Word: butcher
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyon, "brings back the past...
...Nazi war criminals have been so hated in France as Klaus Barbie, the infamous "Butcher of Lyon." While serving as head of the Gestapo in Lyon from 1942 to 1944, Barbie ordered the execution of more than 4,000 people and the deportation of 7,000 French Jews to concentration camps. His hands were also stained with the blood of Jean Moulin, France's most revered 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...
...loan from the state. Barbie immediately repaid the debt, plus interest, but it did him little good. Instead of releasing him, Bolivian officials put him on a plane bound for Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana. When told he had been handed over to French authorities, the Butcher of Lyon made a gesture, as if slitting his throat...
...well as on the whereabouts of other Gestapo fugitives wanted by Allied authorities; in return he was given a false identity, a home in Munich and the opportunity to get out of Germany while the Americans played dumb and refused French requests for his arrest. By 1951, the Butcher of Lyon was safely exiled in Bolivia...
...Butcher's" legal defense hinges on some familiar arguments already used without success at the Nuremburg trials after the war. For example, Barbie, quoted in 1972, claimed that "to participate in a war carries risks, even if one is only doing his duty." He further noted in a more recent interview that, "I did my duty. My particular job was the war against the French Resistance...if Germany had won the war they wouldn't be bothering with my case...