U.S. Department of Justice, Criminal Divison. Klaus Barbie and the United States Government. Vol. 1: A Report to the Attorney General of the United States. Vol. 2: Exhibits to the Report to the Attorney General of the United States. Submitted by Allan A. Ryan, Jr. Washington: Government Printing Office, August 1983.
Allan A. Ryan, Jr. Klaus Barbie and the United States Government: The Report, with Documentary Appendix, to the Attorney General of the United States. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984. xxii, 541 pages.
Allan A. Ryan, Jr. Quiet Neighbors: Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in America. San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1984. xii, 386 pages.
John Beattie. Klaus Barbie: His Life and Career. London: Methuen, 1984. 228 pages.
Tom Bower. Klaus Barbie: The Butcher of Lyon. New York: Pantheon, 1984. 255 pages.
Erhard Dabringhaus. Klaus Barbie: The Shocking Story of How the U.S. Used this Nazi War Criminal as an Intelligence Agent. Washington: Acropolis Books, 1984. 208 pages.
Magnus Linklater, Isabel Hilton, and Neal Ascherson. The Nazi Legacy: Klaus Barbie and the International Fascist Connection. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984. 35 pages.
The expulsion of Klaus Barbie from Bolivia in February 1983 and his subsequent arrest and prospective trial by the French government for war crimes, his employment by the U.S. Army, and the Army's subsequent cover up, have aroused the interest and passions of people on three continents. Forty years after the end of World War II, after the major and minor war crimes trials in Europe and the Far East, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and after wars in India, Korea, Vietnam, Latin America, and elsewhere, people are still concerned about what happens to a third-rate Nazi war criminal- concerned enough for the United States Government to embark upon a fullfledged investigation and for journalists and writers to publish books and articles about the man and his actions. The reasons for this interest are understandable. A new generation that has grown up since the war wants answers to very perplexing questions; in addition, neo-Nazis and historical revisionists have both challenged the accepted view of the Holocaust and, in some instances, denied that it took place at all. Those who remember are appalled by the ignorance of the young and outraged by the mendacity of the others. Thus old wounds have been reopened and a new interest has developed in half-forgotten men and events. 1
The facts of the case are not in dispute. Klaus Barbie was born in Bad Godesberg, near Bonn, on 25 October 1913. His parents, Nikolaus Barbie and Anna Hees, both village school teachers, were not married until the following January.2 Klaus Barbie spent his early years in Udler, near Trier, and entered the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium at Easter 1925. On 2 April 1933 he joined the Hitler Youth, became a leader in the Deutsches Jungvolk (a junior branch of the Hitler Youth), and did volunteer work at the local Nazi Party office. He was appointed adjutant to a party leader in Trier on I February 1935, was recruited by the SD (the security service of the SS) at the same time, and became a regular member of the SD seven months later. He served one year in Berlin and was then transferred to Dusseldorf, where he married Regine Willms on 25 April 1940. His next assignment was Dortmund, where he apparently monitored the activities of religious and right-wing political groups. He was commissioned a second lieutenant (Untersturmfuhrer) in April 1940, and a month later was transferred to the SD office in Amsterdam, where he was promoted to first lieutenant in the same year. During much of 1941 and part of 1942, Barbie seems to have divided his attention among France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In the Netherlands he is believed to have participated in the roundup and deportation of Jews, though the record is vague on this point. In November 1942 he was sent to Lyon. He first served as deputy to the commander of the Einsatzkommando, mobile military-police units that fought and eliminated resistance groups, partisans, and other enemies behind the front lines, especially the local French resistance forces, which, in January 1943, were under the leadership of Jean Moulin.3
Sometime later-the date is not clear-Barbie became head of SD Section IV, the Gestapo. 4 His primary duty was to arrange and supervise operations against the French resistance, infiltrate its organization (whose headquarters were in Lyon), disrupt its activities, and either eliminate or turn around its members.5 Barbie's performance in Lyon was outstanding, and he was decorated and received a letter from Himmler "praising [his] 'special achievements in the field of criminology and untiring efforts in combatting a resistance organization.'"6 In addition, he was promoted to captain (Hauptsturmfiihrer) in November 1944, for "his 'exceptional talent for intelligence and criminology' and . . . for eliminating numerous enemy organizations."7 According to the French government, Barbie tortured and murdered members of the Resistance, most notably its regional commander Jean Moulin, and was responsible for the murder, massacre, and deportation of civilians. The French government charged Barbie specifically as follows:
The arrest and murder of a district police officer and the massacre (at the Ecole de Sante) of twenty-two hostages, including women and children, in 1944;the arrest and torture of nineteen persons at Lyon in the summer of 1943;
the liquidation of the Lyon Committee of the General Union of French Jews, at the end of which, following a raid on 9 February 1943 on the offices of this organization, eighty-six persons were deported;
the shooting of forty-two persons of whom forty were Jews at Lyon and nearby in 1943 and 1944;
a raid on the railway workshop at Oullins in August 1944 in the course of which two people were killed and several wounded;
the deportation to Auschwitz and Ravensbruck concentration camps of some six hundred and fifty persons, of whom half were Jews, by the last rail transport leaving Lyon on 11 August 1944;
the shooting of seventy Jews at Bron on 17 August 1944, and of other Jews and two priests on 20 August that year at St-Genis-Laval;
the deportation of fifty-five Jews, of whom fifty-two were children, at Izieu in the Ain. 8
The Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects (CROWCASS), compiled by Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Forces in the spring of 1945, reported under Barbie's name that he was accused of murdering civilians and torturing military personnel; the CROWCASS was "distributed to all major echelons of the Allied occupation forces in Germany, including the United States Army Counter Intelligence Corps."9
Between the time Barbie left Lyon ahead of the advancing Allied armies and the end of the war, his assignments and whereabouts are not known.10 When the American armies entered Germany in 1945, there was considerable fear that remnants of the German forces would make a last stand in an Alpine redoubt and that fanatical SS troops might organize an underground resistance movement.11 These fears were fed by intelligence reports and rumors and were taken seriously by the American High Command. One such report dealt with the clandestine underground movements of a group of former SS men who, as experienced intelligence officers and devoted anticommunists, wanted to offer their services to the British and American occupation authorities. When the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) investigated this particular group, it learned that one of its leaders was Klaus Barbie, who had been identified by CIC headquarters in January 1947 as "the head of the Gestapo in Lyon."12 In a subsequent CIC raid on the group's hideout, several persons were arrested, but Barbie was not among them. CIC agents later traced Barbie to Stuttgart and Munich and reported in March 1947 that
"due to his background and experience with the GIS (German Intelligence Services) it is very possible that Barbie might be useful in penetrating" a supposed Soviet intelligence net in a small town in the U.S. zone about which very little was known at that time. It is recommended that Barbie not be interned as yet, but that he be used in an attempt to penetrate the supposed Soviet net. It is at present believed that a tight enough control over him can be maintained so that his arrest could easily be effected should such action become desirable. Using him for the purpose outlined here would be an excuse to keep him under surveillance."13
Instead of approving this plan, CIC headquarters ordered the arrest of Barbie, but once again he eluded his captors. Two further attempts at arrest in April and May were also unsuccessful. While searches for Barbie continued in Wurttemberg and Hessen (CIC regions I and 111), Robert S. Taylor, a CIC agent in Bavaria (region IV) had found Barbie and, with the approval of his superior, Lt. Col. Dale Garvey, had decided to use Barbie as an informant, "provided that he 'break off any connections with illegal SS elements ... '"14 Taylor and Barbie met in Memmingen, a small town 60 miles west of Munich, around 18 April 1947; Barbie agreed to Taylor's terms and was hired as a paid informant.15
To understand why the United States Government used and shielded Klaus Barbie for almost four years-April 1947 to March 1951-it is necessary to consider the attitudes of the U.S. Government, its Army and its personnel, as well as the situation in Europe in the immediate post-World War 11 period. 16 The economic situation in Germany and throughout Europe was worse than anticipated, the pressure to bring the soldiers home was irresistible, and fear that communism would spread overshadowed all else. The economic situation in Germany was eventually eased by combining the British and U.S. zones in January 1947 and by the currency reform and Marshall Plan of 1948, but the fear of communism made everyone suspicious and shifted U.S. interest from Germany, the former enemy, to the new threat, the Soviet Union. The feeling was that present and former allies could no longer be trusted and that the United States had better look after its own vital interests.17
On the practical, day-to-day level, this meant that the U.S. government had to know as much as possible about the immediate and long-range intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Union. This included the identities and activities of communist agents in the U.S. as well as in the British, French, and Soviet zones of occupations. As a result of the precipitous demobilization of U.S. armies, the shortage of qualified personnel was extremely acute, especially among intelligence and counterintelligence personnel. It was believed that the only practical way to alleviate this severe shortage was to hire those Germans who had some training in intelligence and whose anticommunism was above reproach. The careers of these Germans under the Nazi regime and their attitudes toward Hitler and the Party were of relatively little concern, especially since the American officials who selected and hired them were often ignorant of the complex issues involved, unfamiliar with the German language and Germany's history, and, in many cases, favorably impressed with the cleanliness and friendly manner of the Germans they came in contact with.18 As far as war crimes and war criminals were concerned, both the U.S. government and the American people had lost interest in this issue and by 1947 believed that it was more important to win over the Germans as allies against the Soviet Union than to antagonize their former enemies by prosecuting them and raking up the unsavory past.19
Two developments of the immediate postwar period illustrate the situation: Project Paperclip and the Japanese War Crimes Trials. The former was an American intelligence operation designed to persuade German scientists and engineers to work for agencies of the U.S. Government (Army, Navy, Air Force, Dept. of Commerce, etc.), first in the U.S. zone of occupation and later in the United States.20 Toward the end of the war, American officials became aware of the considerable advances German scientists had made in such fields as jet and rocket propulsion, guided missiles, and aerial torpedoes, and were worried about the possibility of Germany's developing an atomic bomb. It was believed that having German scientists and engineers work for the United States would greatly advance and speed up U.S. research efforts and would simultaneously prevent the Soviet Union, Britain, and France from reaping the benefits of these Germans' services. Thus intelligence teams advancing into Germany with U.S. armies seized German scientists, engineers, laboratories, and instruments not only from the Soviet zone but from the British and French zones as well. In some instances, interservice rivalry between the Navy and the Army Air Force led to competition to see which service would be in charge of what type of scientists and equipment. The Soviet, British, and French troops engaged in similar activities.
The movement of German scientists and engineers to the United States and their preferential treatment at a time when the immigration of displaced persons and former concentration camp inmates was being delayed caused much controversy and discussion among Americans. In May and June 1945, Secretary of War Robert Patterson and the War Department's General Staff discussed policy directives regarding the employment of German scientists and engineers and recommended "the importation of 'the minimum number of scientists necessary/ none of whom should be a known or alleged war criminal . . . [and] the dual purpose of the program [was] to 'increase our war- making capacity against Japan and aid our postwar military ... research. On 13 September 1946 President Truman officially approved .'"21 an expanded version of military and civilian exploitation," stressing that the project "would not employ ardent Nazis, but neither would it discriminate against those who had been 'nominal' party members or who had received awards or honors under the Nazi regime."22
The discovery of germ warfare activities during the Japanese War Crimes Trials and their subsequent coverup also illustrate the prevailing postwar mentality. In this case the American prosecuting attorney, David N. Sutton, failed to follow up on charges that the Japanese had waged biological warfare in China; this failure resulted in the dismissal of these charges by the International War Crimes Tribunal in Tokyo.23 The man responsible for the biological warfare (BW) activities of the Japanese army was General Ishii Shiro, an army surgeon, who had conducted and supervised chemical and biological experiments on American, Chinese, and Soviet prisoners of war, thousands of whom had died as a result of these experiments. When the Chinese Nationalist and Soviet governments presented Washington with proof of General Ishii's activities during the war, and when the Soviet government asked that he be turned over for trial in the Soviet Union, the U.S. government declined. Instead, in July 1947 General Ishii and his colleagues were closely interrogated by U.S. officials, with whom they cooperated to the extent of "preparing voluminous reports ... [supplying] photographs of 'selected examples of 8,000 slides of tissues from autopsies of humans and animals subjected to BW experiments.'"24 In their report to Washington the American officials pointed out "that the knowledge gained by the Japanese from their experiments, 'will be of great value to the U.S. BW research program' and added, 'The value to U.S. of Japanese BW data is of such importance to national security as to far outweigh the value accruing from war crimes prosecution.'"25
Project Paperclip and the handling of the charges of chemical and biological warfare during the Japanese War Crimes Trials are both examples of one aspect of U.S. policy in the immediate postwar period that is relevant to the case of Klaus Barbie: a tendency to take advantage of any opportunity to get ahead of allies as well as enemies in the race to expand U.S. knowledge and capabilities in areas that might be useful in dealing with the Soviet Union. Thus the employment of Klaus Barbie by U.S. counterintelligence agents in Germany in April 1947 should come as no surprise.
Two other aspects of the Barbie case deserve examination. One is whether the CIC agents who hired Barbie knew at the time about his war crimes. As noted above, Barbie's name was on the CROWCASS list, which circulated widely among intelligence and counterintelligence authorities throughout the U.S. zone of occupation in 1945-1946. The list was not a perfect one, inasmuch as it was too long-it listed between 70,000 and 150,000 names of war criminals, including "some 80,000 'security suspects'-persons who had not been accused of war crimes at all and who were not 'wanted' by any country."26 Further, the list was considered by many officials to be unreliable because it was believed that many of the security suspects listed had been accused of unspecified or even trumped-up charges by their political enemies. Although the 1945 CROWCASS lists Barbie as "wanted for murder of military personnel and torture of civilians," the 1947 list mentions him only as wanted for murder. The evidence thus suggests that, in the case of Barbie, the CIC ignored the list.27 The Ryan Report disagrees, arguing that "when reports of Barbie's barbaric actions surfaced in May 1949," CIC headquarters directed the regional office to dismiss Barbie and to interrogate him so as "to determine the truth behind the charges."28 Therefore, the Report concludes, "Headquarters' sharp reaction to specific charges [against Barbiel of war crimes in May 1949 makes it most unlikely that it had been ignoring for two years similar charges contained on the CROWCASS list."29 The fact remains, however, that although CIC headquarters demanded that its agents in the field take action to dismiss Barbie in May 1949, the latter procrastinated and equivocated, and headquarters, apparently not highly concerned, did nothing to follow through.30 The charges that U.S. authorities were reluctant to hand Barbie over to the French, that they claimed not to know where he was, and that they deliberately covered up their knowledge of these matters are serious charges, and the Ryan Report deals with them in a forthright manner:31
. . . by its false statements to HICOG [the U.S. High Commissioner's Office for Germany] on June 16, 1950 that Barbie's whereabouts were unknown, responsible officials of the Army interfered with the lawful and proper administration of justice. They knowingly obstructed the bona fide efforts of the office of the U.S. High Commission for Germany to carry out its lawful obligation to effect the extradition of war criminals. . . . By knowingly misleading HICOG to believe that Army officials did not know Barbie's whereabouts, those officials wrongfully impeded the due and proper administration of the law in a matter then pending before an official agency of the United States Government.32
Barbie's escape to South America through the Rat Line with the help of CIC agents in January 1951 was but an extension of this coverup.33 As to the possibility of prosecuting those CIC agents who were involved in the coverup and who are still alive, the Ryan Report cites 18 U.S. C. 3281 et seq. to the effect that the statute of limitations makes prosecution of these people impossible after 1977.34 This view is challenged by former Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg, who argues "that the statute of limitations does not apply to CIC officers, who were military personnel at the time, and therefore subject primarily to military law."35 According to Goldberg, "the offenses committed by the CIC officers were so flagrant and violative of military law and tradition that they cannot be excused. Chaotic conditions do not excuse flagrant and intentional violations of military law. The role of the CIC in the Barbie case is not only to be condemned, as Ryan concludes in his report, but also must not be condoned."36
Except for the official report, the literature on Klaus Barbie is largely written in popular, journalistic style, with few sources, no references, and no pretensions of scholarly objectivity. All of these volumes rely heavily on the official report.37 The latter is a model of objectivity and restraint and focuses primarily on the U.S. Army's recruitment and use of Barbie, the French requests for extradition, and his escape and activities (as far as they are of interest to U.S. officials) in Bolivia. Within the narrowly defined limits of its scope the conclusions and recommendations of the report are fair.
An original and interesting thesis, which links the authoritarian prewar Nazi/fascist systems to the postwar neofascist movements in Central and South America and considers Barbie as the connection between the two, is presented by M. Linklater, 1. Hilton, and N. Ascherson in The Nazi Legacy: Klaus Barbie and the International Fascist Connection. The authors point out, correctly, that Barbie was a third-rate SD official, "who hunted, murdered, and tortured for ... [his] masters ... [and that] he was only one among thousands." For these authors, however, importance lies in the fact that he "is an average specimen of fascism . . . 'that mixture of profit-seeking, self- interest, cheap emotion, and organized brutality.'"38 According to these authors, the Barbie case is significant in two respects: first is his service as the link between the dictatorships of the 1930s and the right-wing international terrorism of the 1960s and beyond-"that is the true legacy of fascism."39 And second, that "Barbie's career ... [proves] that justice is often one-eyed in a polarized world..." His anticommunism appealed to Americans as well as to Latin American dictators and, in the end, "compared to his reliability in the global war between ideologies, Barbie's excesses during Hitler's 'anti- Bolshevist' crusade counted for little."40 These authors also claim that Barbie was not the only prominent Nazi to work for the CIC. There was also a certain Herr Mueller, who had been a special prosecutor in Munich and had interrogated the Scholls, leaders of The White Rose Resistance group, who were executed in 1943. This Mueller was the "administrative chief' in the Augsburg office of the CIC.41 Linklater, Hilton, and Ascherson end their challenging volume with a disturbing question. Barbie, they say, was not just a third-rate war criminal of a past era, but "a faithful servant, a useful henchman, a true handyman of our times. He is entitled to stand up in the French courtroom, and to say to the world: 'You all needed me, dictators and democrats, Germans, Americans, and Bolivians. You all paid me for my services and were grateful for them in your time. Why then, am I standing here alone?'"42 The question is rhetorical, but what the authors are saying is that men are often brutal and murderous and that on occasion they use opportunists, soldiers-of-fortune, and even criminals to do their dirty work for them; and that the men behind the scenes are, for the most part, not punished in the end. The issue is not whether those who torture and murder should be punished: of course they should be. The issue is rather why many of those who employed the torturers and murderers and gave the orders-the desk murderers-go unpunished. The conventional answer is that those who give the orders are in a different category from those who do the killing. The former are generals, officers, and statesmen, and conventional morality does not apply to them. By trying the desk murderers, the International Tribunal at Nuremberg challenged but failed to overturn this convention, as the continuing atrocities of the postwar years have amply demonstrated.
John Beattie's The Life and Career of Klaus Barbie: An Eyewitness Record is a book of a different kind. A fast-paced journalistic account (the author is a senior feature writer of the London Daily Star), it never explains who the "eyewitness" is but includes many startling "revelations, " all of them unsupported. The author claims that Barbie worked not for the CIC but under the protection of the U.S. Department of the Army Detachment (DAD), a forerunner of the CIA, and the CIC placed "his [Barbie's] name on the automatic arrest list as a category one war criminal."43 At another time, according to Beattie, Barbie worked for the State Department and still later, perhaps, for the Office of Policy Coordination, "known as a dirty tricks' brigade ... [and] a branch of the State Department."44
Another journalistic account, though somewhat less sensational, is Klaus Barbie: The Butcher of Lyon, by Tom Bower, a producer of documentaries for the BBC. The book's major failing is that when dealing with the political background, the author is unfamiliar with the facts. For example, contrary to Bower's assertion that "virtually nothing had been done to create the machinery to implement . . . [the] solemn promises" of Roosevelt and Churchill "to hunt down and prosecute war criminals,"45 the record shows that at least since 1942 both the United States and Great Britain worked on the problem.46 On the other hand, the book gives a good account of the personnel and organizational chaos prevailing during the early period of the occupation of Germany and of how rival agencies worked at cross purposes and thus made decisions which, 30 years later, are difficult to explain.
Klaus Barbie: The Shocking Story of How the U.S. Used this Nazi War Criminal as an Intelligence Agent, by Erhard Dabringhaus, is a first-hand account by the former intelligence officer who for about four months "handled" Barbie personally. It is a very disappointing book. Written in a superficial and chatty style and without references, it is badly organized, simplistic in its explanations of the political background, and unbelievably naive. According to the author, Barbie, "while working under the protection of the U.S. Army CIC ... had no reason not to tell the truth."47 One of the really "big scoops" that Barbie produced, for which Dabringhaus takes credit, was the discovery that uranium was being mined in the Soviet zone near the Czech border.48 As any European secondary schoolboy could have told him, uranium had been mined in that area almost continuously since the Middle Ages. But beyond these factual shortcomings and interpretive flaws, the book has a more serious fault. As has been noted elsewhere,49 Dabringhaus's excuse for not revealing Barbie's activities in France during the war to CIC headquarters sounds exactly like the excuses of the war criminals at Nuremberg. "Being part of a military organization," Dabringhaus writes, "I had to work within channels; during those turbulent times I had no access to the press, and it was impossible to skip channels to go to higher headquarters direc..."50 If Dabringhaus, a former professor of German language and cultural history at Wayne State University, is typical of CIC personnel in post-World War II Europe, one need not be surprised at the failures of U.S. counterintelligence at the time.
Finally, Quiet Neighbors: Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in America, by Allan A. Ryan, the author of the official report, is not strictly relevant to this essay, although it contains a chapter on Klaus Barbie. The book does, however, provide some revealing sidelights and important background material. The chapter on Barbie is a condensation of the Official Report and includes Ryan's letter to the Attorney General recommending that the U.S. Government apologize to the French for justice delayed.51 The other chapters deal with specific cases of Nazi war criminals in the United States, and provide excellent descriptions of public opinion and of the official attitude toward war criminals in the post-World War Il period.
The implications of the Barbie case-his employment and its subsequent coverup by agencies of the U.S. Government-are serious and farreaching. As the authors of The Nazi Legacy have noted, Barbie was "a faithful servant ... a true handyman of our times. . . "52 used without scruples by anyone who needed him. The issue of morality never entered the minds of those who employed him; expedience was the watchword, and "the end justifies the means" an accepted standard. In addition, the amount of bureaucratic confusion at the end of the war was substantial and communications between different parts of the same organization were often poor. This was particularly true in the case of the U.S. High Commissioner's Office not knowing (and not caring to find out) that the U.S. Army European Command's CIC detachment was employing Barbie and, in the case of the French, the Foreign Ministry's ignorance of the Surete's repeated interrogations of Barbie in the U.S. zone. Finally, there was the overriding preoccupation with anticommunism, pressure to produce information about communist activities no matter what the cost and circumstances.
The question of morality in the affairs of government is an old and complicated one and the moralistic flavor of American diplomacy goes back to the beginnings of the Republic. As Arthur Schlesinger has pointed out, "Saints can be pure, but statesmen must be responsible. As trustees for others, they must defend interests and compromise principles. In consequence, politics is a field where practical and prudential judgment must have priority over simple moral verdict."53
The post-World War II period was the beginning of America's global involvement and a time of worldwide ideological struggle for which neither the American government nor its officials were prepared. These men fought this struggle, quite naturally, with their prejudices and their lack of sophistication and training. Since then, American attitudes have changed and greater accountability is expected in all phases of government. "It would be naive to think that this greater accountability will, by itself, prevent another Barbie episode. But it is not naive to believe that we have seen the end of the attitude that anything is permissible, including the obstruction of justice, if it falls under the cloak of intelligence."54 In the light of recent CIA involvements in Central America, this assessment may seem optimistic, but there is little doubt that the experience of the past has heightened the public's awareness of moral issues and the government's sensitivity to the importance of such concerns.
NOTES
1. The New York Times, 3 Mar. 1985, p. E5.
2. This and the following are based on Magnus Linklater et al., The Nazi Legacy, ch. 1, and on Klaus Barbie and the U.S. Government: A Report to the Attorney General of the United States, prepared by Allan A. Ryan, Jr., section 1, henceforth cited as the Ryan Report.
3. M.R. Marrus and R.O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York, 1981), p. 336, and Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York, 1973), pp. 182, 185ff.
5. Ibid. ' p. 21. For a short description of Barbie's activities, see Allan A. Ryan, Jr., Quiet Neighbors: Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in America, pp. 274-75.
8. Linklater et al., The Nazi Legacy, pp. 324-25.
9. Ryan Report, pp. 22, 48n., and section IVB.
10. During an interrogation in March 1948, Barbie told CIC officers that he was arrested by British authorities in November 1946, but escaped. Ryan Report, pp. 52-54.
11. The Seventh United States Army in France and Germany, 1944-1945: Report of Operations, 3 vols. (Heidelberg, 1946), 3: 809-10. See also Linklater et al., p. 135.
14. Ibid., pp. 37-38; pp. 23-27 and Appendix IV for details of CIC organization in the U.S. zone.
15. Ibid., p. 38. It should be noted that Barbie was not the only war criminal the U.S. Government employed, nor was the U.S. the only country to make use of war criminals and former SS men. John Loftus, The Belarus Secret (New York, 1982), pp. 48-49, 57, 59, 63, 66, 77n., 85. (Like most accounts on this subject, Loftus's information has to be accepted with reservations; however, there is sufficient corroborative evidence for some of his points to make reading his book worthwhile). See also Ryan, Quiet Neighbors, pp. 234-35.
16. The following is based on Alfred Grosser, Germany in Our Time: A Political History of the Postwar Years (New York, 1971), and John Gimbel, The American Occupation of Germany (Palo Alto, 1968).
17. Ibid., ch.1 , esp. pp. 7-8, 35-36.
18. Writing in the New York Times, 19 Oct. 1945, Drew Middleton reported that many of the Baltic people in the DP camps, most of whom spoke English, "have made a good impression on the American Military Government's officers." Quoted by Ryan, Quiet Neighbors, p. 14.
19. "Keeping . . . Nazi collaborators [out of the U.S.] was not a high priority." Ibid., p. 28. See also, Nazis And Axis Collaborators Were Used To Further U.S. Anti- Communist Objectives in Europe-Some Immigrated to the United States, Report by the Comptroller General of the United States, GAO/GGD-85-66, 28 June 1985.
20. This and the following are based on G. G. Lasley, Project Paperclip (New York, 1971). For a recent, updated account of Project Paperclip, see L. Hunt, "U.S. cover-up of Nazi scientists," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Apr. 1985): 16-24.
21. Lasley, Project Paperclip, pp. 71-72.
22. Ibid., p. 177. Arthur Rudolph, a German rocket engineer brought to the United States with Wernher von Braun in 1945, was accused in 1984 of having worked thousands of slave laborers to death at a German underground V-2 rocket assembly line during the war. Rather than face charges, he left the United States voluntarily and returned to his native Hamburg. (Washington Post, 19 Oct. 1984, p. A 3; 6 Nov. 1984, p. A 20.)
23. This and the following are based on John W. Powell, "Japan's Germ Warfare: The U.S. Cover-up of a War Crime," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 12, no. 4 (Oct./Dec. 1980): 2-17.
28. The charges surfaced when French newspapers in Paris and Dijon published stories about Barbie's war crimes and informed their readers that Barbie was at that time, May 1949, "1 a peaceable businessman in Munich, U.S. zone,"' and that French Veterans and Resistance Organizations, as well as the "Victims of Nazism," had sent a letter to the American ambassador "demanding the immediate arrest of Barbie and trial before the [French] Military Tribunal" (Ryan Report, p. 71). A year earlier, in May and June 1948, agents of the French Surete had interrogated Barbie in Frankfurt and Munich in connection with the treason trial of Rene Hardy in Paris. (On Hardy, see D. Schoenbrun, Soldiers of the Night [New York, 19801, pp. 270-83, 285-89.) The French apparently questioned Barbie only about the French Resistance and not about his connection with any war crimes (Ryan Report, pp. 67-68). Following the accounts of the Paris and Dijon newspapers, the French mission in Munich requested that the Office of the U.S. Military Government in Germany (OMGUS) initiate an investigation and turn Maus Barbie over to French authorities because he was wanted for war crimes (Ryan Report, p. 84). One of the reasons the CIC was reluctant to turn Barbie over to the French was the widespread belief that the French intelligence service was an extension of the Soviet espionage system (Linklater et al., p. 141).
31. Next to hiring him, the failure of U.S. authorities to hand Barbie over to the French and their denial of knowledge of his whereabouts constitutes the heart of the case; the U.S. Government eventually apologized to the French Government for the coverup in August 1983. In a note to the U.S. Attorney General, Robert Badinter, the French minister of justice, reported that the official American report (and presumably the American apology) "reveals a concern for the investigation of the truth that honors your country" (Ryan, Quiet Neighbors, pp. 322-23). However, the French newspaper Liberation had another opinion: "This American acknowledgement must be all the more painful in a period in which moral values are being stressed by the Reagan administration.... The United States, in apologizing to France for having protected the torturer of one of its national heroes, jean Moulin, is in the position of an adult who confesses to a childish misdemeanor while preaching universal virtue." Quoted by F. du Plessix Gray, "When Memory Goes," Vanity Fair (Nov. 1983):122.
33. The Rat Line was an underground railroad first used by the U.S. CIC detachment in Vienna in 1945 to help undercover agents who had worked for the Allies to escape from the Russian zone of occupation in Austria to the U.S. zone and then to Italy. Later on, skilled refugees, Nazi collaborators, and Soviet defectors were moved through the line to Genoa and from there to South America. (Linklater et al., The Nazi Legacy, pp. 183ff.; Ryan Report, pp. 141-46.)
35. Arthur J. Goldberg, "Klaus Barbie and the United States Government," Harvard Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law Review 19, no. 1 (Winter 1984): 1-14. The quotation is on p. 6.
37. As indicated above, there are two editions. The one published by the U.S. Government Printing Office is typed, paperbound, and in two volumes; the first volume contains the report and the second volume contains photocopies of documents, which are in some instances difficult to read. The other edition, published by University Publications of America, is a hardbound, one-volume, printed work, identical in content to the government edition. It has, however, different pagination and the legibility of the documents is much poorer; the document appendix has been paginated.
38. Linklater et al., The Nazi Legacy, pp. 16-17.
43. John Beattie, The Life and Career of Klaus Barbie, pp. 139-40.
44. Ibid., p. 146. This information, although not so acknowledged, is taken from Loftus, The Belarus Secret, pp. 8ff., though the connection between OPC and Barbie is made by Beattie.
45. Tom Bower, Klaus Barbie: The Butcher of Lyon, p. 111.
46. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1943, vol. 1, p. 402, n. 1; ibid., 1944, vol. 1, p. 1227, n. 1, p. 1265, n. 1.
47. Erhard Dabringhaus, Klaus Barbie, p. 148.
49. The Washington Post, 2 July 1984, p. C 8.
50. Dabringhaus, Klaus Barbie, p. 88.
51. Ryan, Quiet Neighbors, p. 322.
52. Linklater et al., The Nazi Legacy, p. 331.
53. Arthur Schlesinger, "National Interests and Moral Absolutes," in Ethics and World Politics: Four Perspectives, ed. E.W. Lefever (Baltimore, 1972), p. 24.
