Did you or your parents grow up with a
Nazi war criminal living on your street, a dithering old man who was once a ruthless
mass murderer in Germany or Poland? After all, some of you out there lived among those war
criminals, more of you than you might think. You’ll agree with us in about 25 minutes.
At the end of April 1945, the smell of Adolf Hitler’s smoldering flesh filled the
nostrils of the few people who witnessed his ad hoc cremation in the Reich Chancellery
Garden. Berlin was in flames. The Red Army was marching in, leaving piles of dead
German soldiers and civilians in its wake. The grand prize, many of the highest-ranking
Nazis, the chief executioners, sadistic scientists, and the demented doctors, were
scurrying from Germany like rats from a house fire. Some of them with assistance from the very
people they’d been fighting against for six years. On April 30, Hitler had said his goodbyes to
the 20 or so people in the Führerbunker in Berlin. He’d already informed a select group of
men of the plan. Burn me until there’s nothing left of me. Don’t let those Soviets take
my body as a trophy. Turn me into ashes, Hitler demanded. Don't leave anything.
Still, when Hitler gave that order, he knew there was still a possibility
of escape. His private pilot, Hans Baur, whom Hitler had a very close bond with, had
pleaded with his boss to get the hell out of the bunker and fly to freedom. Baur had been
saying this for weeks. Even when the Red Army’s shells made Hitler jump every so often, Baur was
still sure he could fly his Fuhrer to safety. In the weeks and days leading up to the end,
Baur’s “Fuhrer squadron” had been ready to leave Germany from at least six airfields in and around
Berlin. There were many options as to where to go: The Baltic coast, maybe. Or further
afield: Greenland, Manchuria, Argentina, Japan…Arab Sheiks would even help hide Hitler!
Hitler wasn’t impressed, so Baur told him again right at the end that he had a Fieseler Fi 156
Storch light plane waiting. He could take off from the Tiergarten near the Brandenburg Gate
and head straight to Bavaria, and from there, to safety on the other side of the world.
Hitler again refused. He was not going to spend his life on the run, not like the
others. He thanked Baur for his concern and duty to the fatherland and handed him
one of his prize possessions, a portrait of the Prussian King Frederick the Great.
And so, on that day, sometime in the late afternoon, Baur was there when Hitler’s dead body
was wrapped in a bloodstained rug and taken into the garden. Tears filled Baur’s eyes. Just days
before, he’d watched his Fuehrer feed nuts to squirrels in that garden. Hitler had been the best
man at his wedding, and now, he was being doused in gasoline, treated no better than garbage.
On May 1, Hitler’s propaganda chief, the ever-loyal Joseph Goebbels, also became
a smoldering mass of flesh and bone in that garden. His wife, Magda, burned next to
him. The Soviets would at least find some of their remains. It turned out that
the cremation job was a shoddy one. The Soviets, under their ruthless
leader Joseph “Man of Steel” Stalin, did not want dead bodies. This was no good. He
wanted to capture those top Nazis. Like the USA, the Soviets wanted the scientists. They wanted the
spies, the great swathes of German intelligence, the doctors who had medical data no other country
had. There were many precious and valuable items among that Berlin rubble, but the
real treasure was the Nazis themselves. Baur did not get far. The road he’d planned
to use as an airstrip had been bombed and was covered in potholes. Hitler was right not to
go. The street was crawling with soldiers from the Soviet 3rd Shock Army. They found Baur
and shot him in both legs. Not too far away, the Nazi Chancellery head Martin Bormann, one
of Hitler’s closest who’d fled at the same time as Baur, was killed by Soviet artillery.
It would be years until Bormann’s death was confirmed. For decades, there were rumors
about his whereabouts in South America, Denmark, and Australia. It was said he was a Soviet spy.
That maybe he and Hitler had teamed up again. The CIA and the FBI never stopped looking for
these two guys, which wasn’t public knowledge, of course. It wasn’t until 1998 that Bormann, who
was one of the main architects of the Holocaust, was conclusively identified
using forensic DNA techniques. Every high-ranking Nazi became a part of this
treasure hunt. The last thing the Americans wanted was for the Soviets to get there first. After one
of Baur’s legs was amputated by Soviet doctors in June 1945, he was interrogated time and again.
Where is the gold? Where’s all the stolen art? Where are your brothers in arms? Where are the
scientists? No way would the Soviets kill this man, who’d been there at the end of Hitler’s life
and surely knew where the other Nazis had fled. As newspapers the world over ran headlines
about Hitler’s death and the peace that was surely on the way, Stalin wasn’t buying it. Not
for a second did he believe Hitler was dead. The Germans didn’t surrender
immediately after Hitler perished, but the war was a hopeless cause. Germany at
least hoped for some favorable conditions, but they were not going to come. Karl
Dönitz, the Grand Admiral of the German navy, replaced Hitler as the head of state and was
the one to make the final decision to give up. The Allies would accept nothing but complete
unconditional surrender, and that happened on May 7 when Alfred Jodl, the Chief of Staff of
the German Army, signed it into effect at the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary
Force at Reims in northeastern France. It was the best of times. It was the
worst of times. Millions of people had died. Soldiers had returned home
with missing limbs. The Soviets, who’d suffered far worse than anyone else, were
barely in the mood for the kind of celebrations seen elsewhere. 27 million dead. Economic
chaos. It was terrible for the Soviets, although their propaganda machine played
down just how bad the war had been. Stalin didn’t even know how close the Americans
were to executing the first nuclear bomb test under the Manhattan Project. His dream of
world domination diminished the moment his aid whispered in his ear on July 16 that
the Americans had completed the test. He was attending the Potsdam conference at the
time with the British and American leaders. It suddenly became much more important to find
those Germans in hiding. The public didn’t know it, but a new secret war featuring
spies was taking place between the US, UK, and the Soviets. Take them alive, not dead,
was what all three were saying. As you’ll see, they did just that but didn’t feel the
need to tell anyone about it. It was capitalism versus communism,
and it would be a long fight. Hitler was dead, even if Stalin didn’t
believe it. Goebbels was surely dead. But what about the other main players?
What about Hermann Göring, the Head of the Luftwaffe? Not long before the end
came for Germany, he’d been sentenced to death by Hitler for the alleged crime of
“attempting to seize control of the state.” Bormann had orders to execute him if Berlin
fell, which of course, was always going to happen. It was better for Goring to surrender to
the Americans than give himself up to the Soviets, and that’s what he did on May 6 when the 36th
Infantry Division of the US Army got hold of him. Goring’s lavish tastes for gold
jewels, and art came out in his trial, as did his starring role in the Holocaust, but
after being handed the death penalty by hanging, not by firing squad as he’d asked, his life
came to an abrupt end in his prison cell. If you had to list the top five Nazis,
including Hitler, of course, you might put Bormann in fourth, Goebbels in third, Göring
in second, and the top man, next to the boss, was the Head of the SS and Gestapo, the
Holocaust’s main man, Heinrich Himmler. Himmler had also become the object of Hitler’s
wrath after he’d attempted to engage in peace talks with the enemy. This infuriated Hitler,
who had always seen Himmler as possibly the most loyal of his inner circle after Goebbels.
Hitler called Himmler’s call for peace treachery, the worst case of disloyalty in his entire
life, and ordered his capture and execution. On May 21, long after Hitler had been turned
into ashes, Himmler was apprehended by the British while trying to escape. He was then sent
to the 31st Civilian Interrogation Camp outside the city of Lüneburg. Despite the civilian
clothes and the absence of his mustache, the British discovered they had someone important
on their hands, but no sooner than Himmler admitted that he was dead. A doctor had asked
him to open wide, and the next second, following a slight crunching sound, he was on the floor.
Hitler’s inner circle was suddenly looking like a quiet place. The man later called the chief
architect of the Holocaust, second to Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, had already died in 1942
at the hands of Czech resistance fighters. This left another of Hitler’s closest, the
Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, Albert Speer, who’d once had ideas that he might
become Hitler’s successor. He was arrested by the British after Germany’s surrender.
It was heard during the Nuremberg Trials that Speer had been a very important
component of the Nazi war machine, a literal architect in the industry of mass
murder. But it was never certain what he knew about the Nazi’s extermination plans,
so he only got a 20-year prison sentence. This also left the Nazi Minister of
Foreign Affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was arrested in May 1945. After the trials
in Nuremberg, he, too, was sentenced to death. Next up for a death sentence was
Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the Armed Forces High Command.
Hitler’s inner circle was now almost emptied. But in the who’s who of Nazis,
Erich Raeder’s name also came up. He’d been the grand admiral of the Kriegsmarine
before Dontiz took over that position. He might have kept his job as Hitler’s
main guy in the navy had it not been for the embarrassment at the Battle of the
Barents Sea when Britain’s Royal Navy delivered a beating to the Germans late at
night in the Artic off the coast of Norway. Raeder lost his job, but that didn’t mean
he was going to get off scot free at the trials. Nonetheless, he and Donitz later
breathed a sigh of relief in the courtroom when instead of a death sentence,
they were handed prison sentences. Raeder wasn’t expecting that since he was
charged with all the biggies: war crimes, conspiracy to commit crimes against peace,
crimes against humanity, planning, initiating, crimes against the laws of war, and waging wars
of aggression. They threw the book at Donitz, too, but some of the charges didn’t stick, and
he got away with a 10-year prison sentence. Both men were able to argue they weren’t
involved in the Holocaust quite convincingly. Those Nazis accused of being a major part of
the Final Solution were not so fortunate to go on to serve prison sentences and, in later life,
write books and take up gardening. Hans Frank, the Governor-General of Occupied Poland,
was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and no way was he
going to get off with a prison term. This so-called butcher of Poland exhibited no
shame during the trial when he said, “I was happy… when Adolf Hitler, in a most wonderful rise
to power, unparalleled in the history of mankind, succeeded by the end of 1938.”
Frank was asked, “Did you ever participate in the annihilation of Jews?”
He replied, “I say ‘yes,’ and the reason why I say ‘yes’ is because, having lived through
the 5 months of this trial, and particularly after having heard the testimony of the witness
Höss, my conscience does not allow me to throw the responsibility solely on these minor people.”
Like many Nazis at the trials, Frank didn’t want to look like an evil beast, so he passed the
hot potato upwards as if everything had been Hitler’s and Himmler’s fault. Hitler must have
been rolling in his grave at this point. Six million Jews dead. Soviet prisoners, other
POWs, Roma people, gay people, all dead, and no one wanted to take the blame. They looked
like burping children denying they’d just stole a can of soda. The evidence was overwhelming.
Another main man in the Holocaust was Ernst Kaltenbrunner, a rabid anti-Semite
that used to hang on Hitler’s every word when the so-called Jewish problem was brought up.
In the opening statements, he was asked if he was aware he was being charged with being one of
the people connected to “Gestapo terror and the atrocities of the concentration camps.”
He said he was and accepted that the “hatred of the world is directed against me.”
While his name might not always pop up in conversations when people
nowadays talk about Nazis, he was what the people said he was, “The Monster
of The Holocaust.” He was one of them, anyway. Still, like the others, he passed the hot
potato, stating in the middle of his trial, “I never saw a gas chamber, either in operation
or at any other time. I did not know that they existed.” Like many at the trials, he tried
to minimize his part in the mass murders, saying he’d just followed orders.
He was one of 10 men, some of whom we’ve mentioned already, that was hanged on October 16,
1946, beginning at 1.11 am. At precisely 1.52 am, it was Kaltenbrunner’s turn. His last words were,
“I have done my duty by the laws of my people, and I am sorry my people were led this time
by men who were not soldiers and that crimes were committed of which I had no knowledge.”
It seems he died throwing that hot potato. 43-year-old Sergeant John C. Woods from
San Antonio in the US was the executioner. Despite all this denial, he took great
pride in his job. He told Time magazine, “I hanged those ten Nazis . . . and I am proud
of it. ... I wasn't nervous. . .. A fellow can't afford to have nerves in this business.”
Some people who were there said some of the men’s heads hit the trapdoor on the way
down and that the rope wasn’t long enough, so they were strangled to death rather than
dying from their necks being broken from the fall. The US Army denied this, but to be frank,
not too many people expressed dismay at a possibly half-botched hangings. Rumors circulated
that the Army had done this on purpose. These 10 men were perhaps the cream of the crop,
but the massacre of millions doesn’t happen without thousands of people being involved. The
US alone arrested around 100,000 Germans accused of war crimes. There was the Doctors’ Trial in
1946, in which 23 men were accused of conducting or taking part in the terrifying Nazi medical
experiments we’ll discuss soon. Seven men were acquitted, and seven were sentenced to death.
The others spent around 10 years in prison. Over 1,300 witnesses came forward
to talk about the horrors inflicted in those camps. Over 30,000 documents were
brought into evidence, and the proceedings generated around 132,000 pages of transcripts.
One of the men featured in those transcripts a lot was Adolf Eichmann, another architect of the
Holocaust. This man helped bring millions of Jews into those camps where they would live in horrific
conditions and almost always be exterminated. Eichmann was one of the men that designed the
plans for the Final Solution. He often gave the orders to many of those men who would later
pass the blame onto anyone but themselves. One of them was Rudolf Höss. The testimony of
Hoss shocked everyone, and it suddenly made Eichmann one of the most wanted men on the planet.
Hoss served as the Auschwitz commandant and was one of the people responsible for introducing the
pesticide Zyklon B as the weapon to kill millions of people in the gas chambers. He didn’t deny it.
He also said something that put Mr. Eichmann in deep water. Hoss was asked,
“Witness, did the State Police, as an authority of the Reich, have anything to
do with the destruction of Jews in Auschwitz?” He replied, “Yes, insofar as I received all my
orders as to the carrying out of that action from the Obersturmfáhrer (Senior Assault-unit Leader)
Eichmann.” This name popped up time and again, and to everyone’s alarm, he wasn’t one of the men
about to testify in any trial. He’d done a runner, and as you’ll see, he’d had some help.
Hoss came right out with it, explaining in a written statement that he later confirmed
in court, “We executed about 400,000 Hungarian Jews alone at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944.”
He admitted to murdering 20,000 Russian POWs as well as torturing British POWs. He said at
Auschwitz, they executed 2.5 million people, while half a million more died from starvation.
Some of the most important words ever written after WWII were in Hoss’s signed
testimony. You need to hear this from the horse’s mouth because it’s so astonishing:
“I used Cyklon B, which was a crystallized prussic acid that we dropped into the death
chamber from a small opening. It took from 3 to 15 minutes to kill the people in the death
chamber, depending upon climatic conditions. We knew when the people were dead because
their screaming stopped. We usually waited about one-half hour before we opened the doors and
removed the bodies. After the bodies were removed, our special Kommandos took off the rings and
extracted the gold from the teeth of the corpses.” Hoss explained how mothers would hide their
children in the camp, how he and his men tried to keep the exterminations secret from the rest
of the prisoners, but the “foul and nauseating stench” gave it away. In relation to the mass
executions, he was asked again, “This entire action came to you directly from Himmler through
Eichmann, who had been personally delegated.” He replied, “Yes.” So, the line of
command went Hitler, Himmer, Eichmann. As you know, Himmler was dead
by this point, as was Hitler, so now Eichmann was the man that everyone wanted,
that the Jewish people were screaming out for. But Eichmann was nowhere to be found. After the
war, he was arrested with other SS officers by US troops and later sent to a work camp. He’d
given the US authorities the name Otto Eckmann. By the time Hoss was spilling the beans,
Eichmann had escaped the camp and was hiding out in Germany under the name Otto Heninger.
For these escaped Nazis to survive on the run, they needed a lot of friends. One of them was
the Austrian Bishop, Alois Hudal, a man who, years later, would refuse to admit he’d done
anything wrong, famously saying, “We do not believe in the eye for an eye of the Jew.”
It was Hudal who made it possible for Eichmann and many other war criminals to hide out in
monasteries and Nazi safe houses until they had sufficient paperwork to get a passport and
head to Argentina or another far-flung nation. These escape routes were called ratlines. Many of
them led to countries in South America, but other chosen destinations were Mexico, Switzerland,
and, as you’ll hear about in detail, the USA. There are various reasons why the Nazis chose
South American countries. One is they could find other Germans there. Many of the countries were
sympathetic to the Nazi cause. Cruel dictators would take them. There was also the fact that
those countries didn’t have extradition treaties, and once enough Nazis were in a certain
country, they could form networks. A Nazi journalist interviewed Eichmann in
1956. These recordings were not made public until 2022. They tell you a lot about Eichmann,
who quite nonchalantly admitted, “I didn't care about the Jews deported to Auschwitz, whether
they lived or died. It was the Führer's order: Jews who were fit to work would work, and those
who weren't would be sent to the Final Solution.” As he said those sobering words, Jewish Nazi
hunters were sure Eichmann was somewhere in Argentina. Eichmann had actually settled in
well, working various jobs and, at one point, becoming the department head at a Mercedes Benz
plant in Buenos Aires under the name Klement. Little did the Nazi hunters know that the
CIA knew that already. The CIA even had its own Nazis in South America on its payroll.
Many years later, the agency declassified 27,000 documents about former Nazis and their
lives on the run. One of the documents reads that Eichmann “is reported to have lived in
Argentina under the alias Clemens.” He was actually living under the name of Ricardo Klement.
Why no one told the Nazi hunters this is complicated. It’s believed the West Germans
and the British also knew much that those Nazi hunters wanted to know. This was the Cold War,
and perhaps those countries, like the US, had a reason not to share all their intelligence. You’ll
understand this more clearly soon. For now, we’ll just say some men were supposed to stay hidden.
In May 1960, a group of Israeli Mossad agents sent to capture Eichmann staked out his house
in San Fernando, a suburb of Buenos Aires. They watched him travel to work and back by bus. They
were sure they had the right man. At one point, one of the agents went to up Eichmann and
talked to him in Spanish. Eichmann got scared, he guessed what was happening, but before he
could run, two other agents were wrestling him to the ground. One of the worst runaway
monsters of WWII had been captured. This wasn’t extradition in any sense
of the law. It was kidnapping, but hey, what were they to do without any extradition
treaties in place? The agents drugged Eichmann and smuggled him back to Israel on a plane,
breaking God knows how many laws on the way. This was incredibly controversial at the time.
For an architect of the Nazi genocide, Israel basically said something like extraordinary
circumstances require extraordinary measures. Eichmann was soon standing in a courtroom,
described by one of the 500 journalists as “a thin, balding man of 55 who looked more
like a bank clerk than a butcher.” It was a naive thing to say. Evil doesn’t snarl
and have horns; it winks and wears a tie. Like the rest, Eichmann denied being the monster
he’d been made out to be. He told the court he “didn’t kill anyone” and that he was “only
dealing with train timetables and technical aspects of evacuation transports.”
Nah, that didn’t impress anyone. He was executed in 1962.
When those Mossad agents were in Argentina, they had to make a sacrifice. That’s because
they might also have been able to capture the man that was known as the “Angel of Death,”
the Nazi doctor that experimented on prisoners in the worst possible ways, Josef Mengele.
This is the man that would walk up to Jews after they entered the camp and picked out the
specimens he wanted, often the children who would later call him uncle after he handed them candies.
Little did they know they were going to be his human guinea pigs. This is how one of those
kids later described being picked by Mengele: “Dr. Mengele pulled me out of a queue as we
were on the way from the c-lager camp to the gas chamber. I was the only one picked that
day personally by Mengele and his assistant. They took me to his laboratory, where I met
other children. They were screaming from pain… I was injected with drugs and chemicals.”
On the behalf of German pharmaceutical companies and the war effort in general, Mengele would
purposefully infect people with diseases. He gave some gangrene after rubbing dirt and
glass in wounds he’d made. He operated on people without anesthesia. Sometimes when
he was done, he ordered them out of the back of the lab, where they were shot.
It’s not certain how many people were victims of these terrible experiments,
but it was likely in the region of 27,000. It’s been reported that over 4,300 of them
died, and many more were rendered disabled or left with terrible scars. Lots of them later testified
about the horrors they’d faced in the camp. His infinitely unethical work, of course,
was useful to the Nazis. In a sane world, you can’t experiment on humans, but in the
world of war, the Nazi war, that suddenly became possible. Some were left outside to freeze
to the point of death and were then dangerously heated up. Women had their muscles and nerves
removed. Many had entire limbs hacked off. Some were given deadly blood infections.
Dr. Zdenka Nedvedova-Nejedla, a Czech doctor who worked alongside Mengele, later testified:
“High amputations were performed; for example, even whole arms with shoulder blades or legs were
amputated. These operations were performed mostly on insane women who were immediately killed
after the operation by a quick injection.” It wasn’t an easy decision for those Mossad
agents to know they were giving up Mengele in order to catch Eichmann. They’d heard the
nightmarish stories, but in that contaminated sea of hidden Nazis, Eichmann was the bigger fish.
One of the Mossad agents explained it simply, “When I have a bird in my hand, I don't start
looking for the bird in the bush. I'll take the bird in my hand, put it in a cage,
and then deal with the one in the bush.” But by the time the Red Army liberated Auschwitz
on 27 January 1945, Mengele was long gone. When the Americans got him in June, he’d already
given all his important documents to a nurse. The US had no idea who they had on their hands,
so they released him under the name Fritz Ulmann, which he later changed to Fritz Hollmann.
He stayed in Germany for a while working on farms, but when those testimonies revealed
his sadistic experiments, he managed to persuade enough people he was a worthy
candidate for a first-class ratline ticket. SS members helped him get to Italy, where
he got a passport from the International Committee of the Red Cross. In 1949,
he sailed on a ship to Buenos Aires and later worked as a carpenter under
the name of Helmut Gregor. He was being careful with for a good reason. A sure
death sentence awaited him in Europe. But his confidence grew over the years. He
made trips back to Europe to see his family, even going on a skiing holiday. Back in Argentina,
he started a pharmaceutical company. He gave young women illegal abortions. He never really changed.
Speaking about Brazil, he once wrote in his diary: “Brazil is a nice country to live in despite the
mixing of the races. But there are many people who, like me, believe and are sympathetic
to the Nazi movement and racial ideology.” He remained a fan of eugenics, writing in
another entry, “Weaker humans should not be permitted to reproduce. This is the only way
for humankind to exist and sustain itself.” During the trial of Eichmann in 1961, Mengele’s
name was mentioned numerous times. Later, in 1963, during the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials,
a witness named Vera Alexander shocked everyone in attendance when she said:
“There was a set of twins, Gypsies, whom he took away one day from the block where I
was - that was the Zigeunerlager - the Gypsy camp. Some days later, he returned them, with veins
in their arms and their backs sewn together.” The judge couldn’t believe his ears and asked
her again, “He sewed them together?!... Like Siamese twins!?” She replied, “yes,” he did.
Alas, Mr. Mengele was never brought to justice. On February 7, 1979, while Mengele
was at a coastal resort in Brazil, he had a stroke in a swimming pool and drowned.
He was seen as one of the ones that got away, but little did Americans know that fiends
like him were living among them at this time. None of this would have been possible if it wasn’t
for those ratlines. Franz Stangl is more proof. He was one of the worst. The commander of
the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps. It’s said on his hands was the
blood of possibly one million Jews. This made him an even bigger fish than Mengele. In
1948, he went to see that man of the cloth, Bishop Alois Hudal, when Hudal said to him, “You
must be Franz Stangl — I've been expecting you.” He first went to Syria with the documents Hudal
gave him, and later, he headed to Brazil. With his family in tow, he worked in Sao Paulo
at a Volkswagen car plant. But for once, justice was served, and Stangl was extradited. He
was back in West Germany in 1967 and was sentenced to life in prison in 1970. Just six months
into his sentence, he died from heart failure. He called the Jews he killed mere numbers,
“cargo,” as he said one time. About mass murder, he stated, “That was my profession. I enjoyed
it. It fulfilled me. And yes, I was ambitious about that, I won't deny it.” In one of his last
interviews, he told a journalist, “In reality, I share the guilt.” 19 hours later, he was dead.
Stangl, like many of the rats in the ratlines, crossed the Alps into Italy. They often hid out
at the Capuchin monastery near Bressanone and sometimes the Franciscan monastery near
Bolzano. This was called the “monastery route.” From there, Rome was usually the next
destination, and then onto far-off places. In Rome, with a member of the Catholic
Church having confirmed their identity, the International Committee of the Red Cross
supplied them with a passport. Somewhere in the region of 120,000 papers were handed out
leading up to 1951. This might sound strange, but it was due to humanitarian concerns. The
so-called “protective passports” were for anyone at risk of persecution, including Jews during the
Holocaust. Still, the organization was roundly criticized for giving those Nazis papers. This
was no time for neutrality, was the usual refrain. Sometimes those involved in the ratlines
weren’t neutral in the slightest, such as the US intelligence agencies that helped the so-called
Butcher of Lyon escape. He was Klaus Barbie, a man whose face stayed in his victims’ memories
for the rest of their lives. The eyes, they used to say, they could never forget his evil eyes.
Like a James Bond villain, he interrogated people suspected of being part of the French resistance
with a cat in his arms. Survivors testified that he’d put the cat down and walk over to his
toolbox, telling them, “You will speak to me. Trust me, you will talk. They all do in the end.”
One of them later testified, “Barbie took pleasure, a pleasure that was
astounding, in torturing.” Another said, “He had the eyes of a monster. He was savage.
My God, he was savage! It was unimaginable.” He butchered them in ways we
can’t even truly describe, and then sent them to their deaths at the camps.
Barbie was the head of the Gestapo in Lyon, whose headquarters were at the famed l'hôtel
Terminus. This is where all the torture happened, often for days on end, with that
damn cat of his always nearby. Not many people could hold out. Some did, though,
such as a woman named Lise Lesevre, whom Barbie thought was connected to a resistance fighter
named Didier. On his last attempt to torture her, after already smashing her up and freezing her
in baths of ice cubes, he said in a calm voice: “I admire you, but in the end, everybody
talks… What you have done is magnificent, my dear. Nobody has held out as long as you. It’s
nearly over now. I’m very upset. But let’s finish. Go on, a little effort….WHO. IS. DIDIER?”
She said nothing, just looked at him from her swollen eyes with a hatred she never
thought she could muster. He then said, “Liquidate her. I don't want to see her anymore.”
Stories like these were common. It was discovered after the war that Barbie sent possibly four
thousand of those people to the extermination camps, including dozens of orphans. This was
a man with plenty of information about spies. He had a lot of intelligence in his mind and
in his little black books, so after the war, he was a man of great value, a top asset.
The British got there first. Their agents beat him and interrogated him, asking him everything
he knew, including the names of all the secret communists in Europe. God only knows, the US
wanted these names more than anyone. In fact, the US took Barbie away from the Brits.
A paper written on the matter reads, “CIC rationalized that if unemployed, Barbie
would renew his overtures to the British who would find out that CIC had not turned him in.”
The U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps, an early iteration of the CIA, knew the French
wanted Barbie the butcher to pay for his crimes, but he was just too good to give up. So, the
CIC put Barbie on the payroll. They said if he spied for them as an anti-communist, he’d
live “very comfortably” and get “hundreds of dollars” for his work. Well, thought Barbie,
that sounds better than hanging from a rope. They also promised him they’d make his name
disappear since the word was already getting around about this the butcher of Lyon.
It wasn’t an easy decision for the CIC. They knew the French wanted justice. It
was a matter of thinking about what was better in the greater scheme of things,
and the agency chose to keep Barbie. Now things get really crazy. A now-declassified
file states, “In 1951, the CIC sponsored his escape to South America via a ‘ratline’ operating
through Italy.” The question is, who did they pay? In actions that many years later the US Justice
Department would have to issue apologies over, the CIC enlisted a fascist war criminal who
was one of the main instruments of ratline escapes. He was the Croatian priest named Dr.
Krunoslav Draganovic, a nasty piece of work said to be behind the murder of hundreds
of thousands of Orthodox Serbs and Jews. Here is part of a secret CIC memo
that was decades later unearthed: “The 430th CIC Detachment has been operating
what they term a 'Ratline' evacuation system to Central and South America without serious
repercussions during the past three years. At the cost of approximately $1,000 for each adult,
430th CIC is transferring evacuees to Italy where they are provided with legal documentation
obtained through devious means there.” South American dictators ran a tight ship in terms
of capturing and killing their enemies, and Barbie was the king of interrogations. They tortured
their critics and made others go missing. Since they were anti-communist, they got the backing
of the US under Operation Condor. The US paid for and arranged coups of democratically elected
leaders, so relatively speaking, having a Nazi on the payroll wasn’t such a big deal. There is even
some circumstantial evidence that it was Barbie and the CIA working in a collaboration that
led to Guevara’s capture by Bolivian soldiers. We now know that Barbie was also on the payroll
of West Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service. He was agent 43118. Like the US, West Germany
would rather this not have come out, but it did. Barbie worked with other organizations that
killed indiscriminately and ruled by fear: the drug traffickers. For a while, he
helped Bolivia’s biggest drug lord, Roberto Suárez Gómez, aka, “The King of Cocaine.”
He later got pally with Pablo Escobar and his Medellín Cartel. Escobar gave him money for his
anti-communist work, which was kind of weird given the US was after Escobar yet at the same
time working with Barbie. It wasn’t too long, though, before his identity was revealed, and he
was on his way back to Europe to face the music. The spying agencies of Americans,
the Brits, and the West Germans were all somewhat hot under the collar because
they’d known all along he was alive and well, working as torturer-in-chef in South
America while trafficking drugs. When he arrived at the airport in 1983, a
44-year-old woman who he had tortured as a kid was there and tried to shoot him. She failed
and got arrested herself. He was hated that much, so his appearance was mightily
embarrassing for the Americans. The Justice Department had to make that apology.
Its long investigation led to a paper being written, with sections headed with things like
“The Army's Interest in ‘Reactivating’ Barbie in 1965-1967”, “drug trafficking,” “weapons trade,”
and “Barbie's Entries to the United States.” While Nazis hunters struggled to find him and the
French were clueless about his whereabouts, the CIA was writing memos that said he could
be re-recruited in the late 60s if he could provide “unique information of significant
importance under secure operational conditions.” Barbie went to trial. His victims hissed and
screamed at him in the courtroom. Some broke down, describing in harrowing detail what had happened
to them back in Lyon. Journalists were rendered speechless by what they heard, how this
now old man had been the very embodiment of sadism. Barbie’s lawyer tried to argue
that what Barbie had done was no different from what the Americans did in My Lai in
Vietnam and what the French did in Algeria. It didn’t work. He was found guilty of crimes
against humanity and died four years later in prison. The question now was, who else had
the CIA and FBI known about all these years? Declassified documents tell us the FBI
investigated the possibility of Hitler escaping through a ratline to South America. Some of the
700 FBI documents declassified in 2014 said just that or at least wrote about the possibility of it
happening. One of them states, “Hitler reported to be hiding out in foothills of Southern Andes.”
The file says a meeting took place in Hollywood. A man in that meeting said he was in a group of
four people who met “Hitler and his party when they landed from a submarine in Argentina.”
More subs arrived carrying around 50 people, including doctors, all part of Hitler’s escape
party. All kinds of things were coming out, but that didn’t mean they were true.
The CIA, under “Operation Bloodstone,” had tried after the war to hire leading former
Nazis in hiding so as to recruit them into the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Both J.
Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. were in on this. The New York
Times said in a report that about 1,000 Nazi war criminals were hired, and some ended up
being given the papers to move to the US. One case involved a man accused of machine-gunning
down 60,000 Jews in Lithuania. He was hired by the CIA as a spy and paid $1,700 a year, as well
as two cartons of cigarettes for each month. That was in 1952. In 1956, he was given the
green light to emigrate to the US. Years later, when the FBI wanted to prosecute him, the
CIA stepped in and said they couldn’t do that because it would expose them.
In 1980, the FBI told the Justice Department to please step aside when the latter
said we know at least 16 Nazi war criminals are living in the US working for you. They were FBI
informants, giving information to the agency on who in the US had sympathies for the Commies.
16 had been hired, but in 1980, only 6 were still on the payroll. The FBI sent a memo to its
agents reminding them the most important thing was “protecting the confidentiality of such sources
of information to the fullest possible extent.” One of these undercover agents was
SS officer Otto von Bolschwing. He’d worked under Eichmann and once authored a
research paper on how best to terrorize Jewish people. Despite being a war criminal, he hooked
up with the CIC after the war, and later when it became the CIA, Bolschwing was one of the
agency’s best European spies. The CIA thanked him in 1954 when it moved him and his family
to New York, what the agency said was “a reward for his loyal postwar service.” Another note
admitted that if the Israelis find out and he’s exposed as one of Eichmann’s main men, it will be
“embarrassing to the U.S.” The CIA managed to keep the information about his close relationship
with Eichmann under wraps for at least a while. They weren’t all great spies. The Times wrote,
“But many Nazi spies proved inept or worse, declassified security reviews show.
Some were deemed habitual liars, confidence men or embezzlers, and a few
even turned out to be Soviet double agents.” Who knows, maybe that quiet man next door
your grandmother used to talk about was a Nazi war criminal helped through a US-sponsored
ratline after the war. It’s thought that under Operation Paperclip, the US took in another
1,600 German scientists, some of whom were members or even leaders of the Nazi Party. These
weren’t hired as spies like the other men but to do what they’d always done: science. Some
became a big part of the Cold War Space Race, and don’t think for a second that the Soviets
didn’t also employ former Nazi scientists - they put about 2,200 of them on the payroll.
According to The Guardian, some Nazis also lived in the UK, and MI6 hired a few. The
paper wrote in 2006, “Most remained in the UK, however, and were granted civilian status. Many
married, started families and, by the 1990s, those who survived were British subjects.”
Günter Ebeling was the Commander of an “Annihilation Squad” of the S.S. in Warsaw and,
right after the war, he ended up working for both the British and American spy agencies.
His alias for both agencies was “Slim.” A research paper featuring Slim and other Nazi war
criminals hired by the Brits and Americans states: “At this time, the British knew Slim was a war
criminal. Perhaps this is why they advised one of their own intelligence officers, Mr. Coleman,
to ‘drop’ his personal friendship with him, which had formed during Operation Nursery.
Nevertheless, the British ID had been using Slim, in coordination with their American colleagues,
in an anti-Nazi operation codenamed ‘Jersey Cow,’ which would later develop into the
better-known Operation Selection Board.” Operation Selection Board consisted of going
after 70 ex-Nazis who were part of a right-wing, virulently anti-communist movement. These rabid
and dangerous war criminal anti-communists had actually believed they would get help from
the British and Americans since they were so against Stalin. It was later written:
“Fantastic as this idea may seem, it made sense to these people, and they believed
that the British and American authorities would accept it. They then decided to make the supreme
effort. At the risk of certain imprisonment, if their plan failed, they sent five of their
leaders to make contact with the authorities, reveal their identity as fugitives,
and make their proposition." The paper also states that Klaus Barbie
was “responsible for the procurement of supplies for the organization and the
establishment of an intelligence network throughout the British and American zones."
For a while, the agencies played along and told the Nazis they were behind them, that they’d
help them set up a new right-wing government so long as they went after the communists. But
the agencies hired Slim to help them arrest these Nazi war criminals, as well as the remaining
Hitler youth in Operation Nursery. In one swoop, the Americans and Brits arrested 50 of these
Nazis. A book written about the matter states: “This was the last large organized
group of Nazis to be formed in the western zone of Germany. It was completely
broken up, its activities were publicized, and its story now serves as a reminder to the
German people of the futility of nationalistic actions outside the scope of the existing
democratic processes now in operation in Germany.” A different paper written about Mr. Slim states,
“Evidence suggests that the CIC believed he was crucial to the successful completion of
Operation Nursery and the breaking up of other Nazi underground organizations.”
But Slim’s story was a common one. The Americans soon started worrying that it
would get out that they, and the Brits, had a war criminal on their secret books.
More concerning was the fact that Slim now knew way too much about American and British
intelligence. What if he became a double agent? He soon became a security risk.
It was said that the agencies love “the information and not the informant.”
These spies were highly expendable. Three British Intelligence officers later
tried to arrest Slim. As the saying goes, they were bringing him in. The report says,
“Slim’s rendezvous on January 18th was a trap.” It says this six-foot-six, huge man, went through
the Brits like a bowling ball. The report adds they “had been ordered to take him alive,
and did not in consequence use their pistols, except to try to overawe him.”
One officer shot Slim in the foot, and he apparently went “berserk,” so they tried to
knock him out with “chloroform.” The report says, “Finally, after a severe struggle one
of them hit ‘Slim’ over the head with a loaded stick and knocked him unconscious.”
They shoved him in a car, “pending advice from the Americans,” but before they could get
him to the Americans, he died in the back. We imagine his last words were something like,
“You double-crossing, lying pieces of “Shhh…” If this story proves anything, it is that the
end of the war was certainly a murky business. Now you need to watch the full version of “How
They Finally Caught The Nazi Butcher.” Or, have a look at “WW2 Serial Killer Even
the Nazis Wanted Dead - Dr. Satan.”
