Killing the SS Page 19
Like Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann, Klaus Barbie set sail from Genoa, Italy. He set sail on board the Corrientes on March 23, 1951. And just as those two assumed new names, so it is that Barbie goes by Klaus Altmann.
“In 1951, because of the French and German efforts to apprehend Subject,” a U.S. intelligence report will state, “the 66th Detachment resettled him in South America. Subject was documented in the name Klaus Altmann and routed through Austria and Italy to Bolivia. Since that time, Army has had no contact with Subject.”
The Butcher of Lyon disappeared into his new identity so completely that when a West German intelligence officer who had traveled to La Paz on business met him by chance at the city’s German Club, the agent insisted to his Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) superiors that they put “Klaus Altmann” on the payroll. He was given the code name Adler—eagle—and a monthly stipend to file reports on the Bolivian government. Barbie’s cover was so good that he traveled freely to the United States and Europe. He built friendships with Bolivia’s top generals and lived well on the proceeds of his many businesses—some legitimate, others not. It was Klaus Barbie—along with the CIA—who assisted those generals in locating and assassinating the famous Communist icon Che Guevara.1 He also supplied guns to a nascent drug lord named Pablo Escobar, eventually helping the narco-terrorist build a $30 billion global empire. With those connections came great power. Barbie and his wife successfully pushed for a “no Jew” policy at the La Paz German Club, where they also distributed pro-Nazi literature.
Despite his high profile, it seemed as if Barbie’s past would never be uncovered. Even when he stood in the German Club, threw his right arm up in a Nazi salute, and shouted “Heil Hitler,” few suspected that Klaus Barbie was among the most vile of all war criminals.
All that changed in 1971. A French court had convicted him in absentia after the war, but thanks to CIA complicity, Barbie never served a day in a French prison.2 Then came French Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld. The husband-and-wife team made it their life’s work to document the Holocaust in France and spent decades tracking Klaus Barbie.
Serge Klarsfeld is a French Jew and can still remember the night police came and seized his father, sending him to Auschwitz. The little boy survived only because he was concealed behind a false wall in their home outside Nice.
Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld in Cologne, 1979
Beate is not Jewish. She is not even French. As a German woman whose father fought in the Wehrmacht, her motivation is atonement for the evils committed by her nation.
Despite their efforts, the Butcher of Lyon remains free and prosperous in Bolivia, protected by his cronies.
Meanwhile, Beate and Serge Klarsfeld continue to tell the world about the SS war criminal and the horrors he perpetuated, never flagging in their quest to bring him to trial.
* * *
It is 1943. Jean Moulin is not Klaus Barbie’s first victim, nor will he be the last. Just forty when the war begins, Moulin serves as the prefect of the Eure-et-Loir district just outside Paris. He is a patriot. And although Moulin does not take up arms in World War II, he will become one of the great figures in that subversive band of warriors known as the French Resistance.
Moulin’s story begins shortly after the German invasion of France. A small force of Sudanese soldiers fighting alongside the French army outside the city of Chartres manages to stop the Wehrmacht advance. It is an affront to the German war machine to be pinned down by supposedly inferior black troops, so much so that when the Germans finally burst through, the 180 Sudanese soldiers are not permitted to surrender. Instead, they are lined up against a wall and shot.
As the prefect, or chief local representative, Moulin is the symbolic leader of his district. In an attempt to persuade the local French population that the murder of the Sudanese was justifiable, the German leadership in France orders Moulin to sign a document stating that the Sudanese were shot for raping and murdering French women.
Knowing the truth, Moulin refuses to sign.
The Germans beat him savagely, then once again demand his signature.
Moulin will not sign the paper. So the Nazis beat him again.
What the Germans do not know is that Jean Moulin has a genetic streak of righteousness that prevents him from bearing witness to a lie. His father was the attorney defending Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, a French officer falsely convicted of treason and sent to the notorious penal colony on Devil’s Island at the turn of the nineteenth century.3 Dreyfus was Jewish, and much of the evidence presented against him was based on anti-Semitism rather than truth. Moulin’s father later went on to also protest the criminal nature of European imperialism—the very system that required the Sudanese troops to fight and die on a battlefield nowhere near their African homes.
Fortified by his father’s example, Moulin defies the Germans for a third time. The Nazis brutally beat him yet again, then throw him in prison. In the depths of his pain, unable to hold out much longer, Moulin recites Hamlet’s soliloquy “To be or not to be,” then pens a suicide note on June 17, 1940.
“For seven hours I have been subjected to physical and moral torture,” Moulin writes. “I know that today I reached the limits of resistance. I know that if it starts again tomorrow, I will sign in the end. The dilemma remains: to sign or to disappear. It is impossible to flee. Whatever happens, I cannot sign.”
Resigned to his fate, Moulin slashes his throat with a broken glass bottle—but it does not kill him. For the rest of his life he will wear a scarf to hide the jagged wound. The cravat will become his trademark.
As the Sudanese murders recede into history, Moulin prevails. Released from prison, he returns to his position as local prefect, though not for long. He soon joins the French Resistance, often traveling to London to meet personally with Gen. Charles de Gaulle, the exiled leader of the Free French forces. For two years, Moulin evades Nazi capture while establishing a network of subversive cells throughout France. Other than de Gaulle, no Frenchman has more authority in the fight against Germany.
Jean Moulin’s code name is simply Max.
* * *
Meanwhile on the Eastern Front, SS police official Klaus Barbie is attached to a Gestapo unit specializing in the acquisition of information from prisoners of war captured in the German invasion of the Soviet Union. It is here that the young SS policeman learns the ways of torture. When he cannot extract the information he needs, Barbie simply resorts to murder. In those cases where he knows the names and locations of prisoners’ families, he makes it a point to kill them, too—and burn their homes to the ground as a reminder of what happens to those who dare defy Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.
It is only a matter of time before Barbie’s skills lead him to a promotion—and transfer. In November 1942, the SS-Hauptsturmführer is assigned to the French city of Lyon, where there has been a considerable disruption of the German occupation by an underground group of Frenchmen calling themselves simply the Resistance.
Barbie sets up his headquarters in the centre ville, at a lodging known as the Hotel Terminus. There he extracts information from suspects through some of the most barbaric forms of torture ever seen. Unknown to either man, he and Jean Moulin are destined to meet.
* * *
On June 21, 1943, Jean Moulin is betrayed. The true identity of his Judas is never discovered. Klaus Barbie personally oversees the arrest of the exalted “Max.” Barbie is just thirty years old at the time, a rising figure in the Gestapo. Rather than send the Resistance leader to his regional headquarters in Paris, he personally oversees the questioning and torture of Moulin.
Barbie conducts the interrogation, which goes on for a week. The beatings continue around the clock. Moulin’s hands and feet are bound with tight metal cuffs so he cannot deflect the blows. Hot needles are inserted under his fingernails. Moulin is whipped and hit repeatedly with a truncheon. Handcuffs with spikes inside are affixed to his wrists and he is hung from the ceiling, whereupon Barbie repe
atedly smashes a rubber bar into his torso and legs. Moulin becomes unrecognizable, his head wreathed in purple bruises.
“I saw Barbie in his shirtsleeves dragging a lifeless body down the steps,” one fellow Resistance fighter remembers of the unconscious Moulin. “He stopped for a few minutes on the ground floor to get his breath back. Then he started dragging the body again down more steps toward the cells in the basement. The man had been badly beaten around the face and his clothes were torn.”
And yet, Barbie has spared Moulin the worst of his tortures: being skinned alive, being sodomized by a dog, having his head thrust into a pail of ammonia—but perhaps all that is to come. It is impossible to tell. Barbie is impulsive in his methods, constantly inventing creative ways of destroying a human being.
Upon emerging from the basement, Barbie makes known his plans to seal Moulin’s fate. The Gestapo leaders in Paris are demanding that the Resistance leader be sent there for questioning. Moulin is the most prized catch in Gestapo history. Barbie plans to personally escort the Resistance leader by train. “If he doesn’t die,” Barbie vows, “I’ll finish him off in Paris tomorrow.”
But Jean Moulin survives Paris—barely. He is nothing more than a breathing corpse when he is placed on a stretcher, then loaded on board the train that will take him to a death camp. On July 8, 1943, as his train sits in the station at Metz, Moulin dies.
Despite Klaus Barbie’s heinous interrogation techniques—methods he now uses occasionally in Bolivia as a thirty-year member of that nation’s secret police—Jean Moulin did not betray a single piece of information about the Resistance. He goes to his death a hero.4
But to the SS, Barbie is also a hero. His role in the capture and torture of Moulin receives praise from the Nazi leadership in Berlin, where he is recalled to receive the Iron Cross First Class with Sword, the Nazi regime’s highest military honor. The citation mentions his “indefatigable devotion to the battle against resistance organizations in France.”
No less than Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, is the author of that commendation.
* * *
French Nazi hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld continue to compile a list of witnesses prepared to tell their stories of Klaus Barbie’s sadism: the woman who watched him crush an individual’s skull with the heel of his boot because he thought the prisoner was Jewish; the time he broke a prisoner’s vertebrae by striking the prisoner on the back with a spiked ball; the beatings; the near drowning in frozen water known as the “bathtub torture.”
It seems there is no method of brutal interrogation that Barbie has not attempted. Each witness remarks about the great pleasure he showed on his face while administering torture.
But to Bolivian authorities, Klaus Barbie is valuable—a necessary force in their fight to maintain power. So it is that Barbie seems to be untouchable. He certainly believes that.
He is wrong.
22
FEBRUARY 7, 1979
BERTIOGA BEACH, BRAZIL
5:30 P.M.
The day has been demanding for Josef Mengele. The sixty-eight-year-old fugitive has traveled to this resort town at the peak of the Brazilian summer to spend a few days in the two-story stucco home of his friend Wolfram Bossert and his wife, Liselotte. Mengele is constantly depressed these days, bitter about his lack of money and his lonely life in exile. Fueled by that low mood, the doctor picked a fight with Wolfram late last night. Liselotte will testify that she does not know the reason but the two men argued well past 2:00 a.m., when exhaustion got the best of them.
Mengele spent the next morning hiking through a local forest with the Bosserts. The afternoon was at leisure on this broad, sandy beach under a blazing sun. As evening falls and the time nears to head back for dinner, the Angel of Death enjoys a final swim. In the distance, a line of black clouds portends a coming storm, but he is unworried. The waves are getting bigger as he continues to navigate the sea. Wolfram and Liselotte Bossert have already gotten out of the ocean. Mengele can see them in the distance, toweling off.
With a burst of energy Mengele swims as hard as he can toward the beach. He rises and falls with the incoming swells, letting the waves help him toward shore. All at once, Mengele’s left arm stops functioning. The same is true of his left leg.
Mengele screams for help. The doctor knows the telltale signs of a stroke, and he battles with the right side of his body to keep his head above water. The waves wash over him, pressing him beneath the surface.
Wolfram Bossert hears Mengele’s cries. He runs into the sea and swims to his friend. Bossert is frantic. Like the sedentary Mengele, Bossert’s physical condition is not peak. The race toward his houseguest through heaving seas has Bossert fearing for his own life.
Wolfram Bossert’s efforts are in vain. By the time he reaches Josef Mengele, the Nazi has drowned.
Bossert wraps an arm around the body and drags it back to shore. Lifeguards help him place Mengele onto the sand, whereupon Bossert himself collapses. Rain begins to fall. Growing colder by the minute, Mengele’s corpse lies on the beach. An ambulance arrives to assist Wolfram Bossert, while Mengele’s body is taken to a Bertioga aid station. Lifeguards pronounce him dead on arrival. Due to the intense thunderstorm, the body lays flat for five hours, until Brazilian officials manage to secure the corpse.
Wolfram Bossert is too exhausted to travel. So it is left to his wife, Liselotte, to accompany Mengele’s body to the morgue. The storm has knocked over a tree, blocking the road, so the sixty-mile journey into São Paulo takes almost three hours.
It is past 2:00 a.m. The coroner is not interested in details at this late hour. The victim is quite obviously dead due to drowning, so there is no further investigation. The coroner also overlooks the need to take fingerprints or photos of the corpse, thus relying solely on Liselotte’s testimony as to the victim’s identity.
“Wolfgang Gerhard,” she testifies, giving the name on Mengele’s fake identification papers.
The coroner immediately releases the body for burial.
For as long as Josef Mengele has lived in São Paulo, Liselotte and Wolfram Bossert have known his true identity. Working closely with Hans Sedlmeier, manager of the Karl Mengele and Sons farm equipment company back in Germany, they have helped funnel money to the fugitive and conspired to keep his location a secret from the law. Liselotte does not know the specific crime she is committing, but she is well aware that her actions are illegal.
The Bosserts have long known this day would come. So they have devised a plan to keep the world from knowing that Josef Mengele is dead.
Liselotte arranges to have Mengele buried the first thing in the morning. The real Wolfgang Gerhard once purchased a plot at the Embu cemetery, and it is there where the burial takes place.1 There is no service. Other than Liselotte, there are no mourners. At her direction, the coffin lid remains closed because the funeral director knows exactly what the real Wolfgang Gerhard looks like. When a cemetery administrator insists on opening the casket, Lisolette feigns a fit of grief-stricken hysteria. Out of respect for the bereaved, the administrator rescinds his request.
Dr. Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, is lowered into grave 321 at Nossa Senhora do Rosario cemetery in Embu, sixteen miles south of São Paulo.
The deceit seems to have worked.
* * *
“I cannot say where he is, but he has been seen five times recently,” Simon Wiesenthal tells the media in 1980, speaking of Josef Mengele, now dead for almost a year.
“I am much closer to capturing him than I was a year ago. His capture could come in the next few weeks.”
In truth, the Nazi hunter Wiesenthal knows nothing at all about the true fate of Josef Mengele.
* * *
Three years later, the Butcher is finally held to account.
After more than a decade of frustration, Beate and Serge Klarsfeld have succeeded in getting Klaus Barbie placed behind bars.
The date is February 7, 1983. Barbie is locked in a cell at the M
ontluc prison, the same jail where he once sent prisoners like Jean Moulin forty years ago. “He must go to the place he committed his crimes,” a French judge pronounced. “He must, in turn, spend the night in a cell there, awaiting his fate.”
In late 1982, a new government was installed in Bolivia. Barbie was no longer protected and just one month ago, the former Gestapo chief was arrested on charges of fraud. The Bolivian government could not get rid of Barbie fast enough and almost immediately extradited him to French soil. He left Bolivia alone, for his wife had just died of cancer and his son was killed two years prior in a hang-gliding accident. When the sixty-nine-year-old Barbie’s flight landed in French Guiana, he was arrested by authorities and placed on board a military transport. Barbie did not know the plane’s destination, but he hoped it was bound for his German homeland, where he believed he might find sympathy. When he learned the transport was taking him to France, a despondent Barbie “walled himself in silence,” in the words of one newspaper report.
Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, on trial in France in 1987
Now, Klaus Barbie sits in his stone cell on this cold winter night, alone with his conscience. This is where Jean Moulin was taken each evening after his days of torture and where the children of Izieu spent a single terrified night before boarding the trains to Auschwitz. So many men and women occupied these cells, bruised and broken at the hands of Klaus Barbie, knowing they would awake in the morning to more of the same. Even four decades later, a sense of horror and evil permeates each cell of this massive prison fortress.
Yet Klaus Barbie is not sorry for what he did. In fact, he remains proud of the work he accomplished for the SS.
For that reason, Klaus Barbie has decided to plead not guilty.
23
MAY 5, 1985