nazi's Nazi-loyal, brutal'
and not too smart. An indifferent student,
he passed high school two years behind his
class southwest of Bonn. His SS file approv-
ingly noted his "'dark blond sleek hair" and
his "consistently strong, positive attitude"
toward Hitler's National Socialism-al-
though. it showed one flaw: Barbie ex-
plairpd in writing that his wife's difficulty
delivering his daughter had prevented him
from fathering additional Aryan children as
efficiently as SS policy encouraged. (He was
eventually to father a son as well.) His field
record made up for any such personal short-
comings. He joined the SS "Jewish section,"
went to The Hague, where he was promoted
to full lieutenant, and later moved on to
Amsterdam, where Dutch investigators be-
lieve he helped deport 300 Jews to the
Mauthausen concentration camp.
Dabringhaus: The U.S. interrogator
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(~ SICK F - 4' ~.
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Stern
Barbie at a comrade's grave in Bolivia: `I would be a thousand times what I have been'
In December 1942 Barbie was trans-
ferred to Lyons, the major Resistance cen-
ter in France's "unoccupied zone." Chubby
but a snappy dresser, he soon set a personal
style as deputy commander of intelligence.
At "work," usually in shirtsleeves, he
snapped his riding crop during question-
ing-although at times he punctuated his
demands with blows from a blackjack, a
rough cudgel or a simple two-by-four. "He
only stopped when you lost consciousness,"
says Maurice Boudet, a Resistance leader
captured by Barbie's men. "Then he woke
you up with kicks to the belly, the kidneys,
the crotch. If that didn't work, he threw you
in a tub of ice water, with cubes floating in it.
After the tub, tl e blackjack. that made your
Fuchs: Eyewitness to Barbie's terror
Gamma-Liaison
plam,
skin swell up. Then he injected acid in your
bladder." When somebody bombed Bar-
bie's favorite restaurant, he had five prison-
ers machine-gunned and left their corpses
on grisly display as a warning. When some
German airmen were shot nearby, Barbie
opened an entire cell block as if to permit an
escape. As the prisoners ran, all 24 were
gunned down.
Special Project: Barbie's biggest catch was
Jean Moulin, the Resistance leader hand-
picked by Charles de Gaulle to unite the
various anti-German groups. As "Max" or
"Rex," his noms de guerre, Moulin had
called a summit meeting of his Lyons lieu-
tenants in late June 1943. Barbie somehow
got word of the gathering, showed up with
his soldiers and arrested the bunch. Barbie
made Moulin his special project. Gottlieb
Fuchs, a Swiss national who served Barbie
as an interpreter before winding up in a
concentration camp, was among the last to
see Moulin-in Barbie's custody and alive,
but terribly beaten. When Barbie left, Fuchs
tried to wipe the blood from Moulin's face.
"I made a kind of pillow out of the rags of his
jacket so his lungs would not fill with
blood," he says. "The man was dying. His
windpipe was caved in." Barbie eventually
shipped Moulin off on a train to Paris, but
the prisoner died en route.
. As the war progressed toward Ger-
many's defeat Barbie lashed out' at entire
villages. Among his prime targets were
Lyons's Jews, many of whom had fled to the
region for sanctuary after the fall of Paris.
Barbie's secretaries confiscated jewels and
other valuables from people brought in for
questioning. Many Jews never lived to see
the Auschwitz train platform. "Barbie
packed them into cattle cars with no food or
water," says Michel Thomas, another Ly-
ons survivor. "The trip took weeks, so ev-
eryone died. The Germans had to wear gas
masks to get rid of the bodies."
After the war, Barbie burned off his SS
identification tattoo-number 272284. He
was captured briefly by the British but es-
caped. The Germans wanted him fora jew el
robbery. The Americans may have picked
him up for black marketeering. But he had
an insurance policy: his store of East-bloc
intelligence at the dawn of the cold war. He
presented himself to U.S. officers and was
installed in a safe house in Augsburg. The
Americans gave him a sanitized identity
and $1,700 a month, according to Erhard
Dabringhaus, one of his American interro-
gators. Barbie offered a dribble of informa-
tion-including the location ofa Soviet ura-
nium mine in what is now East Germany,
evidence that Moscow was developing an
atomic bomb. Dabringhaus took a pistol to
their meetings. "Had I known this guy
would escape," he says, "I think I would
have put a bullet through him."
The French repeatedly asked that Barbie
be returned for trial, but the Americans
refused. As a compromise, the French were
permitted to interrogate Barbie under
American guard. The French "were ready
to tear him apart," says one of the American
escorts, John Willms. But Barbie "felt so
secure he would give them smart answers."
Did U.S. agents help Barbie escape to South
America in 1951? The question will test a
U.S. Justice Department unit that already
has4ocumented cases in which war crimi-
nals were, smuggled into the United States
for training as anti-Soviet agents. Intelli-
gence officers of the period deny that any
Nazi with Barbie's notoriety was paid or
relocated. "We'd spend a lot of time inter-
viewing them,"' says former Army counter-
intelligence man Ralph Farris. "If they
didn't want to talk to us, all we had to do vas
say: 'The French would like to talk to you,'
or "The Russians would like to talk to you.'
They were glad to be in American hands."
Iinfluence: By whatever means, Barbie es-
caped. The old-Nazi Odessa network appar-
ently helped with his travel plans-a voyage
from Genoa to Argentina as Klaus Alt-
mann, mechanic, and family. He settled in
Bolivia, opened a sawmill, and by 1970 had
set himself up as a security adviser to Gen.
Hugo Banzer. Among his deals: to plot out
two all-white cities intended to attract refu-
gees fleeing southern Africa's black nation-
alism. Barbie's influence may have reached
its peak in 1980, when he supported Gen.
Luis Garcia Meza's successful coup against
an elected civilian government. Barbie may
or may not have been a ringleader of the
assorted European Nazis, right-wing thugs
and Argentine extremists who cornered the
illegal cocaine trade.
Barbie had lost his cover in 1971. On a
hunch, the Nazi-hunting team of Serge and
Beate Klarsfeld had circulated his picture
to newspapers around the world-and the
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INTERNATIONAL
German executive of a Peruvian publishing
firm identified the fugitive, who at the time
was living in Lima. Barbie fled back to
Bolivia, which does not share an extradi-
tion treaty with France, and lived safely
until the reformist civilian government of
Hernan Siles Zuazo took power last Octo-
ber. To the Mitterrand government's de-
light, Sales Zuazo was ready to cooperate.
Last month the Bolivians arrested Barbie
on a seven-year-old bad-debt charge. Then
the government announced that it was "ex-
pelling" Barbie-not extraditing him-
and that France was the only European
government willing to take him. The Bo-
livians flew Barbie to French Guiana,
where he was put on a French presidential
plane bound for an air base near Orange-
then on a helicopter to Lyons.
War Crimes: It will take the French
courts at least a year to prepare for Barbie's
trial. The French have begun debating
whether to bring back the death penalty,
outlawed by the Mitterrand government,
for his case. Another problem is to assemble
an adequate list of charges: his convictions
in absentia have lapsed under the statute of
limitations. Prosecutors must make a new
- : e Lost C en of ieu
"The activities of the Jewish children's home were ended this
morning. In total, 41 children aged 3 to 13 were arrested. More-
over, all theJewishpersonnel, ten heads, fiveofthem women, were
also arrested. No money or other objects of value were found The
transport [to a concentration camp) will take place on 7 April,
1944. SS Obersturmfuhrer, Klaus Barbie"
That telegram alone might convict Klaus Barbie on the
"crimes against humanity" charge he faces in France. But Julien
Favet, 63, offers further damning evidence. As a young farm-
hand,, Favet watched the
roundup of the Jewish chil-
dren-and saw a man he
identifies as Barbie giving
orders on the "scene. Last
week NEWSWEEK'S Ron
Moreau met with Favet at
the children's home, a stone
schoolhouse in the moun-
tainside village of Izieu, 50
miles east of Lyons. Below,
his eyewitness account of
one ofBarbie's butcheries:
On a warm Thursday
morning, April 6, Favet left
his boss's house and headed
for the fields. As he passed
the small boarding school
for Jewish children next
door, an upstairs shutter
flew open and his two young
friends, Henri Goldberg,
14, and his brother Joseph,
12, peered out. "Julien,"
they called, "we can't take
the cows to pasture this
morning. We have to work
in the dining room all day."
case based on "crimes against humanity," a
class not subject to limitations. Fresh evi-
dence is plentiful-on the deportation of 41
Jewish children from Izieu; the deportation
of 80 rebellious railroad workers from Oul-
lins; the murder and cremation in a baker's
oven of a World War I hero and four other
people. A trial based on a handful of leftover
crimes won't do justice to Klaus Barbie's
record. But it will set a precedent for other
prosecutions and help France exorcise at
least one Nazi monster.
STEVEN STRASSER with SCOTT SULLI VAN in Paris.
THEODORE STANGER in Bonn, BARRY CAME
in Rio de Janeiro and bureau reports
in bad French, "You are the terrorist who jumped." The officer
had confused Favet for the school's doctor who.had escaped, as
had one child, by jumping out a back window. At that point,
Favet noticed two SS men in long German overcoats and wide-
brimmed hats talking to a local peasant. The peasant, he says,
was the "piece of garbage" who had denounced the children to
the Nazis, who wouldn't otherwise have known about them.
"There are some people around here," says Favet, "who cannot
sleep quietly at night, thinking what they did." One of the SS
men, hesays, was Barbie: "I can tell from his photos. It's simply a
face one cannot forget."
Gas Chambers After the peasant quisling identified Favet,
him released. Just then shots rang out. The
corner storeroom where the
children kept a pig they'd
been. raising. The pig darted
out of the room and was cut
to shreds by gunfire. Then
one boy tried to jump down
from the truck. The soldiers
grabbed him, kicked him,
and beat him with rifle butts.
Then, as the small convoy
moved out, Favet got a last
glimpse of the Goldberg
boys, who might have got-
ten away had they taken the
cows, to pasture that morn-
ing. As it was, they went to
the gas chambers at Ausch-
witz. The school's director,
Miron Zlatin, and two of the
boys didn't even get that far.
A Nazi firing squad execut-
' TOUT- HOMME " EST` UN
MOPCEAU.DE CONTINENT,
UN E PART. DU TOUT;
., w
LA MORT DE TOUT hOMME
QUE JE IAIS PARTIE
DU GENRE HUMAIN
ed them in Lyons.
The little stone school-
house still sits on the side of
the granite mountain. A
Mr. and Mrs. Louis Thibau-
dier now live there. They
Favet, the memorial: Cries and brave songs from small friends
Favet went on to plant his asparagus. But by 8:30, when no one
delivered him his morning snack, he sensed that something was
wrong. Walking back to the school, he noticed two canvas-
covered trucks in the front drive. Suddenly someone jammed a
machine-gun barrel deep into his stomach, doubling him over in
pain. A German SS trooper prodded him to the front courtyard.
The Nazis had stuffed the children "like sacks of potatoes"
into the trucks, he recalls. "Most were crying. A few were
bravely singing ... They cried 'Julien, Julien,' but I couldn't do
anything for them." A German officer walked up to him and said
yard. In the attic, they have kept several long wooden school
benches and some faded postcards pasted on the walls by the
children 40 years ago. Mrs. Thibaudier also takes care of a large
white stone commemorative plaque on the house's front wall.
With a soft snow falling, Favet stood on the porch and read the
children's navies, pointing out the ones he remembered best. He
paused, then said, "I think they should tie Barbie to the fence and
pull out his fingernails one by one." Mrs. Thibaudier wanly
disagreed. "If Barbie did this," she said, "he should be punished.
But we shouldn't talk of torture;--no matter who it is."
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