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Many know of how primary organizer of the Holocaust fucking Nazi Adolf Eichmann was abducted by Israeli agents in Argentina, put on trial, and executed for being a murderous piece of shit. Fewer know the story of Nazi shitwagon Klaus Barbie, who also relocated to South America, identified a dozen years after Eichmann. Alas, justice would be slow in coming.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: January 19, 1972--
After a few years of rounding up and deporting Dutch Jews off to death camps, Barbie became known as the “Butcher of Lyon,” a city in the fucking Nazi-collaborating Vichy France regime. As head of the local Gestapo, he tortured and murdered Jews and resistance fighters alike, and had many more sent to death camps, including a lot of children. It is believed he was personally responsible for the deaths of 14,000 people. If ever someone needed a high-velocity projectile to the brain, it was this guy. But the Americans didn’t agree. After the war the U.S. used him as a spy on European commies. The French convicted Barbie in absentia of war crimes and wanted to execute the fucker, but the U.S. wouldn’t hand him over and instead arranged for his escape to Bolivia in exchange for him teaching the Bolivian government how to use torture to suppress communism in that nation.
In 1971, French Nazi hunters located Barbie, and on January 19, 1972, that story was published in a French newspaper, identifying him with a photo and exposing his alias: Klaus Altmann. After the story came out Bolivian authorities put Barbie in protective custody, where he of course denied being a fucking Nazi. Two weeks later a French journalist traveled to Bolivia to interview Barbie, conducting the interview in Spanish. Then the journalist tricked Barbie. Suddenly switching to French—a language “Herr Altmann” wasn’t supposed to know—the journalist asked Barbie if he’d ever been to Lyon, and Barbie answered that he hadn’t. HA! Gotchu, motherfucker! Continues below …
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His fingerprints confirmed he was indeed Klaus Barbie, and resistance fighter Simone Lagrange saw the interview on TV and said oh yeah that’s the fucker who tortured me during the war. And yet Bolivia refused to extradite him. Eight years later it’s alleged that Barbie participated in a violent coup that overthrew the Bolivian government. Then in 1982 there was a newly elected democratic government in Bolivia and the president said get this Nazi fuck outta my country and had him extradited to France.
The trial was televised, a rare thing in France, and Barbie was convicted of numerous crimes against humanity. France had only recently abolished the death penalty, so Barbie spent the rest of his life in prison, dying from cancer in 1991 at the age of 77. The U.S. did eventually apologize to France for harboring Barbie after the war and for aiding his escape.
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