Klaus Barbie

From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia Nikolaus Klaus Barbie 25 October 1913 23 September 1991 was an SSHauptsturmführer rank equivalent to army captain and Gestapo member He was known as the Butcher of Lyon for having personally tortured French prisoners of the Gestapo while stationed in Lyon France After the war United States intelligence services employed him for their antiMarxist efforts and also helped him escape to South America The Bundesnachrichtendienst the West German intelligence agency recruited him and he may have helped the CIA capture Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara in 1967 Barbie is suspected of having had a hand in the Bolivian coup détat orchestrated by Luis García Meza Tejada in 1980 After the fall of the dictatorship Barbie no longer had the protection of the Bolivian government and in 1983 was extradited to France where he was convicted of crimes against humanity He died of cancer in prison on 23 September 1991