So, in December 1950, the US decided to trundle Barbie and his family down the ratline, an escape hatch for Nazi agents created by CIC officers Lt. Colonel James Milano and Paul Lyon. Lyon and Milano had been shuttling Nazis out of Germany, Austria and eastern Europe since 1946, sending them to Argentina, Chile, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia. The tour guide for this operation was himself a war criminal, Father Krunoslav Draganovic, a Croatian who oversaw the relocation of several hundred thousand Jews from Yugoslavia to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps. As the fascist government in Croatia began to crumble at the end of the war, the priest made his way to the safety of the Vatican. Then Draganovic, using the cover of his position in the Red Cross and with the Vatican, shuttled hundreds of war criminals out of Europe.
Many of Draganovic’s first recruits were members of the Ustashi regime, the death squads under the control of the Croatian dictator Ante Pavelic, who supervised one of the great killing sprees of the war. Hundreds of thousands of Serbs – on some estimates more than 2 million – were killed by Pavelic’s forces in an insane desire to make Croatia “a 100 percent Catholic state.” Pavelic would show his favorite trophy to visitors at his office: a forty-pound jar of human eyeballs extracted from his Serbian victims. After the war Draganovic helped Pavelic secure safe passage to Argentina, where he became a frequent dining companion of Juan and Eva Peron.
Other Nazis whom Draganovic helped escape Europe for South America included Colonel Hans Rudel, who went to Argentina, where he headed Peron’s air force and became a leader of the international neo-Nazi movement; Dr. Willi Tank, a chief designer for the Luftwaffe; and Dr. Carl Vaernet, who had overseen surgical experiments on homosexuals at Buchenwald, castrating gay men and replacing their testicles with metal balls. Vaernet was adored by the Perons, who made the Nazi doctor head of Buenos Aires’s public health department.
In 1947, the Counter-Intelligence Corps contracted with Father Draganovic to help them dispose of some of their problematic agents and recruits, namely Nazi scientists, doctors, intelligence officers and engineers. The deal was made in Rome by CIC officer Paul Lyon, who noted that Draganovic had established “several clandestine evacuation channels to the various South American countries for various types of European refugees.”
The priest Draganovic was not an altruist, even on behalf of his Nazi colleagues. He demanded from the American intelligence agencies $1,400 for each war criminal who passed through his doors, and the US intelligence agencies were glad to pay his price.
A memo from an intelligence officer working at the US State Department explained that “the Vatican justifies its participation by its desire to infiltrate not only European countries, but Latin American countries as well, [with] people of all political beliefs as long as they are anti-communists and pro-catholic church.”
Fearing that Barbie might slip through their fingers, the French protested directly to John J. McCloy, the US High Commissioner in Germany. McCloy icily replied that the US would not hand over Barbie to the French for possible execution, “because the allegations of the citizens of Lyons can be disregarded as being hearsay only.” McCloy knew this not to be true. In 1944 Barbie’s name was prominently displayed in McCloy’s office on a list called CROWCASS (the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects), where Barbie was identified as being wanted for “the murder of civilians and the torture and murder of military personnel.”
Barbie was hardly the only SS man whom McCloy and his cohorts endeavored to protect from justice. Another was Adolf Eichmann’s right-hand man, Baron Otto von Bolschwing. This SS officer was hired by the CIC in 1945, where he became one of the agency’s most productive assets, recruiting, interrogating and hiring former SS officers. Von Bolschwing was later traded to the CIA and did work in East Germany. Like Barbie, von Bolschwing was a top-rank war criminal, having been one of Eichmann’s ideological gurus on Jewish matters, helping to script the plan to “purge Germany of the Jews” and rob of them of their wealth. It was von Bolschwing who had directed one of the most brutal slaughters of the war, the murder of hundreds of Jews in Bucharest. The Bucharest pogrom is described in detail by historian Christopher Simpson in his remarkable book Blowback. “Hundreds of innocent people were rounded up for execution,” Simpson writes. “Some victims were actually butchered in a municipal meat-packing plant, hung on meathooks, and branded as ‘kosher meat’ with red-hot irons. Their throats were cut in an intentional desecration of kosher laws. Some were beheaded. ‘Sixty Jewish corpses [were discovered] on the hooks used for carcasses,’ US ambassador to Romania Franklin Mott Gunther wired back to Washington after the pogrom. ‘They were all skinned … [and] the quantity of blood about [was evidence] that they had been skinned alive.’ Among the victims, according to eyewitnesses, was a girl no more than five years old, who was left hanging by her feet like a slaughtered calf, her body bathed in blood.”
In 1954, von Bolschwing was brought to the United States. Richard Helms, who had helped recruit many of these criminals, defended the use of people like von Bolschwing, saying, “We’re not in the Boy Scouts. If we’d wanted to be in the Boy Scouts we would have joined the Boy Scouts,” a flippant way of dealing with his recruiting practices.
Barbie’s Counter-intelligence Corps handlers went to extraordinary lengths to protect their recruit. Eugene Kolb rejected the idea that Barbie might have physically tortured people on the grounds that he “was such a skilled interrogator, Barbie did not need to torture anyone.” In fact, Barbie was a sadistic monster whose vocational priorities were the infliction of pain and ultimately death, rather than the extraction of information. His upward career in the SS, heralded by games of volleyball with Heinrich Himmler in Berlin in 1940, came abruptly to an end when he beat Jean Moulin to death without getting any information out of him. Barbie’s expertise as a torturer relied on the use of bullwhips, needles pushed under fingernails, drugs, and, most uniquely, electricity sent by nodes attached to the nipples and testicles. A generation later, Barbie and CIA operatives would happily cooperate in applying these techniques to left oppositionists in Bolivia and elsewhere.
When it came to Barbie’s anti-Semitism, his American intelligence patrons once again sprang to his defense. Lieutenant Taylor said that Barbie “was not an anti-Semite. He was just a loyal Nazi.” Another CIC memo held that Barbie “showed no particular enthusiasm towards the idea of killing Jews.” In fact, Klaus Barbie got his start as an officer for the SD, a subunit of the SS charged by Reinhard Heydrich with solving the Jewish problem as rapidly as possible. In an early purge in Holland, Barbie led the infamous raid on the Jewish farm village of Wieringermeer, where he and his men used German shepherd dogs to round up 420 Jews, who were sent to their deaths in the stone quarries and experimental gas chambers of Mauthausen.
From the training grounds of Holland, Barbie was transferred in July 1941 to the Eastern Front, where he joined one of the SS’s so-called “special task forces,” the Einsatzgruppen. These mobile killing units were assigned the task of murdering every Communist and Jew they could find in Russia and the Ukraine without regard – in Heydrich’s phrase – “to age or sex.” In less than a year, these mobile death squads under the command of men such as Barbie killed more than a million people. Here was the model for the CIA’s death squads in Vietnam – William Colby’s Phoenix Program and cognate operations – and in Latin America, where CIA-sponsored teams in Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Colombia and Argentina applied similar methods of brutal terror, killing hundreds of thousands. There’s nothing, in terms of ferocity, to separate a Barbie-supervised killing in Russia from later operations such as My Lai or El Mozote.
Rewarded with a new promotion for his work on the Eastern Front, Barbie headed to Lyons in 1942. One of his tasks was to help fulfill Himmler’s recent order that the SS in France deport at least 22,000 Jews to concentration camps in the east. Barbie and his henchman Erich Bartlemus took up the task with enthusiasm. Barbie and Bartlemus raided the offices of the Unio
n Générate des Israelites de France in Lyons, seizing records showing the addresses of Jewish orphans and other children hidden in the countryside. Later that day, Barbie arrested a hundred Jews, sending them off to their deaths at Auschwitz and Sobibor. Next Barbie descended upon the Jewish orphans home at Izieu, rounding up forty-one children aged three to thirteen along with ten of their teachers. All were trucked off to the Nazi death camps. Reporting on this raid of the schoolhouse to his supervisor, Barbie noted, “Unfortunately in this operation it was not possible to secure any money or valuables.”
During his time in Lyons, Barbie was delightedly alert to the suffering of the prisoners he held in Montluc prison. He apparently derived a sadistic pleasure from locking his prisoners in cells for days at a time with the mutilated corpses of their friends. He would assemble captured members of the French Resistance before mock firing squads, apply hot irons to the soles of their feet and palms of their hands, repeatedly plunge their heads into toilets filled with piss and shit and entice his black Alsatian dog, Wolf, to bite their genitals. Barbie’s torture of Lise Leserve was particularly horrific. He shackled her naked body to a beam and beat her with a spiked chain. But despite his “great skill” as an interrogator, Barbie never got Leserve to talk. She survived his torture and a year in a Ravensbrück work camp to testify against him at his trial in 1984.
In 1944, with the Allies advancing on Lyons, Barbie prepared to flee France. But before he left, he ordered the remaining 109 Jewish inmates of Montluc machine-gunned to death and had their bodies dumped in a bomb crater near the Lyons airport. Barbie also tried to wipe out the last of the French Resistance leaders under his control. On August 20, 1944, Barbie’s men loaded 120 suspected members of the Resistance on trucks and drove them to an abandoned warehouse near St. Genis Laval. The prisoners were led into the building, where they were machine-gunned. The mound of corpses was drenched in gasoline and the building was destroyed by phosphorus grenades and dynamite. The explosion sent body parts flying into the town 1,000 feet away.
Such were the highlights in the career of the man who was dispatched in 1951 along with his family by US military intelligence to a Counterintelligence Corps safehouse in Austria. There the Barbie family was given a crash course in Spanish and was furnished with $8,000 cash; Barbie was provided, courtesy of in-house forgers, with his new identity: Klaus Altmann, mechanic. In a grim jest, Barbie picked the name Altmann himself, after the name of the chief rabbi in Barbie’s hometown of Trier. The Rabbi Altmann had been one of the luminaries of the anti-Nazi resistance until 1938, when he had gone into exile in Holland, where he was tracked down in 1942 and sent to his death at Auschwitz.
From Vienna the Barbies were passed via Draganovic’s ratline to Argentina and then to Bolivia. A CIC memo triumphantly noted, in this rescue of a war criminal, that “the final disposal of an extremely sensitive individual has been handled.”
On April 23, 1951, Klaus Barbie and his family arrived in La Paz, Bolivia, a city the young Che Guevara would later call “the Shanghai of the Americas.” Che, who visited La Paz in the summer of 1953, described it as inhabited by “a rich gamut of adventurers of all the nationalities.” Some of those adventurers, including Klaus Barbie, whom Che may have unwittingly passed on the streets or in the bars of La Paz, would, with the aid of the CIA, help track down and kill the revolutionary fifteen years later in the jungles outside Vallegrande.
Upon arrival in Bolivia, the Barbies were warmly embraced by Father Rogue Romac, another of Father Draganovic’s exiles. Romac’s real name was Father Osvaldo Toth, a Croatian priest wanted for war crimes. Toth helped Barbie establish a lucrative business destroying the Bolivian rain forest. The Nazi made a small fortune operating sawmills in the Bolivian jungles near Santa Cruz and lumber yards in La Paz. But Barbie soon became restless and could not long conceal his political ambitions. He was quickly drawn into the service of the proto-fascist government of Victor Paz Estensorro, where he consulted on internal security matters with the Nazi exiles Heinz Wolf and a certain Herr Müller. Müller was a former Nazi prosecutor who had condemned to death the young leaders of the White Rose Resistance. Their crime: handing out anti-Nazi pamphlets at Munich University in 1943.
Barbie proved so useful to the Bolivian ruler that on October 7, 1957 he and his family were rewarded a highly sought prize: Bolivian citizenship, a status that would frustrate attempts to extradite him back to Europe. Barbie’s citizenship papers were personally signed by Bolivian vice president Hernán Siles Zuazo, who, many coups later, would be forced to relinquish Barbie to the French Nazi hunters. Barbie, however, had no particular loyalty to Paz Estensorro. Indeed, he soon found himself griping at a man whose bizarre political ideology merged leftist populism with fascist notions of social order. Barbie’s uneasiness with Paz Estenssoro was mirrored by similar grumblings in Washington. Paz Estenssoro had disappointed his American patrons on two touchstone issues: he maintained cordial relations with Castro’s government in Cuba and he refused to send the Bolivian military to crush striking tin miners. The CIA sent Colonel Edward Fox to La Paz to search for a candidate to replace Paz.
The man who won the CIA’s favor was General René Barrientos Ortuño. Barrientos was no stranger to Klaus Barbie. Indeed, they had been secretly plotting the overthrow of Paz for some time. The moment came in 1964 when the presidential palace was stormed and Paz was presented with a simple choice: he could “take a ride either to the cemetery or to the airport.” Paz packed his bags and caught a plane to Argentina. The Barrientos coup returned Bolivia once more into the clutches of a military dictatorship. But this time the US government was taking no chances. It took firm control of the Bolivian army, sending dozens of US advisers to La Paz and bringing 1,600 of Bolivia’s military officers back to the United States for training at American military bases. The group sent to the United States included twenty of Bolivia’s top twenty-three generals.
It was during this time that the French renewed their hunt for Barbie. They began to look for him in South America and sent repeated cables to the American government regarding Barbie’s whereabouts. The US denied any knowledge of its former agent, even though the CIA and other intelligence agencies were well aware that he had gone to work for the Barrientos regime.
Barbie secured a position in Barrientos’s internal security force, known as Department 4, where he planned counterinsurgency operations and instructed his underlings on Nazi techniques of interrogation and state terror. Barbie also used this position to put into play once more his ideology of political eugenics. This time his victims were Bolivian Indian tribes, whom he considered genetically and culturally inferior.
Barrientos and Barbie lost no time in going after the tin miners, executing a series of bloody raids by the army and Barbie’s secret police. Hundreds of miners and labor organizers were killed. Leaders of the union and of the opposition political party were forced into exile, dooming the tin mines, which were then the principal source of revenue for the Bolivian economy. Barrientos attempted to replace the lost revenue from the mines with oil profits, handing out huge concessions around the town of Santa Cruz to Gulf Oil. In return, Barrientos received what the company chastely termed “campaign contributions.” Gulf also presented Barrientos with a helicopter, a gift the company said was made at the instruction of the CIA. As we shall see, it was a present that would come back to haunt the general.
Revolutionary movements were multiplying across Central and South America and the CIA correctly feared that Bolivia, with its mixture of Indian peasants and radical labor groups, was ripe terrain for revolt. The CIA poured several million dollars into Bolivia during 1966 and 1967. Some of the cash, about $800,000, went directly into the pockets of Barrientos, no doubt making it easier for the general to tolerate the American takeover of his government. The CIA justified its presence in Bolivia in a 1967 memo: “Violence in the mining areas and in the cities of Bolivia has continued to occur intermittently, and we are assisting this country to improve
its training and equipment.”
With a more stable and authoritarian regime in power, Barbie took the opportunity to expand his financial empire. He started an enterprise called the Estrella Company, which sold quinine bark, coca paste and assault weapons. He also hooked up with Frederich Schwend, the SS’s financial whiz, who had ended up in Lima, Peru. Schwend had been sent to Latin America through the Nazi underground by the OSS after telling Allen Dulles where the SS had cached millions in cash, gold and jewels looted from its victims. Schwend claimed to be a chicken farmer, but in reality he was a high-paid consultant to generals in Peru, Colombia, Bolivia and Argentina.
The two Nazis also joined forces to create Transmaritania, a shipping company that was to generate millions in profits. Barbie shared the wealth by inviting onto the board of his company some of the heavy hitters of the Bolivian government, including the head of the Bolivian navy, the head of the joint chiefs of staff; and the head of the Bolivian secret police, General Alfredo Ovando Candía. This shipping company began by handling flour, cotton, tin and coffee, but soon turned to much more profitable cargo: guns and drugs. The source for most of the weapons, including attack boats, tanks and fighter planes, marketed by Barbie and Schwend to regimes across South America was a Bonn-based company called Merex. Merex was controlled by another ex-Nazi taken on by the US: Colonel Otto Skorzeny, Hitler’s favorite stormtrooper and the man who had rescued Mussolini from prison. During the height of the Contra War, Oliver North’s operation would turn to Merex to consummate a $2 million weapons deal, thus underlining the essential continuity of Nazi alliances in US agencies from Army Intelligence to the OSS to the CIA to Reagan’s National Security Council.
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