Nadene Goldfoot
Seventy-Seven (77) years ago, World War 2 came to an end on September 2, 1945 that had lasted for 6 ungodly and inhumane years since September 1, 1939. Roosevelt had just died on the 12th of April and Harry S. Truman was the president within the next 5 months. Roosevelt had been in power for the past 12 years!
That means there are 3 generations of people who didn't have to live under such insanity. World War II Casualties: Estimates suggest that some 75 million people died in World War II, including about 20 million military personnel and 40 million civilians. But then, the craziness of war never ends for very long, does it? We've had plenty since then. Evilness seems to come out of certain people, and it did with the Nazis.
One of the worst was a German-Frenchman named Klaus Barbie. You'd never suspect one of their own, but it happened. The Barbie family came from Merzig, in the Saar near the French border. It is likely that his patrilineal ancestors were French Roman Catholics named Barbier who left France at the time of the French Revolution.
He's now a well-known sadist who loved to torture people. That's why he's remembered as the "Butcher of Lyon". I'll get to that. The sad fact is that he was aided by the USA.
Klaus Barbie, the former Nazi Gestapo chief of German-occupied Lyon, France, went on trial in Lyon more than four decades after the end of World War II. He was charged with 177 crimes against humanity.
As chief of Nazi Germany’s secret police in Lyon, Barbie sent 7,500 French Jews and French Resistance partisans to concentration camps, and executed some 4,000 others. Among other atrocities, Barbie personally tortured and executed many of his prisoners. In 1943, he captured Jean Moulin, the leader of the French Resistance, and had him slowly beaten to death. He might be called a Sadomasachist. Sadomasochism is the giving and receiving of pleasure from acts involving the receipt or infliction of pain or humiliation. Practitioners of sadomasochism may seek sexual pleasure from their acts.
In 1944, Barbie rounded up 44 young Jewish children and their seven teachers hiding in a boarding house in Izieu and deported them to the Auschwitz extermination camp. Of the 41-51, only one teacher survived. In August 1944, as the Germans prepared to retreat from Lyon, he organized one last deportation train that took hundreds of people to the death camps.
At the time, the USA was more interested in stopping Communism and had the CIA and the US CIC (US Army's counterintelligence Corps) putting all their time and effort into this. This is because, in the middle of the worst atrocities ever imagined to Jews, they thought that the Soviets were their primary enemy and threw common sense to stop Germans aside, even as one landed in their lap.
On April 6, 1944, German trucks traveled 50 miles from Lyon to the village of Iaieu, stopping at a farmhouse owned by a French woman, Sabina Zlatin, who was born in Poland but had been naturalized as French now. Chances are that she was Jewish, being born in Poland I have found Jewish Zlatins in the USA.
Barbie received word that she had been smuggling Jewish children over the border into nearby Switzerland. Reports were that she was harboring more young Jews. It was a neighboring farmer of German descent who betrayed the safe house. He had hired a teen-age boy from the children's home, somehow found out that the children were Jewish, then apparently passed the information to German troops garrisoned in a nearby town.
To the Nazis, she was La Maison d'Izieu with a secret home for Jewish orphans and refugees. She had been undiscovered for over a year. With Barbie there now, her farm was surrounded and they grabbed the children, ages under 3 to 17, and hurled and kicked them into the back of the vehicles "like a sack of potatoes." People in the vicinity could hear them screaming. His love of torture seemed to be passed on to those who worked for him.
Some children saw the trucks coming and ran away, but the Nazis trapped 44 children and 7 adults and all were arrested. They were then loaded onto a train-a cattle truck no doubt, and shipped to Auschwitz to be gassed. Sabina wasn't arrested, but her husband, Miron Zlatin, was shipped to the Tallinn death camp in Estonia where he was executed by a firing squad.
Barbie wrote his report; "This morning the Jewish children's home "Children's Colony" in Iaieu-ain was liquidated. Altogether, 41 children, aged 3 to 13 were arrested. It was possible to arrest the whole Jewish staff consisting of 10 persons including 5 women. Cash or other valuables could not be seized." Almost everyone was murdered in a death camp. Only one lived to tell this story and that was Lea Feldblum, one of the adult administrators. She said, "The tiniest ones cried, the others sang...they burned all of them."
Such a man with his reputation of taking glee in murdering innocent children was employed and protected by the USA government. He took no attempt to conceal his true identity. He had killed 200 Frenchmen himself, hung 'em up by the thumbs in the basement of his headquarters," one CIC agent later recalled of his 8 months working with Barbie. The CIC agent even reported this to headquarters but their reply was that they knew all about it but he's was still valuable to them.
This "Butcher of Lyon", Klaus Barbie, was called this for having personally tortured prisoners of the Gestapo—primarily Jews and members of the French Resistance—while stationed in Lyon under the collaborationist Vichy regime. After the war, United States intelligence services, which employed him for his anti-Marxist efforts, aided his escape to Bolivia, where he advised the regime on how to repress opposition through torture.
The Vichy regime was: Vichy France, which is the common name of the French State headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain during World War II. The regime was authoritarian, xenophobic, antisemitic, corporatist and traditionalist in nature. It adopted a policy of collaboration with Nazi Germany, which occupied its northern and western portions before occupying the remainder of Metropolitan France in November 1942. Though Paris was ostensibly its capital, the Vichy government established itself in the resort town of Vichy in the unoccupied "Free Zone" (zone libre), where it remained responsible for the civil administration of France as well as its colonies. In other words, a goodly part of France became Nazi and collaborators with Germany. They sided with the winning party because they shared a lot of their ideals, anyway.
After the Americans offered Barbie money and protection in exchange for his intelligence services, Barbie worked as a U.S. agent in Germany for two years, and the Americans shielded him from French prosecutors trying to track him down. In 1949, Barbie and his family were smuggled by the Americans to South America.
Beatte Klarsfeld nee Kunzel Serge Klarsfeld
Beatte was German, born in Berlin in 1939. However, in Paris she was confronted with the consequences of The Holocaust. In 1963, she married the French lawyer and historian Serge Klarsfeld, whose father was a victim of the Auschwitz concentration camp exterminations. Beate has said that her husband helped her to become, "a German of conscience and awareness."
In 1972, the Nazi hunters Serge Klarsfeld and Beatte Kunzel discovered Barbie’s whereabouts in Bolivia, but Banzer Suarez refused to extradite him to France. Hugo Banzer Suárez was a Bolivian politician and military officer who served as the 51st President of Bolivia. He held the Bolivian presidency twice: from 1971 to 1978 in a military dictatorship; and then again from 1997 to 2001, as a democratically elected president. A dictator is going to be a bad guy, self-serving.
In the 1970s the Klarsfelds considered kidnapping Barbie in much the same way the Mossad did Eichmann, but the plan fell through. They decided instead to bring international pressure to force his extradition. Serge Klarsfeld, a French Jew (born 17 September 1935) is a Romanian-born French activist and Nazi hunter known for documenting the Holocaust in order to establish the record and to enable the prosecution of war criminals. Since the 1960s, he has made notable efforts to commemorate the Jewish victims of German-occupied France and has been a supporter of Israel. Beate Auguste Klarsfeld, Protestant-born is a Franco-German journalist and Nazi hunter who, along with her French husband, Serge, became famous for their investigation and documentation of numerous Nazi war criminals, including Kurt Lischka, Alois Brunner, Klaus Barbie, Ernst Ehlers, Kurt Asche, and others.
Wiesenthal, born in 1908, the year my father was born in what is now part of Ukraine
Chances are that it was not the Mossad but Simon Wiesenthal, well known Nazi hunter, who was after Eichmann. Actually, that was a collaboration. "Wiesenthal provided photographs to Mossad agents on 18 February. Zvi Aharoni, one of the Mossad agents responsible for Eichmann's capture in Buenos Aires on 11 May 1960, said the photos were useful in confirming Eichmann's identity. On 23 May Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion announced Eichmann was under arrest and in Israel. The next day Wiesenthal, while he was being interviewed by reporters, received a congratulatory telegram from Yad Vashem."
In the early 1980s, a liberal Bolivian regime came to power and agreed to extradite Barbie in exchange for French aid. On January 19, 1983, Barbie was arrested, and on February 7 he arrived in France. The statute of limitations had expired on his in-absentia convictions from the 1950s; he would have to be tried again. The U.S. government formally apologized to France for its conduct in the Barbie case later that year.
Barbie’s lawyers seemed more intent on putting France and Israel on trial than in proving their client’s innocence, and on July 4, 1987, he was found guilty. For his crimes, the 73-year-old Barbie was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison, France’s highest punishment. He died of cancer in a prison hospital in 1991 in Lyon, France. Nikolaus "Klaus" Barbie was born on 25 October 1913 in Godesberg, later renamed Bad Godesberg, which is today part of Bonn. He was 78 years old.
A lot of people and a lot of records were written about World War II and the Holocaust. How there are humans who remain as Holocaust deniers is beyond me. Even the Nazis themselves were out to get publicity. They documented everything they did.
Resource:
Book: Killing the "Nazis" by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard, the hunt for the worst war criminals in history
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/24/world/sabina-zlatin-dies-at-89-saved-children-from-the-nazis.html#:~:text=Sabina%20Zlatin%2C%20who%20rescued%20dozens,Saturday%20in%20a%20Paris%20hospital.
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/topics/end-world-war-ii-1945#:~:text=Truman%20announced%20Japan's%20surrender%20and,Japan%20Day%20(V%2DJ%20Day).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vichy_France#:~:text=Vichy%20France%20(French%3A%20R%C3%A9gime%20de,corporatist%20and%20traditionalist%20in%20nature.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Beate_Klarsfeld
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serge_Klarsfeld
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Wiesenthal
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