The activities of Klaus Barbie in Holland, including the deportation of 300 Jewish youths to their deaths at the Mauthausen concentration camp, will be added to the charges against him when the former gestapo chief in Lyon goes on trial in that French city for “crimes against humanity.”
Paul Brilman, a Dutch public prosecutor who specializes in the cases of Nazi war criminals, will assist the French prosecuting attorneys. He will provide details of Barbie’s crimes during the eight months in 1941 when he worked for the gestapo in Nazi-occupied Holland. Barbie who headed the gestapo in Lyon from 1942-44, has been charged with the deportations of thousands of French Jews and the torture and murder of members of the French resistance, including their leader, Jean Moulin.
Barbie was expelled from Bolivia, a country where he found haven after World War II, and was turned over to French authorities last weekend. He is presently imprisoned in Lyon. The Netherlands State Institute for Documentation on World War II has evidence that Barbie was responsible for the deportation of Jews from Holland in June, 1941, before the deportations of Dutch Jews began en masse.
The youths involved included 200 German Jewish refugees who had been confined to the Jewish “working village” set up at Wieringermeer, north of Amsterdam, They were evacuated and billeted with Dutch Jewish families in a residential area of Amsterdam, According to the documents, Barbie obtained the addresses of those families from the local Jewish Council which was led to believe that the youths were to be returned to the “work village.”
All of the homes were raided. The Nazis seized not only the refugees but the sons of the families they were staying with, about 300 youths in all, and shipped them to Mauthausen. None survived.
Brilman, meanwhile, is seeking another war criminal, Abraham Kipp, a former Dutch police officer who collaborated with the Nazis and escaped to South America after the war, Kipp was sentenced to death in absentia by a Dutch court in 1949 for his role in the deaths of 15 Jews and resistance members. He is believed to be living near Buenos Aires, Argentina rejected an earlier request for extradition but Brilman hopes that Bolivia’s expulsion of Barbie will prompt the Argentine authorities to extradite Kipp.
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