Klaus Barbie was born Nikolaus Klaus Barbie on October 25, 1913, in Godesberg, then part of the German Empire. His parents, Nicolaus Barbie and Anna Hess, were both teachers and married one year after Klaus was born.
His father was conscripted into the German Army during World War I, wounded in the neck at Verdun, and captured by the French, whom he hated for the rest of his life. He never recovered his health and became an alcoholic who abused his children.
When Klaus was ten, he attended the local school where his father taught. He later attended a boarding school in Trier and was relieved to be away from his abusive father.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in January 1933. In June of that year, Barbie's younger brother Kurt died at the age of 18, and Barbie's father Nicolaus also died later that year.
Unable to finance his university studies and unemployed, Barbie was conscripted into the Reich Labor Service, a major Nazi organization created to mitigate unemployment, militarize the workforce, and indoctrinate workers with Nazi ideology. The experience turned Barbie into an unshakable supporter of the Third Reich.
In September 1935, Barbie joined the SS and began working in its subgroup, the SD, the intelligence service responsible for gathering information about the Nazi Party's enemies, real and perceived. These supposed enemies included political opponents, Jews, and Freemasons.
The SD became one of the Nazi regime's key sources of information about Jews and took on an increasingly prominent role in anti-Jewish policies. For most of its existence, the SD was run by and closely associated with Reinhard Heydrich, an important Nazi figure in the history of the Holocaust.
In his initial post, Barbie was trained as an interrogator, a role to which he would return later with terrifying effect. In May 1937, Barbie joined the Nazi Party, and two years later, in April 1939, he became engaged to the daughter of a postal clerk, with whom he had two children.
World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The campaign in Poland ended on October 6, with Germany and the Soviet Union dividing and annexing the whole country.
The German invasion of France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands began on May 10, 1940, and became known as the Battle of France. These countries were conquered within six weeks.
After the German conquest and occupation of the Netherlands, Barbie arrived in Amsterdam on May 29, 1940. Until March 1942, he was employed there in the Central Office for Jewish Immigration.
Barbie and his subordinates were responsible for the persecution of resistance fighters and Jews, especially those who had moved from Germany before the war. He was also instrumental in the persecution and torture of Freemasons in the Netherlands and personally directed attacks on them.
On October 11, 1940, Barbie arrested Hermanus van Tongeren, Grand Master of the Grand Orient of the Netherlands, a masonic Grand Lodge. In March 1941, Van Tongeren was transported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he died two weeks later in freezing conditions.
On April 1, Barbie summoned Van Tongeren's daughter Charlotte to the SD headquarters and informed her that her father had died of an infection in both ears and had been cremated.
On one occasion, when Barbie received orders to arrest two German Jewish ice cream peddlers, he decided a mere arrest was not sufficient punishment. Instead of arresting the two men, he murdered them on the spot, killing one by bludgeoning him to death with an ashtray and the other by shooting him. For his zeal, he was awarded the Iron Cross by his superiors.
On a separate occasion, Barbie was given credit for rounding up and dispatching over 200 Zionists when he tricked the local Jewish Council into giving him the locations of hundreds of Jews hiding in Amsterdam.
During the disturbances in Amsterdam in February 1941, Barbie had acid thrown into his face by Jewish shop owners. In reprisal, over 400 young Jewish men were arrested and sent to Mauthausen, where most of them perished.
In 1942, when the Gestapo needed a man to head its office in Lyon, the capital of the French Resistance, Klaus Barbie, with his cunning, language skills, and special zeal, was a natural choice as local Gestapo chief.
Klaus Barbie earned the nickname "The Butcher of Lyon" for his brutal actions toward Jews and members of the French Resistance. He personally interrogated and tortured his victims from his headquarters in the notorious Hotel Terminus.
Barbie was also a sexual deviant who raped the women he interrogated. In her account of Barbie's interrogation, one woman wrote that women were always tortured naked to the deep enjoyment of the torturers.
Barbie kept two German Shepherd dogs. One was trained to lunge and bite, and the other was trained to mount naked women. After the war, Mario Blardone, who survived Barbie's interrogation, described how he had seen Barbie try to have a young girl raped by his dog.
Barbie's most infamous victim was the hero of the French Resistance, Jean Moulin, whom Barbie personally interrogated daily for three weeks. Moulin was mercilessly tortured by Barbie and his men.
Hot needles were shoved under Moulin's fingernails. His fingers were forced through the narrow space between the hinges of a door and a wall, and then the door was repeatedly slammed until the knuckles broke.
Screw-levered handcuffs were placed on Moulin and tightened until they bit through his flesh and broke the bones of his wrists. He would not talk. He was whipped and beaten until his face was an unrecognizable pulp.
Moulin refused to divulge any intelligence to his captors. He died from the effects of his torture near Metz on July 8, 1943, on his way to captivity in Germany.
On behalf of his cruel crimes, and especially for the Moulin case, Barbie was awarded the First Class Iron Cross with Swords by Hitler himself.
Barbie also tortured children. Simone Lagrange, a soft-spoken Holocaust survivor whose family was exterminated, later recalled the arrest of her father, mother, and herself on June 6, 1944, after a French neighbor denounced them as Jews.
Simone and her parents were taken to the Gestapo headquarters, where Barbie, dressed in gray and caressing a kitten, said Simone was pretty. She recalled that he was caressing the cat and her, a kid of 13, and that she could not imagine he could be evil because he loved animals. She was tortured by him for eight days.
During the following week, Barbie hauled Simone out of the prison cell each day, yanking her by the hair and beating and punching at her open wounds in an effort to obtain information.
Another survivor, Lise Lesevre, recalled how Klaus Barbie tortured her for nine days in 1944, beating her and nearly drowning her in a bathtub. She told of how she was hung up by handcuffs with spikes inside them and beaten with a rubber bar.
She was ordered to strip naked and get into a tub filled with freezing water. Her legs were tied to a bar across the tub, and Barbie yanked the chain attached to the bar to pull her underwater.
During a last interrogation, while she was ordered to lie flat on a chair, she was struck on the back with a spiked ball attached to a chain. It broke a vertebra, and she suffered for the rest of her life.
Another survivor said Klaus Barbie had the eyes of a monster. The survivor described him as a savage, saying he broke teeth, pulled hair back, and put a bottle in a victim's mouth and pushed it until the lips split from the pressure.
One of Barbie's most infamous crimes was the deportation of youngsters from the Children's Home in Izieu in southern France. The rescuers Sabine and Miron Zlatin had hidden the children in a remote farmhouse in their own valley.
The children, most of them immigrants, ranged in age from 4 to 17. Their Jewish identities were a closely guarded secret, and in official records the young persons were identified only as refugees.
On the morning of April 6, 1944, Barbie led a raid on the children's colony, capturing 44 children and seven adult caretakers. A witness of the raid later recalled that it was breakfast time and the children were in the refectory drinking hot chocolate.
The witness was on the way down the stairs when three trucks appeared in the drive. The witness's sister shouted that it was the Germans and to save herself. The witness jumped out of a window and hid in a bush in the garden.
The witness heard the cries of the children being kidnapped and the shouts of the Nazis carrying them away. They threw the children into the trucks like sacks of potatoes, most of them crying and terrorized.
Fearing that local authorities might intervene, Barbie arranged for their immediate transfer to the transit camp. Miron Zlatin and two of the oldest youngsters were ultimately sent to Estonia, where they were shot to death. The rest of the children were deported to Auschwitz, where they were gassed immediately.
One Auschwitz survivor later testified, asking where the children who arrived with them in the camp were. There was not a single child to be seen. Those who had been there for a while explained the reality, pointing to the chimney whose smoke never stopped and the odor of burnt flesh.
In all, it is believed that Barbie was responsible for the execution or murder of over 4,000 individuals and for the deportation of 7,500 Jews, most of whom perished in Auschwitz.
Barbie left Lyon in August 1944, just a month before the U.S. Army liberated the city. He made his way back into Germany, where he joined the fighting until the war ended.
After the war, the French government filed charges against Barbie, and his name was published on lists of wanted criminals. Although Barbie was arrested at least twice, he was not identified.
In 1946, Barbie was living under an assumed name in Marburg, Germany, and working with an organized group of Nazis to form a new German government.
In 1947, a U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps officer located Barbie, but instead of arresting him, the officer recruited the wanted war criminal as an informant.
Between 1947 and 1951, Barbie supplied American officials with information about French intelligence and Soviet and anti-communist activities in the U.S. zone of occupied Germany.
By the time the French government requested Barbie's extradition from American officials in 1949, it was public knowledge that Barbie was living freely in the American zone under a false identity.
As French demands for extradition escalated in 1951, the CIC, fearing that Barbie knew too much about its intelligence operations, helped Barbie escape to South America with his family via the American rat line, which smuggled escaped Nazis and other Axis fugitives out of post-war Europe.
Under the name Klaus Altmann, Barbie settled his family in La Paz, Bolivia, while the French government tried him in absentia and sentenced him to death.
Barbie established himself as a prominent business figure in La Paz with strong connections to the Bolivian ruling party. He was involved not only in the shipping trade but also in arms dealing.
Over the next 20 years, he received Bolivian citizenship and a diplomatic passport that allowed him to travel to Europe and the United States unimpeded.
However, in 1971, Nazi hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld identified the old man as Barbie and located him, then living in Peru. In 1972, the Klarsfelds launched a public campaign to have Barbie brought back to France to stand trial for war crimes.
Barbie returned to Bolivia, where his connections with the Bolivian military provided protection from extradition until the regime fell in the 1980 Bolivian cocaine coup.
Under a new government, Barbie was arrested in 1983 and returned to France. Back in Lyon, Barbie was charged with war crimes for the deportation of the children of Izieu, the August 1944 deportations to Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, and other crimes.
Controversially, Barbie did not face charges related to the arrest and torture of Jean Moulin.
Among those who testified against Barbie were the 80-year-old Sabine Zlatin, founder of the Children's Home in Izieu, and her fellow caretaker Lea Feldblum, who was 69 years old and the sole survivor of those deported from the home.
Barbie's trial was a major public event, prompting serious conversations in France about the war, the French Resistance, and the Holocaust. During his trial, Barbie said that when he stood before the Throne of God, he would be judged innocent.
When the trial concluded in 1987, Barbie was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Despite his conviction, Barbie remained an unrepentant and devoted Nazi.
He stated that he was proud to have been a commanding officer of the best military outfit in the Third Reich and that if he had to be born a thousand times again, he would be a thousand times what he had been.
Klaus Barbie was 77 years old when he died of cancer in French custody on September 25, 1991. There were no tears shed for Klaus Barbie.