Klaus Barbie: The Nazi war criminal who became a CIA spy
At the time of writing, it seems easier than ever to believe that the United States government has always fundamentally believed that communism is a bigger threat to the world than fascism. The truth is, however, that the life and times of Klaus Barbie show that this is nothing new.
Born Niklaus Barbie in October 1913, this abhorrent man was a genuine and devout believer in the doctrine of Nazism.
There was no hiding behind the adage of “just following orders” for Barbie, and not only because for the vast majority of his career, but he was also the one giving the orders. This was a man who did what he did with a song in his heart. Either firmly believing that what he was doing was the morally correct thing to do, or getting such a thrill out of murdering, torturing and raping with impunity that the morals just didn’t occur to him. Men like that have always been common.
In a way, Barbie was the ideal Nazi success story. An unemployed drifter at 20 whose father and brother had died, leaving him with nothing, he’d been conscripted into the Reich Labour Service, then the SS two years later. He showed such aptitude and enthusiasm for his work in the SS that he was assigned to their espionage service, where his job became locating the remaining “undesirables” still living in Germany at the time. When the Reich began their invasion of Europe, Barbie was one of the recruits sent out to lead similar operations over the continent.
Barbie had seemingly found his calling and was so “successful” in his line of work that he was moved from his original post in Amsterdam to the recently conquered France. He was assigned to Lyon, where he well and truly earned the nickname ‘The Butcher of Lyon’ by being horrifyingly cruel, sadistic and inhuman. By Nazi standards. I don’t go into his atrocities in detail, a brief Google search will reveal the depravity of his actions, but suffice to say that no woman, man or child was spared his brutality.
Because this article really isn’t about what Barbie did during the war. This article is about the fact that after the war, the US government took one look at this unapologetic fascist and thought, “Yes, you’re just the man we’re looking for.”
How did the US government use Klaus Barbie?
After the Reich lost the Second World War, Barbie went into hiding for two years, living as a beggar to escape the justice being handed out to his Nazi cohorts at the Nuremberg trials. However, he was scouted by the US Army’s Counter-Intelligence Corps, who felt that Barbie was the right kind of guy to join the fight against communism.
Robert S Taylor, a CIC officer, said of Barbie that he was “an honest man, both intellectually and personally, absolutely without fear. He is strongly anti-communist and a Nazi idealist who believes that he and his beliefs were betrayed by the Nazis in power.”
Taylor, a high-ranking US government official, is talking about a man who, a scant few years earlier, was allegedly training dogs to rape Jewish women. The French were on the warpath for Barbie, quite understandably, requesting that the US extradite him back to France, where he could stand trial for his crimes. The United States simply saw too much value in this fascist monster and denied they knew of his whereabouts, lying through their teeth to a supposed “ally”.
Over the next few decades, Barbie became a prized US asset. His most infamous work came in Bolivia, where he was instrumental in using his Gestapo-honed tactics in propping up dictatorships at the behest of the CIA. He wasn’t alone either; his forces were teeming with Nazi sympathisers who’d escaped justice after the Second World War, some there due to collaboration with the United States, some who’d arrived there on their own. If you listened to Barbie, he would often crow that it was his tactics that secured the capture and execution of Che Guevara, as if there weren’t more than enough reasons to despise this vermin already.
Barbie was eventually found by the French Nazi hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld in 1971, setting off a chain of events that, after over a decade, would lead to his arrest in 1983. He was tried and found guilty of 41 counts of crimes against humanity and would die in prison in 1991, at the age of 77. It’s very tough to feel that any real justice was done; however, not when he had the most powerful nation in the world funding his unconscionable actions for decades.
Think of him the next time someone tries to tell you that America stands for any kind of truth and justice.