The Nazi Hunters (39 page)

Serge located Raymond Greissmann, a Lyon Jewish community leader during the occupation, who provided testimony that Barbie knew exactly what would happen to the people he arrested. “
Shot or deported, there’s no difference,” he quoted him as saying in front of him. Jean
Moulin’s sister wrote a letter in support of the Klarsfelds’ efforts. And in Munich, Beate held a sign over the head of Holocaust survivor Fortunée Benguigui, who had been deported to Auschwitz a year before her three boys had followed her there from Izieu, never to return. “
I am on a hunger strike for as long as the investigation of Klaus Barbie, who murdered my children, remains closed,” it proclaimed.

Munich public prosecutor Manfred Ludolph not only relented, reopening the case, but also provided Beate’s delegation with two photos. One was of Barbie in 1943. The second photo showed a group of businessmen seated around a table, and one of them looked very much like an older version of the man the Klarsfelds had targeted. Ludolph told them the photo had been taken in La Paz, Bolivia, in 1968. “
That is all that I can say at this time,” he added. “Since you have demonstrated how efficient you are, why don’t you help me identify the man?”

After the Klarsfelds circulated the photos, they began gathering affidavits of people who had known Barbie and could identify him in the latter one, taken in La Paz. Once the 1943 photo appeared in both the French and German press, a German living in Lima reported to the Munich prosecutor that he had met “Klaus Altmann” when he had recently visited the Peruvian capital. Ludolph passed along the contact to Beate, and soon the Klarsfelds had Barbie’s address in Bolivia. Ludolph and the Klarsfelds also put together a report that all but proved Altmann was Barbie. It noted that the birth dates of Altmann’s children were a perfect match with those of Barbie’s children. As always, Beate was ready to take direct action. She flew to Lima and then La Paz, meeting with journalists there to tell the Barbie story. At the same time, she denounced the Banzer regime, which was protecting him. “
I was helping the Bolivians make a connection between what happened under Hitler and what was going on under Banzer,” she recalled. Not surprisingly, the Bolivian authorities were not grateful for that help, and she was hustled out of the country. On a stopover in Lima, two policemen kept her in an office so she would not be free to move around the city. “We are here to see to your safety,” one of them told her. “You risk being killed by Nazi organizations in Lima
that are furious over the campaign you have launched against them in South America.”

By early 1972, the Klarsfelds’ publicity campaign began to prod the French authorities into action. President Georges Pompidou wrote to Banzer, arguing that the French people would not permit the crimes of the past to be “
forgotten through indifference.” Beate returned to La Paz, this time with another mother of two children of Izieu who had perished in Auschwitz. Given the attention they were attracting, the Bolivian authorities allowed the women in but warned them not to speak publicly. Beate played along at first—until she could arrange a press conference. The two women followed up by chaining themselves to a bench in front of the offices of the shipping company where Barbie worked. One of the signs proclaimed in Spanish: “In the name of the millions of Nazi victims, let Barbie-Altmann be extradited!”

That visit, too, ended quickly—but they had scored another public relations coup. Barbie soon gave up the pretense that his real name was Altmann, and his case received growing coverage in the media. But the Klarsfelds also recognized that, even with more support from both the German and French authorities, the chances that the Bolivian regime would give him up were almost zero. A counselor to the Foreign Ministry in La Paz had told Beate: “Bolivia is an inviolable asylum, and all who take refuge in it are sacrosanct.” He also informed her that the country had a statute of limitations for the prosecution of major crimes of only eight years, which meant that whatever Barbie did during the war was “ancient history.”

Barbie knew that he was protected by the Banzer regime and could afford to be dismissive of the whole campaign the Klarsfelds were waging against him. Like so many other Nazi criminals he claimed that he had only done his duty during the war, and he had nothing to atone for. “
I have forgotten,” he said. “If they have not forgotten, that is their business.”

That impasse left the Klarsfelds with a dilemma: should they simply continue campaigning for his extradition, hoping that some part of the equation would change eventually to make that possible, or should they
consider more drastic action? In her memoir, which she published in French in 1972 and then in English in 1975, Beate asserted that some people had asked them why they had not gone ahead and simply killed Barbie. “
None of the people who said that would have done it himself,” she noted, seemingly dismissing such a possibility. Besides, she added, “Killing Barbie would not have proved a thing. . . . It would be merely a settling of scores.” She argued that she and Serge were intent on bringing him to trial, where incontrovertible evidence of his guilt could be presented and the public would once again learn about Nazi crimes.

What she did not mention then, but she and Serge admitted later, was that they had not ruled out using force if they could not extract Barbie by legal means. “First we tried kidnapping,” Serge explained during my interview with the couple in Paris in 2013.
In December 1972, he flew to Chile to meet with Régis Debray, the French Marxist who had joined Che Guevara, the Argentine veteran of the Cuban Revolution, in his bid to overthrow the Bolivian regime. That effort failed: in 1967, Guevara was killed and Debray ended up in a Bolivian prison with a thirty-year sentence. Facing a major international campaign to free him, the Bolivian authorities released Debray in 1970.

The plan was to team up with some Bolivian rebels, cross the border, and snatch Barbie. Serge had brought $5,000 with him to buy a car for the operation. According to Serge, the effort failed when the car broke down. But it may have also been doomed by the rapidly deteriorating situation in Chile, where Marxist President Salvador Allende was toppled by a military coup in 1973.

For nearly ten more years, the Klarsfelds kept the Barbie case alive but appeared to be making little progress. They were also preoccupied with the cases they were pursuing against Lischka, Hagen, and Heinrichsohn, who were also former SS officers who had served in occupied France. They were much more vulnerable than Barbie since they were still living in West Germany. When those three were finally convicted in 1980 for their role in the deportation of fifty thousand Jews from France to their deaths, the Klarsfelds had real reason to celebrate.

Still, they were not giving up on Barbie—quite the contrary. Despite
what Beate had written about rejecting the idea of assassinating him a decade earlier, both she and Serge now say they were ready to back such an effort by the 1980s. Banzer, Barbie’s Bolivian protector, had lost power in 1977, but a new military strongman soon took over who also offered him protection. In 1982, a Bolivian who lived in France came to the Klarsfelds and told them that he was returning to his homeland and he wanted to kill Barbie. “We told him we are in favor,” Serge told me, explaining that such an action could only be justified in a situation where a dictatorship was protecting a Nazi criminal, thus offering no alternative.

But when the would-be assassin arrived in Bolivia, he reported that the military regime was crumbling. The Klarsfelds abandoned the assassination plan and went back to work convincing the French government to find a way to get Barbie back to France to stand trial. This time they had a ready ally. As Serge pointed out, Debray “was then no more a terrorist but a special counselor to [French President] Mitterrand.”

After a civilian government replaced the military rulers in La Paz, Barbie was arrested on January 25, 1983, ostensibly for defrauding the government in a business deal. The new Bolivian authorities left no doubt that they were eager to get rid of their problematic resident.
When the West Germans balked at an offer to send him back to his homeland, the Klarsfelds’ efforts with the French government paid off. The Bolivians flew Barbie to French Guiana, and a French military jet then whisked him to France.

In preparation for Barbie’s trial, Serge published his book
The Children of Izieu: A Human Tragedy.
In it, he profiled each of the forty-four children who had been sent to their deaths; their names and faces were rescued from the anonymity of statistics to offer their mute but powerful testimony. Together with Beate, he wrote an introduction that stressed that one of the key reasons for bringing Nazis to justice was to document their crimes. “
And it was for the children of Izieu—and for them alone—that we tracked down and unmasked Klaus Barbie,” they added.

Barbie did not stand trial until 1987, and he continued to proclaim his innocence till the end. The proceedings took place in Lyon, the city
where he had exercised his murderous powers as Gestapo chief. He was convicted for crimes against humanity, given a life sentence, and died at the age of seventy-seven in the Lyon prison four years later.

• • •

During the maneuvers to bring Barbie to justice, there was one significant loose end: the allegation that U.S. intelligence services had employed him after the war and then arranged for his escape to South America. Allan Ryan, who was the director of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations at the time of Barbie’s return to France, admitted that he was caught by surprise by the story—and, in particular, by the reports that Barbie had worked for U.S. intelligence services. “
I didn’t know a damn thing, and I said so,” he declared.

But faced with questions from Congress and the media, Ryan had every intention of finding out. On February 11, 1983, less than three weeks after Barbie was flown to France, he met with the director of Army Counter Intelligence, who had prepared a three-inch-thick file about him. The most recent document was dated March 27, 1951: it was a report by two Army intelligence agents who had provided him with false papers using the name “Altmann,” escorted him to Genoa, and sent him on his way to South America. “
The evidence of American complicity with Barbie was unmistakable, and if we did not put together the story, every network, newspaper, and self-styled Nazi hunter would do if for us,” Ryan concluded.

In an earlier era, Washington would have hid behind denials and claims of national security. But with OSI now in the picture and the government officially committed to tracking down Nazis, it could hardly ignore such a serious allegation. Nonetheless, Attorney General William French Smith initially attempted to do so. To Ryan’s astonishment, Smith decided there was no need for an official investigation, although he stopped short of announcing his decision. While the Justice Department kept ducking questions about Barbie, both the press and members of Congress demanded to know why it was not taking any action. Ryan had to sit quietly, but he was fuming.

Finally on March 14, John Martin of ABC called to say he was working
on a story for that evening’s newscast and checking whether there were any new developments. “
The clear implication was that something was being covered up,” Ryan recalled. He called Smith’s press secretary to alert him. It took Smith only half an hour to reverse his decision and announce that he was authorizing an investigation. Martin was able to include that news in his report.

Ryan quickly put together a small team at OSI to unearth what they could. Although there was no longer any doubt that Barbie had worked for the Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps and benefited from its protection, it was still unclear how much the American officers who dealt with him knew about his record in Lyon during the war and about the French efforts to find him. It was also unclear whether he had worked for the CIA, and whether he had continued to work for the Americans after he found refuge in Bolivia in 1951.

The result of OSI’s exhaustive investigation was a detailed report that, while carefully maintaining a dispassionate tone, painted a picture of internal intelligence intrigue and deceptions worthy of a John le Carré spy novel. Although CIC headquarters had already sent information to its regional office in January 1947 identifying Barbie as the former Gestapo chief in Lyon and as a “
dangerous conspirator” in a network of former SS officers, the CIC agents in the field were focused on their top priority: gathering information about suspected communist activity in occupied Germany. One of those agents, Robert S. Taylor, received a tip from a former German intelligence agent in France that Barbie could be very helpful in those efforts.

Taylor and his immediate superior decided that, instead of notifying headquarters, which was liable to seek his arrest, they would use Barbie as an informant. According to Taylor, Barbie struck him as “
an honest man, both intellectually and personally, absolutely without nerves or fear. He is strongly anti-Communist and a Nazi idealist who believes that his beliefs were betrayed by the Nazis in power.” Within two months, Taylor and his superior were confident enough of his value to openly appeal to headquarters that he should remain free as long as he was working for CIC.

In October 1947, an officer from headquarters ordered the arrest of Barbie so that he could be sent to the European Command Intelligence Center for “
detailed interrogation.” But Barbie emerged unscathed from that experience. He was seen as particularly valuable because of his knowledge of French intelligence, which the Americans believed was heavily infiltrated by communists. And, perhaps more importantly, his interrogator believed it was safer for the Army to keep him in their employ because his knowledge of “
the mission of CIC, its agents, subagents, funds, etc. is too great.”

The French government made repeated attempts to locate Barbie, with its ambassador in Washington and other senior officials pressing the State Department and the U.S. High Commission for Germany for their assistance. At the same time, CIC continued to employ him. In OSI’s report, Ryan carefully worded his key conclusions. He argued that the CIC agents who initially employed Barbie should not be “
vilified for that decision” since they were “on the whole, conscientious and patriotic men faced with a difficult assignment.” Their decision to enlist Barbie in that assignment was “neither cynical nor corrupt.”