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The Holocaust History Project.
The Holocaust History Project.

WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
 
 
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Moulin, l'unificateur ("Jean Moulin, Unifier of Resistance"); and Eric Piquet Wicks's Quatre dans l'ombre ("Four in the Shadows").

In a few days I had sixty solid pages of data. I now had to get them reproduced. Fortunately Francis Lenchener's father allowed us to use his copying machine. During the following months we spent a lot of time in the Lenchener offices copying those documents and collating them, and eventually we produced about two hundred rather bulky sets for distribution.

Much has been written about Klaus Barbie, including a defensive memoir that he wrote in collaboration with the Brazilian journalist Dantas Ferreira. But what I have added to this literature is the indisputable evidence about his crimes that I discovered in Germany and in records not generally available to the public.

Nikolaus (Klaus) Barbie was born on October 25, 1913, in Bad Godesberg, near Bonn. His mother, Anna Hees, twenty-seven, and his father, Nikolaus Barbie, did not marry until January 30, 1914. The marriage took place in Merzig, in the Saar, the ancestral town of the Barbie family. Klaus's father was first an office worker and later a schoolteacher. He died at the age of forty-five from a neck tumor that resulted from a World War I wound.

Until he was eleven, Klaus went to the elementary school in Udler, where his father taught. Then he entered Friedrich-Wilhelm High School in Trier, from which he was graduated in 1934. Starting on April 1, 1933, Klaus was part of the Hitler Youth. He did not continue his studies at a higher level, but volunteered for work service at Niebull, in Schleswig-Holstein. He stayed there for six months, from April 26 to October 31, 1934. Once his work term was over, Klaus enlisted in the Hitler Youth, and even then he was voluntarily cooperating with the regional branch of the Nazi Party as secretary to the chief of the Trier section.

Early in 1935 he came into contact with the secret service of Reichsführer S.S. Himmler – the S.D. On September 25, 1935, he became S.S. No. 272,284, and was assigned as an assistant in the S.D.'s central office, the IV-D. In October 1937, Klaus Barbie was transferred to the administrative staff of the S.D.

He had joined the Nazi Party as No. 4,583,085 on May 1, 1937. (It is extraordinary that the three principal S.S. members I am attacking had the following party membership cards: Barbie, No. 4,583,085; Hagen, No. 4,583,139; Lischka, No. 4,583,185. There were over eight million Nazis, and these three were of different
     
   
 
WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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