What do you think?
Rate this book
The Devil's Agent
The Devil's Agent , a new book by Peter McFarren and Fadrique Iglesias, reveals a startling inner and detailed portrait of the Nazi Klaus Barbie known as the Butcher of Lyon using previously unpublished letters he wrote from his cell in Lyon, France, documents released since the removal of the Berlin Wall confirming his work as a U.S. and West German spy and over a hundred photographs of his family, business associates and Nazi friends. This 624-page book also details Barbie's family history, the role he played as a Gestapo officer in German-occupied France, his responsibility for the murders of more than 14,000 Jews and French Resistance fighters during the Nazi Holocaust, his flight from Europe after the war with the backing of the U.S. Government, the Vatican and the International Red Cross, and his settlement in Bolivia with his wife Regine and two children. His nefarious past exemplifies "Collective and Personal Evil" that is also addressed in this book. The Devil's Agent goes deep into Barbie's life in Bolivia and relays information that has never been written about, as some of his closest allies and friends have just recently exposed some of his darkest secrets. During 1942-1944, Klaus Barbie was a mid-level Nazi officer in charge of the Gestapo HQ in Lyon, France. His treatment of prisoners ranged from banal indifference to pleasure as he sadistically tortured and murdered his victims. After the war, what set him apart was the public role he played as an unscrupulous businessman and adviser to military rulers, and Western intelligence agencies, in close alliance with other escaped Nazis, while living in Bolivia. The unrepentant war criminal was the most important Nazi to continue operating as a public figure after World War II. In Bolivia, Barbie trafficked in tanks and weapons and supported the hunt for the Argentine-Cuban guerrilla leader "Che" Guevara. He collaborated with cocaine trafficking kingpin Roberto Suárez Gómez, authoritarian right-wing military governments and a network of escaped Nazis, paramilitaries and mercenaries from Europe and South America to overthrow a Bolivian civilian government in 1980. The Devils Agent describes co-author Peter McFarren's personal encounters with Klaus Barbie in 1981, when McFarren and his colleague Maribel Schumacher were arrested in front of the Nazi's Bolivian home after trying to interview him for a story for The New York Times . After an extensive, decades-long search by Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, Barbie was identified, captured and extradited to France. He was one of the few escaped Nazis tried and sentenced for crimes against humanity in occupied France. His expulsion from Bolivia to France in 1983 and his unprecedented trial and conviction generated tremendous publicity and deep soul-searching for a country that had still not faced up to its mixed record of supporting the Nazi regime while also resisting its occupation. The Devil's Agent serves not only as a reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust; it takes us inside the inhuman and merciless mindsets that were behind these crimes and continue to plague our world today.
622 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
22 people are currently reading
58 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 8, 2022
Book: The Devil's Agent: Life, Times and Crimes of Nazi Klaus Barbie
Author: Peter McFarren, Fadrique Iglesias
Publisher: Xlibris (5 June 2013)
Language: English
Paperback: 624 pages
Item Weight: 903 g
Dimensions: 15.24 x 3.96 x 22.86 cm
Country of Origin: India
Price: 1718/-
What a tale!! What an implausible tale!!
It was the 70s. The American appetite for cocaine had created one of the prevalent businesses on the planet.
If only Klaus Barbie had been given up earlier…But he wasn’t done yet.
Klaus Barbie was a somewhat miniature player in the whole Nazi machinery, a mid-level officer who executed orders to torture and murder with brutal pleasure. There were thousands of Nazis who were accountable for committing greater atrocities in much larger numbers than Barbie.
What set Barbie apart was the unrestricted role he played in Bolivia as a businessman and adviser to military rulers and the conditions of how he was later identified as the ‘Butcher of Lyon’, prosecuted on more than a few occasions, and finally extradited to France, where he was tried and sentenced to life in prison.
Barbie was one of the few Nazis who served the Third Reich in occupied France and was tried and sentenced for crimes against humanity.
Barbie came to represent the mistreatments of power as well as collective and personal evil during the half a century he operated in Europe and Latin America. His most vicious and hideous acts were committed during World War II, but it was in Bolivia that Barbie established a reputation as a shrewd, unfeeling, and violent operative who acted without scruples or a moral compass.
Back to our interesting little story then…..
Being as connected as he was and so well-versed in extreme violence, Barbie did some business with Bolivia’s biggest drug lord at the time, Roberto Suárez Gómez, aka, “The King of Cocaine.” This man made hundreds of millions of dollars from getting peasant farmers to grow cocaine for pennies, after which, he sold it to the Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel, who then shipped it to the US.
Gómez was considered to be the biggest coke producer on the planet, so big he later financed yet another coup in Bolivia, this one becoming known as the “Cocaine Coup.”
Barbie worked for such drug lords doing security. The Escobars and Gomez’s of this world were repeatedly hunting for their enemies, be it other traffickers, grasses, or spies. Barbie became close to Escobar when he started doing his security for the transportation of Bolivian-grown coke to Colombia. For that, Escobar, a man with boundless cash, funded Barbie’s anti-communist work. In a way, this even made Escobar a US friend, not just Barbie.
All this time, not many people knew Barbie by his real name. He’d been using the alias Klaus Altmann. But then in 1971, it seems his identity was exposed, and later some documents were discovered by French Nazi hunters.
Soon a photo of Barbie appeared in the French media. Well, well, well, if it aint the Butcher of Lyon said a lot of people. Barbie was next held in a Bolivian prison for his own protection, and this time, no one was there to help. Still, there had to be more proof. Was this gentleman really the butcher? Some French journalists went to Bolivia to interview him. He denied the charges and when shown photographs of some of the people he’d tortured, he denied he’d ever seen them.
This went out on French TV in 1971 and at that point some of the people he’d hurt still were alive and well. “It is him!” Thought Simone Lagrange, one of those harshly tortured as a teenager by Barbie…….as she watched this clip in revulsion.
That was the beast. She could never forget his face. Still, Bolivia wouldn’t hand him over, not that they could anyway as he still denied who he really was.
And you can be sure, the US, West Germany, and the UK were keeping their mouths close about all this. Here was discomfiture in the making. The New York Times even turned up at his house, with the journalists later being asked nicely by a bunch of armed men if they could gently leave.
Remember, Barbie wasn’t just friends with the world’s most powerful drug lords, but he’d also helped hideous tyrants get into power and keep power. It wasn’t going to be easy sending him back to Europe.
The years passed, and then in 1983, a democratic government won in Bolivia. These people were no friends to Nazi criminals. Barbie was arrested, purportedly for some money he owed, but much to his shock he was soon sitting on a plane in handcuffs heading back to France.
On February 7, 1983, the newspaper, Le Monde, ran the headline on its front page, “He is going to pay, at last!”
Angry crowds were there to meet him at the airport, with reports stating some people had gone there to kill him. A woman who he’d sent to the Drancy internment camp had bought a 22-caliber rifle for his arrival, but it seems her shot missed.
The New York Times wrote at the time, “At Lyons airport, where a crowd had gathered in expectation of Mr. Barbie's arrival, the police arrested a 44-year-old woman carrying a carbine under a white sheet. The police did not recognize her, but said they understood that she had spent time in a concentration camp during World War II.”
That is when the Justice Department started investigating the situation, and you already know the outcome of that. ‘Sorry France, we messed up. Commies, c’mon, those damn commies.”
It also turned out that the FBI had 85 pages of files from 1972 to 1987 on a man not named Klaus Altmann but Klaus Barbie. So, they knew who he was all along.
Barbie maintained all through that they’d got the wrong man and he was Klaus Altmann. On 26 May 1987, he went face to face with some of his victims, after which he said, “I have nothing to say.”
A journalist wrote about one scrupulous moment during the trial, saying, “Her eyewitness account made the courtroom cry.” This was a woman who said Barbie had forced her to watch as he ordered his men to beat her father to death. After that, she was sent to a death camp.
The trial had a long list of atrocities that Barbie had been involved in, including capturing those orphans, a massacre of 22 hostages in a basement of a Gestapo building, an execution of 42 people who’d been involved in an uprising, and of course all the torture he’d done to people. But there was a problem.
France had a statute of limitations, and for that reason, all the charges could be dropped. He was no longer officially guilty of the crimes for which he was convicted in absentia all those years ago. Too much time had passed.
There was one thing the prosecution could do, though, and that was charge him not for individual offenses or murder and such but for committing crimes against humanity. There was no statute of limitations in France for that, but now the prosecution had a much harder job on its hands.
Auschwitz survivor and Nobel Peace Prize-winning writer Elie Wiesel took the stand and was first asked to talk about the nature of the Holocaust. Barbie’s French lawyer, Jacques Vergès, defending the defenseless, later asked Wiesel what he thought about the Algerian kids that had died in French internment camps. Wasn’t that a crime against humanity, or was it just war?
After all, no French generals had been hanged for that for war crimes. Wiesel told Verges that he knew nothing about the French camps; he’d been in the US when that happened, to which Verges roared, “I conclude from it that the deaths of these children were silent, their cries did not cross the Atlantic let alone the Mediterranean...You are an American citizen, what do you think of the fate of the children of Mai Lai, of whom the murderer is today still free?” If you didn’t know, US troops committed various war crimes in Vietnam and one was what we now call the Mai Lai massacre.
No one was put to death because of it, or barely even punished.
Even if those crimes were a form of ruthless cruelty, it didn’t mean Barbie wasn’t a war criminal.
Then, people started whispering. If one act of violence isn’t a war crime, then does that mean the other thing isn’t, legally speaking anyway?
Could Barbie the smiling torturer be innocent of “crimes against humanity” in view of what France had done to people, or even what the US had done to people, during wartime?
One writer asked, “Was imperialism a crime against humanity?” On the last day, in his final statement, Verges said, “Does crime against humanity only force emotion or merit commemoration if it hurt Europeans? Would there be in death a hierarchy that made the difference between the dead dignified by memory and those dignified by being forgotten?”
This is a question some people have been asking ever since about various other bloody brutal conflicts, but was it going to work for Barbie?
At the end of the trial, Barbie said, “I have some words to say. I did not commit the raid in Izieu. I fought the Resistance and that was the war and today the war is over. Thank you.”
It took six hours for the jury to come to a decision. Yes, they agreed, Barbie was a war criminal and he’d had a foremost responsibility in one of the most atrocious things that has ever taken place on this planet. He was found guilty of crimes against humanity, and the judge told him he’d be spending the rest of his days behind bars.
He didn’t spend too long there, dying in prison four years later, aged 77, from leukemia and spine and prostate cancer.
Klaus Barbie was an executor of collective and personal evil as a Gestapo officer, a spy for the U.S. and West German governments, and an ally of fascist regimes in Latin America.
This former SS captain was adroit at blending in, finding the right associates, and eluding accountability for three decades. He knew how to escape from justice and to secure links and relationships with useful allies.
He possessed an exceptional capability for self-control and for managing public relations although always with a low profile and never showing all his cards.
These skills among others made him a desirable strategist for the secret services of several countries.
This book tells his story.
Most recommended for Holocaust history buffs.
Author: Peter McFarren, Fadrique Iglesias
Publisher: Xlibris (5 June 2013)
Language: English
Paperback: 624 pages
Item Weight: 903 g
Dimensions: 15.24 x 3.96 x 22.86 cm
Country of Origin: India
Price: 1718/-
What a tale!! What an implausible tale!!
It was the 70s. The American appetite for cocaine had created one of the prevalent businesses on the planet.
If only Klaus Barbie had been given up earlier…But he wasn’t done yet.
Klaus Barbie was a somewhat miniature player in the whole Nazi machinery, a mid-level officer who executed orders to torture and murder with brutal pleasure. There were thousands of Nazis who were accountable for committing greater atrocities in much larger numbers than Barbie.
What set Barbie apart was the unrestricted role he played in Bolivia as a businessman and adviser to military rulers and the conditions of how he was later identified as the ‘Butcher of Lyon’, prosecuted on more than a few occasions, and finally extradited to France, where he was tried and sentenced to life in prison.
Barbie was one of the few Nazis who served the Third Reich in occupied France and was tried and sentenced for crimes against humanity.
Barbie came to represent the mistreatments of power as well as collective and personal evil during the half a century he operated in Europe and Latin America. His most vicious and hideous acts were committed during World War II, but it was in Bolivia that Barbie established a reputation as a shrewd, unfeeling, and violent operative who acted without scruples or a moral compass.
Back to our interesting little story then…..
Being as connected as he was and so well-versed in extreme violence, Barbie did some business with Bolivia’s biggest drug lord at the time, Roberto Suárez Gómez, aka, “The King of Cocaine.” This man made hundreds of millions of dollars from getting peasant farmers to grow cocaine for pennies, after which, he sold it to the Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel, who then shipped it to the US.
Gómez was considered to be the biggest coke producer on the planet, so big he later financed yet another coup in Bolivia, this one becoming known as the “Cocaine Coup.”
Barbie worked for such drug lords doing security. The Escobars and Gomez’s of this world were repeatedly hunting for their enemies, be it other traffickers, grasses, or spies. Barbie became close to Escobar when he started doing his security for the transportation of Bolivian-grown coke to Colombia. For that, Escobar, a man with boundless cash, funded Barbie’s anti-communist work. In a way, this even made Escobar a US friend, not just Barbie.
All this time, not many people knew Barbie by his real name. He’d been using the alias Klaus Altmann. But then in 1971, it seems his identity was exposed, and later some documents were discovered by French Nazi hunters.
Soon a photo of Barbie appeared in the French media. Well, well, well, if it aint the Butcher of Lyon said a lot of people. Barbie was next held in a Bolivian prison for his own protection, and this time, no one was there to help. Still, there had to be more proof. Was this gentleman really the butcher? Some French journalists went to Bolivia to interview him. He denied the charges and when shown photographs of some of the people he’d tortured, he denied he’d ever seen them.
This went out on French TV in 1971 and at that point some of the people he’d hurt still were alive and well. “It is him!” Thought Simone Lagrange, one of those harshly tortured as a teenager by Barbie…….as she watched this clip in revulsion.
That was the beast. She could never forget his face. Still, Bolivia wouldn’t hand him over, not that they could anyway as he still denied who he really was.
And you can be sure, the US, West Germany, and the UK were keeping their mouths close about all this. Here was discomfiture in the making. The New York Times even turned up at his house, with the journalists later being asked nicely by a bunch of armed men if they could gently leave.
Remember, Barbie wasn’t just friends with the world’s most powerful drug lords, but he’d also helped hideous tyrants get into power and keep power. It wasn’t going to be easy sending him back to Europe.
The years passed, and then in 1983, a democratic government won in Bolivia. These people were no friends to Nazi criminals. Barbie was arrested, purportedly for some money he owed, but much to his shock he was soon sitting on a plane in handcuffs heading back to France.
On February 7, 1983, the newspaper, Le Monde, ran the headline on its front page, “He is going to pay, at last!”
Angry crowds were there to meet him at the airport, with reports stating some people had gone there to kill him. A woman who he’d sent to the Drancy internment camp had bought a 22-caliber rifle for his arrival, but it seems her shot missed.
The New York Times wrote at the time, “At Lyons airport, where a crowd had gathered in expectation of Mr. Barbie's arrival, the police arrested a 44-year-old woman carrying a carbine under a white sheet. The police did not recognize her, but said they understood that she had spent time in a concentration camp during World War II.”
That is when the Justice Department started investigating the situation, and you already know the outcome of that. ‘Sorry France, we messed up. Commies, c’mon, those damn commies.”
It also turned out that the FBI had 85 pages of files from 1972 to 1987 on a man not named Klaus Altmann but Klaus Barbie. So, they knew who he was all along.
Barbie maintained all through that they’d got the wrong man and he was Klaus Altmann. On 26 May 1987, he went face to face with some of his victims, after which he said, “I have nothing to say.”
A journalist wrote about one scrupulous moment during the trial, saying, “Her eyewitness account made the courtroom cry.” This was a woman who said Barbie had forced her to watch as he ordered his men to beat her father to death. After that, she was sent to a death camp.
The trial had a long list of atrocities that Barbie had been involved in, including capturing those orphans, a massacre of 22 hostages in a basement of a Gestapo building, an execution of 42 people who’d been involved in an uprising, and of course all the torture he’d done to people. But there was a problem.
France had a statute of limitations, and for that reason, all the charges could be dropped. He was no longer officially guilty of the crimes for which he was convicted in absentia all those years ago. Too much time had passed.
There was one thing the prosecution could do, though, and that was charge him not for individual offenses or murder and such but for committing crimes against humanity. There was no statute of limitations in France for that, but now the prosecution had a much harder job on its hands.
Auschwitz survivor and Nobel Peace Prize-winning writer Elie Wiesel took the stand and was first asked to talk about the nature of the Holocaust. Barbie’s French lawyer, Jacques Vergès, defending the defenseless, later asked Wiesel what he thought about the Algerian kids that had died in French internment camps. Wasn’t that a crime against humanity, or was it just war?
After all, no French generals had been hanged for that for war crimes. Wiesel told Verges that he knew nothing about the French camps; he’d been in the US when that happened, to which Verges roared, “I conclude from it that the deaths of these children were silent, their cries did not cross the Atlantic let alone the Mediterranean...You are an American citizen, what do you think of the fate of the children of Mai Lai, of whom the murderer is today still free?” If you didn’t know, US troops committed various war crimes in Vietnam and one was what we now call the Mai Lai massacre.
No one was put to death because of it, or barely even punished.
Even if those crimes were a form of ruthless cruelty, it didn’t mean Barbie wasn’t a war criminal.
Then, people started whispering. If one act of violence isn’t a war crime, then does that mean the other thing isn’t, legally speaking anyway?
Could Barbie the smiling torturer be innocent of “crimes against humanity” in view of what France had done to people, or even what the US had done to people, during wartime?
One writer asked, “Was imperialism a crime against humanity?” On the last day, in his final statement, Verges said, “Does crime against humanity only force emotion or merit commemoration if it hurt Europeans? Would there be in death a hierarchy that made the difference between the dead dignified by memory and those dignified by being forgotten?”
This is a question some people have been asking ever since about various other bloody brutal conflicts, but was it going to work for Barbie?
At the end of the trial, Barbie said, “I have some words to say. I did not commit the raid in Izieu. I fought the Resistance and that was the war and today the war is over. Thank you.”
It took six hours for the jury to come to a decision. Yes, they agreed, Barbie was a war criminal and he’d had a foremost responsibility in one of the most atrocious things that has ever taken place on this planet. He was found guilty of crimes against humanity, and the judge told him he’d be spending the rest of his days behind bars.
He didn’t spend too long there, dying in prison four years later, aged 77, from leukemia and spine and prostate cancer.
Klaus Barbie was an executor of collective and personal evil as a Gestapo officer, a spy for the U.S. and West German governments, and an ally of fascist regimes in Latin America.
This former SS captain was adroit at blending in, finding the right associates, and eluding accountability for three decades. He knew how to escape from justice and to secure links and relationships with useful allies.
He possessed an exceptional capability for self-control and for managing public relations although always with a low profile and never showing all his cards.
These skills among others made him a desirable strategist for the secret services of several countries.
This book tells his story.
Most recommended for Holocaust history buffs.
September 12, 2014
Should have been shorter, but interesting.
many repetitive passages or concepts discussed multiple times. certain phrases or passages repeated throughout. a good book, if you have the patience for it. needed a good editor.
many repetitive passages or concepts discussed multiple times. certain phrases or passages repeated throughout. a good book, if you have the patience for it. needed a good editor.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews