Word: gestapo
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KLAUS BARBIE almost got away with genocide. With the Third Reich collapsed in 1945, Barbie, the notorious Gestapo chief of Lyon in occupied France, mysteriously slipped through an international dragnet and found asylum in South America, leaving behind the bodies of thousands of his victims. For thirty-two years he evaded Nazi hunters and scoffed at extradition attempts and death sentences passed in absentia by the French courts of justice. Barbie had played the war crime game...
Barbie's story began in November 1942 with his appointment as chief of the Gestapo's Fourth sector at Lyon after serving in the Hitler Youth and the S.S. Upon his arrival in France, Barbie assembled the tools of his trade-whips, clubs and two-by-fours-and set about earning the nickname that would follow him throughout his life-the Butcher of Lyon, Raymond Aubrac, a resistance member captured during the war, remembers that "it was not sophisticated torture, just brutal...there was nothing intellectual about his methods. He just asked the same questions over and over again...
...this day. According to France's renowned war criminal experts, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, American intelligence agents secretly recruited Barbie to conduct spying missions in eastern Germany immediately following Hitler's defeat. Barbie supposedly helped gather information on Soviet troop positions as 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...
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...
...Hitler that decorated German government offices during the Nazi regime were mainly slavish copies of those done by Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler's official photographer. Last week, 37 years after the German leader's death, the only known candid live portrait of the Fuhrer, carefully hidden from the Gestapo by the worried artist Klaus Richter, went on display at the Berlin Museum for the first time. Richter caught Hitler in profile almost by accident in 1941, while making sketches for a commissioned portrait of Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Goring. The German leader suddenly appeared with Benito Mussolini, and while Hitler...