The interview that led to the arrest of Klaus Barbie, the Nazi Butcher of Lyon

And the role of the USA in protecting the Nazi "Butcher of Lyon"

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Klaus Barbie during his trial in 1987 (on the right) next to his lawyer

Klaus Barbie was head of the Gestapo in Lyon, France, during the Nazi occupation. There, he became known as the Butcher of Lyon for his sadistic enjoyment of torture and killing. Under him, thousands of Jews and other French people were sent to death camps, with most going to Auschwitz. Devoted to the end, he sent one last train of hundreds to the extermination camp before fleeing the country just as the Allies were advancing in on Lyon.

He adopted the named Klaus Altmann after the war and was recruited by the United States Army Counter Intelligence Corps to help fight against the USSR and “communism”. For years, France sent extradition requests to prosecute him, without success. One day, after one such request, the United States replied that they had lost all traces of Klaus and that was to be the end of it.

Of course, they hadn’t really lost track of him. Rather, the US had exfiltrated Klaus Barbie through the CIA because he was starting to be too much of a liability. He eventually ended up in Bolivia in 1951, officially as a wood mill owner but in the 1960s, Klaus secretly started working for the Bolivian dictatorship to help them track opponents to the regime — mainly socialists and communists.

Suspicions were mounting against Klaus Altmann. In the wood mill, he marked all tenth planks with a small swastika. Then, from 1966 to 1971, he headed the Compagnie Transmaritima Boliviana, the biggest Bolivian maritime shipping company that was also responsible for fuelling the drug and weapons trade in South America. In the 70s, it seems he was once again hired by the CIA.

This was bringing him international attention, and people like the Klarsfelds, who made it their life mission to track ex-Nazis, were on his tail.

It all culminated in 1972. French Journalist Ladislas de Hoyos was set on unmasking Klaus Altmann once and for all. He organized an interview with Klaus which was to be monitored and overseen by the Bolivian government — then still an anti-communist dictatorship. The questions in the interview were sent to be approved beforehand and they would be asked in Spanish only. It would last only a few minutes and be monitored by Bolivian soldiers.

This didn’t deter Ladislas. He started the interview as agreed, asking simple questions such as “Your name is Klaus Altmann, is that correct?” in Spanish. Very quickly however, the journalist started asking Klaus to say things in French like “I was not in the gestapo” or “I have never used torture”. Already Klaus was showing some proficiency in French, as his answers were too confident for someone who, so the story went, lived in Berlin all his life as a manual labourer until he emigrated to Bolivia after the war.

Then, Ladislas broke the rules and asked him a question in French: “Avez-vous déjà été à Lyon?” (“Have you ever been to Lyon?”). Without any hesitation, Klaus answered in German as he had done for all other questions so far: “No, I’ve never been to Lyon”. This was the second strike that betrayed his knowledge of French.

The soldiers were getting unsettled. This wasn’t what the journalist was supposed to ask. But, they still let the interview go on.

Near the end of the interview, Ladislas handed Klaus pictures of Jean Moulin, a famous resistance fighter who was killed by Klaus himself. He asked: “do you know who this person is?”

“Altmann” shook his head no.

But he had committed a grave mistake.

By holding the pictures, he left his fingerprints on them. Ladislas knew he’d got him.

Calmly, he took the pictures back, folded them in half, and put them away in his jacket’s inside pocket — out of sight and out of mind — before continuing with the interview.

By the end, the Bolivian forces understood what was going on and were getting agitated. The cameraman took the film out and gave it to the French consul who was present during the interview. When the soldiers asked the cameraman for the film, he didn’t protest and handed them decoy reels.

The team didn’t overstay their welcome. They quickly got into the consular car and drove to the consulate, where the evidence was sent to France in a diplomatic baggage — which means nobody was allowed to open it en route to its destination. In France, they were able to analyze the prints taken from the pictures of Jean Moulin.

They matched.

Klaus Altmann was finally proven to be nazi criminal Klaus Barbie beyond any doubt after decades of investigating.

This was only the first half of the job done, however. Klaus was still living peacefull in Bolivia and it would be difficult to extradite him to face trial. In 1983 finally, after the fall of the US-backed dictatorship and a change of government in Bolivia, Klaus was set to be extradited to France.

He himself thought he was going back to Germany and so he wasn’t worried (there is some evidence he worked for the West German government here and there).

As soon as he landed and stepped off the plane, he recognized the airport. A delegation was waiting for him and announced the charges for which he was arrested.

He was symbolically interned in the Montluc Prison, where he had tortured hundreds only decades before. Two months later, he was condemned to life in prison by the court for crimes against humanity.

The death penalty had been abolished in France only two years earlier.

Klaus died in prison in 1991.

Klaus’ story is a reminder of what fascists will always do. Any committed fascist is able and willing to do what Barbie did — torture and send thousands to die. But it’s also a reminder of the toxic cocktail that is imperialism and fascism put together. While the world remembers the liberation from the Nazis, we must remember that Nazis were allowed to flee their crimes with help from the USA, and were even employed and paid by to kill communists (Operation Gladio comes to mind). There was never any liberation, there was never any denazification in Europe. They were just shuffled around and tried to be lost to time. And I haven’t even delved into the whole situation in Bolivia which was fraught with regime change, fascism and US intervention (Operation Condor) for the decades that Barbie was living there and beyond.

Indeed, Barbie died in prison in 1991. Many of us here were not born in 1991, and even fewer of us were alive in the 80s. This whole event — from the interview to the trial — is already lost to the past and yet, if there is one thing that hasn’t changed, that is still true today, it must be how the USA will always protect its own war criminals and send them to commit more crimes.