Original subtitles

[NEIL ASCHERSON SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] I don't think Barbie

was destined to be

an evil monster from the word "go" at all.

He was a poor boy.

Uh, his father was a village schoolmaster,

ferocious disciplinarian,

eventually he drank too much-- a lot of pain from a war wound.

He suffered as a boy...

from a big lack of self-esteem.

He wanted to matter,

perhaps wanted a secret to respect himself by.

-[MAN CHANTING IN GERMAN] -[DRUM PLAYING]

-[CHANTS] Sieg heil! -[GROUP] Heil!

-[MAN] Sieg... -[ALL CHANTING] Heil!

NEIL: He was the sort of person, like millions of others

who were ready to be just overthrown

by the Nazi movement.

His wish to be important came out

when he was still really a schoolboy.

He was employed as a petty agent

to spy on his school comrades

by the Nazi organization in '33 already.

I think his capacity

for being cruel, brutal--

his desire to master and exploit

other human beings, you know,

and his study of the techniques for doing this--

I think this is a kind of trade he learned.

I don't think he was more anti-Semitic than, um...

people in his background.

There was a Jewish population in Trier.

He would have known a lot of Jews,

he would have known the chief rabbi, Altmann,

when he went by in the street.

And of course, many, many years later,

when the rabbi had been long dead

in the Auschwitz gas chambers,

um, Klaus Barbie stole his name

as his first alias.

[INTERVIEWER SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] How do you feel about being

the daughter of a man

who is described as the "Butcher of Lyon"?

What does that mean to you?

We never came to know why he was called "butcher."

Well, because they say he was a great torturer.

Yes, but who-- who invented that?

-I tried to discover it. -INTERVIEWER: Well, his victims--

And by the way, the butchers in Lyon are very upset,

because it's an honorable profession,

isn't it? They are.

[RUMBLING]

[SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] He had an endearing trick of holding my hand

and there was uh, a wound here--

there was a little piece of sinew or tendon--

and he used to just twiddle that to hurt me.

And as the interrogation proceeded

then he would squeeze my fractured shoulder.

-INTERVIEWER: Hard? -Hard, yes, to make me scream.

And then, with a truncheon he would just...

uh, hit me over the head

not to break my skull

but just to numb me, you know.

And, well, I mean, say,

that is the treatment I received for three months.

NEIL: People would recover consciousness

and then find this guy standing over them

flicking his riding crop against his boots

in the classic sort of filmic Nazi way.

But he was rather like that. He was an ironic man.

[RAYMOND AUBRAC SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] People believe that

10,000 Jews were taken under his orders to the death camps

with the help of,

pity to say, a great many French people.

[ROBERT PAXTON SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] Jean Moulin was erected

into this eminent figure by de Gaulle.

Moulin was reburied in the Pantheon,

in the '60s, uh,

when de Gaulle was president of the Republic,

in another one of these grand gestures

to give the French once more a sense of their--

the grandeur of their history and the importance of the Resistance.

[SNIFFLES]

[SOBBING]

[SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] Of course, resistants also were in a way innocent,

but they were acting against the-- the German power.

But children were acting against nobody.

So Barbie was the only one

who sent Gestapo men to arrest children.

[GUNFIRE]

[ROBERT TAYLOR SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] In a way, one could almost

not do anything wrong in Germany at that time.

It was chaos, confusion, corruption.

For example, in Northern Germany there were gangs

of displaced persons,

deserters from various armies--

Russian, English, American--

who would hijack trains and ship them down to Italy.

[EARL BROWNING SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] When I was a regional commander

in Bremen,

I heard about Barbie because he had escaped arrest

by the CIC in Marburg.

So we were told to be on the lookout for him.

He was operating as "Klaus Becker"

but he was identified by an associate

from the SS and he was arrested.

The arresting officer put him in the jeep

and drove off to his office to interrogate him,

and he jumped out of the car.

The agent pulled his gun and shot at him

but only hit him in the finger and he escaped.

He was helping to organize

an underground SS organization

very much as described

by Fredrick Forsyth in"The Odessa File."

He went on to Hamburg and he was captured there by the British,

who said, "We are not Americans.

You won't get away from us."

He had two people with him and they were each put in separate cells

but within three days they had all escaped from the British in Hamburg.

So he was an escape artist, no question about it.

[SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] There was never any shortage,

particularly within the US military,

of people who saw Soviet communism

as a threat to civilization itself.

Prior to the war, some of them had seen Soviet communism

as more dangerous than German Nazism

and favored aligning with German-- with Nazism.

People who knew the most about German communists

were the SS

who-- who had been coping with them

even before World War II.

[SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] The use of Nazis was a key part

of the US strategy

of fighting the Cold War.

It was not an overt strategy,

and that's, I think, one of the very troubling parts about it,

aside from the moral issue, it's that this was done in secret.

I had a man that I was working closely with-- Kurt Merck,

former captain German Army Intelligence.

Merck told me pretty much who Barbie was

and he warned me about the probability

that he was on the CROWCASS register.

He warned me that he was arrestable

and left it up to me.

INTERVIEWER: Why did you feel that it was worth taking that risk?

The information he could supply.

[KAI HERMANN SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] They admired--

these officers admired him. He was an idealist,

he was tough, he was strong, he didn't--

you know, he knows to interrogate and...

[STAMMERS]

He cannot do the same things he did in France,

he cannot do now, but he was still very efficient, you know.

I don't really think he was a sadist,

I think he just did whatever he had to do, he...

he was very proud of his ability to interrogate people

and he knew how to do it.

And he used whatever force was necessary.

[ALLAN RYAN SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] The Americans knew

that Barbie had been a SS official in Lyon.

They did not know, uh, until later,

two years later,

uh, that he was wanted

for war crimes by the French.

Bullshit, yes.

This is a fair description of that claim.

Why? It's because Barbie's role

in the murder of Jean Moulin

had been front-page news in French newspapers

for the previous two years.

The claim that the CIC as an institution--

most particularly the parts of the CIC

that were interested in the French communist party--

were not reading the French communist party newspapers,

is a transparently false claim.

[SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] In 1948,

I was a special agent with CIC,

that's our Counter Intelligence Corps in occupied Germany,

I was stationed in Augsburg

and as such since I spoke fluent German,

I was assigned to handle a network

of German informants.

Among them was Klaus Barbie

and Klaus Barbie was later on,

I discovered that he was wanted for murder by the French

and that I reported this

to my superiors

and they told me to keep nice and quiet.

"He's still valuable. When he's no longer valuable

we will turn him over to the French."

I thought that I was gonna get a promotion

when I told them about Barbie and they told me to keep quiet.

There was the idea that the ends justify the means.

But that's of course a Nazi idea and a totalitarian idea.

Secondly, um, the idea was, well,

the Nazis knew something about the Russians.

Well, wait a minute, who won the war?

I mean, how do you decide that they're all of a sudden experts

when they were defeated by the Russians?

[SIMPSON SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] Reinhard Gehlen was chief

of German military intelligence

on the Eastern front during World War II.

During the invasion of the USSR,

the Nazi forces, the Blitzkrieg,

captured hundreds of thousands of Soviet POWs

and they put them in these camps

where they were systematically starved to death.

Gehlen's guys went to the camps

to interrogate these prisoners.

If the prisoners cooperated, maybe they got a little bit of food.

If they didn't cooperate, they starved to death.

Something of the order of seven million people died in these camps.

So Gehlen was a scientist of atrocity.

After the war,

Gehlen was recruited by US intelligence

and most particularly by Allen Dulles

who eventually became the director of the CIA.

We've been able to identify at least 100 war criminals

who were part of his network.

The other problem is that the Nazi war criminals had an agenda.

The more they inflated the Russian threat,

the more you needed them

because they were quote-unquote the "experts".

CHRISTOPHER: Gehlen portrayed what was going on

-in Eastern Europe after 1945... -[AIRPLANE WHIRRING]

...as though the Red Army of 1945

still existed,

and was still pursuing the same goal

of overrunning all of Germany

and eventually all of France, all of Italy, and the rest of Western Europe

and thereby conquering the world.

One of the things that this led to

was a series of dramatic conflicts

in 1948 and 1949

that eventually led to the permanent breaking

of any notion of US-Soviet cooperation.

[SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] I remember him taking me to one particular spot

which we uncovered and...

uh, dug it out and there were rifles,

small arms, grenades,

all nicely wrapped in Cosmoline

and he said, "We have thousands of these all over the country."

And that sort of made me a little suspicious

and I reported this and they said,

"We know this. they're all working for us

in case the communists come across the Iron Curtain."

[PATRICIA McSHERRY SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] The stay-behind armies

which were created after World War II were secret,

anti-communist, paramilitary formations

that were hidden from democratic governments.

Klaus Barbie was one of the organizers

of the German stay-behind.

He was instrumental in recruiting other Nazis.

That was part of a CIA operation.

And the stay-behind armies were supposed to, theoretically,

prepare for a Soviet invasion of western Europe.

However, there was an even more secret element

to their function,

which was to prevent the Left

from coming to power electorally.

When you provide weapons

to Nazi war criminals,

it's a very, uh, dangerous thing to do,

and that's what the US government did.

INTERVIEWER: What the--

How many, you know, who they were,

what's happened to those weapons, now,

are they still around?

I don't know the answer to that.

So a lot of evidence has come out, for example,

in Italy, um, in Greece, uh, in Germany,

in various countries where the stay-behind armies

were involved in destabilizing democratic organizations,

uh, unions, um,

uh, carrying out paramilitary kind of shock actions.

-[EXPLOSION] -[GLASS SHATTERING]

They knew that Barbie was working for the Americans.

The Americans acknowledged that to the French.

Uh, the French said,

"Will you sent him to Paris, so he can testify?"

And the Americans said,

"No. Uh, would you like to come to Stuttgart

and you can talk to him there?"

[REPORTER SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] Agent John William says

the French agents were furious at Barbie.

They even said, "You'll never leave this room alive."

And he swore at 'em

and pounded the table and shook the chairs,

and made all kinds of commotion and threat.

But, uh, he felt rather secure

that he was in US custody

and that he wasn't gonna be turned over to the French.

Their questions of him

dealt entirely with the matter of René Hardy.

There was never any interrogation

about what Barbie himself had done.

And there's a number of reasons one could speculate

is to why that's true.

EARL: The French never bothered

to make an official application for Barbie.

They didn't make any effort.

The assumption that we made was that they really didn't want him.

They were just going through motions.

[SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] Barbie had recruited

two senior French politicians.

The guys were famous after World War II.

They were secretly Barbie's informants during the war.

So, two of the most senior people in France

were traitors.

JOHN: Henri Lebrun

and Francois Poncet.

Poncet was the French high commissioner of Germany.

Germany was run by a pool

of Allied commissions, if you will,

and the French representative was Klaus Barbie's informant.

So all the requests for Klaus Barbie

that came up to the high commission

were quietly rerouted.

SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] He did advise the CIC and trained them

and he got to know the CIC, uh,

as well as anybody in that unit in Augsburg.

That was why we were reluctant

to have him go back to the French.

INTERVIEWER: What do you mean he "trained them"?

What did he train them in?

Techniques.

How to solve problems and, uh,

how to get things done.

He was a very clever man and...

he'd had a lot of experience in France.

[SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] That'’s when the army decided

to put him in the so-called "Ratline."

[PETER McFARREN SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] He found a place

that received him well--

the government was conservative at that time, you know,

there were several ex-Nazis or Nazi sympathizers

who lived here in Bolivia,

um, there was a large German community.

[SHOPKEEPER SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] As far as I know, he even arrived here

with a Jewish name.

"Altmann" has a German-Jewish sound to it.

As I understand, he even dealt in businesses

with other Jewish people who lived here,

so he mingled with Jewish folks

who ignored that he was one of those Nazis.

[COW MOOING]

[ISABEL HILTON SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] You have two factors

which Barbie is not very keen on--

he'’s working for a Jew,

and he'’s working with people he regards as inferior--

Indians.

and by the account of his friends in La Paz

he behaves impeccably

and keeps his political views to himself

and teaches the Indians to wash and that kind of thing.

[CLAMORING]

[GUNSHOT]

[REPORTER SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] After months of turbulence,

after a revolution that brought a bitter and bloody gun battle

to this very plaza,

a military junta has now taken over control

of Bolivia's government offices behind me.

The strong man of the new junta is the president,

US-trained Air Force General René Barrientos.

[INTERVIEWER SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] Just how long

have you been searching for Che Guevara

and in which countries have you been searching for him, as it were?

Well, we have different people in different countries, you know, working all over.

Especially in Latin America and...

Southeast Asia and down through that way.

And many of us, you know, some have been here before

[SCOFFS] and we never could find him,

or he was always a step ahead of us.

But here, I guess his luck ran out.

[HELICOPTER BLADES WHIRRING]

[INDISTINCT CHATTERING]

[JOHANNES SCHNEIDER-MERCK SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] So, I knew him

as "Klaus Altmann Hansen."

He was introduced as a German from Bolivia.

We were in New Year and we were sitting in a large group, you know,

on this long veranda table

with Schwend sitting as the boss on the top side,

Altmann Hansen was sitting here, his wife was sitting there.

We were talking.

During the conversation, I just observed, I said...

"Just to believe how this bastard Hitler, you know,

had actually betrayed until the very end, you know,

the idealism of the German youth."

Barbie-- or Altmann Hansen-- suddenly jumped up and shouted, you know,

[IN ENGLISH] And I got up and said, "Heil Hitler!" Like this, just laughing.

And then I noticed that Schwend was not laughing.

Schwend just looked at him and he made a sign with his hand--

"Sit down, be quiet. Don't, don't."

[MUMBLES] And he sat down, and I said,

"Oh, Jesus Christ. He actually means it."

Transmaritima Boliviana.

This was a business

and I'm sure a lot of people made a lot of money off Transmaritima,

because you were selling the Bolivian flag

as other countries had done like Liberia

uh, so you would have ships going all over the world

with the Bolivian flag. They could do what they wanted.

And it was a great cover for a lot of activities including arms trafficking.

[SERGE KLARSFELD SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] Here we have the photo

of Klaus Altmann

in an administration council

of TransmaritimaBoliviana.

We showed that to-- to--

to several people and we brought

the photo to the French police

in order to see if that man was that man.

So, they made the examination and they told us

that, uh, the man in 1970

is the man in 1943.

[IN ENGLISH] We asked the French government to ask extradition to Bolivia

and they asked for the extradition again.

I found another mother whose children also had been deported

from the same children's home.

There were two girls deported.

[BEATE IN ENGLISH] There was never a feeling of, you know, uh, hate,

but more a feeling of justice has to be done, you know.

She could not stand the fact that he was living in La Paz

free and she, all her life was broken,

the fact that she has lost all her family.

[GUNFIRE]

[SIMPSON SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] He's an entrepreneur of terrorism.

He's an entrepreneur of...

a particular form of

what was called anti-communist violence.

Now, you need to understand that the anti-communist violence for the most part,

particularly in South America, was not directed at communists.

It was directed at schoolteachers,

it was directed at labor officials

who had some vague leftist point of view.

That was the "communist" in the Barbie world view.

[sobbing]

[SOFT PIANO MUSIC PLAYING]

["YOU ARE MY HEART'S DELIGHT" PLAYING]

MALE SINGER: ♪ You are my heart's delight

♪ And where you are

♪ I long to be

♪ You make my darkness bright

♪ When like a star

♪ You shine on me

♪ Shine, then My whole life through ♪

♪ Your life divine

♪ Bids me hope anew

♪ That dreams of mine

♪ May at last come true

♪ And I shall hear you whisper

♪ I love you

[McFARREN SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] I was trying to find Klaus Barbie,

I was still working as a freelancer with theNew York Times.

After several hours of showing his photo around,

we were able to locate his house.

I am pretty sure it was this house here.

And so we knocked insistently on the door

and I saw Barbie

on one of the windows over there.

And, uh, we shouted,

hoping that he would open the door and we could talk to him

and about 15-20 minutes later, a van showed up

and the van parked right over here,

and, uh, it was an unmarked van

and five or six, um, well-armed paramilitary showed up

with, uh, with machine guns

and very aggressively told us to get into the van,

and obviously we were very, very concerned

and we were taken to the seventh,

um, regiment, in Cochabamba,

military regiment that was then headed by General Vildoso

who later on will become president of Bolivia.

And we were interrogated there for several hours

and, uh, the biggest concern of the interrogators

was how did we find out where Klaus Barbie lived?

During the interrogations, they said that

if we did not tell them who was our source

they would pull our fingernails out. So they were pretty aggressive.

[GUNSHOT]

[CHANTING IN SPANISH]

[EXPLOSION]

[INDISTINCT CHATTERING]

[GERMAN MUSIC RECORDING PLAYING]

[IN ENGLISH] The minister of cocaine is the central figure

in the most lucrative cocaine operation in the world in Bolivia.

The source of 80 percent of cocaine on this earth.

It's impossible to pinpoint exactly

how much money he and his countrymen make from the drug trade.

The best guess is that it's around a billion dollars a year.

I think Arce Gomez has got some real problems, Mike.

He's in the big league of transporting cocaine

all over the world, certainly to the United States.

What you're saying is that the government,

they are all accomplices in a cocaine smuggling scheme.

[SPEAKING IN SPANISH]

We cannot be involved in the drug trafficking business for one reason--

we are upright people.

That is why we can speak with a clear strong voice on this point.

We hold the truth in our hands.

[McFARREN SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] He did not really have security.

He described Alvaro De Castro as a bodyguard,

I think he was a very good friend and adviser.

He worked with him on several of the deals.

But he wasn't really there as a bodyguard, and he really didn't need it.

He walked the streets freely,

and if somebody really wanted to go after him, or something, they knew where to find him.

Klaus Barbie, known as "The Butcher of Lyon,"

was seized in downtown La Paz Bolivia

where he had been living since 1957.

[IN ENGLISH] At that time I was minister of Justice

and I remember calling up

the director of the penitentiary administration,

telling him,

"When Barbie will arrive in Lyon

put him in Fort Montluc.

Because during the war,

that's where his victims were. That's where he tortured them."

[GUARD SPEAKING FRENCH]

[SPECTATORS MURMURING]

[MESSNER SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] I don't see my father as a butcher.

I see him as a very kind, very...

very sweet father,

very tender.

And for me,

all those accusations and defamations

are still a war consequence.

Maybe I'm feeling like in the war again.

For us, the war hasn't finished.

[APPLAUDING, CHEERING]

[HOLTZMAN SPEAKING IN ENGLISH] Look at Iraq, it's a good example.

You can look at Afghanistan-- how to fight the Russians.

We used the most extreme

fundamentalist Islamic groups.

We were never really willing

to use people who were just simply democrats.

[LAUGHS]

HOLTZMAN: If the ends justify the means,

and if you're willing to use Nazi war criminals,

then where do you draw the line ever?

[INDISTINCT CHATTER]

[INDISTINCT CHATTER] [ASCHERSON

SPEKING IN ENGLISH] States and governments do hire people

to do horrible things--

torture, interrogation, sometimes murder.

And they hire them on the basis

that they can be denied or dropped.

I didn't feel pity for Barbie.

I felt a disgust with the established world,

the world of states and governments.

Barbie was entitled to say, "You all needed me,

and yet now, here I am in this court alone.

There's a hypocrisy here."

And I felt that.