Klaus Barbie Read online

  Kolb was born in southern Germany and had emigrated to America aged seven in 1925. His war had ended at the Elbe and he was then attached to a ‘T-force’ to search for Nazis and documents – work which, he says, he did not like. He became much happier when the order came down that the intelligence priority was to discover the intentions and activities of the communists. Kolb believes himself above all to have been a professional intelligence officer and the intelligence priorities of the immediate post-war months disturbed him. There was excessive exaggeration of the danger of a Nazi conspiracy which then switched to an obsession with a potential communist conspiracy. What cemented his relationship with Barbie was their mutual understanding, ‘a common psychological community of interest’ between professionals about intelligence work. Kolb sentimentally remembers that ‘meeting of souls’ between himself and Barbie, where both recognised the communist danger but derided those who interpreted everything as a communist conspiracy.

  Kolb’s first task was to assess the output of the Augsburg detachment. After scrutinising all the files, his ten-page memorandum concluded that the Merk network had become expensive and worthless, ‘It dawned on people at all levels that it was all hogwash. His system did not really exist. We were getting false information, like a paper mill.’ Kolb recommended that the network be dissolved while retaining some of its best assets, of which Barbie was one. Browning ordered its disbandment in April 1949. Only Barbie was to be retained to recruit informants. Their mission was officially restricted purely to counter-intelligence. Headquarters were soon to decide that American CIC agents and not the Germans should be in charge of the networks. Intentionally, it led to greater control but also closer involvement between Bechtold and Kolb, and Barbie. At the height of the cold war, with the blockade of Berlin by the Russians, the employer/employee or victor/vanquished relationship had simply vanished. They were now equal partners in a common struggle. Yet according to Earl Browning, Barbie’s use, both in scope and importance, was severely limited by directives sent from headquarters. Those directives were rejected by Munich and according to Kolb did not exist.

  Neither Kolb nor Bechtold were concerned in any moral or legal sense about Barbie’s war-time crimes. Bechtold openly admits that during the one-and-a-half years in which he became a friend of Barbie, they discussed his brutal methods on many occasions. He still admires Barbie as an intelligence officer and has no qualms about events in Lyons. ‘The way he explained it, when they caught Resistance people in the act, there was just no time to lose. They needed the names of the others fast and in war anything goes.’ For Bechtold that was an understandably pragmatic approach which he too adopted when asked how he could work so closely with a known, notorious Gestapo officer: ‘I was just obeying my orders.’ Kolb, on the other hand, completely denies that anyone knew about Barbie’s war crimes, ‘If we’d known, we wouldn’t have used him.’ Yet he admits that Barbie was known to be a former Gestapo officer. ‘You’ve got to make a sharp distinction between fighting the Resistance and the Jewish thing. Deporting the Jews was a war crime and we didn’t know about it. Nor did the French ever mention it.’

  ‘He struck me,’ says Kolb, ‘as the sort of interrogator who didn’t need torture, and he indicated to me that he subscribed to the theory among all good interrogators that you don’t use torture. We probably suspected on one or two occasions that he might have used the rubber-hose technique, but he denied all that and frankly I was even sceptical of the French accusations.’ Surprisingly, Kolb even denies that he ever knew that Barbie’s name featured on a CROWCASS list. Coolly, Kolb explains how the CIC in 1949 calculated the problem about Barbie’s continued use as, ‘Cost = minimal, benefit = enormous.’

  Their respect for Barbie stemmed from observing his method of interrogation. Like apprentices watching a master artist, they saw, as Kolb put it, ‘how to milk a source’. After discussing the content of his reports during their regular meetings in a safe house, Kolb and Barbie would discuss the techniques of interrogation. Kolb, like many Americans, had been through a British interrogation course in the Cotswolds and was confident about his expertise, ‘but Barbie knew it all. He was shrewd, extremely intelligent, good in manipulating human beings, too good.’ When Kolb was confronted with a few cases where he had made no progress, he summoned Barbie. ‘In one case I was convinced the suspect was a communist agent. Barbie told me I was wrong. Of course I accepted his judgement. He always said use guile not duress … except where a bit of duress is needed.’

  Beneath this respectful attitude, the two expatriate Germans undoubtedly shared a feeling of kinship with Barbie and also a desire to understand their own country. At dinner in Barbie’s house with the family and his mother, Bechtold would listen intently to Barbie’s accounts of Nazi life, his admiration for Kaltenbrunner, and the problems of fighting the Resistance. Kolb, in contrast, believes that Barbie was neither anti-semitic nor a fervent Nazi, ‘He was just a fellow traveller.’ As far as Bechtold was concerned, Barbie had applied to join the judicial branch of the civil service and had just found himself in the ‘security services’. Bechtold never calls it the Gestapo.

  Under Kolb’s direction, Barbie’s work changed dramatically. Combined with the new directives to disband the German networks, headquarters had issued orders about new targets. The CIC was to work exclusively on direct penetration of the extremist parties in the American zone, which in reality meant the Communist Party. According to Kolb, although CIC agents were forbidden to cross the border, the regulation was ignored when ‘operational requirements’ demanded. It was an extension of the new ‘positive intelligence’ policy adopted in 1947. To emphasise the new aggressive approach, the 7970 CIC was renamed the 66th Intelligence Group, and Augsburg was no longer a sub-station under Munich but the self-governing Region XII.

  With new orders came new tactics. Using blackmail, money, offers of sex, and exploiting people’s greed, Barbie directed those antenna so admired by Kolb to attract informants inside the Bavarian KPD. In another change of tactics, Kolb also took the initiative and ordered Barbie to try and win over specific targets. As there was no longer any use for Merk, the new team was confined to Barbie and Bechtold, normally working from a safe house and not an American billet. Their secretary was Hans Müller, a former Gestapo officer wanted by the German police for murdering the ‘Gebrüder Scholl’ – two famous anti-Nazis whose speeches before their execution became an inspiration for post-war Germans, including Beate Klarsfeld. Müller’s assets, according to Bechtold, were that he could act on their behalf when they were away and that he had ‘excellent contacts with the local police and could always get them to help us’.

  As Bechtold quickly discovered, one of Barbie’s greatest assets was the Kamaradenschaft. With the lamentable failure of denazification, former high-ranking Nazis could be found in nearly every senior position, especially in the German police and security services. Repeatedly, Bechtold stood by in amazement as the unobtainable was secured by Barbie approaching a former SS officer. For example, with tighter German controls over the issue of identity and registration cards, the two found travelling through Bavaria with false identities increasingly difficult: immediately, Barbie sought out a former SS officer who had become chief of a local police force and gratifyingly provided everything. With one set of papers they posed as employees of a research bureau, with another they posed as journalists visiting Bavaria’s leading politicians. As Bechtold looked on in wonder, Barbie engaged the latter in lengthy but polite off-the-record arguments, discovering their precise intentions. Considering the intelligence vacuum at the time, it was unique material, eagerly awaited by the highest levels of the American military government in Frankfurt. Neither they nor Bechtold were ever concerned that their whole operation depended on SS and Gestapo officers who had been intimately involved in appalling crimes.

  Bechtold is quite honest about Barbie’s power and influence. He relied on Barbie’s judgement to decide whether a former SS man should be used
or not, regardless of his past. Barbie, after all, was a good penetration expert: ‘He had served his apprenticeship in other assignments before he arrived in France. In France he got the final polish.’ Morality is not a known commodity in the intelligence world. The task at hand was always overriding. As Bechtold says of Barbie, ‘He was a man capable of genuine human emotions, as long as they did not interfere with his mission.’ Sentiments which he easily understood. ‘In working with him,’ says Bechtold, ‘I was just obeying orders.’

  Their major success together was the penetration of the headquarters of the Bavarian Communist Party. Kolb says that it was at the relatively low level of secretaries, chauffeurs and office staff, but Bechtold claims that Barbie successfully penetrated the highest ranks of the Bavarian Party. In Augsburg, Barbie had discovered that the secretary of a senior official was unhappily married, professionally frustrated and in need of extra finance. With Bechtold’s help, he convinced the woman to deliver regularly the minutes of the Party committee’s weekly meeting which included the directives it was receiving from KPD headquarters in Frankfurt. Regularly she left an envelope at a dead-letterbox to be collected by Barbie. Communication between the two was by prearranged innocuous telephone calls followed by other letters. Disappointingly, the minutes revealed little more than might have been expected – arrangements for May Day parades, election manifestos, and demands that the Americans should leave Germany. But since few other CIC agents were delivering anything at all, the head of the ‘communist desk’ in Stuttgart, Daniel Benjamin, joined in supporting Barbie’s protection.

  The next stage of the operation was, in Bechtold’s view, a greater success. To ensure that their informant was not a double agent, Barbie insisted that they check the source in Berlin itself. Officially, the CIC was not allowed to cross the border, but inevitably these orders were ignored. Barbie selected ‘Laib’, an SS officer wanted for war crimes by the Norwegians, to organise the mission. ‘Laib’ brought back not only confirmation, but a bonus – the identity of a Czech agent in Bavaria. Spellbound with professional envy, Bechtold watched as Barbie interrogated the Czech, slowly and skilfully enmeshing their suspect in a web of self-contradictions until, confused and exhausted, he confessed and agreed to become a double agent. But that too turned out to be a disappointment when the Czech proved to be a triple agent and tried to ensnare them into Czechoslovakia.

  Other approaches were blatantly unsuccessful. One senior KPD official approached by Barbie was threatened that failure to cooperate with the Americans would result in publication of documents showing that he had been a Gestapo informer during the war. This was just one of many ‘dirty tricks’ with which the American intelligence agencies were experimenting. Three days later the approach was exposed in the local communist newspaper, and the official disappeared shortly after.

  Nevertheless, both Vidal and Lavoie at Tech Spec were convinced that Barbie was indeed proving his worth and that increasing French pressure on account of his war crimes should be ignored. They, like other Americans, were concerned with the future and not the past. To them it seemed that European obsessions with such sentimental irrelevancies could only harm the security of the west. Gehlen’s new German secret service (BND) had quite blatantly recruited SS officers wanted for mass murder, and that had been approved by Washington. Among the many was General Bömelberg, the senior Gestapo officer in Paris. What distinguished him and the others from Barbie was that, although many of their victims were also Jews, with few exceptions their crimes had been committed in countries now ruled by the communists. Most important of all, they had not murdered Moulin. France was an important American ally and by the beginning of 1950, political pressure in Paris forced the government to intensify their demands for Barbie’s extradition.

  THE DECEPTION

  The French investigation of German atrocities in Lyons began very slowly. After the Germans finally evacuated the town in the first days of September 1944, Lyons, like most other newly-liberated towns in France, burst into an orgy of lawless celebration and bloody recrimination. The immediate victims were collaborators who had somewhat foolishly not fled with the Germans. Throughout the region, cowed groups of terrified Frenchmen awaited the dispensation of justice. Those fortunate enough not to be summarily executed were incarcerated in Montluc and the other prisons where their victims had suffered. But after those heady days had passed, the problems facing the administrators were enormous. Not only did the physical damages of war have to be repaired, the administration of the country had to be reconstructed. Complicating these tasks was the war itself, which continued for a further eight months.

  The Lyons police faced an unique problem. To purge their ranks entirely of collaborators would decimate them. To make matters worse, the town was suddenly confronted by an unprecedented wave of robberies and police who might otherwise have investigated German crimes were immediately diverted to prevent domestic banditry. There was also a political problem. The Gaullists were locked in a bitter power struggle with the communists and were unwilling to allow communist police officers the authority to initiate investigations. Since many police officers were former Vichy sympathisers, there was little to be expected from their investigating German crimes.

  The examining magistrates were also handicapped by acute legal confusion. The French judicial system needed to be completely reorganised and purged before warrants could be issued; charges could only be made once French law had been considered and retrospectively altered by a new parliament. Many months passed before magistrates knew which new laws would be enacted giving them the powers to prosecute. Only adding to the turmoil, there was a continuous change of personnel, undermining any hope of persistent investigation.

  In Paris, responsibility for war-crimes investigation was divided between the Ministries of Defence and Justice. Their agencies, the DST (the French MI5 or FBI), the Direction Générale des Etudes et Recherches (DGER), later the SDECE (MI6 or CIA), and the Police Judiciaire’s ‘Brigade Anti-Gestapo’ all began nominal investigations in 1944. But even in the limited work which they did manage, there was little co-operation with other branches of the various police and security forces, with the examining magistrates or with the special commissions established nationally, departmentally and in each town. The proliferation of investigations hindered effective police work and coordination. In the ensuing chaos much evidence was lost, mislaid or never even collected.

  The purging and reconstruction of the Lyons police and judiciary was only partially completed at the beginning of 1945. By then various agencies and officials had started their own uncoordinated investigation into Gestapo crimes. They all faced innumerable problems. With very few exceptions, all the Germans had disappeared, the victims who had survived often did not know the name of the German responsible, while the best informed were the collaborators whose evidence was clearly prejudiced, not least because they were about to be executed. The greatest obstacle was the immaculate destruction by the Gestapo of all their records before their departure.

  Gradually the police and examining magistrates in towns and villages across the region collected statements and reports. Corpses were exhumed, massacres reconstructed and eyewitnesses found. (Much of this material was destined for Professor Mazel’s Mémorial de l’Oppression, a horrific catalogue of Gestapo crimes.) Confounding the police investigation was their ignorance of the Gestapo’s structure and chain of command. For four months Inspector Chandon of Brigade Ten sifted the limited evidence to produce, in June 1945, the first schematic explanation of power and organisation in the Ecole de Santé. With all its inadequacies, it still remains the definitive study and clearly shows that Barbie was the Gestapo chief working directly under Knab.

  On 31 August 1945, exactly a year after Barbie left Lyons, the city’s military tribunal issued a warrant for his arrest on charges of illegal arrests and murder. On 12 September another examining magistrate charged him with murder and arson. The charges were based on the murders in the Ecole de
Santé, the deportations of members of the Resistance in Montluc, and his campaign around St Claude. There was no mention of Moulin, nor of the Jews. In fact it was merely a formal procedure. Thousands of warrants were being issued throughout France against Germans who were just faceless names, very often wrongly spelled. The Lyons magistrates could only hope that an Allied soldier would see Barbie’s name on one of the many wanted lists and notify the French government representative at Baden-Baden. There was nothing else to be done. The American and British governments had consistently refused to allow French investigators to be attached to the Allied armies, and, because of the chaos in France, no French teams could be expected to operate in Germany for the foreseeable future. There the matter might have remained until today – with Barbie, like so many other officers of the Lyons Gestapo, living a prosperous life safe from prosecution in West Germany. His misfortune was the trial of René Hardy.

  Until Hardy’s first trial, very few Frenchmen had heard about Moulin and the events at Caluire. Moulin was after all dead, just one of many dead Resistance heroes. After Hardy’s second escape, he fled to North Africa where some of the Resistance leaders were less convinced by the allegations made in France. After serving the Free French government, he returned at the Libération and was appointed director of the repatriation department in Frenay’s new Ministry of Prisoners, in clear recognition of his services to the Resistance. The Caluire survivors were determined, however, that Hardy’s treachery should not remain unpunished and with little effort initiated a secret investigation resulting in his arrest on 12 December 1944. Hardy’s trial started on 20 January 1947 and ended four days later with his acquittal in the absence of any conclusive evidence. Aubrac and others were furious but helpless.