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Bestial Crimes of Klaus Barbie - Sadistic Nazi SS Officer known as the “Butcher of Lyon“. Nikolaus “Klaus“ Barbie was born on 25 October 1913 in Godesberg then part of the German Empire. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party came into power in January 1933. In June of the same year, Barbie's younger brother Kurt died, at the age of 18. Because Barbie’s father Nikolaus also died later that year, young Klaus could not finance his university studies. Immediately after the German conquest and occupation of the Netherlands, Barbie arrived in Amsterdam on May 29, 1940 and until March 1942 he was employed there in the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. Barbie and his subordinates were responsible for the persecution of resistance fighters and Jews, especially those who had moved from Germany before the start of the war. Barbie was also instrumental in the persecution and torture of Freemasons in the Netherlands and personally directed attacks on lodges. On 11 October 1940, Barbie arrested Hermannus van Tongeren, Grand Master of the Grand Orient of the Netherlands which was a Masonic Grand Lodge in the Netherlands. In March 1941, van Tongeren was transported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp where, in freezing conditions, he died two weeks later. On 1 April, Barbie summoned Van Tongeren's daughter, Charlotte, to the SD headquarters and informed her that her father had died of an infection in both ears and had been cremated. In 1942 when the Gestapo needed to pick a man to head their office in Lyon, the “Capital of the French Resistance,” Klaus Barbie with his cunning, language skills, and special zeal was a natural choice. As the local Gestapo chief, Klaus Barbie earned the nickname “the Butcher of Lyon” for his brutal actions towards Jews and members of the French Resistance. He personally interrogated and tortured his victims from his headquarters in the notorious Hotel Terminus. Barbie was also a sexual deviant who raped the women that he interrogated. Erna Paris in her account of Barbie’s interrogation wrote: “Women were always tortured naked, to the deep enjoyment of the torturers. Barbie kept two German shepherd dogs. One was trained to lunge and bite. The other was trained to mount naked women.” After the war, Mario Blardone, who survived Barbie’s interrogation, described how he had seen Barbie try to have a young girl raped by his dog. Barbie’s most famous victim was the hero of the French resistance, Jean Moulin, whom Barbie personally interrogated on a daily basis for three weeks. He also tortured the children. Simone Lagrange, a soft-spoken Holocaust survivor whose family was exterminated, later recalled the arrest of her father, mother and herself on June 6, 1944. Denounced by a French neighbor as Jews, Simone and her parents were taken to Gestapo headquarters where Barbie, dressed in gray and caressing a kitten, said Simone was pretty. “He was caressing the cat. And me, a kid 13 years old, I could not imagine that he could be evil because he loved animals. I was tortured by him for eight days.” During the following week, Barbie hauled Simone out of a prison cell each day, yanking her by her hair, and beating and punching at her open wounds in an effort to obtain information. Another survivor, Lise Lesevre, recalled how Klaus Barbie tortured her for nine days in 1944, beating her, and nearly drowning her in a bathtub. She told how she was hung up by hand cuffs with spikes inside them and beaten with a rubber bar. She was ordered to strip naked and get into a tub filled with freezing water. Her legs were tied to a bar across the tub and Barbie yanked a chain attached to the bar to pull her underwater. During her last interrogation, Barbie ordered her to lie flat on a chair and struck her on the back with a spiked ball attached to a chain. It broke a vertebrae, and she suffered for the rest of her life. Another survivor, Ennat Leger, said: “Klaus Barbie had the eyes of a monster. He was a savage. My God, he was a savage! It was unimaginable. He broke my teeth, he pulled my hair back. He put a bottle in my mouth and pushed it until my lips split from the pressure.” Join World History channel and get access to benefits: Disclaimer: All opinions and comments below are from members of the public and do not reflect the views of World History channel. We do not accept promoting violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on attributes such as: race, nationality, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation. World History has right to review the comments and delete them if they are deemed inappropriate. ► CLICK the SUBSCRIBE button for more interesting clips: #ww2 #worldwar2videos #worldhistory
