The Butcher of Lyons

So, it has been a while since I did a book review, but today it's time.

Last week I finished; Klaus Barbie: The Butcher of Lyons by Tom Bower.

Klaus Barbie (1913 – 1991) was a Hauptsturmführer (captain) in the SD, subsection IV, better know as the Gestapo. This probably tells you quite a lot already.

After a short intro, the book sketches out his childhood and how he came to join the SS. This is followed by his early service culminating in Barbie being posted to Lyons. This section is a hard read as the details of the interrogation techniques he used are pretty stomach churning. But it would have been a mistake to gloss over it too much, as it's important to be aware of what these people did.

This section also details the French Resistance groups and Barbie's intelligence work to find and break them.

As the war ends, the book goes through Barbie's struggles to evade the Allies and how he in 1946-47 starts to work for the US CIC, or Counter Intelligence Corps. As relations between the Soviet Union and the rest of the Allies rapidly fell apart, and paranoia over Stalin's plans for Europe explodes, Barbie found himself invaluable to the American effort to spy on and suppress German communist parties.

Finally when pressure from the French became too much, and the CIC could no longer convincingly lie to cover for Barbie, they spirited him away to South America through Italy.

Barbie sets himself up as a businessman and intelligence officer/adviser for right wing governments in South America, particularly Bolivia. Since Bolivia's founding in 1825 they have had 190 changes of government, ususally through coups, so Barbie had no shortage of work.
Finally, thanks to the untiring efforts of the Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, Barbie was extradited to France to stand trial for all the people he tortured and sent to their deaths.

This is where the book ends, as it was published in 1984 before his sentencing to life in prison in 1987. The kindle version I read is a reissue, and it would have been nice to have an addendum of post '84 events, but that is why we have Wikipedia.

As history books go, this one was a very easy read. It never got bogged down but it never loses the important details. It also manages to keep a good sense of a neutral perspective, reporting but never editorializing. This is of course not an entirely easy thing to do with this subject matter.

Finally this book gives an interesting insight in the unwillingness the Allies had in actually running down and punishing Nazi criminals. A speech by Roosevelt and later Churchill made it an unavoidable issue, but officials on both sides of the Atlantic really didn't want to meddle in that. Sure, the big-wigs had to go, but beyond that, many were content with leaving things as they were. This attitude coupled with the communist fueled paranoia really explains why and how the US came to protect a man like Barbie.

If the subject matter interests you, I absolutely recommend this book, both for the quality of research but also for being well written.

That's that. Join me again next time for more Eccentric Spheres, and have yourself a great week!