Klaus Barbie (Nazi Party card #4,583,085; SS card #272,284) was picked up from the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in 1948 and used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which absorbed the activities of the CIC, as a “contract agent” for nearly three decades.
During the same period he contracted work with the CIA, Barbie — acting at the strategic direction of a post-World War II SS underground, Die Spinne (The Spider) — was also a “consultant’ to Latin American military dictatorships enjoying the support of the United States.
In that capacity, Barbie advised those repressive regimes on the use of “death squads” and other forms of political terror.” Barbie had been directed to go to Latin America where he was to organize “forces” and “spheres of (fascist) influence.” (See February 16 Bulletin.) He arrived in Bolivia in May 1951.
(According to ABC-TV News network on Friday, November II, one Robert Wilson, a self-admitted international jewel thief, knew Barbie in Bolivia. Wilson alleged that Barbie “freely confessed” his war crimes as well as his involvement with the CIA, According to Wilson, Barbie claimed he visited such American cities as New Orleans, and San Francisco during the course of his work with the CIA. Barbie travelled freely on a Bolivian diplomatic passport. The CIA refused comment.)
ACTIVITY IN BOLIVIA
In Bolivia, Barbie found a most accommodating atmosphere in which to carry out his work. For years the Bolivian economy had been dominated — 60 percent — by German investment interests and the large German colony there. As far back as the 1920’s, officers of the German General Staff trained Bolivian armies after World War I.
Barbie, according to my own sources, quickly organized “coordinated” activities with the large Nazi concentrations in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Paraguay where fascist military dictatorships reigned.
In Bolivia, Barbie trained a secret police force and national police along the lines of the gestapo he ran in France during the Holocaust.
He was granted Bolivian citizenship in 1957. His name was linked to several notorious political killings in 1964, 1972 and 1976. Barbie enjoyed the full backing of the government of Col. Hugo Banzer Suarez which in the 1970’s blocked all attempts to extradite Barbie for his war crimes in Europe.
Banzer provided Barbie with a uniformed body guard, and promised, in his words, “to protect Sr. Barbie from any attempts to kidnap him from members of the communistic French resistance,” the Associated Press reported widely in 1972.
Just before his recent return to France for his war crimes there, Bolivian sources told the AP (January 26, 1982) that the new, liberal regime in La Paz would soon bring charges against Barbie “for having organized and advised a network of mercenaries and para-military for using them to silence foes of past military regimes.”
INVOLVEMENT FOR THE HUNT FOR CHE GUEVARA
According to my sources, Barbie participated an advisor for the hunt for the Argentinean revolutionary, Che Guevara, who, along with Fidel Castro, was a leader of the Cuban revolution. Guevara was tracked down in the mountains of Bolivia and murdered by the Bolivian military.
“The whole operation was vintage SS, ” my source told me. “Bolivian internal security forces swept peasant villages, interrogated and tortured the inhabitants, set up elaborate informer systems in the towns and cities.”
Torture and murder are nothing new in Latin American politics, any more so than other parts of the world. But there were certain “refinements” which Barbie systematically introduced along with fellow Nazi war criminals in Latin America.
“He showed them how to do the ‘Nacht und Nebel’ thing, “my source stated.
The Nacht und Nebel Erlass was the infamous 1941 “Night and Fog Decree” of Hitler directing that any “persons endangering German security” were to be seized without any semblance of due process and “made to disappear into the night and fog” without a trace. Ultimately, the gestapo became the major experts of this terrorist device. In Latin America, especially in Argentina, this technique resulted in thousands of “disappeared ones.”
IN COMMUNICATION WITH WANTED WAR CRIMINALS
Barbie was in constant communication and organized fascist undertakings with the following wanted war criminals:
* Edward Roschmann, called the “Butcher of Riga” where he directed the slaughter of some 45,000 Latvian Jews during the Holocaust. After a 1977 extradition request by West German, Roschmann was spirited from Argentina to safety in Paraguay by the efforts of Die Spinne forces in Latin America “coordinated” by Barbie. Roschmann died of a heart attack in Paraguay.
* Franz Strangl, a former commandant of the death camp, Treblinka where one million Jews were murdered, found haven in Brazil and was in constant communication with Barbie until his extradition in 1967. Strangl escaped in 1948 from an Austrian prison by the Vatican’s “monastery route” through the efforts of the same Bishop Alois Hudal who aided Barbie (See Part 1, February 16 Bulletin.)
* Walter Hermann Julius Rauff (Nazi Party #5216415, 55# 290947), chief of the “Technical Office,” Il-D of the SS/RSHA on the Russian Front from 1941-1944. He is the self-proclaimed (and documented through innumerable captured Nazi documents used during the Nuremberg war crimes trials) inventor of the mobile gas-vans that played a major role in the extermination of 1.4 million Soviet Jews in Nazi-occupied Soviet Union. Rauff — also a beneficiary of the Vatican’s escape route — became (and still is) an advisor to the secret police of the Chilean military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet who led the CIA-supported overthrow of the Allende regime in 1973.
FACTS NOW KNOWN FOR CERTAIN
These are but a few of the leaders of the long-established “beach-heads” of fascist “force” and “influence” that have taken root throughout Latin America.
The facts that are now known for certain is that the U.S. State Department and American military intelligence agencies knew of, condoned, covered up and frequently participated as a party of the first part in the immediate post-war escape routes for some of the unspeakable criminals of the Holocaust during the years 1945 to 1948, even well before the CIA went operational
It is further clear — and becoming clearer — that the CIA took up those early operations and refined and extended them afterwards. Also complicit in this sordid history are the Vatican and, to a lesser extent, the Inter national Red Cross.
A foremost beneficiary and leader of this history is Klaus Barbie, also known as Klaus Altmann, and also known as the “butcher of Lyon.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
