The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (53 page)

The encounter between Michel Thomas and Klaus Barbie at St Joseph’s prison in Lyon more than forty years after they had last met was a calm and dignified affair without emotion or histrionics. In a gloomy room set aside for judicial investigations, Michel sat at a table flanked by a judge and a lawyer. Across from him, beside an interpreter and a court reporter, but so close the men could almost touch, was wartime Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon.
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The meeting was part of the preliminary hearings in the course of collecting evidence for the trial against Barbie. Michel had already given testimony in Paris to the police, in the presence of prosecuting attorney Serge Klarsfeld, and now he had been called as a witness to establish the identity of the man who had interrogated him forty years earlier. Barbie argued in German that when he was in ‘police’ training a professor of criminology had stated that it was impossible to recognise anyone after such a long time. Especially if that person, on his own admission, had only been in the other’s presence for two hours. ‘I did not expect ever to agree with the defendant, but in this case I do,’ Michel said. ‘If I had passed the man sitting there in the street I would not have recognised him. But facing him and staring at him here close-up, I know. His voice, his demeanour. It is clear. That is Klaus Barbie.’

Michel drew attention to a distinguishing mark he had noticed all those years earlier: a right ear lobe lower than the left. ‘And that effeminate gesture, the flicking of his hand with his little finger bent inwards. The mocking, sarcastic smile. And nobody could forget those eyes, those rat’s eyes with no mercy in them.’
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After the war, Klaus Barbie had disappeared for thirty-three years. Although wanted by the Americans, British and French, he managed to keep one step ahead of them all through a mixture of his own low cunning and the gross incompetence of his pursuers.

Ever since he left Lyon, he had been on the move. As a member of the Gestapo he came under the automatic-arrest category, so he took an assumed name one month after Germany’s surrender, and worked on farms to survive. He was soon back in touch with clandestine Nazi and SS organisations, however, and learned to make a living forging identity papers. In the winter of 1945, he was arrested by the Americans at Darmstadt, for reasons that remain unknown. He received a fourteen-day prison sentence but his true identity was not discovered and he was released.

He became a common criminal, posing as a policeman on one occasion to rob a baroness of her jewellery in Rassel, and moved from one town to another, selling forged identity papers and black-market goods. As his circle of underground SS contacts grew, one proved to be a double agent working for the British. Barbie was subsequently arrested and told, ‘Well, my friend, we are not the Americans. You are not going to run away from us!’ A bold statement that was to prove entirely incorrect. The British moved him to a safe house in Hamburg and locked him in a room, but Barbie found a crowbar, levered the padlock from the door and fled. He would later claim that the British had roughed him up. ‘I lost all interest in the British and all faith in their promises.’ He acquired new forged ID papers and returned to Marburg and a life of petty crime.

The Americans and the British had launched a crackdown at this time on Nazi Résistance groups. Operation Selection Board targeted numerous suspects, and in February 1947 agents simultaneously raided dozens of addresses all over Germany. Barbie was thought to head an underground Nazi group, made up of seventy members, that was involved in smuggling fugitives out of the country. He later claimed to have escaped through a bathroom window as CIC agents burst through his front door.

Soon after this narrow escape he decided that his only long-term chance of remaining at liberty was to switch sides and work for Allied intelligence. He sought out Kurt Merk, a former wartime colleague and Abwehr (German military intelligence) officer who had been recruited by CIC to run a spy network. The men met in the small town of Memmingen, just a short drive south of Ulm, and Merk agreed to introduce his former colleague to his American masters.

Barbie’s name was immediately recognised by CIC as one of the principal Selection Board targets still at large, but the regional commander saw him as a valuable informant and neglected to inform HQ. And so it came about that one section of CIC secretly protected the Gestapo officer, while another searched for him. The American agent who recruited Barbie found him to be ‘an honest man, both intellectually and personally, absolutely without nerves or fear... a Nazi idealist’.
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‘The new CIC officers were totally and completely incompetent, with no idea of how to run an intelligence operation,’ Michel explains. ‘They looked for help from “professionals” - Nazis who had worked in intelligence. Most of these men just sold them newspaper reports they had read in the Czech press, or the like. They got zilch from Barbie.’

Barbie’s past was no secret to his masters. He had been on the CROWCASS directives since 1945, accused of the murder and torture of civilians, and CIC had further identified him as head of the Gestapo in Lyon. A brief profile on him was also among the multitude written by Michel while in Munich. Barbie did not deny his position - which, after all, was his sole claim to expertise in intelligence work - but insisted he had not been involved in torture and murder. However, Merk later reported to CIC that Barbie had tortured Résistance members and had boasted of hanging them from their thumbs until they were dead. ‘If the French ever found out how many mass graves Barbie was responsible for, even Eisenhower would not be able to protect him,’ he said.
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A report was now sent to HQ and an internal squabble broke out within CIC between Barbie’s protectors and those who arrested him. After being a paid informant for nine months, he was finally arrested and taken to Oberursel for investigation. Barbie was scared and angry when he was locked lip, alarmed that he might be handed over to the French and shot. In a hollow attempt at defiance, he told his captors, ‘You are not going to get anything out of me!’ It took only a week of solitary confinement for him to change his mind. He began to write lengthy, heavily edited accounts of his activities in Lyon and admitted being a member of the SD, but claimed he was attached to foreign espionage rather than the Gestapo. A CIC officer reported, ‘It is not believed that he had wilfully withheld information.’

It became clear to Barbie that the Americans were only interested in his post-war activities, and his captors seemed satisfied with his account. They prepared to release him to return to work with CIC in Memmingen. The French, however, took a different view when their investigations revealed that US intelligence knew of Barbie’s whereabouts. As early as 1948 there were newspaper reports in France, and then official notes between the countries, demanding his extradition from Germany. CIC was faced with a situation that was diplomatically embarrassing and potentially explosive.

French intelligence demanded the right to interrogate Barbie. After first feigning ignorance of his whereabouts, two CIC officers took him to a rendezvous with French agents. He denied that he was Klaus Barbie, and the Americans warned the French not to ask unauthorised questions, breaking off the interview after only ten minutes. A second meeting was demanded, during which the French agents formed the clear opinion that Barbie had been given immunity by the Americans. No questions regarding his whereabouts or activities were allowed, although he did admit his identity. ‘He is very important to the United States,’ the CIC officer accompanying Barbie said. ‘He does dangerous things.’

A third unproductive meeting convinced the French that Barbie had been offered full American cover. CIC’s reaction to a statement by the French government charging him with ‘murder and massacre, systematic terrorism and execution of hostages’ was to hide him from French war crimes investigators. They decided to keep Barbie under wraps, claiming that the French security services were ‘thoroughly penetrated by Communist elements’ who wanted to ‘kidnap Barbie, reveal his CIC activities, and thus embarrass the United States’.
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Barbie was moved to Augsburg, where he worked with spy networks designed to penetrate the French intelligence service, and employed agents to infiltrate right-wing Ukrainian émigré organisations inside Germany. He also used German agents to penetrate the local KPD (German Communist Party) and was paid a bonus of one hundred Deutsch Marks when he obtained a list of the Augsburg membership. However, his overall contribution to American intelligence was insignificant in comparison to his crimes.
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Continued pressure from the French government persuaded CIC HQ that Barbie should be quietly dropped as an informant without being told of his altered status. He continued to be paid for writing worthless reports while CIC made plans to spirit him out of Germany along a ratline -espionage jargon for a clandestine route used to smuggle out agents. They chose the Monastery Line, run by a certain Monsignor Kruoslav Dragonovic, a high-ranking prelate in the Croatian Catholic Church. Dragonovic, known inside CIC as the ‘Good Father’, was himself a war criminal. He had been a ‘relocation’ official with the Croatian Fascist Ustachi in Yugoslavia, a regime responsible for the murder of at least four hundred thousand Serbs and Jews. The priest fled to the Vatican in 1944 and created an escape route out of Croatia for members of Ustase.

Monsignor Dragonovic knew his business as the man in charge of the single largest and most important ratline, and the CIC used his services extensively over a number of years. In particular, CIC in Vienna used the Monastery Line to ‘establish a means of disposition of visitors’ - meaning prisoners - whose continued residence in Austria constituted a security threat as well as a source of public embarrassment to the commanding general. A deal had been struck with the monsignor, who agreed to provide false IDs, visas, safe houses and transportation to South America for a thousand dollars a head. In exchange, CIC helped certain fugitive Ustachi selected by Dragonovic to leave the US zone, even though many of them appeared on Allied lists of war crime suspects.

Barbie was duly given his new ID - Klaus Altmann - and Dragonovic was paid his usual fee to arrange papers and passage to South America. When Barbie went to say farewell to his mother, CIC agents took elaborate security measures in case she was being watched by French agents in search of her son. Then, together with his wife, son and daughter, Barbie was driven by CIC agents from Augsburg to Salzburg and escorted by train to Genoa, where the party was met by the Good Father. The family was issued with substitute passports from the International Committee of the Red Cross and given immigration visas to Bolivia. Then, on 23 March 1951, Barbie and family sailed on an Italian liner to Buenos Aires, Argentina. CIC HQ congratulated themselves on a job well done. Those involved were commended for the ‘extremely efficient manner in which the final disposal of an extremely sensitive individual was handled. This case is considered closed.’
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Klaus Barbie took up residence in Bolivia, where at first he was reduced to begging from fellow Germans and took on the appearance of a tramp. Later, he obtained a job managing a remote sawmill in a tropical mahogany forest where he attempted to indoctrinate bemused local Indian workers with ‘good Nationalist Socialist ideas’. Barbie had been working on the estate for a month when he found out the German owner, who had emigrated to Bolivia before the war, was a Jew. Untroubled by his previous convictions, he remained in the man’s employ for a further three years.

Barbie was sentenced to death
in absentia
by French courts in 1952, and again in 1954, for the murder of members of the ftesistance. He was granted Bolivian nationality in 1957 and made himself useful to subsequent right-wing military regimes. He became financially solvent after founding his own sawmill and began to boast of his more acceptable wartime experiences to fellow members of the town’s racially exclusive German club. His open enthusiasm for Nazism was not even dulled when Mossad commandos from Israel kidnapped Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. And when the West German ambassador visited the German club in La Paz, Barbie responded to a toast by shouting, ‘Heil Hitler!’
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The Vietnam War temporarily turned Barbie into a rich man when there was a large demand for chinin, the bark used to make quinine. In 1965 US Army intelligence remembered their embarrassing asset and moved to reactivate Barbie as an agent. The plan was scotched by the CIA after enquiries made by Senator Jacob Javits regarding America’s employment of war criminals as intelligence agents. But although the CIA, US Army and State Department all knew that Klaus Altmann was Klaus Barbie, neither body felt obliged to inform the French or German governments, both of which had outstanding legal files on him.

No one informed US Immigration either, and in 1970 Barbie visited America on two occasions. As a partner in the state-owned Transmaritima shipping line, he had developed close connections with the Bolivian military and was suspected of transporting large quantities of arms. He was granted a diplomatic passport by Bolivia and used it to visit Germany. Barbie’s particular expertise was called upon when Hugo Banzer, a notoriously oppressive military dictator even by South American standards, took over the government in 1971. Barbie was given power to create internment camps for the regime’s political enemies where torture and execution were common. He also served in the Bolivian secret police and was involved in drug smuggling.
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