Americans ‘got Barbie out’

Press, 6 July 1983, Page 6

Americans ‘got Barbie out’

NZPA London American intelligence agents worked closely with the accused Nazi killer, Klaus Barbie, after World War II and spirited him out of Germany in 1951 rather than turn him over to the French, American agents say. In interviews with the British Broadcasting Corporation the now-retired agents said that Barbie had been invaluable in their efforts to learn about the Communist Party in the south German state of Bavaria.

To have given him to the French would have betrayed American intelligence secrets, the agents said, explaining why they had conducted Barbie out of Germany via a secret route called the “rat line,” through which hundreds of Nazis useful to the Americans escaped. Barbie was returned to France in February from Boliva, where he had been living since 1951. Now 69, he faces charges of torturing and killing thousands of Frenchmen and women and rounding up thousands more French Jews to be shipped to Nazi death camps. “We did not have any great pangs of conscience,” said Eugene Kolb, a major in the United States Coun-ter-Intelligence Corps, the main American intelligence agency in Europe after World War H. When American officials had first interviewed Barbie in 1947 they knew he was wanted for his Gestapo activities and was on a list calling for his “automatic

arrest,” he said. But Mayor Kolb insisted that they knew only of charges that Barbie had been rough in his interrogation of members of the French underground — not that he was suspected of atrocities. “The benefits (of employing Barbie) outweighed the costs. The charges against him were not that serious. We did not have any information that he was a major war criminal. Balance that off against his great utility to our organisation,” he said. Another former C.I.C. major, Ed Dobringhaus, recalled how Barbie and his family had been set up by American agents in the southern German town of Augsburg complete with an office and secretary. “We treated him very well. We went overboard to be nice to that guy ... we went out drinking beer once in a while,” he said. Late in 1947 Earl Browning, who headed the C.LC’s region four, headquartered at Frankfurt, saw Barbie’s name on a list of agents. “This was an astonishing thing to me because we all recognised that this was a man we had been looking for,” he told the 8.8. C. “We ordered him arrested.” Barbie was seized in December, 1947, and taken to the European Command interrogation centre in Oberursel.

“He was interrogated over a period of two or three months. Then he was released,” he said. “He had been in effect cleared by his release.”