Barbie and his family escaped from Europe down the ‘Rat Line’, an efficient, well-funded route, established with official approval by the US Army’s 430 CIC in Austria. The Rat Line had been set up in 1947 by Jim Milano and Paul Lyon, to help American agents and sympathisers out of the Russian zone in Vienna down to safety in Salzburg in the American zone. The ‘shipments’ were mostly Russian defectors and valuable contacts who had worked for the Americans in Soviet-occupied Europe and were suddenly vulnerable. According to Milano, ‘As a reward for services, we settled them in different parts of the world.’
Once in Salzburg, Milano and his three-man team would put the ‘body’ in a safe house, known as the ‘rat house’, and set about processing. Invariably the safest destination for the ‘body’ was South America, especially certain countries with ports – Chile, Peru, Brazil and Colombia. The only potential obstacles were the documents, passports and visas necessary for safe passage through the many checkpoints and borders of Europe and thence into South America. But these were not a problem for Milano. At his disposal was a laboratory where his experts forged and altered documents, passports and identity cards of every nationality, including American. Milano is insistent that forgery was not always necessary: ‘documents could be bought. One of our good sources was in the Italian State department. Bribery was a key element in this business.’ Another important supplier in Rome was an American diplomat in the International Refugee Office who eventually became an alcoholic and an embarrassing liability. Finance was supplied to Milano, with his superiors’ approval, from the intelligence fund.
Every Rat Line operation was meticulously rehearsed, step by step, to prevent any embarrassment to the American government. ‘We would never let a Rat Line product out of our sight,’ says Milano. When the paperwork was completed, his three-man team, with the ‘body’ dressed in an American uniform, drove in an army jeep down to Bad Gastein and proceeded, with the jeep, by train through the Alps to the Italian border. There a ‘friendly’ customs official waved the party through and the four headed for either Naples or Genoa, depending on the availability of the next ship across the Atlantic.
The contact in Genoa was Krunosla Draganovic, a Croatian priest whom Milano called ‘the good Father’. Draganovic had been discovered by Lyon on one of the earliest Rat Line operations in Trieste and had proved to be enormously valuable for the American operation, not least through his good contacts with displaced persons organisations managing quotas for emigration to South America. At the time, the South American countries were eager to attract skilled labour. Draganovic briefed the Rat Line team on the particular skills needed by each country: it was then a simple matter of filling in the ‘body’s’ profession on the documents. Draganovic’s fee was about $1,000 per person (half-price for children) and there was a special rate of $1,400 for VIP treatment. Invariably there were delays in the port, so a small hotel was selected where no questions would be asked: ‘The escort would babysit in the hotel, not letting the shipment out of sight until the ship’s departure. Then we would walk him right up to the gangplank, turn him over to somebody aboard the ship who knew that this was a special person who had to be taken care of, and that was the end of the Rat Line.’ No one left Europe with less than $1,000 and some left with as much as $8,000, in recognition of their services and to help them start their new life. Barbie is said to have been given $5,000, although he was later to admit to the Bolivians that he possessed only $850.
Who it was who actually decided to put Barbie onto the Rat Line is still unknown. The key CIC documents recording the decision, according to the Justice report, ‘disappeared’ apparently just before the file was microfilmed in 1951. Amnesia has severely afflicted all those who are still alive and were directly involved in the decision in Augsburg, Stuttgart and Frankfurt, including the CIC commander, Colonel David Erskine. Many files have not been declassified, not only those of the CIC but also files from EUCOM and HICOG. According to the available evidence, EUCOM gave the final approval on 25 January 1951.
Barbie’s entry into the Rat Line was with George Neagoy, from 430 CIC’s B detachment, based in Linz. Leo Hecht, a twenty-three-year-old German-born Jew, had been ordered by Kolb’s successor at CIC Region XII, Wasel Yarosh, to help the Barbie family prepare for evacuation: at Neagoy’s request, he now procured passport photographs of Barbie and the family, provided suitcases and other minor necessities for the journey from Augsburg and arranged a meeting between Barbie and his mother for their final farewell. Fearing that French agents might be following the mother to find her son, the meeting was arranged with all the finesse of a top-secret operation. Barbie’s mother was ordered to take a circuitous route from Trier to Augsburg; Hecht, dressed in civilian clothes, met her at the railway station; he used a specially procured undercover car, and was ordered to be present throughout the farewell to ensure that Barbie did not reveal his future plans. According to Hecht, Barbie was ‘looking forward to and rather expectant’ about his new life. When Neagoy had finally collected the family (Yarosh himself drove them to an autobahn restaurant and handed them over), Hecht remembers feeling that, ‘without Barbie, Augsburg was rather empty. He’d made such an enormous contribution. And we had no idea then what he’d done in France.’ Both Milano (who left Europe in 1950) and his successor, Jack Dobson, who authorised Barbie’s ‘evacuation’, insist that they would never have approved use of the Rat Line for ‘shipping’ Gestapo officers. But by then CIC in Augsburg and Stuttgart was quite proficient at lying about their star asset.
Neagoy had returned to Augsburg with Jack Gay, another CIC agent, on 9 March. He brought with him a temporary travel document for stateless people, no. 012,145,4, issued by the Combined Travel Board at the American High Commission office in Munich on 21 February 1951. It was either forged by 430 CIC or obtained under false pretences. In it Barbie was described as one Klaus Altmann, born on 25 October 1915 in Kronstadt, Germany, a mechanic by trade. His children, Ute and Klaus, were stated to have been born in Kassel on 30 June 1941 and 11 December 1946. He was also given a transit visa, no. 1,507, allegedly issued by the Italian consulate in Munich, which allowed the family to travel to the Italian port.
Neagoy loaded the family onto an American army truck and drove them across the border to Salzburg. From here, two days later, since it was impossible with two children to travel as American soldiers, the family continued by train for Genoa. Their destination, according to their travel documents, was the American port at Trieste. The only complication arose at the Austrian border, where the customs official queried the documents. According to Barbie, ‘I said to him, “Look, I’ve got children …” and he shouted at me, “Get going, and I don’t want to see you again.” I replied, “You can be sure of that.”’
The meeting with Draganovic in Genoa was like a natural homecoming for Barbie. Before the war, Draganovic had been professor at the faculty of Catholic theology in Zagreb. During the war, he was one of the leading clerics who favoured the forced catholicization of orthodox Serbs. With the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, he became a chaplain in the concentration camps to which the Serbs were sent. For those Serbs who resisted catholicization, the Ustachi, who collaborated with the Germans, used methods of torture which even very few Germans practised during the war. The domestic holocaust between the nationalities in Yugoslavia was a sideshow of which the world was largely ignorant but the casualties were staggering. Hundreds of thousands died at the behest of Catholic priests and, many have suspected, with the cognisance of the Vatican.
At the end of the war Draganovic, like many other senior Ustachi leaders, disappeared into western Europe, protected by the ignorance of the Allies and their growing distrust of Tito’s government. Draganovic fled to the Vatican, was given sanctuary, and was then appointed to care for Croatian Ustachi imprisoned in Allied camps. While in the Vatican he met Bishop Alois Hudal, the representative of the Deutsche Nationale Kirche. Hudal, like many other clerics, had sympathised with the Nazis and other fascist governments because, in his view, only they could protect the Church against Russian communism. Following the collapse of the Third Reich, Hudal personally helped hundreds of incriminated Nazis, including senior Gestapo officials from Berlin and the officers of extermination camps, to leave Europe for South America on what has become known as ‘the Vatican route’. Draganovic obtained from him the necessary introductions, firstly to the Red Cross officials who could provide an internationally accepted passport for Europeans anxious to leave the continent for a new life, and secondly to the network of consular, port and shipping officials who, for a bribe, could smooth the fugitive’s path. In his original briefing to Milano, Lyon had described Draganovic as ‘a Fascist, war criminal, etc.’. Nevertheless, the CIC still called him ‘the good Father’.
According to Barbie, Draganovic was waiting for the family at the Genoa railway station holding a photograph sent ahead by Neagoy. He took the family directly down to a small hotel by the harbour whose other occupants, as Barbie would discover later, were all Nazi fugitives – among them Eichmann himself. George Neagoy travelled with the family to Genoa, supervised the travel arrangements and waited with them until their departure.
Over the next few days, according to Barbie, Draganovic organised their departure. Barbie’s original intention had been to live in Argentina; he had obtained a letter of introduction to the government to ease his entry. But Draganovic convinced Barbie that, with its oil prospects, there was a better future in Bolivia. ‘Draganovic knew a priest in Cochabamba and people on the way here also told me that it’s always spring in Cochabamba.’
There were several matters for Draganovic to settle. The next ship leaving Genoa, the Corrientes, a converted liberty ship, was already full, with room only for Barbie. Draganovic bribed the shipping clerk with a large raw ham to cancel a previous reservation, freeing a cabin for the Barbie family. Their next call was to the Bolivian consulate: here Draganovic arranged a cabled request to La Paz for a residence permit. As a testimony to Draganovic’s influence, the approval was granted within two days. Then they visited 38 Via Albaro, the Argentinian consulate. The officials greeted the visitors with ‘Heil Hitler’. Barbie, naturally cautious, feared a trap but to his surprise they seemed genuine. He waited in an outer room while Draganovic took his five-year-old son, Klaus, into the official’s office. They emerged shortly after with entry visas, dated 19 March. Their final call in this labyrinthine paper-chase was to the International Red Cross Commission who, seeing the Croatian priest, automatically granted a temporary passport for the Altmann family.
During that time Barbie established a friendly relationship with Draganovic. There were trips to nightclubs and restaurants. When Barbie asked why Draganovic was helping him, the answer was gratifying. ‘[His reasons] were purely humanitarian. He helped both Catholics and Protestants, but mostly they were SS officers, about two hundred in all. Anti-communists. He said to me, “We’ve got to keep a sort of reserve on which we can draw in the future.” I think that was the Vatican’s motive as well.’
Amongst hundreds of Italian immigrants, the family sailed in a third-class cabin from Genoa on 22 March, arriving in Buenos Aires exactly three weeks later. It was a pleasant journey. There were many other Nazi fugitives aboard, some of whom Barbie had glimpsed at the hotel: here was a chance to discuss the old days and the future. After six days in Argentina, the family set off finally by train for Bolivia. As a professional and dedicated intelligence officer, Barbie was to remain silent thereafter about his American connection.
The arrival in La Paz, in June 1951, was a depressing experience. At 12,000 feet above sea level, Barbie and his wife immediately succumbed to altitude sickness. Worse, most of his money had been spent in Buenos Aires or on the journey and he had less than one thousand dollars left. The family moved into one of the capital’s dirtiest and cheapest hotels and Barbie set out immediately to walk the streets, looking for work: ‘It would have been no use being a qualified lawyer in that situation. My only asset was what I had learnt in the Hitler Youth and afterwards.’
They had arrived in Bolivia just two weeks after the country’s 169th change of government. Since winning independence in 1825, the poverty-stricken country has experienced 182 coups and 193 presidents. Its three million inhabitants, eking out their living from agriculture and tin mining, were ruled by a rich oligarchy many of whom were the children of German emigrants. Although very few Nazi fugitives went to Bolivia, most preferring the comparative wealth and comfort of the bigger South American states, a newly arrived German need not feel a complete outcast. Some sixty per cent of the country’s economy was owned by the German community; German nationals trained and led the national army during the Thirties; and there had been many Nazi sympathisers in the provincial towns of Santa Cruz and Cochabamba during the war, often parading in Nazi uniforms. ‘The Phalangists,’ said Barbie twenty years later, ‘were a comforting sight. It did me a lot of good to see them.’ As in most other South American countries, the military in Bolivia played an important role in the nation’s government and could but welcome the advice of someone with five years’ experience of war in Europe.
The few people who remember seeing Barbie on his arrival describe a dirty tramp, doing the daily rounds, begging other Germans for enough coins to buy himself and his family the next meal. ‘The first offer of work I got,’ he says, ‘was to repair twelve bunsen burners; I was really proud that I could do it.’ His salvation was Hans Ertl, who had heard of a job as manager of a remote sawmill, high in the Los Yungas. Despite his complete ignorance of woodwork, Barbie left his family in the city and drove for two days in a truck up perilously winding rough mountain tracks, through the Cumbre pass, 4,650 metres above sea level, and down into the tropical mahogany forest at Caranavi, 2,000 metres above sea level. In the deep ravines below lay the rusting chassis of trucks which had missed one of the thousand bends. ‘I never thought we would arrive; I knew nothing about wood, diesel engines or sawmills, and couldn’t speak Spanish.’ The estate was a hunter’s paradise, filled with wild fowl, wild turkeys, deer and black bears. ‘I spent three years there and recovered from the war.’
Barbie’s immediate problem was to establish his authority over the eighty local Indian workers. ‘I had to decide whether I should shout at them Prussian-style or say nothing because I couldn’t speak Spanish.’ He decided to say nothing but to impress them by working with them, setting himself apart, and instituting what he calls, ‘some of our good National Socialist ideas’. Injured workers were given first aid, Barbie personally cleaning their wounds with alcohol and ointment. ‘That really impressed them. They never forgot it, and I never had any problems.’ Once he had established himself, his family joined him from La Paz; his wife managed the estate’s grocery store.
Barbie had been hired after a two-question interview with Herr Riess, the general manager – ‘Why do you want to work?’ and, ‘Where do you come from?’ There were no questions about why Barbie had left Europe. It was not until a month after he was hired that Barbie met Ludwig Kapauner, the German estate owner, who had emigrated to Bolivia before the war. He arrived with four other people: ‘A jeep drew up and five beautiful Jews stepped out … One day Kapauner came up to me and said, “Herr Altmann, do you know anyone else like you? I need them because I can’t trust my own people.”’ The appalling irony of this moment reduced Barbie to tears and laughter when he recalled it in 1979; and there was more to come. Phalangists had daubed Kapauner’s trees with Swastikas in his absence. Kapauner ordered their removal, and Barbie obediently obliged. Until Barbie’s exposure in 1972, Kapauner never suspected Altmann’s background and even promoted him to be his representative in La Paz. ‘Altmann,’ he told friends, ‘is probably one of those unlucky Germans.’
As Barbie was settling into his new life in South America, the permanent military tribunal in Lyons was hearing eyewitness evidence of his crimes during the April 1944 campaign in the Jura and especially St Claude. By a majority verdict, on 29 April 1952, the seven judges sentenced him to death in his absence. A second trial started two years later, on 15 November, to judge the crimes committed by twenty-two Gestapo officers in Lyons. Barbie was again charged in his absence. Amongst the crimes mentioned were the massacre at St Genis-Laval and the shootings in Montluc. By a majority verdict, Barbie was found not guilty on various technical charges, but was convicted and sentenced to death for his crimes in Montluc. When the news reached him from Germany, he felt untroubled but realised that he would need to take some precautions for his safety.
In 1957 he was still using the temporary Red Cross documents obtained in Genoa as identification papers. Moving to La Paz had made it important to regularise his status, both for living in the city and so that he could leave Bolivia if necessary. The first and natural solution was to apply to the German embassy for a passport. Barbie’s application was handled in the customary way, with requests for six photographs and birth and residence certificates. Herr Altmann’s excuse, that they had all been lost during the war, was unacceptable to the consular official. Sensing potential danger, he quickly applied for Bolivian nationality.
Under Bolivian law, an applicant has to live ten years in the country before qualifying for naturalisation. But in Bolivia, as in all countries, laws are subject to flexible interpretation. As his Spanish had improved, Barbie had forged contacts with officials of the MNR party, a group which previously had been pro-Nazi, but more recently had swung to the left. Local party officials were delighted to meet an authentic ambassador from the Reich. After the embarrassment at the German embassy, Barbie quickly appealed to his new contacts for help and with little effort the statutory ten-year rule was ignored. The documents granting the Altmann family Bolivian nationality were signed on 7 October 1957 by Dr Hernán Siles Zuazo, then President of Bolivia. Twenty-six years later, when he returned to the presidency, he denied that his executive order was valid.
By 1960, Barbie was not wealthy but he had sufficient income from a sawmill which he founded in 1960 in Cochabamba, with a partner, for the family to live quite comfortably. A thoroughly sanitised version of his wartime services to Germany was common knowledge amongst the town’s German community. At their small but racially exclusive German club, Barbie often spoke about the glories of the Third Reich, rousingly led the singing of the Nazi Party’s Horst Wessel song, and gradually let slip that he had been more than a nominal supporter of the Third Reich. As the months passed, the crestfallen refugee recovered his old, bellicose self-confidence and blatantly displayed his former allegiance. Europe, the war and Lyons seemed far enough away.
The news from home was that, thanks to the Economic Miracle, Germany was booming, and the only memory of the wartime years was tinged with nostalgia. Prosecutions for war crimes in Germany had effectively ceased in the early Fifties, the new German government conveniently assuming that the occupying powers had cleaned up the mess and fulfilled the needs of justice. Bolivian newspapers in 1956 did not report the trial and conviction of eleven former Auschwitz guards in Ulm, not far from Augsburg, and no-one told Barbie. The evidence of their participation in the mass murder had horrified many Germans who, after the war, had been too concerned with their own struggle for survival to take notice of Allied propaganda about German atrocities. Surprisingly, until their arrest, the eleven had been living normal, exemplary lives, just like any other ex-servicemen. Their discovery had been an accident but their testimony, and their self-confessed effortless ability to avoid criminal investigation, embarrassed West German politicians. In the anguished debate which followed, Bonn was convinced, reluctantly, that most German war criminals had not fled to South America after the war, but had stayed and prospered in the Federal Republic. In 1958, the State Ministers of Justice agreed to create a central agency in Ludwigsburg to investigate German war crimes. Ponderously, yet with characteristic methodical efficiency, thousands of Germans suspected of war crimes were listed for investigation. Every German police force was sent a list of suspects whose last known address was in their area. Barbie was listed automatically. One of Ludwigsburg’s first inquiries was addressed to the American Army in Germany. It replied curtly but revealingly that all contact had been lost in 1951 ‘and his present whereabouts were unknown’.
In April 1961, police in Kassel went to 83 Eichwaldstrasse, the home of Carol Bouness, a relative of Barbie’s wife. Unusually for this sort of inquiry, the police were not met by deliberate unhelpfulness but instead given a vital lead, and even more. Bouness did not like Klaus Barbie and told the police without hesitation that he had worked for the Americans in Augsburg and that Regine had written to her from Bolivia. As a throwaway line, she added that, according to Barbie’s mother, the Americans had even helped the family escape. Having exhausted their own powers of inquiry, Ludwigsburg passed the case on to the prosecutor’s office in Kassel. Despite Bouness’s assertions of American help, this was still Barbie’s last-known place of residence. This was the beginning of that bureaucratic process which has suffocated most West German investigations into war crimes. With some notable exceptions, the state prosecutors’ lethargy, lack of interest, political prejudice and outright incompetence has left most of their 83,000 investigations unresolved. The Barbie file was set to share the same fate.
After a year’s investigation, the Kassel police concluded that Barbie had been employed in Munich by the Americans as early as 1945, under cover as a tradesman. According to their investigations, Barbie had arrived in La Paz only in 1961 or 1962, and his wife had joined him only recently. They believed that he was still employed by both the CIA and the BND, the German secret service, and that he was in direct contact in Germany not only with his mother and aunt but also with his daughter, whose address was fully enclosed. It was a lamentable piece of investigation.
After months of inactivity, the Kassel prosecutor passed the file to the Augsburg prosecutor, because that was Barbie’s last-known address; the Augsburg prosecutor decided that he could do nothing because Barbie was believed to be living in Bolivia, a country with which West Germany had no extradition treaty.
On 7 November 1963, a memorandum marked ‘secret and confidential’ and containing the results of the Kassel inquiry was sent from the French Sécurité Militaire (FSM) in West Germany to the investigation bureau at the Army Ministry in Paris. It concluded with the request that the Bureau ask the two French secret services to find Barbie in La Paz, but at the same time advise them of his use by the CIA and BND. The FSM also requested permission to intercept the Barbie family’s mail and to tap their phones. They received no positive reply. General Jaquier, then head of the French Secret Service (SDECE) in Paris, denied in 1983 that he ever saw the memorandum: ‘If I had, I would remember it.’ The following year, on 28 September, General de Gaulle paid an official three-day visit to Bolivia. Whether or not he knew that the country was harbouring the murderer of his wartime delegate to France, we do not know; but there were more important matters on his mind.
Twenty years after the war, de Gaulle’s visit reinforced Barbie’s sense of security. Despite the spectacular kidnapping in 1960 of Adolf Eichmann from Argentina by a Mossad squad sent specially from Israel, Klaus Altmann was convinced that his real identity was truly buried. When the German ambassador came in March 1966 as an honoured guest to the German club, the former Gestapo chief stood up during the toast to Germany’s continuing prosperity and shouted ‘Heil Hitler’. It was just the latest in a series of Nazi slogans and anti-semitic taunts with which he had amused the club members. But the ambassador reacted with honest horror, demanding Barbie’s immediate expulsion. As he was hustled out of the club, he is alleged to have shouted, ‘Damn you, ambassador. I was an officer of the Gestapo.’ By now, however, Barbie was too important in Bolivia to be seriously affected. After the 1964 military coup by General René Barrientos, Barbie’s relations with influential army officers rapidly intensified. He did not participate openly in military operations, but they shared a common language and shared their experiences.
Overnight, Barbie became not only influential but rich. ‘For the first time, I was a war profiteer,’ Barbie told General Wolff. The war in question was in Vietnam; Barbie’s profits came from selling chinin – a wood bark used for the manufacture of quinine – to Von Böhringer, the German chemical company in Mannheim. For Eberhard Büttner, Böhringer’s South American representative, Barbie’s sawmill in La Paz was an ideal base for stripping wild chinin trees. Büttner’s contract was with Herr Hochhauser, the mill owner, but the profits were divided with Barbie, who by then possessed considerable expertise in wood. Alone, or by mule with Büttner, Barbie drove into the Bolivian wilderness to negotiate with wood dealers for a regular supply of bark to his mill in La Paz, for shipping via Chile to Germany. As the American casualties in Vietnam increased and demand for quinine grew, Büttner returned to La Paz and suggested that Barbie and Hochhauser try to cultivate chinin trees. Seed and saplings were shipped from the Congo and planted 300 kilometres from La Paz. Barbie claims that the project was a great success – ‘Only two of the 200 trees died.’ Von Böhringer said that the project was a disastrous failure and that the plants died of disease. In the early Seventies, as American involvement in the war diminished, the chinin business slowly disappeared. Barbie’s claim that he earned ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars every week’, is derided in Mannheim but there is no doubt that substantial amounts were paid into an account which he had opened in the Bahamas. He had earned enough ‘to pay for all my legal bills’.
Unknown to Barbie, in 1965 he was also being considered for re-employment by the US Army as a special agent. The Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (OACSI) wanted to mount an intelligence-gathering operation in Washington. On the intelligence staff was someone who had been involved with Barbie in Germany, and knew that he had gone to Bolivia. After clearance with the CIA, the OACSI asked its liaison officer at the American embassy in La Paz to confirm that Klaus Altmann was in La Paz. The reply was positive. But, according to the documents so far released, Barbie had still not been approached when, in mid-1966, the prominent Jewish US Senator Jacob Javits passed on to the State Department a letter from a constituent, Sandra Zanik.
Zanik had just watched an NBC television programme in which Alfred Newton, who by then was very ill, had complained that his Gestapo torturer was now a prosperous businessman living in Munich and working as an American and French agent. Zanik asked Javits to find out ‘why a man can go free after killing and torturing. This is a very odd situation. I am wondering how many more people such as this are on the United States payroll or getting rich from us.’
The State Department asked the Army about Barbie and received a relatively honest account of the German’s background and the American connection. But the State Department’s short reply to Javits was completely deceptive, suggesting that Barbie was just one of many informants and that an investigation into his past had been found to be ‘inconclusive’. To the bureaucrats’ relief, Javits did not pursue his inquiry; but it had been a salutary warning for the CIA. As the Bolivian situation worsened over the next two years and Barbie’s importance grew, Javits’ inquiry was used by the CIA as a reason to veto the Army’s persistent interest in re-enlisting their man. But the CIA did not consider telling the US immigration service, or the French and German governments, who Klaus Altmann was and where he could be found.
By then Barbie’s second major business venture, which started in 1966, had confirmed him as a prominent Bolivian citizen and had introduced him to crime on a scale which, until then, even he had neither experienced nor imagined.
In 1879, Bolivia lost the maritime Antofagasta province in a war with neighbouring Chile and the country was suddenly landlocked. Bolivia has ceremoniously mourned this shattering consequence every year with processions and a dedication at their naval ministry, which is based on an inland lake. In 1966, President Barrientos announced that a public fund would be launched to buy a cargo ship which would fly the Bolivian flag, the only ship of its kind in the world. The presidential appeal to national pride failed to stimulate enough donations; only $50,000 were collected, while four million were needed. Suddenly a German emigrant appeared with a possible solution. Barbie described himself as a maritime engineer and said he would be proud to use his expertise to arrange the purchase of not just one boat, but a whole fleet. Relieved of the embarrassment, the President handed over to Barbie the $50,000 fund and guaranteed him a state loan. ‘Transmaritima Boliviana’ was born. Ownership was divided: 51% for the state and 49% for Barbie and his business associates. In theory Barbie was working for the state, but in practice he rapidly excluded the state representatives from supervisory control.
Even for Bolivia’s traditionally turbulent political life, the upheaval following the discovery in early 1967 that Che Guevara was at large in the Bolivian countryside, attempting to foment a Marxist revolution, was tempestuous. With the Vietnam war at its height, Washington was convinced that Fidel Castro had sent his faithful lieutenant there as part of Moscow’s planned international aggression and policy of encirclement. The CIA and an elite jungle warfare unit, the ‘Green Berets’, were rapidly deployed to hunt down and destroy the Cuban revolutionaries. In October 1967, Guevara was captured and killed in the Bolivian jungle, but his death plunged the already brutalised and corrupt country even further into spiralling political anarchy. Politicians disappeared or were killed, while the country’s government swung between right-wing and left-wing military dictatorships, the latter determined to remove American military and economic domination. Relations with Washington were stretched to the limit. The American government, uncertain in late 1970 about the new left-wing government led by General Torres, was suddenly hesitant about arms supplies and economic aid. The differences between left and right hardened. On the verge of civil war, factions in the army vying for power and planning a coup against the Torres government began searching for a secure and secret supply of arms.
No group was more concerned about the country’s instability than the powerful German community. Their candidate in the military was Colonel Hugo Banzer, an American-trained cavalry officer whose rich landowning family had originally emigrated from Germany. To stage his coup he needed weapons. One obvious source was the German in La Paz with a shipping company, who had often boasted of his long and distinguished military career, and whose political views were unquestionably favourable to a right-wing military group. After twenty years in the wilderness, Barbie could once again offer his services in the fight against communism.
Every businessman has a characteristic method of trading. As manager of the Transmaritima, Barbie’s was to ‘buy’ or ‘rent’ equipment, but not pay. For five years he chartered, but never bought, four cargo vessels. He appointed friends as managers and his son Klaus as company representative in Hamburg. Most important of all, as an important state employee, he secured a much prized diplomatic passport which gave him privileged facilities to travel. In quick succession he went during the late Sixties to Peru, Brazil and Argentina. More significantly, using a visa issued on 17 July 1969 by the American embassy in La Paz, he flew to Miami twice on 19 July and again on 21 January 1970. On both visits he flew for one-day trips to Freeport in the Bahamas to deposit money in secret bank accounts. Besides Miami, he is known to have visited New Orleans, Houston and San Francisco. His business in New Orleans seemed innocent – Barbie even claims that he was presented with the keys of the city by the Council in 1970. Captain William Ayres, president of the Ayres Steamship company, clearly remembers Klaus Altmann using his agency to carry general cargo between the Gulf ports and South America. The relationship lasted only a few months because of an argument with an Ayres representative. But suggestions that the cargoes were foodstuffs are derided by Barbie’s acquaintances in La Paz. George Portugal, a long-established Bolivian arms dealer, insists that Barbie had become an arms supplier to a military faction.
The international arms trade is by nature plagued by secrecy, spurious denials and especially rumour. Disentangling fiction from truth, fifteen years after the event and without eyewitnesses, is often impossible. Yet there are substantial and verifiable events to suggest that, by the late Sixties, Barbie, as general manager of Transmaritima, had established close relations with the various military leaders by offering vital services. The cheap and unmonitored supply of arms was one such service.
Amongst the arms Barbie is alleged to have imported into Bolivia over the years are 50,000 rounds of .38 calibre bullets, Ingram sub-machine-guns, Israeli-made Uzi and Galil sub-machine-guns, and German-manufactured Heckler and Koch A3 sub-machine-guns. In the Seventies he is alleged to have arranged the purchase of 100 light tanks from Austria, although both the manufacturers, Steyer, and an alleged Austrian middleman, Evelyn Krieg, deny all knowledge of the deal. The most sensational of all these arms deals is his alleged purchase in 1967 of small arms from Belgium, ostensibly for Bolivia, which were then diverted to Israel, which was, at the time, cut off from its usual sources of supply by an international arms embargo. The use by Israel of a German of uncertain origin for services concerning its very survival, is not unusual.
It was in the course of arranging these deals that Barbie, using his diplomatic passport, flew to Germany. (Sometimes he claims to have visited France and laid flowers on Moulin’s tomb, but there are grave doubts that Barbie has ever returned to France. He did, however, fly on an Air France plane in South America, spending the flight with his head hidden behind newspapers.) His visit to Hamburg ended in a bizarre mystery which led to one of many colourful but unsubstantiated allegations surrounding Barbie’s Bolivian life. The purpose of the journey was to meet representatives of Hapag-Lloyd to negotiate contracts on behalf of Transmaritima. During his stay Barbie heard that the Bolivian consul in the city, Roberto Quintanilla, had been shot dead in his office. Back in Bolivia, Quintanilla, an aggressive right-wing policeman, had investigated a series of apparently related murders following the mysterious helicopter crash in April 1969 in which President Barrientos was killed; but his notoriety stemmed from his close proximity to the hunt and murder of Guevara. Quintanilla’s assassin was Monika Ertl, the daughter of the man who had arranged Barbie’s first job and who had remained a close friend. Monika Ertl was a member of a guerrilla movement determined to avenge all those associated with Guevara’s death. It is alleged that either Barbie or his son made the arrangements and accompanied the body of the right-wing policeman back to Bolivia. On his return, Barbie was asked by her family to persuade Monika Ertl to surrender. He failed, and Ertl, when caught, was executed on the spot to avoid any diplomatic complications. Barbie used his influence to minimise the Ertl family’s suffering, pleased that he was not plagued by the same problems with his own children.
At the time, Barbie had some business problems but he found life otherwise very pleasant. Despite their long separation during the war, his relations with his wife were very good. In 1969, his daughter Ute, then twenty-seven years old, was living in Kufstein, Austria. Barbie had arranged through Manfred Rudel, a wartime pilot and infamous post-war neo-Nazi, to find her a suitable school there: he had not wanted his daughter to mix with the local boys. Later, she married an Austrian teacher and lost close contact with her family. Barbie’s son Klaus, then aged twenty-two, studied law in Barcelona but had returned to Bolivia. Neither knew about their father’s past until 1971.
On 5 June 1968, the Barbies celebrated their son’s marriage to Françoise Craxier-Roux, a French girl whom Klaus had met in Europe. To legalise the marriage according to French law, Craxier-Roux informed the French embassy in La Paz. Yet, although the French had known since 1963 that Barbie lived in La Paz, neither the embassy’s vice-consul, Dominique Colombani, nor the ambassador, Joseph Lambroschini, even considered comparing the birth-dates of Altmann and Barbie. Lambroschini says that he had never even heard of Barbie or of Altmann when he served in the embassy.
The reaction in the German consulate in summer 1969, on the other hand, when Ute applied for a visitor’s permit, was considerably different. The embassy had already been alerted by an angry Bolivian Jew that Altmann was Barbie’s cover name, and were immediately suspicious when Ute described her father as Polish. The ambassador asked Bonn to check the discrepancies in Ute’s and Klaus’s dates of birth. The reply was that, while there was no record of the birth of Ute Altmann on 30 June 1941 in Kassel, the birth of Ute Barbie was registered on the same day in Trier. Klaus-Georg Altmann was allededly born on 11 December 1946 in Kasel, near Leipzig, which had no record of his birth. Klaus-Jörg Barbie’s birth was registered on the same day in Kassel, near Frankfurt.
Comparison of their parents’ details also produced remarkable similarities. Klaus Altmann was born on 25 October 1915, whereas Barbie’s date of birth was 13 October 1913. There was also a similar coincidence about Mrs Altmann’s maiden name, given as Regina Wilhelms. Barbie’s wife’s name was Regine Willms.
On 20 September 1969, the West German foreign minister sent his colleague, the minister of justice, a short summary of Altmann-Barbie’s post-war history. It concluded, ‘We advise you to make only discreet inquiries, because Klaus Altmann has close relations to important people in the Bolivian government, and to former Nazis now living in South America, such as Fritz Schwend in Lima.’ Attached to the note was a photo of Altmann, published in a Bolivian newspaper, showing him as a prosperous businessman in the centre of a group of similar people. It had been sent through an intermediary the previous year to a German public prosecutor by Herbert John, a German journalist and publisher living in Lima, who believed that Altmann was in fact another Nazi war criminal, Theodore Dannecker.
Dr Wolfgang Rabl, the public prosecutor in Munich, had inherited the Barbie file from Augsburg in 1971 when the Bavarian state government decided to concentrate all Nazi war-crime prosecutions in the state capital. Rabl did not try to hide his lack of interest in war-crime prosecutions, and, despite the initial evidence of Barbie’s possible address, was disinclined to take the matter further. After perusing the file he noted simply that the case should be dropped. His reasons, he felt, were legally justifiable. He ignored the possibility of public repercussions.
Rabl knew that German courts could not try cases involving Nazi crimes against the French. According to a 1954 agreement between the Allies and the new German government, German courts could not prosecute Germans for war crimes while a prosecution was still pending in France. The French negotiators had insisted on this provision, fearing that German courts would be too lenient with their own countrymen, but they had ignored the provision in the new West German constitution which forbade the extradition of German nationals to stand trial in any other country. The ‘catch-22’ was finally acknowledged by the two governments to be benefiting only Nazi criminals living in safety in West Germany, but negotiating a new agreement was proving difficult. Rabl wanted to hand the case over to the French.
Rabl’s second reason for wanting to drop the case was also, in his view, legally sound. The only alleged crime with which Barbie could still be charged was the arrest and deportation of the children from Izieu. It was the only known crime for which he had not yet been tried. Some would consider the case quite watertight. Barbie’s name was on the telex to Paris and the text was unambiguous. But Rabl was not convinced that the telex alone was sufficient evidence for a successful prosecution: ‘The mere fact that, on 6 April 1944, the defendant arrested forty-one children who were obviously not destined for the labour camps and had them shipped to the concentration camp at Drancy, cannot be interpreted to mean that he knew the eventual destination of those children. Not one sure piece of evidence of his subjective interpretation of his act can be produced.’ Rabl doubted whether anyone could prove conclusively that Barbie actually knew that he was sending the children to be murdered. He believed that in 1944 Barbie was either still completely unaware of the Final Solution or that his knowledge could not be proven. On 22 June 1971 he formally submitted his summaries to Manfred Ludolph, his departmental chief, suggesting the case be dropped. Ludolph nodded his assent.
Hugo Banzer attempted his first coup in Bolivia in January 1971. Ill-prepared, it failed and ended in strikes and violent fights between the military and the students and workers. By June, Banzer had strengthened his position. Secretly-acquired weapons and ammunition were airlifted clandestinely from Brazil to Santa Cruz, and for the next two months, with direct American support, the Banzer forces pushed south towards the capital, killing hundreds of students and workers. On 22 August, Banzer moved into the presidential palace, proclaiming that his regime was dedicated to destroying communism and trades unions. At his disposal was a police force which rapidly developed ruthless techniques of questioning which had not been used in Bolivia before; the same type which the Germans had found useful thirty years earlier in Europe. The new junta was grateful for the help and services of ‘Don Klaus’, a man to whom they felt indebted for his supply of arms.
Professional gamblers weigh the odds before committing themselves, considering their assets and then taking a calculated risk based on their experience; those who play the game rashly are called punters, and they usually lose. Barbie’s venture into shipping falls into the latter category. By 1970, Transmaritima was 10,000,000 pesos in debt, eight-and-a-half times the initial capital. The following year, its foreign creditors became alarmed when the Bolivian government removed Barbie from the company board. To protect their debts, the creditors issued writs in Panama and Hamburg to seize the company’s assets, only to find that they were the victims of a clever confidence trick. Transmaritima had no assets. Barbie had milked the company for his own purposes, a bitter disappointment to thousands of Bolivians who had contributed to the national fund – but not enough in a country like Bolivia to put Barbie at risk. In 1969, Barbie might have been embarrassed by the investigations of three journalists in La Paz into the Transmaritima saga, but they had been mysteriously murdered. There were good reasons to suspect Barbie’s involvement, but there was no proof and his position remained unaffected.
Nevertheless, soon after the company collapsed and Banzer became President, Barbie decided to move to Lima, Peru, to continue work in the shipping business. According to Barbie, his wife was suffering from La Paz’s high altitude and they left on medical advice. Others are convinced he left for his own safety and with the President’s blessing in the wake of the Transmaritima scandal. He arrived in Lima with enough money to buy a Swiss-type chalet, with large grounds and swimming pool. The cost, he said, was $22,000.
Barbie had an acquaintance in Lima, Fritz Schwend, a former SS colonel and also a fugitive. Schwend had masterminded ‘Operation Bernhard’, Hitler’s audacious plan to flood the world with forged British currency: the notes were distributed to German agents throughout the world with orders to spend them as fast as possible. After murdering one of his accomplices in Italy, Schwend had fled Europe but, unlike Barbie, arrived in South America with considerable wealth. His presence in Peru had never been a secret. He lived in an enormous house, surrounded by a high wall which encouraged speculation that he was the financier of the Odessa network, or even the Fourth Reich, in constant communication with all the important Nazi politicians who were not killed or captured in 1945. Martin Bormann, Josef Mengele and Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller were just three of the infamous Nazi fugitives said to have passed through his home. Barbie had met him for the first time when he passed through Lima in 1968 and soon after his arrival in October 1971 he called on Schwend again.
At first the Barbies were very happy in Lima. The climate was much more pleasant and the city more cosmopolitan. Schwend was a perfect host and, over many days and nights, the two former SS men talked about the past and even planned joint business ventures for the future. Among the many entertaining people to whom Schwend introduced him was Herbert John, a collaborator of Luis Banchero Rossi, known as the ‘guano king’. Schwend was negotiating a deal with Rossi, a multi-millionaire fishing magnate and one of Peru’s richest businessmen. On New Year’s Day 1972, however, Rossi was found dead. He had been murdered and Schwend was the prime police suspect. Barbie, who was working with Schwend on the deal, was also automatically under suspicion. The Peruvian police were convinced of a Nazi conspiracy.
Barbie’s new-found happiness was suddenly clouded. He did not know that in Europe Rabl’s decision to drop his case had been vigorously challenged by a young German woman whose efficiency and fervour matched Barbie’s own, and who was determined that he should be brought back to Europe to stand trial for his crimes of forty years ago. A Protestant, born in Berlin, Beate Klarsfeld was just three years old when Barbie arrived in Lyons. The ‘Butcher’ could be forgiven for not foreseeing that, after a lifetime of manipulation, evasion, deceit and monstrous crime, he would eventually be doomed by a young woman.