BACK IN PARIS, we went public with the information that Barbie was probably living in Bolivia. We had the photographs copied and sent them to Lyon in the hope that witnesses would come forward and identify him.
Jean Pierre-Bloch went to see the French foreign minister Maurice Schumann on October 8 and asked him to intervene with the Bolivian government so that it would find and extradite Barbie. He also gave him the photocopy of the German prosecutor’s decision to reopen the case and the famous photograph of the group of businessmen. It would then have been very easy for the French authorities to find Barbie: all that needed to be done was to send a copy of the photograph to the embassy in La Paz and then for one of the embassy’s employees to make the rounds of the few expensive hotels in the Bolivian capital, asking porters and barmen if they recognized the man in the picture. We would have had the man’s identity by the end of the day. But none of this happened.
I gave a copy of the group photograph to an editor at France-Soir in the hope that its publication would bring forward witnesses to Barbie’s current identity. A few days later, the editor told me, “Our legal advisers said we shouldn’t publish this picture because, if the man in the image turns out not to be Barbie, he would be in a position to sue us.”
One morning in October, I went to the headquarters of the Paris police’s criminal investigation division at 36 Quai des Orfèvres. I did not have an appointment, but I explained to the employee at the anthropometrics department that I had some photographs to analyze. Eventually, I was taken to the office of the department’s chief, a man in a white shirt who greeted me warmly. He was a former Resistance fighter, and he knew my name. “I can only do a superficial examination, and I cannot give you a written report,” he cautioned. I expressed my gratitude. For the next half hour, he inspected the three photographs and then told me, to my immense relief, “Yes, there is a very good chance that this is the same man: same ears, lobe turned outward, especially the right ear, which is rare. The shape of the left frontal bone is highly unusual, and the folds at the end of the lips are identical.”
I sent Dr. Ludolph an account of this examination. On October 12, his assistant, Prosecutor Steiner, wrote me a letter expressing the prosecutor general’s willingness to work in tandem with me on this case.
At the end of the month, I sent Dr. Ludolph several witness statements from people who had met Barbie and who recognized him, with varying degrees of certainty, as the man in La Paz. On November 2, L’Aurore published the photograph of Barbie alongside the anthropometric examination and affirmed that this was indeed Jean Moulin’s murderer. “This is the first time,” the newspaper wrote, “that B.K. has been able to pursue her crusade with the blessing and even the support of a West German judge, when she is still on bail herself. A paradoxical situation for prosecutor general Ludolph’s new assistant!”
A few weeks later, the prosecutor asked me if I would be willing to get in touch with a German living in Lima who had seen a businessman recently arrived from La Paz and believed that it was Barbie. This German had seen the 1943 photograph of Barbie in a recent article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which he received in Lima. His name was Herbert John, and he was a manager at Editoriales Unidas, a publishing house owned by the very wealthy Luis Banchero Rossi, the “Fish-Meal King of Peru.”
On December 16, Prosecutor Rabl, the man who had made the initial decision to drop the case against Barbie, wrote to me: “The prosecutor’s office has come into possession of recent photographs that probably show Barbie. I have asked the Department of Anthropology and Human Genetics at the University of Munich to draw up a report on the question of this man’s identity. I would be very happy if you could, after receiving this report, come to Munich to discuss in detail what should happen next.”
Rabl put me in touch with Peter Nischk, a friend of Herbert John’s who lived in Munich. On December 28, Nischk sent us Barbie’s current name and address: “Klaus Altmann, c/o Fritz Schwend, Santa Clara via Lima, Casilla no. 1, Carretera Central, km. 14.”
We had been monitoring all press articles relating to Bolivia and Peru for several days now, and the omens were not good: in Le Monde, we learned that France was attempting to appease Peru’s hostility to French nuclear testing. All the same, Serge phoned General Bourdis, chief of the prime minister’s military office, on December 30. Bourdis had been Serge’s superior in 1961 and 1962 when Serge was doing his military service. They met discreetly, and Serge gave him all the details that we had about Barbie.
Serge told a military office adviser that there were two factors regarding the possibility of extradition, one of which played in our favor and the other against us. The first was the wave of negative sentiment recently aroused by something the president of the Republic, Georges Pompidou, had said about the Resistance. By acting vigorously to extradite Barbie, the president would be in a position to end that negativity. The other factor was the French desire to appease the Peruvian government over France’s nuclear testing. Then Serge came to another difficulty, one that he had recently learned about during a phone conversation with Herbert John: “Fritz Schwend, Barbie’s friend, is a CIA agent; he was also a Nazi war criminal sentenced in absentia by the Italian courts to twenty-one years in prison. Now the owner of a chicken farm, Schwend was responsible for developing the system of postal censorship in Peru. He has eyes and ears everywhere. If France demands Barbie’s extradition, Schwend—and consequently Barbie—will know about it within five minutes.”
And yet it was important that France show its determination to relentlessly pursue Nazi criminals. In any case, Barbie would probably manage to flee Peru, even if we did all we possibly could to prevent that.
* * *
LATER, PEOPLE WOULD often ask us, “Why didn’t you kill him? You could have caught him off guard.” None of these people would have committed the act themselves.
Our goal was to compel the legal system to try these criminals and to prevent the rehabilitation of Nazi criminals who had operated in France. To achieve that, we had to focus on a few of those criminals, the most important ones: Lischka, Hagen, Barbie. Their names would provoke a passionate debate, thus preventing these monsters from living their lives in peace and quiet. If Barbie were identified, it would strengthen the public’s conviction that Nazi crimes must not be swept under the carpet and forgotten. Killing Barbie would have achieved nothing. At most, the newspaper articles would say, “A man suspected of being Klaus Barbie was found murdered yesterday.” It would have been nothing more than an act of vengeance.
A few days later, we found out that Luis Banchero Rossi—Herbert John’s boss—had been murdered in his own home in Chaclacayo. The prime suspect was his gardener’s degenerate son. But we knew that Altmann and Schwend were neighbors of Rossi and that Altmann had been seen on several occasions with the gardener’s son.
In the meantime, on January 8, 1972, Serge and I went to Xavier Vallat’s funeral. We did not go to mourn this man, who had been the first commissioner general for Jewish Questions under the Vichy government. We went to protest all those who were there to celebrate his merits and falsify the truth. We were the only protesters, but our presence was a reminder that Vallat’s anti-Jewish acts had not been forgotten. We stood outside the church in silence, wearing yellow stars on our chests, holding a copy of Dr. Billig’s reference work, Le Commissariat général aux Questions juives (The General Commission on the Jewish Question). Vallat’s friends insulted us, and some even spat at us. But the chief of police refused to force us to leave.
On January 12, I received a letter from Prosecutor Rabl, who informed me: “The identity report from the Department of Anthropology and Human Genetics has just reached me. Its conclusion is that there is a very strong possibility that the businessman Klaus Altmann in La Paz, Bolivia, represented in the photographs, is in fact Klaus Barbie.”
Five days later, we sent the new photographs of Barbie that I had received from the Munich prosecutor’s office to L’Aurore, along with the latest information. The newspaper published them on January 19 under the headline “Will France Bring Him Back?” This article had the impact we were hoping for: in France, former Resistance fighters and deportees demanded that the government extradite him. In Lima, Altmann furiously denied that he was Barbie. Numerous articles followed, asking if Altmann really was Barbie. Still, the French government did nothing.
On January 21, Dr. Ludolph sent me more information concerning Altmann’s personal data. That afternoon, Jean Pierre-Bloch and I gave a press conference in Lyon to provide an update on the investigation. Geissmann, the lawyer who provided the key-witness statement, and some of his friends decided that—as they had been lucky enough to survive Barbie’s persecutions—they ought to do what they could to bring the torturer to justice. So they paid for me to fly to Lima.
My departure was set for the night of Thursday, January 27. But I needed to take written evidence with me, and Dr. Ludolph’s information had all been provided verbally. At 2:00 a.m., he finally called me back and agreed to provide me with an official dossier. At seven the next morning, I caught a flight to Munich, and at ten I arrived at Dr. Ludolph’s office. We worked together until seven in the evening. He found out all he could for me about the issue of extradition between France and Peru, which was made possible by the laws of October 23, 1888, and July 28, 1924. We finalized a dossier signed by the prosecutor general of Munich, which established irrefutably that Altmann and Barbie were one and the same. Four key proofs were given in the dossier:
1. Klaus Altmann’s daughter, Ute, was born on June 30, 1941, in Kassel. The registry office for Kassel does not list any Ute Altmann. On the other hand, Ute Barbie—Klaus Barbie’s daughter—was born on June 30, 1941, in Trèves.
2. Klaus Altmann’s son, Klaus-Georg, was born on December 11, 1946, in Kasel, near Leipzig. The commune of Kasel does not exist, but in Kassel, on December 11, 1946, in Dr. Kuhn’s clinic, Klaus-Jorg Barbie, son of Klaus Barbie, was born.
3. Klaus Altmann’s wife is called Regina, and her maiden name was Wilhelms. The series of amazing coincidences continues: Klaus Barbie’s wife is also called Regina, and her maiden name was Willms.
4. Last, the thoroughly convincing anthropometric examination conducted by Professor Ziegelmayer at the University of Munich was detailed in a sixteen-page report. I translated it on the plane back to Paris.
* * *
MY PLANE LANDED in Paris at 11:00 p.m. on Wednesday night. Serge and I spent an hour on the phone booking a seat on the flight from London to Lima the next morning, because Serge realized that if I moved up my journey, I would have a full day in Lima—the Friday—when all the offices would still be open and I would be able to act.
Then we went to the newspaper France-Soir, where the proof of Altmann/Barbie’s identity did not seem to interest anyone. At the AFP press agency, they photocopied the dossier but did not send a dispatch. Once again, the dossiers alone did not have any effect. The next day, Serge would send this dossier to the head of the French military court.
I also learned from reading Ludolph’s dossier all about what Barbie did between 1945 and 1949, particularly his activities working for the Americans. Later, I would send my notes to Allan Ryan, who was leading an official investigation in Washington into the links between Barbie and the American special services in Germany, so that the United States could formally apologize to France for its behavior regarding this Nazi criminal. Barbie had even been the subject of a wanted notice on April 25, 1949, for stealing jewelry. The text of this notice was a masterpiece of irony: “Klaus Barbie, five foot six, dark blond hair, thin lips, sunken eyes, distinctly Jewish features, speaks literary German, courteous manners.”
At 2:00 a.m., I went to bed, exhausted. It was too late to see Arno now, and I would have to leave before he woke up. At 4:00 a.m., Serge got me up. We heard on the radio that Barbie had left Lima by car and was headed toward Bolivia. We calculated that he could not reach the border until Friday afternoon. By then, I would be in Lima. And, if necessary, I would pursue him to La Paz.
On the flight to London, I reread my notes on Barbie. When I got to the airport, however, the policeman inspected my passport, then consulted the long list of names of people sought or suspected by the British authorities. He asked for my ticket, took my passport, and disappeared. I began to fear I would miss my connection. The reason for this treatment was the campaign against Rudi Dutschke’s expulsion that I had waged in London. “Just get a policeman to watch over me while I wait for my flight,” I told them. “That way, you won’t have to worry.” Finally, they let me through.
On the way to Lima, I read Barbie’s dossier and slept. Thanks to the time difference, I landed in Peru at 10:00 p.m. the same day. It was hot and humid; I was wearing a heavy winter coat, but here it was summer. There had been a mistake in the dispatches—they’d given my arrival time as GMT instead of local time—so there were no journalists waiting for me at the airport in Lima. Even my informer, Herbert John, wasn’t there.
I managed to get hold of Albert Brun, the AFP’s correspondent, and he came to fetch me. A thin, tanned man in his early fifties, he was accompanied by Nicole Bonnet, the Figaro correspondent. I took a room at the Savoy, showered, changed my clothes, and went down to the bar with my dossier to join a group of journalists. I showed them the proof that Altmann was Barbie. Albert Brun translated my explanations into Spanish. It was 2:00 a.m. before I finally got to bed.
Around nine the next morning, I met Herbert John on the front steps of the hotel. He was in his thirties, very tall with stooping shoulders, blond haired and blue eyed, and he looked nervous, ill at ease. He kept glancing fearfully around him, giving me the impression that we were being watched. He promised to put me in touch with the Bolivian police so that I could give them my documents. At the AFP office, there was a constant flow of journalists consulting the Barbie dossier. Everyone seemed completely convinced. That day, the Peruvian newspapers began a campaign: “The German Nazi Hunter Proves That Altmann Really Is Barbie.”
I gathered from my conversations that Peru did not wish to become involved in a conflict between France and Bolivia and wanted Barbie to return to Bolivia. Also, thanks to “Don Federico”—a.k.a. Fritz Schwend—Barbie could count on solid support from the Peruvian special services. Around noon, a friend of Herbert John took me to the military police, where I explained the situation to a general and asked him to arrest Barbie before he crossed the border. He photocopied my dossier and promised to pass it on to the relevant ministry. Then I went to the government’s press office: all the employees there knew that Barbie was going to cross the border. They looked with interest at my documents. They all admitted that Altmann was Barbie, but they did not perform the crucial act of closing the border to him. Instead, they phoned the intelligence service, which was located across the street. There, I met a colonel, who listened to my story, photocopied the dossier, phoned the border post, and asked if Barbie’s car—a Volkswagen with the registration plate HH CD 360, registered under his son’s name in Hamburg—had crossed the border. It had not. From there, I rushed to the French embassy, where I spoke with Mr. Chambon, the ambassador, a former deportee who gave me a warm welcome and embraced me in front of the press. I gave him a copy of the documents, and he was instantly convinced.
The phone rang: the consul in Puno was calling to tell him that Barbie had crossed the border at noon, accompanied by two Peruvian policemen who handed him over to the Bolivian police. So the request that the ambassador had just made to the minister of the interior—to arrest Barbie while we waited for an official demand for extradition—would go no further.
I returned to the AFP, where I continued working with the press and television people until midnight. That work was crucial, as the Peruvian press would be read in Bolivia.
The next morning, I caught a plane to La Paz. I was on Barbie’s trail.