Word: altmann
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...Resistance leader, who is believed to have died under torture in 1943. Twice Barbie was tried in absentia for his crimes and sentenced to death by French tribunals. But for more than three decades the Nazi managed to escape punishment and, indeed, prospered in Bolivia under the alias Klaus Altmann...
EXPELLED. Klaus Barbie, 69, alias Klaus Altmann, the "Butcher of Lyon"; from Bolivia, to which he fled in 1951. An SS captain who was Lyon Gestapo chief from 1942 to 1944, he was sentenced to death in absentia by French courts for active complicity in killing some 11,600 French Jews and Resistance fighters. Barbie was returned to France, where he will probably be tried again, since that country abolished the death penalty...
There is "irrefutable evidence," according to the La Paz district attorney, that Altmann is really Klaus Barbie, the SS captain who ran the Gestapo in Lyon from 1942 to 1944. Among Barbie's crimes were the deportation of thousands of Jews and the torturing to death of several hundred Maquis, including Resistance Leader Jean Moulin. A French military court sentenced him to death in absentia in 1954. Four years earlier, however, Klaus Altmann had migrated from Berlin to Italy to Bolivia, where he went into business and acquired Bolivian citizenship...
...allow war criminals to be considered as fine upstanding citizens." Mrs. Klarsfeld held press conferences, organized demonstrations, circulated photographs and generally made such a fuss that she finally got a letter from a German in Lima, Peru, saying he had seen Barbie there under the name of Altmann. That prompted the French to ask for his extradition. Before the request reached Lima, Altmann retreated to Bolivia, which has no extradition treaty with France. The French nonetheless sent another request...
After brooding over the case for more than a year-while Altmann swaggered around in a green Tyrolean hat, usually accompanied by a tough young bodyguard-the Bolivian Supreme Court finally demanded that the question of Altmann's identity be officially settled. Altmann admits to using the name Barbie as a pseudonym; he also has a birth certificate in that name and has received mail from the Barbie family in Germany. But he is a Bolivian citizen who claims that he has broken no Bolivian law. The French argue, however, that the fugitive acquired Bolivian citizenship by fraud...