generalspeaking

His Nation's Call

He was responsible for countless deaths of innocents. Just doing his job. Which was to dispatch French Jews - men, women and children, to their death.

He exemplified German efficiency and took his responsibilities seriously. He ordered the deportation of Jewish orphans to Auschwitz and supervised the torture of Jewish women. He was the Butcher of Lyons. Klaus Barbie was assigned the post of Gestapo chief in Lyons, France, during the German occupation under the collaborationist Vichy government.

A good and loyal German, a reliable and perfectionist public servant, an outstanding member of the Nazi party. A German patriot by birth, a fascist by inclination.

Fascists and Communists felt themselves to be diametrically, ideologically, politically opposed. Although truth to tell each represented ultra-ideological crises in human identity-values; one adhering to left-wing fascism, the other to right-wing fascism.

When Germany and its Axis allies felt the sting of defeat, most elite Nazis fled to safe ports, most often in South and Central America. Klaus Barbie found a home and another identity in Bolivia. Sentenced to death in absentia by a French court, he lived on and lived well in Latin America until his whereabouts were discovered and West Germany called him to duty with their secret service.

Under the alias of Klaus Altmann where he was known in Bolivia as a well-placed businessman with notable connections working on behalf of a major German pharmaceuticals company he was able to give his controllers in West German intelligence the information they wanted; whether Bolivia was going the way of Cuba, invested into the Soviet hegemonic sphere.

When his dispatches were no longer felt to be useful, his duties ceased and he was dismissed from service with West German intelligence. West Germany, it is useful to recall, deplored the country's Nazi past, its quest for world domination, its mounting of the Holocaust. But if service to the Fatherland could be accessed, uncomfortable alliances could be made, and broken.

It took Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld to bring his presence in South America to public notice in 1972. And it took another eleven years for Bolivia to agree to extradite him to France in 1983. Where he was then jailed for crimes against humanity and where he died in prison, in 1991.

Labels: Germany, Holocaust, Human Relations, Political Realities

posted by Pieface @ Monday, January 17, 2011