Butcher of Paris, The

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As chief of Nazi Germany’s secret police in Lyon, Barbie sent 7,500 French Jews and French Resistance partisans to concentration camps, and executed some 4,000 others. Among other atrocities, Barbie personally tortured and executed many of his prisoners. In 1943, he captured Jean Moulin, the leader of the French Resistance, and had him slowly beaten to death. In 1944, Barbie rounded up 44 young Jewish children and their seven teachers hiding in a boarding house in Izieu and deported them to the Auschwitz extermination camp. Of the 51, only one teacher survived. In August 1944, as the Germans prepared to retreat from Lyon, he organized one last deportation train that took hundreds of people to the death camps. In 1947, Barbie was recruited as an agent for the 66th Detachment of the US Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) along with a Serbian agent of the Belgrade special police and SD, Radislav Grujičić. [16] [17] The US used Barbie and other Nazi Party members to further anti-communist efforts in Europe. Specifically, they were interested in British interrogation techniques which Barbie had experienced firsthand, as well as the identities of former SS officers British intelligence agencies might be interested in recruiting. Later, the CIC housed him in a hotel in Memmingen; he reported on French intelligence activities in the French zone of occupied Germany because they suspected that the French had been infiltrated by the KGB and GPU. [18] On 11 March 1944, Petiot's neighbors in Rue Le Sueur complained to police about a foul stench in the area and large amounts of smoke billowing from a chimney of the house. Fearing a chimney fire, the police summoned firemen, who entered the house and found a great fire in a coal stove in the basement. In the fire, and scattered in the basement, were human remains. [3] Article of newspaper Le Matin for 14 March 1944, reporting the discovery of 21 Rue Le Sueur.

The court rejected the defence's argument. On 4 July 1987, Barbie was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Four years later, he died in prison in Lyon of leukemia and spine and prostate cancer at the age of 77. [54] Two months after they had survived the Nazis, their dismembered remains were fished out of the Seine.”Nevertheless, the island was peaceful and filled with many shops that would please the king and his nobles. Among these quaint, street-side shops, on the corner of rue des Marmousets and rue des Deux-Hermites, sat the friendly butcher and the chummy barber.

Petiot's murder of Jews and his fraudulent escape network were depicted by the 1990 French movie Docteur Petiot that chronicles his life between 1941 and 1944. Petiot was portrayed by actor Michel Serrault. Historians estimate that Barbie was directly responsible for the deaths of up to 14,000 people, [12] [13] personally participating in roundups such as the Rue Sainte-Catherine Roundup which saw 84 people arrested in a single day. He arrested Jean Moulin, a high-ranking member of the French Resistance and his most prominent captive. In 1943, he was awarded the Iron Cross (First Class) by Adolf Hitler for his campaign against the French Resistance and the capture of Moulin. [ citation needed]There is no evidence for any of these statements. However, in 1980, he was cited by former U.S. spymaster Col. John F. Grombach as a World War II source. [6] Grombach had been founder and commander of a small independent espionage agency, known later as " The Pond", which operated from 1942 to 1955. [7] Grombach asserted that Petiot had reported the Katyn Forest massacre, German missile development at Peenemünde, and the names of Abwehr agents sent to the U.S. [6] While these claims were not corroborated by any records of other intelligence services, in 2001, some "Pond" records were discovered, including a cable that mentioned Petiot. Well, I like history in comics but it's a hard bargain. The author needs to keep the story interesting and "working", but also keep it as close to faithfulness as possible. By the time the French government requested extradition of Barbie from American officials in 1949, it was public knowledge that Barbie was living freely in the American zone under a false identity. As the French demands for extradition escalated, the CIC decided it was too risky to continue using Barbie as an informant. However, the CIC was not willing to hand Barbie to the French, fearing that Barbie knew too much about CIC intelligence operations. In 1951, the CIC helped Barbie escape to South America with his family via the American “Rat Line” that smuggled escaped Nazis and other Axis fugitives out of postwar Europe. Life and Recognition in South America Now French authorities have released for the first time the police records which led to Dr Petiot being guillotined, aged 49, in May 1946. Letters that Nazi war criminal Barbie sent to Bolivia from prison revealed". San Diego Tribune (in Spanish). 5 January 2015 . Retrieved 16 January 2020.