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Home , Beate Klarsfeld, Klaus Barbie

Barbie Trial

Trial of SS officer , who was known as "the butcher of ." The trial, which aroused interest and controversy all over the world, was held in Lyons, , from May to July 1987. Barbie joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and the SS in 1935. In 1942 he began working for the . In November of that year he was sent to Lyons to serve as the city's Gestapo chief. During the 21 months in that post, Barbie was responsible for many horrific actions; he even carried out some of the atrocities himself (hence his nickname). One of the most notorious things he did was to torture to death the famed hero of the , . After the war Barbie worked for the government as a secret agent in . He moved to La Paz, in 1951, and became a Bolivian citizen in 1957 under the false name, Klaus Altmann. Despite the fact that Barbie was safely settled in South America, the French government tried him for war crimes twice during the 1950s. In both cases he was convicted and sentenced to death. In 1971 French tracked Barbie to La Paz. Over the next few years the French government repeatedly requested that the Bolivian authorities extradite Barbie to France; they finally agreed to cooperate in 1983, and Barbie was returned to France. Barbie was charged with various , including a raid on the Lyons headquarters of the Union of French Jews on February 9, 1943, in which 85 Jews were arrested and sent to Auschwitz the of 44 Jewish children whom Barbie's Gestapo men found to be hiding in the village of , more than 43 miles from Lyons; and ordering the last from Lyons to Auschwitz on August 11, 1944. Altogether, Barbie was charged with being responsible for the deportation of 842 people from Lyons, some Jewish and the rest French resistance fighters. Barbie was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He died in jail in 1990.

______1/1 Shoah Resource Center, The International School for Holocaust Studies