Klaus Barbie
1913 – 1991 · aged 78
German SS officer, head of the Gestapo in Lyon and convicted war criminal (1913–1991)
- Born
- 25 Oct 1913 · Bad Godesberg
- Died
- 25 Sept 1991 · Pierre-Bénite
Life timeline
Their life from birth to death. On the timeline, world events of the time are shown faintly.
- 25 Oct 1913BornBorn in Bad Godesberg
- 1939 – 1945WarWorld War II
- 25 Sept 1991DiedDied in Pierre-Bénite
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Meanwhile in the world
Major world events during their lifetime (1913 – 1991).
- 1914 – 1918World War I
- 1915 – 1923Armenian genocide
- 1917Balfour Declaration
- 1917February Revolution
- 1917October Revolution
- 1917 – 1922Russian Civil War
- 1919 – 1920Paris Peace Conference
- 1920Treaty of Versailles
- 1933 – 1945The Holocaust
- 19341934 FIFA World Cup
- 19361936 Summer Olympics
- 1937 – 1945Second Sino-Japanese War
- 19381938 FIFA World Cup
- 1938Munich Agreement
- 1939 – 1940Winter War
- 1940 – 1945Auschwitz concentration camp
- 1941Attack on Pearl Harbor
- 1941 – 1945Eastern Front
- 1941Operation Barbarossa
- 1942 – 1943Battle of Stalingrad
- 1945Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
- 1945 – 1946Nuremberg trials
- 19501950 FIFA World Cup
- 1950 – 1953Korean War
- 1953 – 1959Cuban Revolution
- 19541954 FIFA World Cup
- 1955 – 1975Vietnam War
- 1956Hungarian Revolution of 1956
- 1956Suez Crisis
- 19581958 FIFA World Cup
- 1959Antarctic Treaty System
- 19621962 FIFA World Cup
- 1962Cuban Missile Crisis
- 19661966 FIFA World Cup
- 1966 – 1976Cultural Revolution
- 1968Prague Spring
- 1969Apollo 11 Moon landing
- 19721972 Summer Olympics
- 19741974 FIFA World Cup
- 19781978 FIFA World Cup
Biography
Niklaus Barbie (25 October 1913 – 25 September 1991) was a German officer of the Schutzstaffel and Sicherheitsdienst and a convicted war criminal. He worked in Vichy France during World War II. He became known as the "Butcher of Lyon" for having personally tortured prisoners—primarily Jews and members of the French Resistance—as the head of the Gestapo in Lyon.
After the war, United States intelligence services employed him for his anti-communist efforts and aided his escape to Bolivia, where he advised the dictatorial regime on how to repress opposition through torture. In 1983, the United States apologised to France for the U.S. Counterintelligence Corps helping him escape to Bolivia to avoid an outstanding arrest warrant.
In 1951, he immigrated to Bolivia. While he was in Bolivia, the West German Intelligence Service recruited him. Barbie is suspected of having had a role in the Bolivian coup d'état orchestrated by Luis García Meza in 1980. After the fall of the dictatorship, Barbie lost the protection of the government in La Paz.
In 1983, he was arrested and extradited to France, where he was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison. Although he had been sentenced to death in absentia twice earlier, in 1947 and 1954, capital punishment had been abolished in France in 1981.
Barbie died of cancer in 1991, at age 77, in his Lyon prison cell.
Text from the Wikipedia article Klaus Barbie, CC BY-SA 4.0
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