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raul

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Nazi Multimillionaire Mass Murderer and Trafficker - Part 2
« on: April 20, 2023, 09:43:17 am »
Chapter 8
Nazi Multimillionaire Mass Murderer and Trafficker

Decades before locking one hundred teenagers in a schoolhouse to be dynamited and burnt alive, Klaus Barbie aka the Butcher of Lyon was born in Bad Godesberg, near Bonn, on October 25, 1913. In September 1935, he joined a special branch of the SS, an intelligence gathering arm of the Nazis. In 1940, he was sent to The Hague to arrest Jews and German political refugees, and he was promoted to lieutenant. In 1941 on the Eastern Front, he joined a mobile death squad, instructed to murder every Communist and Jew they could find in Russia and Ukraine, regardless of age or sex. Over a million were killed in less than a year at the hands of SS death squads.

In November 1942, he was sent to Lyon, where he became the head of the local Gestapo, assigned to fight Communists, prevent sabotages and persecute Jews. With a unique zeal for brutality, he devastated the local French Resistance. Those who were lucky enough to have emerged alive later testified about his methods.

In 1944, Lise Lesèvre was arrested carrying mail for the French Resistance. The torture began with spikes inside handcuffs that penetrated her skin. She was hooked up to chains tied to the ceiling. Barbie and his underlings beat her with a riding crop. When she fainted and collapsed, he kicked her in the face. They put her in a bathtub naked and attached her legs to a bar. When he yanked a chain attached to the bar, her head submerged until she almost drowned.

“I thought my lungs were going to explode. They pulled me up by my hair, then asked the questions again and pulled me back into the water by the chain. If I live to be 100, I will never forget Barbie. That lasted for two hours.”

Refusing to provide names, Lise ended up on a rack, an iron rectangular table that pulled her arms and legs until her bones almost broke. Hitting her with a spiked ball, Barbie broke a vertebra. Sentenced to death by him, she was accidentally transported to a labour camp, instead of a concentration camp to be gassed. At the end of World War II, she was freed.

“He was a viper,” Lise said. “What struck me was this type of happiness he got when he hurt someone. I wonder where beings like that are made.”

Simone Lagrange was only 13 when she arrived with her petrified parents at the Gestapo headquarters in Lyon, where Barbie was cuddling a cat. After her parents refused to reveal the addresses of their two other children, he pulled Simone’s hair and hit her in the face. Every day, he extracted her from a cell, and punched her open wounds. He sent her mother to Auschwitz, where she was gassed. While Simone was embracing her father, a German officer shot him in the head.

“He only stopped when you lost consciousness,” said Maurice Boudet, a Resistance leader. “Then he woke you up with kicks to the belly, the kidneys, the crotch. If that didn’t work, he threw you in a tub of ice water, with cubes floating in it. After the tub, the blackjack: that made your skin swell up. Then he injected acid in your bladder.”

Another survivor, Ennat Léger, said Barbie “had the eyes of a monster. He was savage. My God, he was savage! It was unimaginable. He broke my teeth. He pulled back my hair. He put a bottle in my mouth and pushed it until the lips split from the pressure.”

Barbie delighted in locking up prisoners with the decomposing corpses of their friends. When his favourite restaurant was bombed, he had five prisoners machine-gunned and their bodies displayed as a warning. When some German airmen were shot, he opened a cell block as if allowing the prisoners to escape. Twenty-four fled, only to be mowed down by bullets. Towards the end of the war, he ordered the machine-gunning of hundreds of prisoners, and the destruction of corpses by using phosphorous grenades and dynamite, which sent body parts flying into the town.

From the winter of 1942 to the summer of 1944, Barbie was involved in 4,342 murders and ordered 7,591 deportations to death camps, making him the third most wanted SS man by the authorities.

On August 18, 1947, with Europe still in chaos, Barbie met two men in a café in Memmingen, a town in Southern Germany. Having worked for the Nazis’ military intelligence agency, Kurt Merck had switched sides and was now working for US intelligence. The other man was Lieutenant Robert Taylor, an officer in the US Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). Merck recommended that Taylor hired his friend, Barbie.

For the next four years, Barbie worked for the CIC. He revealed British techniques of interrogation – which he had experienced – and named the SS men most likely to have been recruited by British intelligence. His main job was to spy on French intelligence. The CIC put Barbie and his family in a hotel and paid him in goods.

Having sentenced Barbie to death, the French almost tracked him down. They requested the CIC give him up, but were rebuffed. Fearing that a captured Barbie would divulge his relationship with the CIC, the Americans facilitated his escape to South America. They paid a war criminal, Father Krunoslav Draganović, to coordinate everything.

After sending several hundred thousand Jews from Yugoslavia to die in concentration camps, Draganović had sought sanctuary in the Vatican. Using his position in the Red Cross, Draganović had established a business charging war criminals $1,400 each to flee from Europe. His customers included the Croatian dictator, Ante Pavolic, who was estimated to have arranged the slaughter of up to two million Serbs. Pavolic delighted in showing his visitors a forty-pound jar of human eyeballs. Many of the war criminals went to Argentina, where they joined the government’s military, security and intelligence forces, and formed a neo-Nazi movement.

In April 1951, Barbie and his family arrived in La Paz, Bolivia. A war criminal, Father Osvaldo Toth, helped them settle. Barbie opened a sawmill business, but soon started to advise the government about internal security. The government found him so useful, he was awarded citizenship.

When the Bolivian government refused to use the military against striking tin miners, while maintaining relations with Communist Cuba, the CIA decided to intervene, with Barbie’s assistance. The president was told that he could “take a ride either to the cemetery or to the airport.” He fled to Argentina, leaving a military dictatorship in power.

Working in the new government’s internal security force, Department 4, Barbie gave training in torture and terror techniques, which were enthusiastically carried out on tin miners and indigenous Bolivian tribes. Tin mines had been the main revenue generator for the Bolivian economy, but Barbie’s death squads killed so many miners and labour leaders that many of the mines closed.

In exchange for political contributions, the government gave America’s Gulf Oil concessions around Santa Cruz. From 1966 to 1967, the CIA invested millions in Bolivia, which helped the regime tighten its grip on labour groups and Indian peasants.

Barbie expanded his business interests to include selling quinine bark, coca paste and assault weapons. He shared the profits from his shipping company with members of the Bolivian government. Initially, he exported flour, cotton, tin and coffee, but eventually he specialised in drugs and weapons, which had the biggest profits. He sold arms to the Bolivian military, which were purchased with money from the US government.

In 1967, he helped the CIA track down the revolutionary Che Guevara, who was captured by Bolivian soldiers and shot ten times. In 1970, he assisted the CIA in yet another coup against a new Bolivian government that had upset the CIA by confiscating the mineral rights awarded to Gulf Oil and for being overly cordial towards the governments of Chile and Cuba. Thousands of miners and union organisers were tortured and disappeared.

The new government made him an honorary colonel and a consultant to the Ministry of the Interior and Department 7, a counterinsurgency wing of the Bolivian Army, both of which received funds from the CIA. He continued to relay information to the CIA on suspected Communist agents in South America. He taught the Bolivian military how to use medical supervision to keep someone alive while being tortured with electricity. The CIA provided him with the names and addresses of people they wanted tortured and eliminated, including liberationist priests and their friends.

The Bolivian government had established one of the largest drug operations in the world. The fields in Alto Beni generated the raw material for approximately 80 percent of global **** supply. Bolivia became the biggest supplier of raw coca and **** paste to the Medellín Cartel, headed by Pablo Escobar. These ingredients were transported by planes or on Barbie’s ships.

To protect his empire, Barbie used the Fiancés of Death, which included former SS officers and Argentine-trained mercenaries. As well as bodyguarding the government, they wiped out rival traffickers deep in the jungle, and strong-armed the Colombians, who had been messing the Bolivians around by reneging on coca deals, haggling the prices of coca paste down at the last minute and sometimes stealing the paste at gunpoint. The Colombians started to take the Bolivians more seriously after the Fiancés of Death used a bazooka to shoot down a Colombian trafficking plane.

From 1974 to 1980, coca production multiplied so much that the price of **** plummeted, generating a surge in US demand, which was supplied by the Colombian cartels. In 1975, **** cost $1,500 per gram in America; in 1986, $200.

Throughout the 1970s, Barbie lectured at neo-Nazi candlelight vigils, extolling the virtues of fascism. He travelled to America at least seven times from the late 1960s into the 1970s.

In 1978, the wife, son-in-law, nephew and private secretary of the dictator running Bolivia were arrested for **** trafficking in the US and Canada, which led to the dictator’s resignation and a general election in 1979. The democratically elected victor was against ****, so the right wing devised the **** coup described by Mike Levine.

On July 17, 1980, the 6th Army Division announced that Communist extremists were threatening the national security of Bolivia, and the rampage started. Media outlets were bombed. Barbie’s mercenaries in ambulances machine-gunned civilians and electroshocked their political enemies. Imprisoned in a soccer stadium, people were shot in groups and disposed of in rivers and canyons.

Barbie became the head of Bolivia’s internal security forces and the supervisor of Bolivia’s drug suppression campaign – to gesture support for America’s War on Drugs. Using money provided by the CIA, he liquidated his rivals in politics and drugs. The following year, the generals running Bolivia made approximately $2 billion from ****.

But Barbie’s days of being a hero-worshipped multimillionaire Nazi torturer and drug trafficker were ending. On January 25, 1983, he was arrested by a new civilian Bolivian government and handed over to the French who he had dodged for decades. In Lyons, he was incarcerated at Montluc, the site of some of his war crimes. Unrepentant to the end, he told an interviewer, “What is there to regret? I am a convinced Nazi … and if I had to be born a thousand times, I would be a thousand times what I have been.”

At trial, he said, “When I stand before the throne of God I shall be judged innocent.” On July 4, 1987, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Four years later, aged 77, he died of leukaemia and cancer of the spine and prostate.

Despite his demise and the constant changes in the Bolivian government, the **** empire he had assisted continued to grow. Bolivian **** production increased from 35,000 metric tons in 1980 to 60,000 tons per year by the late 1980s, most of it destined for America. The Bolivian police and troops armed and trained by the CIA and the DEA – ostensibly to eradicate coca growers and drug traffickers – continued to terrorise drug rivals and political enemies.

Only after the DEA was kicked out of Bolivia in 2009 did **** production fall. According to United Nations data, **** production in 2014 declined by 11 percent, the fourth year in a row of steady decrease. Did the Bolivian government launch a blitzkrieg against the coca growers? No. They simply encouraged farmers to make money from alternative crops.

“Bolivia has adopted a policy based on dialogue, where coca cultivation is allowed in traditional areas alongside alternative development [in others],” Antonino de Leo, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s representative in Bolivia, told VICE News. “It’s not only about making money off a crop. In the old-fashioned alternative development approach, we substitute one illicit crop for a licit crop. It’s about a more comprehensive approach that includes access to essential services like schools, hospitals and roads in areas that traditionally have been hard to reach.”

Taken from British author Shaun Attwood

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