Klaus Barbie Read online

  When Pell finally arrived, the antagonisms which were already developing between the Commission and the British government increased. The State Department was even less interested in helping than the British government and was equally unwilling to hand over any cases for the Commission to investigate. Pell had only been appointed after many others had rejected the Department’s invitation. His name was suggested by the President in return for his political support of the White House in previous years; foreign service officers were appalled that such an excitable extrovert should be their ambassador. The harder Pell tried to create the machinery for hunting down war criminals in London, the more reluctant the State Department officials became. With relief, the Department handed over responsibility for war-crimes investigation to the War Department whose Secretary, Henry Stimson, in accepting the new charge, added that because of a ‘shortage of personnel’ he would be unable to help the Commission. Frustrated at every turn, Pell and Hurst became involved for the next twelve months in a persistent series of arguments with their respective governments about their powers and responsibilities, and the need to create investigative agencies.

  Relations were worsening when, on 26 August 1944, General de Gaulle entered newly-liberated Paris and marched down the Champs Elysées. The same newspaper reports in London and Washington which suggested that the end of the war was in sight, also carried reports about brutalities in France during the German occupation. Public interest in plans to bring the Germans responsible to justice was immediately aroused. As the organisation especially established for that task, the Commission was inundated with demands for information. Hurst was embarrassed but was determined to hold his first press conference, despite enormous pressure from the British and American governments to remain silent. An unusually large number of journalists crowded into the Commission’s offices.

  Asked how many names were on the Commission’s list, Hurst replied, ‘The list of war criminals is not a very long one. It is meagre.’ In the uproar which followed, Hurst stoutly refused to divulge the number. It was in fact just 184 names, fourteen of whom were held responsible for toppling a statue off a pedestal – an unlikely war crime. The following day, the Commission’s failure made headline news on both sides of the Atlantic. A few weeks later Pell was recalled, complaining in public that Department officials ‘do not want to punish Nazi criminals as thoroughly as they advocate’; Hurst retired on ‘grounds of ill-health’, while Foreign Office officials concluded, much to their disappointment, that the attractions of closing the Commission down were outweighed by the anger that would be generated in the United States if they did. As the Allies swept through France and were poised to invade Germany, nothing had been done to implement the pledges made by Churchill and Roosevelt. Klaus Barbie and tens of thousands of other war criminals had at that time still very little to fear.

  Reviewing the position in his Pentagon office in September 1944, John McCloy, the Assistant Secretary of War, blamed the British for the crisis. Energetic, highly competent, and politically astute, McCloy realised that the British had produced only a pile of official papers, no results and considerable political embarrassment. It was by now obvious, he felt, that only the American and British armies in Europe would have the resources to investigate the crimes. Hundreds of thousands of Germans had already been captured; the US First Army had crossed into Germany and was pressing towards Aachen; but in the absence of an unequivocal directive from their own commanders, the military machine had refused to take on any responsibility for war crimes. SHAEF headquarters, directing the invasion of Europe, had already insisted that it would only investigate war crimes which had been committed against troops under its command since 6 June; the Combined Chiefs of Staff were still considering directives to their armies and would do so until long after the end of the war; the army commanders, faced with the immediate battle, had not even considered the issue. At the War Office in London, senior officials led by the permanent secretary, Sir Frederick Bovenschen, were deliberately creating as many obstacles as possible to prevent the British army taking on any war-crimes responsibilities. He was successful until the end of the war when the British army in Germany found itself with just twelve men (‘three scratch teams’) to comb through the whole of the British zone.

  Taking the initiative to prevent just that happening in the American Zone, McCloy phoned Brigadier-General Weir, the US Army’s Deputy Judge Advocate-General, and asked whether he had any ideas about building a war-crimes agency. Delighted by the call, Weir arrived within minutes in McCloy’s office with a proposal he had been drafting for some weeks. It involved cutting across no fewer than twenty-five different departments, and giving their powers to the JAG. Despite opposition from the General Staff, McCloy announced two days later that the JAG would be the sole war-crimes agency. Weir was ordered to start immediately. He submitted a plan to expand his staff from four to one hundred and twenty-five but was only allocated twenty-nine, a totally inadequate number for Weir’s requirements. His plan, on FBI advice, involved creating a huge police operation equipped with a gigantic punch-card system, special maps and intelligence archives. It was exactly the right idea, but incredibly he envisaged that the whole operation could be based in Washington. A year later, a sadder and wiser man, he confessed that his idea would have only been realisable with a staff of 2,500. But by then most of his staff had been diverted to work for the prosecution of the major war criminals at Nuremberg. Not one of his staff had been available in January 1945 to investigate the most outrageous German war crime against American troops, the slaughter by the 1st SS Panzer group of 102 prisoners of war at Malmédy in the Ardennes forest. The lawyers in Washington were thrilled by the prospect of putting Hitler and his aides on trial on unprecedented charges, such as crimes against humanity and waging aggressive war. The smaller crimes, they felt, could be left to the army in Europe.

  In the SHAEF Handbook, issued to all officers, the arrest of war criminals was listed as the fifth most important objective in the occupation of Germany. General Eisenhower had received an order from the Department of the Army at the end of 1944 to set up a war-crimes office; his directive, issued on 24 February, explicitly ordered the newly-established teams to investigate only ‘alleged war crimes against members of the armed forces of the United States’. That directive excluded all crimes in concentration camps and the crimes committed against the French and the nationals of other occupied countries. Knowing that very few crimes had been committed against American personnel, the army commands automatically put Eisenhower’s directive as a very low priority.

  Colonel Clio E. Straight was appointed to head the US Army’s JAG war-crimes section in Europe. Born in Iowa, he readily admits that he knew nothing when he was appointed to the post, either about Europe or about the crimes committed by the Germans. Moreover, he was unable to leave his temporary headquarters in Paris until July 1945; he was repeatedly told that there was no transport available to Germany. By that time, seventeen teams were operating independently in the US Zone but because of untrained personnel, lack of transport and money and, above all, a low-priority rating, their work was unimpressive. When Straight finally arrived in Wiesbaden and set up his office, he was overwhelmed by the chaos. Other army units refused to give him even perfunctory co-operation, he could not get facilities that he desperately needed, and the investigating teams were working far away in splendid isolation. There was, he wrote some years later, ‘almost a complete lack of appreciation of the impending problem … it was still not appreciated that war crimes had been committed on an extremely vast scale … It does not appear that steps were taken by the Commands to implement even the directives to arrest war criminals. Responsibility for apprehension and detention was just assigned indiscriminately.’

  The investigators, Straight discovered, were frustrated because arrests could only be carried out by CIC (Counter Intelligence Corps) agents, and the CIC did not feel it was their job. ‘Sending the [war crimes] directive to soldiers in
fighting units, who had a war to fight and then an uneasy peace to maintain, just couldn’t produce any results,’ he ruefully remembers. Trying to save something of the operation, Straight ordered the investigators to ignore all cases not involving American personnel or concentration-camp victims. ‘It was not possible to try all those crimes, there was no useful purpose,’ he recalls. Quite simply, Straight’s decision meant that Barbie’s crimes were not subject to American investigation. But Straight cannot be blamed. He was the mere victim of the failure of officials in London and Washington to implement the politicians’ pledges.

  In theory, it should have been relatively easy both to arrest and to identify Barbie. To prevent any resistance movement developing, and for general security reasons, SHAEF directives specified the arrest of anyone who had served in the army or the police or had been an officer in the Nazi Party. Despite the unprecedented chaos into which Germany was plunged, millions of Germans had been arrested and were interned throughout the country – among them, for a time, Barbie himself. Although the War Crimes Commission had finally published a list of wanted war criminals, the most effective list should have been the one published in Paris by CROWCASS, the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects.

  According to the proposals put to Eisenhower in November 1944, CROWCASS would regularly publish three lists: one of the wanted men, another of those detained for specific crimes, and a third listing all German war criminals detained and the camps where they could be found. The method of finding the wanted criminal was theoretically quite attractive. The internment camp would return to Paris a completed form with the name, photograph and fingerprints of each imprisoned German. The information would be punched onto a card and fed into a Hollerith IBM card-index machine, which would then compare the information available on similar cards with the names of the wanted men. It would then be relatively easy to go to the camp and arrest the wanted man. Barbie’s name appeared in one of the earliest lists, yet CROWCASS never placed him in any danger. Every aspect of the system failed.

  By July 1945, eight million Germans were interned. Punching their names onto cards was overly ambitious. Not even the German High Command ever had the advantage of a complete list. The majority of internment camps either did not receive the lists, or did not fill them in, or failed to return them to Paris. Those that did arrive were invariably either outdated because the internees had been moved to another camp, or worthless because the criminals were registered under false names. In the Paris headquarters there was chaos. The Hollerith machines which had been shipped from America invariably failed to work, the premises were too small, and the staff were at loggerheads with each other. When Patrick Dean at the Foreign Office saw CROWCASS’s first list, he wrote, ‘misleading and unreliable’. Barbie was arrested at least twice before being employed by the Americans, yet remained unidentified.

  Barbie was first listed on a war-crimes list in the first UNWCC published list in December 1944. Listed no. 48 in the German section, he was named as ‘Barbier, alias Kreitz’, a Gestapo official in both Lyons and Dijon. Three years later, the CROWCASS list listed him as ‘Barbie, Barbier, Barby, von Barbier, or Klein, or Kreitz or Mayer,’ wanted for murder. His file number was 57.

  After his escape from the school, Barbie was finally reunited with his family, who were still living with his mother-in-law in Trier. Despite the relative comforts, he quickly felt both exposed and frustrated. It needed little imagination to realise that Allied soldiers hunting for former Gestapo officers would start their search at his family home.

  After fond farewells, and with the help of friends, he found lodgings in Marburg, a small university town forty miles north of Frankfurt. Robert Schmidt, the owner of 35 Barfusserstrasse, was a committed Nazi who had joined both the Party and the Brownshirts in 1930. He unquestioningly accepted Barbie’s pretext that he was hoping to enroll as a student in the local university. His house became the fugitive’s principal home until August 1946. A fellow lodger was Hans Becker, an alias which Barbie quickly assumed so that, in the event of a raid, he would have an effective cover story. By either skilful design or pure coincidence, Barbie also lived occasionally at the home of a Fridolin Becker in Kassel. It was from that house, on 18 April 1946, posing as a CID officer called Becker, that he and two others entered a local home pretending that they were looking for a wanted man, believed to be hiding in one of the rooms. Once inside, they stole 100,000 marks-worth of jewellery. In 1950, his two accomplices were arrested and convicted of the theft. The police were unable to arrest Barbie, who by then was working for the Americans; but quite mysteriously, soon after the trial, the jewellery was delivered at police headquarters. The German prosecutors remain convinced to this day that the anonymous delivery was made by an American CIC officer.

  Barbie’s life in Marburg was comparatively comfortable. Irrepressible and indefatigable, Barbie – the manipulator, the deceiver, the unrepentant Nazi police officer, but above all the unscrupulous survivor – instinctively began the transition from gamekeeper to poacher. At first he resorted to the very same activities which he had suppressed with such violence in Lyons: he became a forger, a black-marketeer, an underground conspirator, and ultimately proffered himself as a willing collaborator. His accomplices were the Kamaradenschaft, the masonic fraternity of former SS officers who enjoyed a unique bond of loyalty.

  Barbie’s first contacts were made around Christmas 1945. According to a Swiss-born CIC agent who penetrated the group, Barbie’s associates were similar fugitive SS men who saw themselves as the nucleus of a new Nazi movement, the spearhead of a Fourth Reich. Rather in the manner of Freikorps, the right-wing military groups which had sprung up after Germany’s 1918 defeat to challenge the new socialist government, and which became the embryo of Hitler’s stormtroopers, Barbie and his associates began constructing a German resistance movement. Amongst Barbie’s first contacts with the group was Frau Erika Loos, a former SS office staffer, whom Barbie had last seen during the final days of the war in Essen. They met at least three times in Marburg during February 1946. Other members were more high-ranking, including a former SS Major General and senior officials from the former Ministry of Propaganda. The group, at least sixty strong, efficiently divided itself into three parts: policy, propaganda and procurement. Barbie was head of the third section, responsible firstly for setting up an intelligence network throughout the American and British zones, and secondly for organising the production of forged forms, mostly Wehrmacht discharge papers which former SS officers needed to disguise their wartime military service. Later he was to deal in authentic Allied forms stolen from Munich. The forgeries provided the funds for their more serious task, resistance to the Allies.

  As their numbers grew, however, the group leaders reluctantly accepted that the combination of oppressive Allied control and the disinterest of the exhausted German population had extinguished any possibility of active resistance. Ever the opportunists, they began discussing a reversal of tactics: if their network could not fight the Allies, why not join them in the fight against Communism. The group leaders decided to approach senior Allied officials and offer their services. Taking part in those discussions was the CIC agent infiltrator. In May 1946, he ‘discreetly disclosed’ an acquaintanceship with a high-ranking British Foreign Office official who was a secret Nazi sympathiser. A meeting was arranged and the British official seemed to be suitably impressed. What he needed before he could transmit the proposal to Washington and London, he confided to the SS emissaries, was a more complete picture: names of their members and details of what they could offer. The British agent was not disappointed. The result was predictable.

  At the end of August 1946, Barbie was walking near Marburg University with Otto Wolfgang, alias Wenzel, an old SS friend. Wolfgang saw a German woman, riding as a passenger in an American army jeep, point Barbie out to the American driver, Dick Lavoie. Barbie hesitated; he was sure that he was totally unknown in the town. But within minutes the jeep had draw
n up next to him. In the front passenger seat was Erika Loos, his early contact with the underground group. He was ordered into the jeep:

  I knew they were taking me to prison. Marburg has very narrow streets and when we reached the post office, we had to slow down to let a tram pass. I then thought, ‘It’s now or never.’ I’d taken a parachute course [in 1941] because for a time I was meant to be sent to Baku [in Russia]. As the jeep slowed down, I jumped out. There was a gasp from the pedestrians, the American looked round, and in his excitement crashed into a tree.

  Barbie ran down an alley, Lavoie shooting at him as he jumped over a wall. A bullet nipped Barbie’s finger:

  I knocked on a door and asked the woman to hide me. She took me upstairs to a bedroom. In the bed lay an old woman. I hid underneath. I heard the Americans when they came and asked if I had passed. She told them that she had seen me, but that I had gone on, jumping over the hedge. When they’d gone, she hid me in the pigeon coop. I stayed there until nightfall, hearing the Americans looking for me. Then I got away.

  A few days later, Dale Garvey at CIC headquarters in Frankfurt issued an urgent message to all CIC offices in the American zone that Klaus Barbie, former Gestapo officer and wanted as a war criminal, had been sighted. All units were asked to be on the alert and arrest him on sight. The next time Barbie met Lavoie it was under different circumstances: ‘I met that American again, some time later. He interrogated me. He’d become very fat and I didn’t recognise him. He told me that Frau Loos had broken her thigh [in the crash].’

  Barbie’s greatest fear now was rearrest and identification. A priority was to remove the blood tattoo mark under his arm – a tattoo which every SS man was given so that, if he ever needed a blood transfusion, he would receive the correct Aryan blood type. Karl Schaefer, an SS friend, suggested that they go to a sympathetic doctor in Hamburg whose work and discretion could be trusted. In early November, with two other SS men, Barbie headed north, to Dr Heinz Gloede at 22 Wangelstrasse. To his surprise, Gloede’s home was still openly filled with Nazi emblems, making no attempt to hide his allegiances. ‘I was suspicious, but I thought my worries were exaggerated. We stayed two days with him and I did my first black-market deal – selling my father’s gold watch.’