The Devil's Agent: Life, Times and Crimes of Nazi Klaus Barbie

By Peter McFarren and Fadrique Iglesias

Klaus Barbie is considered the most important former Nazi who became a public figure and who established himself in South America where continued his unrepentant criminal activities in close alliance with other Nazis and government officials. The Devil's Agent, a new book by Peter McFarren and Fadrique Iglesias, reveals a startling inner and detailed portrait of this horrific figure known as the Butcher of Lyon using previously unpublished letters written from Barbie's cell in Lyon, France, documents released since the removal of the Berlin Wall confirming his work as a U.S. and West German spy and over a hundred photographs of his family, business associates and Nazi friends.

This 624-page book also details Barbie's family history, the role he played as a Gestapo officer in German-occupied France, his responsibility for the murders of more than 14,000 Jews and French Resistance fighters during the Nazi Holocaust, his flight from Europe after the war with the backing of the U.S. Government, the Vatican and the International Red Cross, and his settlement in Bolivia with his wife Regine and two children.

His nefarious past exemplifies "Collective and Personal Evil" that is also addressed in this book. How the book is different: The most recent books on Barbie are over twenty years old, and do not reveal his work with U.S. and German intelligence in South America. The Devil's Agent goes deep into Barbie's life in Bolivia and relays information that has never been written about or mentioned before, as some of his closest allies and friends have just recently exposed some of his darkest secrets.

During 1942-1944, Klaus Barbie was a mid-level Nazi officer in charge of the Gestapo HQ in Lyon, France. His treatment of prisoners ranged from banal indifference to pleasure as he sadistically tortured and murdered his victims. After the war, what set him apart was the public role he played as an unscrupulous businessman and adviser to military rulers, and Western intelligence agencies, in close alliance with other escaped Nazis, while living in Bolivia. The unrepentant war criminal was the most important Nazi to continue operating as a public figure after World War II.

In Bolivia, Barbie trafficked in tanks and weapons and supported the hunt for the Argentine-Cuban guerrilla leader "Che" Guevara. He collaborated with cocaine trafficking kingpin Roberto Surez Gmez, authoritarian right-wing military governments and a network of escaped Nazis, paramilitaries and mercenaries from Europe and South America to overthrow a Bolivian
civilian government in 1980.

The Devils Agent describes co-author Peter McFarren's personal encounters with Klaus
Barbie in 1981, when McFarren and his colleague Maribel Schumacher were arrested in front of the Nazi's Bolivian home after trying to interview him for a story for The New York Times. McFarren obtained hundreds of Barbie's personal photographs and letters from prison that have never been made public before. Beyond their historical significance, these shine a light into Barbie's compartmentalized inner life: devoted husband, torturer, loving father, spy, adaptive businessman, anti-Semite, opportunist. Combined with extensive use of the wealth of historical materials released in the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the authors connect the inner Barbie with his times to provide insight into how collective evil occurs. From crimes against humanity to Holocausts, it happens step by banal step.

McFarren also worked on the documentaries Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie and My Enemy's Enemy and wrote numerous articles about Barbie and the military regimes he supported.

After an extensive, decades-long search by Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, Barbie was identified, captured and extradited to France. He was one o

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483636443

Peter McFarren

Peter McFarren is a journalist, photographer, filmmaker, and social entrepreneur who has written about Klaus Barbie since 1980 and worked on several documentaries and many books about him. He currently lives in Cairo, Egypt. Fadrique Iglesias is a columnist and writer specializing in cultural and arts management. He currently works for the Cultural Center of the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, DC, and lives in Virginia, USA.

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Copyright © 2013 by Peter McFarren and Fadrique Iglesias.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 05/23/2013

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Preface

Chapter 1   Introduction and a Personal Experience with Barbie

Chapter 2   From Misfit to Mass Murderer in Lyon

Chapter 3   Barbie: A Spy in the Service of the United States and West Germany

Chapter 4   My Father Was Not a Butcher

Chapter 5   Barbie and the Nazi Network in Latin America

Chapter 6   Dictators, Arms Trading, and Hunting Che Guevara

Chapter 7   The Klarsfelds and the Hunt for Klaus Barbie

Chapter 8   The Barbie and Ertl Families: A Story of Friendship, Passion, Intrigue, and Betrayal

Chapter 9   Barbie and the Cocaine Connection

Chapter 10   Barbie and the Bridegrooms of Death

Chapter 11   Trapped and on the Flight to Justice

Chapter 12   Barbie and France on Trial

Chapter 13   Barbie’s Prison Letters

Chapter 14   Barbie, an Agent of Collective Evil

Epilogue   Lest the Living Forget

Annex 1   Cocaine and Coup d’état

Annex 2   Bolivian Leaders Tied to Lucrative Cocaine Trade

Bibliography

About the Authors

Endnotes

This book is dedicated to the victims of genocide, hate crimes, and discrimination and the advocates for righteousness who fight to bring to justice the persons and institutions responsible for those crimes.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Devil’s Agent: The Life, Times, and Crimes of Nazi Klaus Barbie has its origin in 1980, when right-wing military and civilian groups funded by cocaine traffickers and organized with the support of Nazi Klaus Barbie took power through a coup d’état, riding roughshod over the most basic standards of human and democratic coexistence. The story of Klaus Barbie, however, has its origins in Europe in the 1930s with the rise of National Socialism, totalitarianism, Nazism, fascism, and religious and ethnic hatred that led to the Holocaust, World War II, and one of the darkest chapters in the history of humankind. Trying to grasp, understand and present nearly sixty years of Barbie’s life and its historical, social, and political context would not have been possible without the support of many friends and family members who contributed in numerous ways to making this book a reality.

We wish to thank the persons and institutions who shared their knowledge and experience with us—in many cases painful memories—about the events described here. John Enders, a journalist friend and colleague in the 1980s, played a key role in preparing the articles published during the government of General Luis García Meza that served as the foundation for this book.

We also wish to thank and recognize the following people for their support in the past and present, between 1980 and 2012, in clarifying the violent events that have continued to occur after World War II. Among them is Mariano Baptista, who, as editor of the La Paz newspaper Última Hora, helped gather information about neo-Nazis and Nazis operating in Bolivia. A special thanks to our families, especially Mela Aviles-McFarren, Mónica Tejada, Valeria and Daniela McFarren, Ana Maria Mendizábal, Begoña Iglesias, Augusto Iglesias, Lisa Polgar, Henry Polgar, Jill Aviles, Pieter DeWitte, and Neal Piper.

Many thanks to Alan Shave, a former British diplomat who lived through many of the periods described in this book, for his help in translating the book from Spanish to English; Bonnie Miller, who played a key role in editing the English version and offered many ideas that strengthened the book considerably; Augusto Iglesias and Connie Echazu Bedregal who helped edit the Spanish version; Douglas McRae, Mark Frautschi, David Atkinson, Lisa Polgar, and Henry Polgar who reviewed the English text of the book and made important comments, and John Enders who wrote the preface.

This book included interviews over a period of thirty years with Álvaro de Castro, Gustavo Sánchez Salazar, Beatrix Ertl, Hernán Siles Zuazo, Helena Abuawad, Father Gregorio Iriarte, Herbert Kopplin, Werner Guttentag, Jaime Aparicio, Cayetano Llobet, William Walker, Michael Vigil, Carlos Soria Galvarro, Jaime Paz Zamora, Roberto Roby Suárez Jr., Ed Schumacher, Maribel Schumacher-Villasante, Eduardo Gil de Muro, Rafael Sagarnaga, Alfredo Irigoyen, Peter Hammerschmidt, Gastón Velasco Carrasco, and other experts who preferred to remain anonymous.

This project was made possible through the support of a Kickstarter campaign that attracted 104 supporters without whom this book would probably not have been published. We are also grateful for the generous support we received from Jill Aviles, Dr. Jerome Dancis, Betsy Ruderfer, Emil Ruderfer, Virginia Watkin, Petrus and Godelieve, Alfonso Tejada, John Newman, Anita Bhatia, Bryan Aviles, and Lynnwood Farr.

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Figure 1. Contact sheet of photographs taken by co-author Peter McFarren of Klaus Barbie’s documents and personal photos in 1983 shortly after he was arrested and expelled from Bolivia.

PREFACE

One afternoon in mid-1982, Luis Arce Gómez, the interior minister in Bolivia’s right-wing military dictatorship led by General Luis García Meza and formerly the regime’s dreaded head of army intelligence and its secret paramilitary police, left his office for a ceremony at the army’s Estado Mayor, or general staff headquarters, inside the Miraflores army building in central La Paz. It was a ceremony closed to the public and the press and included all then-current officials of army intelligence (known as G-2) as well as past officials who had served during the decades following World War II. I had just finished interviewing Arce Gómez, and he invited me to accompany him. The event at army headquarters was to decorate an ailing septuagenarian general for his many years of work in the country’s intelligence apparatus. The chiefs of Bolivian intelligence and all its branches were there, as were several less presentable creatures who normally never left the basement of the Interior Ministry, where the torture rooms were located.

Klaus Barbie, known in Bolivia as Klaus Altmann, was a guest of honor at this event. Barbie’s presence in the country and his role in advising Bolivia’s military and intelligence officers in interrogation techniques and other practices were widely known and had been for years. He was of great interest to the Nazi hunters in France and Israel.

Arce Gómez introduced Barbie to me as my so-called instructor. Then Barbie began talking about the allegations that he had committed crimes against humanity during the time he headed the Gestapo unit in Lyon, France. He ranted against journalists who were attempting to expose him to international publicity, including several who he said had cheated him out of book rights or had otherwise hoodwinked him. He talked openly about his connections to other former Nazis living in the Southern Cone region of South America without naming them.

It was clear then that Barbie felt no remorse for his wartime actions. I was a man of war in a time of war, he told me.

The personal affection and close professional ties between Arce Gómez and Barbie were clear. They had worked together closely over the years, particularly after the military seized power in a July 1980 coup d’état and during the months of severe and brutal repression against Bolivia’s labor unions, campesino and leftist political leaders and journalists that followed.

Everything comes to an end, however. Eventually, Barbie lost the protection afforded him by his friends in the Bolivian military. At the end of 1982, a liberal democratic regime returned to power in Bolivia, and the military leaders who had led the coup, including Arce Gómez and García Meza, were disgraced and eventually jailed. The rest of the army returned to their barracks where they have remained. All of a sudden, Barbie had nowhere to hide and no one to hide behind. The world knew who he was and where he was, and he had no one to protect him any longer.

Barbie, after World War II, had entered first Argentina and later Bolivia with false documents under the Altmann name, and he lived for many years in relative prosperity and comfort. By the 1970s, however, largely due to investigations by the couple Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, his real identity and whereabouts became known. France first requested his extradition from Bolivia in 1973.

Today, Barbie’s horrendous crimes during the war as a Gestapo Nazi officer, his work for U.S. and West German intelligence agencies, his ties to right-wing military dictatorships in South America and the thugs who ran them and to the illicit trafficking in cocaine have all been exposed. It has always astonished me that Barbie (and other Nazis) lived freely and openly for so many years in South America and that even after he was unmasked and France had requested his extradition, it still took a decade to bring him to trial. It wasn’t until 1983 that he was finally returned to France, where he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison and where he died a pathetic old man in a prison cell in 1991.

Barbie’s ties to military leaders in Bolivia had first paid off during the 1971-78 regime of General Hugo Banzer Suárez, himself a descendant of German immigrants. Banzer ruled Bolivia as an ironfisted, anticommunist dictator. Not surprisingly, France’s extradition request was denied in 1974 by Bolivia’s military-appointed Supreme Court. It ruled that Barbie could not be extradited because he was a Bolivian citizen, even though it had clearly been shown that his citizenship was fraudulently obtained.

During the extradition proceedings, Barbie spoke to the local press and seemed unfazed by the possibility that he might lose his freedom or his comfortable place in Bolivian society. And comfortable it was. During the 1970s and early 1980s, he was regularly seen walking the streets of La Paz, sipping coffee at his regular corner table at the Club La Paz with a bodyguard and friends. After his extradition was denied in 1974, Barbie later said he had made a deal with Banzer. In exchange for a ruling in his favor, he would keep his mouth shut and keep a low profile. Apparently, he agreed.

In the three decades that have passed since my brief encounter with Barbie in La Paz, much has been learned and published about how high-level Nazis escaped Germany and resettled in several South American countries after the war. Barbie’s relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, the International Red Cross, U.S. military intelligence and other officials is a dark stain on the history of justice, human rights, and the rule of law. Barbie’s postwar connections, the interconnectedness of Nazi networks in South America and their usefulness to right-wing militaries throughout the continent—in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia—constitute a shameful chapter in Latin American history.

With the elaboration of The Devil’s Agent: The Life, Times, and Crimes of Nazi Klaus Barbie, the extent of those connections, relationships and collaborations is now made public, in many cases for the first time. It is for this reason that the book you are reading is unique. The work of Peter McFarren and Fadrique Iglesias is a significant contribution to the historical literature regarding Nazis in South America and specifically the history of Barbie’s role during the corrupt and brutal right-wing regimes that ruled Bolivia in the 1960s to the early 1980s. And it offers a fascinating glimpse inside a fascinating country’s complex social and political fabric.

How is it possible for a Nazi butcher, on the run, to survive—even thrive—in a foreign land for thirty-eight years? In this book the reader will find answers to that vexing question.

John Enders

Oregon, USA

CHAPTER 1

Introduction and a

Personal Experience with Barbie

If we ignore the past, if we distort or deny what happened, then the past will return. Only by remembering can we and our children and their children build a just future; a future in which human life never loses its value.

—Nazi hunter and human rights activist Simon Wiesenthal¹

Coauthor Peter McFarren’s First-Person Experience

Bolivia is a land of striking beauty, from the summit of Illimani at over 21,000 feet to the marshes of the Pantanal on the Paraná River at only 300 feet above sea level; a culture that mixes the indigenous Quechua, Aymara, and Guaraní with the Spanish; a people as open and welcoming to foreigners as it is geophysically insular; with a history of great wealth in the silver mines of Potosí of the seventeenth century and great poverty in 50 percent of the population that continue to live on no more than $2,000 a year; and controlled by governments that have ranged from some of the most politically and socioeconomically pioneering in the region to the most pathologically dictatorial and cruel.

Bolivia has struggled with public institutional weakness throughout its history, having gone through seventy-eight different administrations since it became a republic in 1825, most through military coups or social uprisings, and once even subjected to three changes of presidents in a twenty-four-hour period. Perhaps it was precisely because of this institutional vulnerability and geographic remoteness that Bolivia also became the hiding place of one of the more notorious Nazi war criminals, Klaus Barbie. It was during Barbie’s last three years in Bolivia and following his ordering my arrest that I became interested in his life, his mind-set and the support he gave to the right-wing military regime that he helped bring to power in 1980.

It was in 1980, during a period of personal exploration and a yearning to return to my birthplace, that I began following the turbulent social and political events taking place in Bolivia. I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, dedicated to the management of a school of haute cuisine and catering company while also dabbling in journalism doing freelance writing for the Christian Science Monitor and the Boston Globe and researching the Pre-Colombian links between the Americas and Africa.

Prior to that, as part of the Panamerican-Panafrican Association, I began writing and taking photographs related to breaches of human rights in the United States and various countries of Africa. For several years, under the umbrella of that foundation, I investigated the presence of hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan in the northeast and southern regions of the United States and their relationship with public officials.

The foundation is led by classical pianist, intellectual, and human rights activist Dr. Robert Pritchard, whom I had the opportunity to accompany on a trip to Zambia at a time when independence movements against colonial rule were gaining force. At the age of nineteen, I was able to meet such illustrious leaders as Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Agostinho Neto of Angola, Sam Nujoma from Namibia, and other leaders of the movements for independence in southern Africa. I started my professional photography career documenting a historic period in the transition from European rule to independence in southern Africa.

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Figure 2. Peter McFarren meeting in Lusaka, Zambia, with Sam Nujoma in 1973 when he headed the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) that fought for the independence of Namibia. Nujoma was the first President of Namibia from 1990 to 2005.

It was after these experiences that in 1980 I decided to visit Bolivia, a country that was gaining notoriety in the United States because of the July 1980 military coup and its links with narcotrafficking. For me, it was a reencounter with my Bolivian roots. I was born and raised in Bolivia and always considered myself a Bolivian and very much influenced by the country’s fascinating cultural and environmental diversity. My growing up in Bolivia also opened many doors that were extremely helpful in my work as a journalist and other careers I pursued.

During that period, I became obsessed with learning more about Klaus Barbie, his collaborators, and the circumstances that resulted in the Holocaust and the murder of millions of Jews and other communities. For years I had been interested in the issues of human rights, racism, and the mind-set of people who are capable of committing monstrous crimes without feeling any remorse. My interest was no doubt fed by my own family history.

My grandparents Martha and Fritz Deutsch, my mother Ruth, my aunt Eva, and uncle Hans came from a Czechoslovakian and Austrian Jewish family. My grandparents were master goldsmiths in Vienna, Austria. My grandfather was detained by the Nazis in 1938 for helping Jews escape from Austria. After he was released from prison with the help of the Swedish church and after the German takeover of Austria in 1938 known as the Anschluss, my immediate family fled first to Sweden and then to New York City. Most of my family that stayed behind in Austria was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau and gassed to death.

Bolivia in a State of Turmoil

Bolivia was going through a tumultuous political and social period, with a hard-line military government aligned with sinister regimes that still controlled many countries of Latin America. There were echoes of the guerrilla wars supported by the Cuban Revolution, the execution of Che Guevara, and the struggles for consolidating democratic processes and institutions. The conflicts played out in the context of the Cold War, with the Bolivian Communist Party, a partner in a coalition that won the 1980 presidential elections. It was also a period of transition, with hundreds of thousands of Aymara and Quechua Indian farmers moving into the cities of Bolivia, bringing with them their cultural heritage as well as their voting power.

It was in that context that I managed to interest the Boston Globe in publishing a story about the human rights abuses being committed in Bolivia, including the compelling themes of drug trafficking and the military coup led by General Luis García Meza that overthrew the democratically elected leftist government. I arrived in La Paz in October 1980. Weeks later, after travelling to Sucre and Santa Cruz de la Sierra, I renewed contact with an old family friend, Helena Abuawad, who would prove to be crucial in revealing the details behind the upheaval Bolivia was undergoing, stained by dictatorships, drug trafficking, and the activities of neo-Nazi groups and mercenaries. When I lived in Sucre as a child with my missionary parents and siblings, Abuawad was a member of the Christian Student Movement that my father, a Methodist pastor, led in the 1960s. She also took care of us when my parents were traveling. Sometimes she arrived with her future husband, José Abraham Baptista, a figure who would later play an important role in the military coup of 1980.

While visiting the colonial city of Sucre in January 1981, I learned of the slaughter in the Calle Harrington in La Paz of young leaders of the Revolutionary Leftist Movement (MIR) who were unarmed and participating in a political meeting. The responsibility for this violent act was later attributed to the minister of the interior, Luis Arce Gómez.

From Sucre in January 1981, I travelled to the tropical city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, located on the eastern foothills of the Andes, and conducted gourmet cooking classes at the Hotel Los Tajibos, then the most elegant hotel in this frontier city that was thriving from the expanding agricultural boundaries, cocaine trafficking and a nascent hydrocarbon industry. The hotel attracted businessman, tourists, and diplomats and was also a popular hangout for Arce Gómez and his mercenary friends from Argentina, France, Italy, and West Germany who were organized by Klaus Barbie, who was then publicly known in Bolivia as Don Klaus but internationally as the Butcher of Lyon and operated mostly outside the public limelight.

I discovered that Helena Abuawad lived in Santa Cruz de la Sierra and decided to contact her. Abuawad was going through a difficult time after her husband, José Abraham Baptista, had been murdered several weeks earlier in Santa Cruz de la Sierra. Her late husband was the former head of the Public Order Department (DOP).² Baptista had also served as head of the National Investigation Directorate (DIN) during the governments of generals René Barrientos Ortuño and Hugo Banzer Suárez. He was gunned down on a main city street for no apparent reason. There are unconfirmed reports that the killing was ordered by Arce Gómez, a onetime ally.

Baptista was not an insignificant player. As head of the local airport and friend of the key protagonists of the 1980 military coup, he was one of the major figures in the events leading up to that overthrow of government. In the years before the 1980 coup, Baptista had facilitated Arce Gómez’s rise to power and eventually his being named minister of the interior. Baptista worked in coordination with General Hugo Echeverría, also a key player in the planning and the execution of the coup. Baptista’s role was to coordinate activities between the military, paramilitary, government agents, and cocaine traffickers who were supporting the planning, funding, and eventual execution of the coup (Iriarte 1982).³

Helena, confiding to me that Baptista was one of the main coordinators of the July 17 military coup that took place barely six months before our meeting, asked that I respect the confidentiality of her information and her name, given the turbulent situation in Bolivia at the time. It was Helena who provided me with a full dossier of documents, photographs, and letters that laid out the events leading up to the 1980 coup and provided clear evidence of the role of various parties in its planning and financing: neo-Nazis, mercenaries, cocaine traffickers, and of course, Klaus Barbie. Perhaps out of concern that he could be killed, Baptista had prepared for his wife a detailed file of documents and photos of his role in carrying out the military coup.

With her current authorization, we reveal for the first time Helena Abuawad’s role in unmasking the conspirators who worked with her husband to disrupt the democratic process and install a military-led government supported by Klaus Barbie, drug traffickers, and the Bridegrooms of Death.

During his last few years in Bolivia, when the country underwent several military coups, uprisings, and widespread political instability, Barbie established relationships with a group of terrorists, neo- and ex-Nazis, and mercenaries who became known as the Bridegrooms of Death, named in honor of a fascist wing of the Spanish Foreign Legion. This group comprised of Italians, West Germans, Frenchmen, Uruguayans, Bolivians, and Argentines, almost all of them with criminal records in their own countries, moved to Bolivia in the 1ate 1970s and early 1980s to support right-wing military officers and coup attempts and in some cases even to participate in the country’s growing drug trade.

Barbie garnered such a high level of acceptance within the Bolivian military establishment that he was given special institutional security protection, an official identification document of the Bolivian army with the rank of lieutenant colonel, and even a diplomatic passport that facilitated his international travel. Several members of the Bridegrooms of Death also provided protection to drug lord Roberto Suárez Gómez and were active supporters of the horrific events in one of darkest periods in Bolivian history.

When not giving cooking classes, I carried out interviews with Abuawad, who described to me using Baptista’s photos, documents, and anecdotes the events that preceded the coup. One afternoon, she took me to the Bavarian Club, a restaurant and meeting point for the neo-Nazis, paramilitaries, and members of the Bridegrooms of Death. It was located in the downtown area of the city and displayed various trophies and Nazi symbols on the walls. The Bavarian Club was the sanctuary for foreigners from Argentina, France, Germany, Belgium, and Spain who celebrated the rise to power of a military regime that shared their fascist mind-set.

The article that resulted from my interviews with Abuawad and the research my colleague John Enders and I carried out in the following weeks was published simultaneously with major headlines in El País of Spain, Excelsior of Mexico, and in other publications. John Enders, a good American friend and journalist who was the Bolivia correspondent for the Associated Press (AP), played a key role in organizing the wealth of information we had accumulated during the months leading up to the military coup, the events of the coup itself, and the aftermath.⁴

Once we completed the article, I flew to Mexico City, where exiled Bolivian journalists and political figures put me in contact with the editor of the newspaper Excelsior. The newspaper was thrilled to receive the story and published it as a lead front-page series. Due to fear of reprisals and to protect our sources, Enders and I signed the stories with the pseudonyms of Monique Leclere and Francois Fallareau.

Abuawad’s story and the detailed exposé of the powers behind the coup and their modus operandi helped to discredit the García Meza regime and hastened the fall of his de facto government. The articles Enders and I published in El Pais and Excelsior that are reproduced in this book included documents that provided details of the planning of the coup as well as dramatic photos of the heavily armed Bridegrooms of Death in their army fatigues and of Colonel Arce Gómez.

After my return from Mexico, the former Bolivian diplomat, Jaime Aparicio Otero, met me at the La Paz Airport in March of 1981, when he was en route to Vienna with a stopover in London. He courageously agreed to hand-carry envelopes with copies of the news story, photographs, and documents that Enders and I had prepared addressed to The Sunday Times of London, Spain’s El País, and other publications.

Aparicio considers that the publications Enders and I authored were instrumental in changing the course of Bolivian politics because they exposed with hard evidence the neo-fascist, cocaine trafficking connections of the leaders of the 1980 military coup and their human rights abuses, corruption and links to mercenaries, fascists, and of course, Klaus Barbie.

In August 1981, Ed Schumacher, then the regional correspondent based in Buenos Aires for The New York Times, saw the articles Enders and I worked on and hired me to work on an article about the military regime, its relationship with Barbie and the Bridegrooms of Death. For this purpose, Ed Schumacher, his wife photographer Maribel Schumacher-Villasante, and I flew to Santa Cruz de la Sierra to interview Helena Abuawad and retrace the sources for the series of articles published weeks earlier. In Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Maribel and I learned of a Nazi and former SS officer named Herbert Kopplin who was in the local jail facing murder charges, and we decided to go in the local prison and interview him, passing ourselves off as his West German relatives while Ed Schumacher waited nervously for us to come out. The interview was crucial in exposing the relationships and role that Klaus Barbie, other Nazis, and paramilitary played in the 1980 military coup.

From Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Maribel Schumacher and I flew to the city of Cochabamba, where we tried to interview Barbie at his home. After we located his house and insisted that he allow us to interview him, Barbie called the local military regiment, and minutes later, we were surrounded by heavily armed civilians and soldiers who detained us and took us to the military base for interrogation. Fortunately we were released unharmed a few hours later, but our detention in response to a request by Barbie was clear evidence of Barbie’s close and official working relationship with the military rulers of Bolivia.⁵

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Figure 3. View of Klaus Barbie’s home and VW vehicle in Cochabamba that was taken by Peter McFarren minutes before he and Maribel Schumacher were arrested in August 1981.

These experiences sparked my interest in investigating and revealing the network of Nazis and fascists who played a key role in imposing a military regime in Bolivia. This led to years of research and writing about and exposing Barbie’s life, the crimes he committed, and how he was able to avoid prosecution and justice for decades, even though his true identity and criminal acts were known during and after World War II by U.S. and West German government officials for whom he worked.

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Figure 4. Visa issued by the Italian consulate of Bavaria to Klaus Altmann on February 21, 1951, with the help of the U.S. government. The document was part of Barbie’s private collection.

The investigations into Klaus Barbie’s life and work as well as my personal contacts with Barbie, interviews with cocaine kingpin Roberto Suárez Gómez, and many of the protagonists of this book from 1980 to the present served as the bases for The Devil’s Agent that Fadrique Iglesias and I started working on in 2010.

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Figure 5. Article written by Peter McFarren for the Associated Press on Roberto Suarez Gomez titled The King of Cocaine and published in the West German Esslinger Zeitung edition of April 16-17 1983.

Writing about Klaus Barbie, an individual who dedicated his life to promoting evil and criminal acts and was among the best-known Nazis who found refuge in South America after World War II, turned out to be a challenging and heart-wrenching effort. It has not been easy to understand and describe how a family man with a middle-class Roman Catholic upbringing was also a sadist and mass murderer responsible for sending thousands of Jews, including many children, to the Nazi death camps, and for torturing and killing hundreds of members of the French Resistance. It was also difficult to try to summarize not only Barbie’s life but also the historical periods and contexts in which he lived following World War I, during World War II, and in the Cold War years when Barbie worked for foreign intelligence services.

It has also been hard to comprehend how a person who was an active player in the Holocaust and the Nazis’ anti-Semitic campaign could be hired by U.S., West German and Bolivian intelligence services that knew of Barbie’s background and work as the Gestapo chief in Lyon, France.

Barbie was a relatively small player in the whole Nazi apparatus, a mid-level officer who executed orders to torture and murder with sadistic pleasure. There were thousands of Nazis who were responsible for committing greater atrocities in much larger numbers than Barbie. What set Barbie apart was the public role he played in Bolivia as a businessman and adviser to military rulers and the circumstances of how he was later identified as the Butcher of Lyon, prosecuted on several occasions, and eventually extradited to France, where he was tried and sentenced to life in prison. Barbie was one of the few Nazis who served the Third Reich in occupied France and was tried and sentenced for crimes against humanity.

Barbie came to symbolize the abuses of power as well as collective and personal evil during the half a century he operated in Europe and Latin America. His most sadistic and monstrous acts were committed during World War II, but it was in Bolivia that Barbie established a reputation as a cunning, ruthless, and violent operative who acted without scruples or a moral compass.

Located in the heart of the South American continent, Bolivia has a reputation for having the greatest political instability in the region, with dozens of coups and seventy-eight different governments since its liberation by Simon Bolivar in 1825. Over the years, Bolivia has become well known for the many international personalities who have visited this diverse and colorful country. Some of them are famous for their contributions to humanity while others gained notoriety for their crimes. Figures like the Argentine guerrilla fighter Ernesto Che Guevara, French explorers Jacques Cousteau and Alcide d’Orbigny, American bandits Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, French intellectual and politician Régis Debray, Spanish army general Vicente Rojo Lluch, and Peruvian Nobel Prize winner author Mario Vargas Llosa, to name a few, adopted Bolivia as their place of refuge or as a base from which to carry out research, lead a revolution, or explore its cultures and biodiversity.

It is worth noting that the Jewish population in Bolivia grew during the years of World War II mainly thanks to the Free Immigration Decree of June 1938 that opened Bolivia’s frontiers to anyone who applied under the condition that an applicant would work in rural areas. According to the researcher León E. Biever, from 1938 until the end of the war the Jewish population in Bolivia increased from approximately 40,000 to 70,000 (Biever 2003).

Within the heart of Bolivian society, there was never a discriminatory feeling toward Jewish immigrants. Leo Spitzer comments in his book Hotel Bolivia:

There is certainly irony, if not injustice, in the fact that for many Europeans and North Americans, Bolivia has acquired a reputation primarily as a place sheltering Nazi war criminals, while its role as a place of safe haven for thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish refugees and displaced persons is virtually unrecognized, if not unknown. In part, this is explained by the widespread lack of knowledge by outsiders of Bolivian history and politics, and by even less awareness (or considerable underestimation) of the importance of South America in general, and of Bolivia in particular, for refugee and postwar displaced person immigration. (Spitzer 1999)

During the 1960s, Bolivia’s life expectancy of forty-five years was the lowest in Latin America, and per capita income was among the lowest on the continent. Despite its economic difficulties and political instability, Bolivia in the twentieth century welcomed immigrants from Spain, Germany, Yugoslavia, Lebanon, and Japan, among other countries, and provided a haven for political refugees as well as for thousands of Jews escaping the Holocaust.

But it also offered sanctuary for war criminals such as Klaus Barbie, the former SS captain responsible for more than 14,000 deaths during the Nazi Holocaust, who immigrated to Bolivia with the help of the U.S. government and Vatican officials using the name of Klaus Altmann-Hansen. Known by the nickname the Butcher of Lyon, Barbie established himself in Bolivia with his wife, Regine, and two children, becoming a businessman, arms trader, West German government agent, adviser to military regimes, and a participant in some of the most violent chapters in recent Bolivian history.

Barbie never showed any repentance for the acts he committed, always taking shelter behind the pretext of obeying orders as a moral justification. Even in his obituary, his daughter Ute Altmann displayed his German officer’s uniform with pride, confirming that for all of the family, the war has not yet finished.

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Figure 6. Portrait of Klaus Barbie taken in 1942 that his family sent out with his death notice in 1991.

From the Holocaust to the Cold War

Adolf Hitler committed suicide in an underground bunker in Berlin on April 30, 1945, as the Third Reich collapsed around him. This event was viewed as the last act of the Nazi regime and allowed for the end of World War II in Europe. When the Allied troops bombed Dresden, destroyed Berlin’s Alexanderplatz train station, and entered the concentration camps where millions of Jews and others were murdered, the horrific Nazi killing machine ground to a halt. Survivors of the death camps felt intense relief at the defeat of a regime that had tried to conquer the farthest corners of Europe and North Africa with the goal of installing a new world order run by a master race and based on the lie of racial and cultural superiority.

A new era began with the realignment of political and economic powers and the consolidation of two dominant ideological blocs: one extending east from Poland, which was loyal to the Soviet Union; and one dominated by the western side of the North Atlantic and led by the United States. The world also had to cope with the millions of deaths that resulted from the Nazi Holocaust and wars in Asia, the Pacific, northern Africa, Russia, and all of Europe, as well as the displacement of tens of millions of people and the collapse of the social, political, and economic structure of vast regions of the world.

Out of this nightmare, new countries and borders were defined, new political, ideological and economic alliances established, and the processes of reconciliation and rebuilding began. From the ashes of war, the United Nations was founded, and the long and often difficult path of bringing to justice the perpetrators of the Holocaust commenced. The Nuremberg Tribunals were established in an effort to bring the main protagonists of the Holocaust to trial. Many of the leaders of the Nazi Party⁶ who survived the war thought it possible to camouflage themselves in the postwar confusion and sought to reposition themselves, build new lives in anonymity, and avoid accountability for the heinous crimes they committed in the name of their Führer, their country, racial superiority, and economic, social, and political dominance.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, thousands of former leaders and accomplices of the Nazi regime, hoping to escape prosecution, sought refuge in the Americas. They attempted, and in many cases succeeded, to cash in on their political and military training and experience. These Nazis established a network of contacts with their former allies and newfound friends, who included military and political leaders in the fascist and authoritarian circles of Latin America.

In this select group of criminals that evaded responsibility for their war crimes by seeking sanctuary overseas was Klaus Barbie, the rebaptized Altmann, who many believe became the former Nazi with the highest visibility and level of political activism in the postwar era. After the war ended, Barbie was recruited by the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), the agency which years later would become the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Barbie collaborated with the CIC from 1947 to 1951—almost as long as he had worked as an SS officer for the Nazi regime in Germany and France. In 1951, he immigrated with his family to Bolivia via the ratline, the escape route which was established with the support of U.S. intelligence and Vatican officials.

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Figure 7. Mug shot of Klaus Barbie shortly after he arrived in Bolivia. Photo was part of Barbie’s private collection.

Barbie was also recruited by the West German foreign intelligence agency or Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) when he lived in Bolivia and provided them with intelligence on leftist activities in the region. Furthermore, he advised the U.S. government in 1967 on the strategy for capturing Che Guevara, a Marxist revolutionary who was also active in Cuba, Africa, and Bolivia, where he was finally captured and killed in an operation supported by the CIA.

In the aftermath of the war, Nazi hunters Simon Wiesenthal and Serge and Beate Klarsfeld began the intensive search for war criminals who had fled Europe, many with the protection of the International Red Cross, the Vatican, or foreign governments. After years of diligent and persistent detective work, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld tracked Barbie down in South America and began a struggle that eventually resulted in his extradition from Bolivia to France in 1983 and his detention, trial, and conviction four years later for the war crimes he committed in France during World War II.

From the Killing Fields to the Andes

Countries like Bolivia traditionally have had weak political and civil institutions that have allowed for repeated episodes of abuse of power by the armed forces and the police. In Bolivia, Barbie participated in many of these offenses during the postwar period. Coming decades after abuses that were committed by civilian, military, and police forces, deciphering a complete accounting of these crimes and the partial declassification and publication of secret archives has been extremely challenging, in part because much of the documentation was destroyed. Rebuilding the jigsaw puzzle of Barbie’s past and the characters who played a part in it has been a complicated and time-consuming process since the events he was involved in were clouded in secrecy in order to avoid accountability.

For these reasons, the testimony of key contemporaries and allies of Klaus Barbie such as Álvaro de Castro has been very revealing. De Castro became a close family friend, business associate, and confidant who revealed many new details of Barbie’s personal and professional life.

Among the most significant personalities associated with Barbie were Hans and Monika Ertl, father and daughter: the father the cameraman of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, director of several iconic Nazi propaganda films, and the daughter a guerrilla of the now defunct Bolivian National Liberation Army (ELN), a successor of Che Guevara’s armed insurrection group that met its end in the Bolivian tropics.

Klaus Barbie was a perpetrator of collective and personal evil as a Gestapo officer, a spy for the U.S. and West German governments, and an ally of fascist regimes in Latin America. This former SS captain was adroit at blending in, finding the right associates, and eluding accountability for three decades. He knew how to escape from justice and to secure links and relationships with useful allies. He possessed an outstanding capacity for self-control and for managing public relations although always with a low profile and never showing all his cards. These skills among others made him a desirable strategist for the secret services of several countries.

Barbie was also savvy at introducing himself to Bolivian society while avoiding the spotlight. He knew how to deal with diverse groups: to perform as the compadre (godfather) of a young Aymara lad, to act as the confidant of immigrant Jews, to advise the military and economic elite of the Bolivian oligarchy, and to serve as a bridge between well-established West German businessmen based in La Paz, Bolivia, and in Lima, Peru. And he was exceedingly successful in his transformed life until the relentless pursuit by Serge and Beate Klarsfeld eventually brought him to justice and resulted in his life sentence for crimes against humanity.

Barbie developed the knack of obtaining information: first in prewar Germany, then during World War II in occupied France, where he monitored and fought the Resistance movement from his Gestapo office, and later selling his services to U.S. and West German intelligence services when they were well aware of his past.

Barbie also established personal contacts and working relationships with his Nazi colleagues, Friedrich Schwend, Hans Rudel, Walter Rauff, and other Nazis who found refuge in Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, and Ecuador. Thanks to his background, training, and relationships with Nazis and paramilitaries, various Bolivian government administrations sought Barbie’s advice, directly or indirectly. One can cite contact and collaboration with the majority of military presidents who governed Bolivia in the decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, such as generals René Barrientos Ortuño, Hugo Banzer Suárez, Juan Pereda Asbún, David Padilla, Luis García Meza, and Guido Vildoso. In all cases his political allies were authoritarian rulers.

After the death of his wife, Regine, and his son, Klaus Georg, both within a span of six months between 1981 and 1982, Barbie was never the same. He suffered from depression coupled with a loss of his characteristic vitality. Nevertheless, the start of the decade of the 1980s, one of the most brutal periods in contemporary Bolivian history, was a period when Barbie thrived professionally.

With the support and contacts established by Barbie and his close aide, Álvaro de Castro, this group of mercenaries was instrumental in plotting and carrying out the bloody 1980 military coup that interrupted the democratic process and installed Luis García Meza as Bolivia’s president. A key ally of the mercenaries and García Meza was Colonel Luis Arce Gómez, later known as the Minister of Cocaine. Both García Meza and Arce Gómez are currently serving life sentences in the Chonchocorro Prison in La Paz for their roles in the 1980 coup that perpetrated the imprisonment, torture, and murder of political opponents.

Facing economic collapse, the regime of military rulers, opposed by the international community and many Bolivians, fell apart in 1981 and eventually turned over the reins of power to democratically elected President Hernán Siles Zuazo. The downfall of García Meza and his collaborators paved the way for Barbie to be arrested in January 1983, expelled from Bolivia, and flown to France, where he faced the victims of his crimes and a reckoning with justice during a historic trial that captivated France and the world.

Barbie always acted secretively, advising behind the scenes rather than carrying out concrete actions. He did not want to appear to be interfering in Bolivia’s turbulent political life with its multiple treacheries and unexpected twists. This strategy served two purposes: First, by not having his name attached to any regime, he avoided purges associated with frequent regime changes and could immediately resume selling his services to the new regime as it established itself, with no loss of continuity for his foreign government clients. Second, he left fewer clues for Nazi hunters and international anticrime organizations such as Simon Wiesenthal, the Klarsfelds, and Interpol.

During his time in Bolivia, when Barbie avoided taking direct action or playing a visible role, he relied instead on his discreet intermediaries, including his most important ally, Álvaro de Castro, the person who most carefully controlled the German’s business interests as well as his safety, including on that frantic February 4, 1983, when Barbie was arrested and expelled from the country, making his last and most critical mistake before he was extradited to France.

In addition to advising the Bolivian military apparatus, Barbie was also successful in his lucrative business ventures. He established the shipping company Transmarítima Boliviana toward the end of the 1960s, conceived originally as a façade for arms trafficking. The sale of weapons was managed using his lieutenant de Castro as a front to represent the West German firm Merex AG, and the Austrian firm Steyr-Daimler-Puch. These representations and the access they afforded Barbie and de Castro to military leaders who benefited directly or indirectly from arms dealings were very important as sources of income and political clout for both Barbie and his customers.

Klaus Barbie was also involved in international arms trafficking that was about to be revealed by the former Bolivian ambassador to Madrid and media owner Alfredo Alexander, and journalist Jaime Otero Calderón when both were assassinated in La Paz in 1971, according to de Castro and relatives of Jaime Otero.

After he was expelled from Bolivia in February 1983 and flown to French Guiana and eventually to France, Barbie gave an interview to journalist, Carlos Soria Galvarro. He reiterated his lack of remorse and admitted that he committed errors but that he did so in his role as a loyal military officer serving the Nazi regime.

De Castro, faithful to the end, acted as Barbie’s legal representative, front man, and spokesman. Documents and interviews confirm the close bond and absolute trust that existed between the two men and reinforced the statements that de Castro later made in lengthy interviews about Barbie’s personal, family, legal, and professional life. It is during years of contact and interviews with de Castro, including by several documentary filmmakers and journalists, that he provided the correspondence of his boss after Barbie was detained in Lyon, France, and sentenced to life in prison.

This book publishes for the first time excerpts from 150 letters that Barbie wrote while in prison in Lyon, France. This correspondence clearly demonstrates Barbie’s complete lack of remorse, his continued interest in political and economic affairs, his close relationships with his family and de Castro, and his resignation to spending the rest of his life in the prison of Lyon, where he died of cancer in 1991. During his life in Bolivia, he maintained his commitment to fascism and his strong personal and professional ties with former Nazis and neo-Nazis in Bolivia and throughout the region.

In the twenty-five years since Barbie’s trial, many key witnesses and fellow collaborators have died. The few who have survived prefer to hide behind a cloud of silence and impunity. There are those who do not want to remember Barbie’s role during and after the war for fear of reprisals, and there are others who try to deny their friendship and collaboration with Barbie in Bolivia.

Decades after Barbie sent forty-four Jewish refugee children from the French community of Izieu to a death camp and detained and tortured Jean Moulin, head of the French Resistance, a man, ironically, much admired by his killer, Barbie was brought to justice