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Klaus Barbie 'boasted of hunting down Che'
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
sent by Tim Murphy - Jan 12, 2008
The Observer - Dec 23, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,,2231852,00.html
Barbie 'boasted of hunting down Che'
The CIA made use of a Nazi war criminal's anti-guerrilla skills
by David Smith
Oscar-winning British director Kevin Macdonald has raised the intriguing
possibility that Che Guevara's capture by the CIA in the forests of
Bolivia 40 years ago was orchestrated by Klaus Barbie, the Nazi war
criminal called the 'Butcher of Lyon'.
Guevara was the Marxist guerrilla who helped Fidel Castro seize power in
Cuba. Barbie was the Gestapo chief in Lyon whose crimes included the
murder of 44 Jewish children, taken from an orphanage and sent to
Auschwitz. Improbably, the men's paths crossed in Bolivia. My Enemy's
Enemy, a documentary directed by Macdonald, whose previous films
include Touching the Void and The Last King of Scotland, examines how
Barbie's record was disregarded when he was recruited by US
intelligence after the Second World War as a useful tool against
communism. He evaded French justice by fleeing to Bolivia where, living
under the alias Klaus Altmann, he was welcomed by fascist sympathisers.
Meanwhile, in 1966 a disguised Guevara arrived in Bolivia to organise
the overthrow of its military dictatorship.
The Americans had been hunting Guevara and, according to the film,
turned to Barbie for his first-hand knowledge of counter-guerrilla
warfare: he had attempted to crush the French Resistance and was
responsible for the death of its celebrated leader, Jean Moulin. Alvaro
de Castro, a longtime confidant of Barbie interviewed for the film,
says: 'He met Major Shelton, the commander of the unit from the US.
Altmann [Barbie] no doubt gave him advice on how to fight this
guerrilla war. He used the expertise gained doing this kind of work in
World War Two. They made the most of the fact that he had this
experience.' De Castro adds that Barbie had little respect for Che
Guevara. 'Altmann said once, "This poor man wouldn't have survived at
all if he fought in the Second World War. He was a pitiful adventurer,
nothing like his popular image. The people have turned him into a myth,
a great figure. But what has he actually achieved? Absolutely nothing".'
Kai Hermann, a journalist, tells the film-makers: 'He [Barbie] always
boasted - though I cannot prove it - that it was he who devised the
strategy for murdering Che Guevara.'
The evidence appears inconclusive, but Macdonald, who won an Academy
Award for One Day in September, about the killing of Israeli athletes
by the Palestinian group Black September at the 1972 Munich Olympics,
told The Observer: 'The Che claim came from several sources. I think it
makes total sense when you understand what Barbie was doing and who he
was working for in the Bolivian military, and how they admired him as a
Nazi officer and what he had done in the war. Jean Moulin was an
infamous episode, and he would trade on it and use that as part of his
calling card.'
Macdonald, whose film will be broadcast on More4 on Thursday at 9pm,
added: 'Guevara arrived in Bolivia in disguise - very much like the
French Resistance, constantly in disguise, travelling around the
country unspotted by the Germans. I suspect Barbie's involvement was
more on a theoretical level and, if you think about it, it makes sense
from the point of view of the Bolivian government and the Americans. He
had hands-on expertise in exactly this type of situation, exactly this
field. He was strongly anti-communist. Neither the Americans nor the
Bolivians had anything like this kind of experience.'
In October 1967 the Bolivian army, with CIA help, captured the
39-year-old Guevara and killed him.
Barbie was involved in torture again in Bolivia and dreamed of
establishing a Fourth Reich in the Andes. But he was tracked down by
Nazi hunters and eventually extradited to France, where he was
sentenced to life imprisonment and died in jail in Lyon in September
1991.
Macdonald's previous film, The Last King of Scotland, was a
fictionalised account of Idi Amin, based on the novel by Giles Foden,
with an Oscar-winning performance by Forest Whitaker. The 40-year-old
director said that he can see parallels between Amin and Barbie. 'The
other side to Barbie is there was a great charm to him, which is one of
the things that make him fascinating. He was a bit like Idi Amin:
somebody of enormous charm but of enormous evil and utter lack of
respect for human life.'
*
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