You might hear a lot about the holocaust camps in Germany and even eastern Europe. But the Nazis didn’t just stop at those places, they refused to spare the innocent people living in the surrounding countries as well. One of the charging commanders of a Nazi camp in the French territory was Klaus Barbie.
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The butcher of Lyon
Klaus Barbie, a former German Gestapo, was no ordinary soldier. Unlike other commanders, Klaus Barbie specifically went after children. He is responsible for the death of more than ten thousand Jews. He was appointed to Dijon and then transferred to Lyon. He was in charge of deporting the French Jews to concentration camps where they would eventually die.
Due to his inhumane torture techniques, he was named the ‘butcher of Lyon’. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, he ruthlessly tortured Jean Moulin, who was a French resistor. Klaus Barbie tormented him for three weeks after which he reportedly beat Moulin to death when he refused to participate in the interrogation.
Barbie sent 44 children to Death camps
Klaus Barbie truly showed his horrendous nature when he sent little kids ranging from four to seventeen years old to the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp. A group of caretakers had hidden at least 44 Jewish children in a house in Izieu, in the south of France. In April 1944, Klaus Barbie somehow got the wind of their hiding location and immediately raided the camp. The children were sent to Auschwitz and were instantly murdered by gas poisoning upon their arrival.
During the liberation of these camps when the Americans descended, Klaus Barbie escaped to Germany and joined the army ranks to fight in the war till the end.
In the end, he was charged with war crimes by the French government and was declared ‘wanted’. However, in 1947, he was recruited by the US army as a witness to reveal any insider information he had about the Nazis.
Later he escaped to South America with the help of US officials with his family. By then, Klaus Barbie was being hunted relentlessly by Nazi hunters which forced him to flee to Bolivia. Nevertheless, Klaus Barbie was finally arrested and transported back to Lyon to face the charges of his crimes. He was sentenced to life in imprisonment. As per the National WWE Museum, in the fourth year of his sentence, he died in jail due to cancer at the age of 77.
Read more:
⋙ These vigilante teenage sisters were known for luring Nazi soldiers to their death
⋙ Irma Grese, the 18-year-old girl who tortured her prisoners to death during World War II
⋙ The dark deeds of Reinhard Heydrich, the 'Butcher of Prague'
