Convicted Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, serving a life sentence in Lyon, is possibly near death.
He was hospitalized Monday in the prison ward and may never be returned to his cell.
Barbie, 77, has been receiving chemotherapy for blood cancer. His condition is “desperate,” according to his lawyer, Jacques Verges.
Last year, Verges requested his client’s release from prison to be treated for terminal cancer. The lawyer also asked a prominent Jewish doctor to treat Barbie. No answer was reported.
The former SS officer was found guilty in 1987 on 17 counts of war crimes committed when he served as Gestapo chief in Lyon from 1942 to 1944, earning the title “butcher of Lyon.”
His offenses, for which he expressed no remorse, included deporting Jewish children to the Auschwitz death camp, arresting thousands of the city’s Jews for deportation and the arbitrary torture of countless others.
Barbie is still under investigation for his part in the torture-murder of French resistance leader Jean Moulin. But his illness kept police officials from questioning him in recent weeks.
Barbie managed to escape from Europe after the war. He was sentenced to death in absentia by French courts in 1952 and 1954.
But France abolished the death penalty in 1981, several years before Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld traced Barbie to Bolivia, where he had lived for years under the alias Klaus Altmann.
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