In 1947 alone, some 8,000 SS members traveled safely to Canada and the US using Red Cross documents. Overwhelmed by millions of applications, the Red Cross could not distinguish defeated Nazis from genuine refugees. The Nazis, through a network of contacts they maintained, managed in many cases to falsify documents and escape to America with fake papers.
Brazil received 1,500 to 2,000 Nazi war criminals, while 500 to 1,000 settled in Chile. The largest number, over 5,000, was recorded in Juan Peron's Argentina.
One of those who managed to avoid trial, at least in the first instance, for their heinous crimes against humanity, was Nikolaus "Klaus" Barbie.
After the war ended he secured informal immunity from Western intelligence and lived in Latin America, implementing the US anti-communist plan.
"Butcher of Lyons"
Barbie rose through the National Socialist Party and was recruited into the Security Services (SD) of the SS.
In 1942, he was posted to Lyon as head of the local Gestapo and set up the horror headquarters in the Hotel Terminus. He went down in history for the horrible tortures, to which he subjected men, women and children indiscriminately. It is estimated that by the fall of 1944 when he left the city, he was responsible for the death of a total of 14,000 people. Hence it was called, "Butcher of Lyon".
After the defeat of the Nazis he managed to win the immunity of the West against the USSR. He initially worked with the British, eventually being recruited in 1947 by the US into the CIC military secret service. The cold war was at its beginning. The French asked for his extradition to stand trial, but the US extradited him to Argentina.
In the following decades he lived in Bolivia under a false passport as Klaus Altmann, cooperating not only with the American CIA, but for some time after 1965 with the West German BND.
The role he took on was an adviser on anti-communism and a trainer of paramilitary groups in Bolivia, "using" his experience for the benefit of his former enemies.
According to historical records, it took place in the planning for the execution of Che Guevara in 1967 and also for the Cocaine Coup (1980).
In 1983 the socialist president Hernan Siles Suasso arrested "Altman" and handed him over to the French authorities.
The trial took place in 1987 in Lyon, where he acted as an "executioner". Barbie faced a total of 41 charges of crimes against humanity, based on the testimony of French resistance fighters and Jews. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in prison on September 25, 1991 of leukemia.
"Killing the SS"
How he managed to escape to the USA is vividly described in "Killing the SS" which is published in Greek these days by Dioptra publications. In the same book, other cases similar to Barbie's are recorded, which shed light on a "grey" side of history.
The following is excerpted from Killing the SS by Dioptra Editions, Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard, published exclusively by News 24/7:
"The new CIA – Central Intelligence Agency – as well as the CIC – Military Counterintelligence – have focused their attention on countering the communist threat. These agencies now see the Soviets as their greatest enemy and are helping ex-Nazis escape and avoid conviction, in exchange for spying and providing secret information.Klaus Barbie, whose name will one day become synonymous with the crimes committed by the Nazis in France, is one of those the Americans helped.
Barbie's atrocities are indescribable, but the most inhumane took place on April 6, 1944. In a meticulously organized mass arrest operation, three German trucks drove fifty miles outside of Lyon to the village of Isier. The trucks stopped at a farmhouse owned by a naturalized French woman named Sabina Zlatin, who was born in Poland. Barbie had information that Zlaten was secretly smuggling Jewish children across the border into neighboring Switzerland. There were reports that he also sheltered other young Jews. Indeed, the House at Isier was a secret hiding place for many orphaned Jewish children and refugees.
It was breakfast time when the trucks stopped. They were preparing hot chocolate in the kitchen when the soldiers, on Babi's orders, surrounded the farmhouse. The children had been hiding there for almost a year without anything happening, and now the soldiers were grabbing them and pushing them onto the back of the trucks "like sacks of potatoes," in the words of one villager. Some children were as young as four years old. The oldest was seventeen. Their voices and screams echoed throughout the village.
Some kids were lucky, as they had time to see the approaching trucks and blew it. However, they grabbed forty-four children. These innocent creatures along with seven adults who were in charge of the small orphanage were arrested. Following orders from Klaus Barbie, the next morning, all the prisoners were loaded onto a train and sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Sabina Zlaten was not arrested, but her husband Miron Zlaten was taken to the concentration camp in Tallinn, Estonia, where he was executed.
Barbie was very satisfied. He returned to his office in Lyons after this raid and typed up his mission report. He miscalculated the number of children captured. "This morning the orphanage with the Jewish children "The Children's Colony" in Yzie was liquidated. A total of forty-one children between the ages of three and thirteen were arrested. In addition, we managed to capture the entire Jewish staff, consisting of ten people, including five women. No cash or other valuables were found".
Almost all adults arrested on April 6, 1944 were murdered in concentration camps. Only one woman survived to tell the tale. Her name is Leah Feldblum, one of the management employees. He will always remember these guys. "I loved them very much. The little ones were crying. The rest were singing... they burned them all".
Now, Klaus Barbie, the same person who enjoyed killing innocent children, has been hired – and protected – by the United States government. He makes no effort to hide his true identity, much to the surprise of his colleagues.
"This guy killed - and this is only one case that I happen to know - personally two hundred Frenchmen and hanged them in the basement of his headquarters," an American agent would later recall, speaking of the eight months he worked with Barbee. "I reported to agency headquarters:'Do you know you're working with a real war criminal?' And the answer:"Yes, we know everything about him, but he remains precious to us".
In 1947 alone, approximately eight thousand SS members traveled safely to Canada and the United States using false documents.
But Fritz Holman chooses not to escape through the Allied passages. His Italian contact, "Kurt", has reserved a place for him on the North King, which is due to sail for Argentina on May 25. Holman's "escape" from the Nazi hunters now seems assured. However, after a month of flawless planning, Holman's trip goes awry. "Kurt" has bribed an Italian official, asking him to stamp Holman's exit visa. But this clerk preferred to take that day off. After a quick thought, Holman decided to put a £20,000 note into his papers and step forward to get the stamp from an unsuspecting employee of the fraud".
More about Barbie's role in Che's assassination you can read at CIA and Nazis, collaborators in the hunt for Che Guevara
The "Barbie Affair" opened the circle for more thorough historical investigations into how the US recruited the Nazis' greatest "killers". According to the assessment of declassified US intelligence data, the number of Nazi spies who served in US services must reach at least 1,000.
Killing the SS - The Hunt for the Greatest Criminals in History
With the end of the Second World War and as soon as the heinous crimes of the Third Reich were revealed, Nazi criminals tried to escape from Germany. Some were immediately arrested, such as the infamous SS leader Heinrich Himmler. However, some escaped capture through a multi-faceted Nazi organization that provided them with cover.
Among the war criminals were Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, who had committed the horrific medical experiments at Auschwitz, Martin Bormann, Hitler's curmudgeonly personal secretary, Klaus Barbie, the brutal Butcher of Lyons, as well as now hideous Nazi Adolf Eichmann.
"Killing the SS" is an espionage saga conducted by unsolicited and unrepentant Nazi hunters.
Within a few decades, Nazi hunters plowed the world to track down SS fugitives and bring them to justice, which sometimes meant their deaths.