Brutality with Effusiveness

The Road to Bolivia - Part 2

Erhard Dabringhaus would often think back to D-Day. He landed on Omaha Beach during the invasion of Normandy, France on June 6, 1944 as part of the U.S. Army’s First Infantry Division. “It was not a happy day,” he recalled. “We lost a lot of men.” It was also easy to be demoralized speaking to the locals. Five days after D-Day, Dabringhaus approach a French woman carrying a basket full of eggs. He asked her for two eggs. “I’ve got to save these eggs for the Germans,” she responded. “They will be back tomorrow or the next day, and you will be swimming back to England.” She reluctantly gave in to his request after some coaxing from a U.S. sergeant, who spoke better French.

Dabringhaus also recalled the disturbing post-liberation practices by the French Resistance, including public shaming and abuse of women accused of fraternizing with German soldiers. This shocked many American troops, some of whom tried to intervene. “Any girl who had slept with a German had her hair cut off and her head shaved,” he remembered. “The women were loaded on open trucks and paraded through the towns, where they were pelted with stones and eggs, beaten with sticks, and frequently spat upon.”

As the war continued, Dabringhaus was sent to England to interrogate captured Nazi soldiers. He was one of the few U.S. Army military intelligence officers who could speak German, having been born in Germany in 1917 before emigrating to the United States with his parents in 1930. He later described the attitudes of the prisoners of war: “Our German prisoners still felt they were winning. ‘We’re gonna knock you Americans out,’ they said. They spoke of their reprisal weapons, the V-1 and V-2, the buzz bombs.” He also witnessed clashing loyalties: “Our division chaplain, a colonel, who happened to be a Catholic, was there at the time. When he saw the bishop of Aachen, he came running, kneeled down, and kissed his ring. A half-hour ago, he was blessing our troops, hoping to beat the Germans. And the bishop had just been stirring up the Germans that with God’s help they could beat the Americans.” He laughed at the absurdity of the situation: “Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

Working with the British, Dabringhaus explored employing psychological tactics in interrogation: “We didn’t have too many guys in the American army who knew what they were doing. I worked with the British to learn ruses how to make a guy talk. We knew the Germans were good family men. We’d go through their billfolds. They’d have pictures of mothers, wives, kids. I’d say, ‘You could help this war end one day earlier, your wife and kids still alive and healthy when you get home. Otherwise, who knows? They might be bombed.’ We were bombing German cities by then.” If a German POW were “especially stubborn,” he would threaten to bring in a certain “Sergeant Kaminski” and the Germans would start “talking at once.” The Germans knew Kaminski was a Polish name and it would remind them of “what they’d done to Warsaw. If I said, ‘Sergeant Kaminski, this guy doesn’t wanna talk,’ the German would say, ‘Don’t bring him in. I’ll tell you the story.’” Another tactic they used involved pretending to employ violence: “We used tricks with ketchup. We had a sergeant dressed as a German. We’d throw ketchup into his face, and he’d run out screaming while we’re interrogating the guy who wasn’t talking. We could not put a hand on a man.”

The Longest Day

Simone Kadoshe would often think of D-Day, how it had begun with promise, living in Saint-Fons, France at the age of thirteen. “I finished grade school with honors, the day before...” she remembered. “On June 6, 1944, I went to the bakery to get some bread. At the time there was rationing, so the lines were endless. I was in line. Someone saw me and said, ‘You made honors, so go to the head of the line.’ So I went first, and then went home.” Had she instead lined up at the bakery, her story may have been different.

That afternoon, a neighbor named Jeanne arrived at their house, asking to borrow Simone’s blue scarf. Jeanne was to visit her husband in prison and she explained why she was so happy: “I’ll be able to tell him the war will be over soon and give him news about his sons!” She had recently given birth to her youngest son, Jacques. Jeanne left and Simone’s father returned home from work around 5:30 pm; the family spoke of freedom being on the horizon. Simone’s mother gave her daughter a snack consisting of a large slice of bread with jam and some coffee. There were three small knocks at the door. Not waiting for the Kadoshes to answer, Jeanne opened the door herself, clutching the blue scarf and crying inconsolably. Simone’s mother handed her a cup of coffee: “Tell me what happened.” Jeanne drank her coffee quickly, appearing to be in a hurry. She described her visit to Montluc Prison: her husband had his fingernails pulled out and his hands had been crushed. “It was horrible,” she said. The Kadoshes sat in silence for a moment and then there were loud knocks at their door. When Simone opened it, she saw a German uniformed officer, who asked, in accented French: “Are you the Kadoshes?” Jeanne replied for her, throwing herself into the SS officer’s arms: “Yes, darling—these are the ones!” Her tears were now gone. Simone later discovered she had sold them out for money, along with her own brother and husband. She also happened to be the mistress of the officer, Gotzmann, who was now arresting them.

The family was packed into a waiting car, a Peugeot 402, and driven to the new Gestapo headquarters at Place Bellecour in Lyon. At the front entrance, a woman in her 30s wearing a gray uniform looked at Simone, then announced to her parents: “Where you’re going, the children—Futsch! Kaputt! In Germany, we need people who can work, not useless mouths. Kinder kaputt!” The officer then looked away with indifference. On an upper floor of the building at around 6:30 pm, they were led into a room with a desk, chair, and curtainless window. An SS officer made them stand against the wall. Simone was near the window and she looked with interest at the green metal lamp hanging from the ceiling. They stood motionless until the back door to the room opened. Klaus Barbie stepped in, wearing a gray suit of civilian clothes, holding a fat gray cat and sporting a cold smile. “He didn’t seem mean,” Simone recalled. “After all, could someone who loved animals be truly cruel?” All but one other SS officer left the room.

Barbie told Simone’s mother that she was very beautiful and that he liked beautiful things. He turned to Simone and gently touched her cheek and went to the desk to let go of the cat. He spoke to her mother in French: “What a lovely little girl you have, madam. Her eyes are beautiful—a different shade than yours. They’re golden. Very rare! Do you have other children?” She replied: “Yes, sir. A boy and a girl—younger than Simone.” Barbie asked: “Where are they?” Her eyes filled with tears. She did not know, she explained, they had been sent to the countryside with other schoolchildren to avoid the bombings. “Come on now,” Barbie responded, “don’t be silly. Give me their address—I’ll send all three of them to the Antiquaille hospital. That way your eldest won’t go to prison.” Simone’s mother was adamant: “It’s not possible, sir. I don’t know the address. I swear to you.”

Barbie bit his lip; enraged, he stomped on the floor and approached Simone. “And you, girl—do you want to tell me where your little siblings are?” She replied that she did not know. Barbie ripped off her black velvet hairnet and grabbed her hair, twisting it around his hand. He yanked her hair and slapped her hard. He then let her fall to the ground, crying in pain. She had never experienced being hit before. Her father stepped forward to intercede and the other officer prevented him, placing a gun to his stomach. Her mother begged Barbie not to hurt her. Barbie nudged Simone back to her feet with the toe of his shoe. He switched from French to German and began screaming as he left the room.

For the Kadoshes, this was the longest day, but it was the following day when the moment came for which Simone could never forgive Barbie, “not that he would care,” she added. Her face bloody from the beatings, Barbie held her face up to her mother outside the prison cell and exclaimed: “See the state your girl is in? You are responsible!”

Disposal

In what sounded to him like a garish display of ego, Erhard Dabringhaus listened as Klaus Barbie regaled listeners with a tale of his espionage work in occupied France during World War II. Dabringhaus was now working for the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps in 1948 and Barbie was an assigned agent. Barbie was in the middle of telling a story of his days working for German intelligence: Barbie and his colleague Kurt Merk had discovered that a British diplomatic courier frequently visited Vichy, France. If they somehow managed to photograph the contents of his attaché case, they believed this would certainly earn them medals. Barbie described the method used to entrap the courier: “We provided him with a good-looking blonde informant during his stay in Vichy. When he didn’t take the bait, we decided to send a redhead. She, too, struck out. On our third attempt, using a very attractive brunette, we again had no luck, even though the diplomat had invited her to have dinner with him.” Deciding the courier must be gay, the pair made a pitch to a 18-year-old son of a Jewish family about to be sent to a concentration camp in Germany. “If you help us,” Barbie offered, “and succeed with this assignment, I promise you that you and your family will be stricken from the list of prisoners going to Germany and you will be allowed to live free in southern France with my protection.” Barbie smiled in recounting the story: “The young man returned after successfully accomplishing his mission.” Dabringhaus doubted Barbie’s insistence that the young man’s family was saved: “I suspect that both Merk and Barbie told the story to many CIC agents to prove what well-trained and exceptional operatives they were and that they were worth every penny that CIC was paying them.”

Stationed in Germany with the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) in 1948, Dabringhaus expected his own commendations for reporting to his superiors that their own agent Klaus Barbie was a wanted war criminal. Instead of the CIC arresting Barbie and extraditing him to France, he heard nothing after repeating the stories of Barbie’s wartime activities he learned from Merk. After waiting a few weeks, Dabringhaus phoned Lieutenant Richard K. Lavoie in Munich and asked him if a decision had been made. He learned that the decision was to continue using Barbie: “Since you and Barbie are doing such a great job of penetrating the Augsburg communist party, we feel you should continue working with him. When the time is ripe, we will turn him over to the French.” Barbie received additional money and Dabringhaus received a promotion from CAF-8 to CAF-9, in his words, “not for discovering Barbie’s atrocities in France, but for penetrating the communist party in Augsburg.” Dabringhaus was aware that Merk was also wanted by French, writing in a July 13, 1948 memo of “the FRENCH situation in which [Merk] is involved by reason of his association with his present common-law-wife,” remarking how “[Merk] can be easily controlled by offering him protection of the US Army.” Dabringhaus’ regional commander, Lieutenant Colonel Ellington Golden, repeated that Barbie would be turned over to the French once his value as an informant to the U.S. government had been “exhausted.”

Sought as a witness in the René Hardy trial by the French authorities, Barbie was on edge. If Dabringhaus arrived at the office late, Barbie would watch carefully if someone else was entering the building to arrest him and would relax once the door finally closed. “Why are you so fidgety lately, Klaus?” Dabringhaus asked. Barbie replied: “I’ve got to think about my safety and that of my family. I know that the French have a dragnet out for me; if they ever get me to France, I’ll never come back.”

Utility

“There are two French agents on their way to your office,” Captain George M. Spiller told Dabringhaus excitedly one day on the phone. “Get rid of Barbie and Merk and tell the agents that you don’t know anything about Barbie!” This was to be one of several occasions in which Dabringhaus lied to French authorities when they inquired as to Barbie’s whereabouts. The two French agents in this case were “very polite” as Dabringhaus explained that he did not even know the name Klaus Barbie. He was surprised when they declined to press him any further on the topic. They never explained why they were looking for Barbie and instead discussed wine and champagne.

A month later, two other officers from the French government came to Dabringhaus separately to ask if he knew Barbie’s whereabouts. This time Col. Golden instructed him to lie to the French officials and again Dabringhaus was surprised that their reason for the request was never explained. Some time later, John Whiteway, a Canadian serving as a liaison officer to France as part of the European Command, requested that Barbie be sent to Paris to testify in the second Hardy trial. The CIC was reluctant to send Barbie, given his stated fear: “If I ever fall into the hands of the French, I will be executed.” They finally arrived at a compromise: the French could take Barbie’s testimony in the U.S. occupied zone in the presence of CIC officers. This occurred on January 21, 1949 in Munich and only matters relating to the trial were discussed, with French officials returning twice more to question him on further details.

Dabringhaus attributed CIC’s attempts at deceiving the French on behalf of Barbie “to the game of espionage.” As long as Barbie produced usable information, Dabringhaus assured him, Barbie could “count on the protection of CIC and the American Army.” Later, CIC headquarters wrote of their reluctance to release Barbie to the French, explaining they were worried he could “reveal his CIC connection, and thus embarrass the United States.”

Barbie soon handed Dabringhaus an intelligence report stating that the Russians were mining uranium ore in an off-limits area near the Czech border. If the Russians were developing an atomic bomb as this report suggested, this threatened the U.S. monopoly on the weapon. Dabringhaus impressed upon Barbie the importance of maintaining his informant on this matter, later calling the revelation “the only one important thing he ever gave us.” Dabringhaus never discovered that this was likely another instance of Barbie simply repeating what he had read in the newspaper. The press reported that the U.S. Army’s own newspaper Stars and Stripes revealed in February 1948 that the Russians were mining for uranium “along the Czech border in Polish-occupied Silesia for uranium bearing pitchblende,” alleging that the Russians had “drafted at least 20,000 Germans from the Russian zone to the area.” On another occasion, Dabringhaus asked Barbie if he could locate” a former high-ranking Nazi” living illegally “somewhere in Bavaria.” Barbie promptly turned over the man’s address and Dabringhaus had him arrested by military police. “At no time did Barbie ever hesitate to turn in his old buddies if he was asked to do so,” Dabringhaus recalled.

In November 1948, Dabringhaus received a new assignment as a Major in the U.S. Constabulary Forces in Stuttgart and “lost track of Barbie.” He was assigned, however, a new stable of “informants composed primarily of former SS officers.” Among them was SS Colonel Günter Bernau, whom Dabringhaus visited one day and happened to open a photo album in his living room. The album fell open in the middle on his lap and a large picture of Hitler occupying the entire page was now in front of him. When Bernau entered the room, he was flustered: “Major Dabringhaus, you must not think me ungrateful or disrespectful to the Americans because I keep a picture of Hitler in my album. But when you hold your head against a brutal enemy for four long years for the Vaterland and your Führer, it is very difficult to cast those years aside in a short period of time.” Reminding him that four additional years had passed, Dabringhaus expressed his hope that this sentiment would “not interfere with your present loyalty to the American forces in Germany.” He found that Bernau had also submitted a report of the Russians mining for uranium; he only concluded from this that “different American intelligence organizations were repeatedly paying for the same pieces of information several times over” and not sharing what they knew due to their jealous guarding of intelligence.

He next heard about Barbie in September 1949, learning that the former Nazi was still working the Americans. Another CIC agent, the German-born Herbert Bechtold, had first taken over Dabringhaus’ role managing Barbie, followed by Eugene Kolb in 1949. A few days after Kolb took on his role, he was warned by an acquaintance that a French war crimes team were looking for Barbie. Kolb hid Barbie for a week in a safehouse while the CIC team feigned ignorance with the French authorities as to his whereabouts until they left. “We did not have any great pangs of conscience,” Kolb stated of their use of Nazis. When questioned on the morality of hiring Barbie, Bechtold replied: “I am not in a position to pass judgment on that. I was just following orders.”

A year later, CIC studied how their association with Barbie had now turned into a liability. CIC leadership acknowledged in a 1950 memo that keeping Barbie exposed them to several risks. First and foremost among these was the damage he could cause in terms of “adverse publicity to CIC in particular and to the Armed Forces in general.” They predicted that “in order to vindicate himself,” Barbie would point out that he served the U.S. government for years and would “expose the fact that this detachment failed initially to arrest him as an automatic arrestee, later failed to turn him over to the British who also wanted him.” They added that “this unit has probably used the services of a war criminal and protected such person from legal authority,” referring to CIC as Barbie’s “guardian angel.” Other risks included compromising “sensitive penetration informants” who were still active in the field and that Barbie could name “several unsavory ‘personalities’ that have been protected and employed by CIC.”

The memo noted that Barbie had worked for CIC since 1947 and lamented that the organization had not dumped Barbie in 1949, which would have afforded them “a time cushion,” which could “have been employed to our advantage and would have somewhat minimized any possible repercussions to this unit.” The memo’s author, Captain W.J. Unrath, emphasized that disassociation with Barbie was urgent and needed to occur before the German government gained more autonomy, which would have made extradition or exposure more likely. In the plan to sever ties with Barbie, Unrath proposed giving Barbie “a debriefing payment” to allow his family, which included a wife and two children, “to be financially independent.” He next presented two options: Plan A involved assisting Barbie escape “through several refugee camps as an Illegal Border Crosser in order to enable him to obtain legal documentation and that way completely lose his identity.” Plan B proposed informing Barbie that he was no longer protected, advising him to leave the Augsburg area because the French were looking for him, and letting him fend for himself, “completely on his own, to do what he pleases.”

The U.S. Army opted for a modified Plan A, helping Barbie and his family escape to South America in 1951 via the “Rat Line,” an underground network run by the 430th CIC and aided by Father Krunoslav Draganović, a fascist Croatian priest and war criminal. Using forged documents and support from the Catholic Church and the Red Cross, Barbie and his family were smuggled to Genoa, Italy, and then to Argentina before settling in Bolivia. His paperwork signed at the Consulate General of Bolivia in Genoa, Italy on March 16, 1951 under his new alias Klaus Altmann indicated that he possessed a total of “US$850” and that he planned “to reside in Bolivia indefinitely.” In a CIC memo headed “Disposal of Dropped Intelligence Informant,” the operation to resettle Barbie used only his alias and was reported as having occurred “without incident.” On April 3, CIC reported “this case is considered closed by the Intelligence Division, European Command, and this Detachment.” Not bothering to disguise his true identity in this instance, the memo for the record added: “Hopefully the final bit of correspondence to the regions concerned on the closeout of the Klaus BARBIE (ALTMANN) case.”

Hans Ertl

While many former Nazis used what CIC documentation referred to as “Operation Rat Line” to escape to South American, European, and North American countries, Hans Ertl was among the few former Nazis who chose to settle in Bolivia. A cameraman by trade, he had worked as a Nazi propagandist on films such as Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia and as German field marshal Erin Rommel’s official photographer during the North African campaign of World War II. Briefly arrested by the Allies following the war, he found continuing his work in film in Germany to be impossible. Offered an opportunity to work for Bavaria Studios in Munich, he failed the political screening in place in post-war Germany. “We know all your footage you made during the war,” the screening officer told him. “You glorified the war. You were twice awarded as the best war correspondent. You especially glorified Rommel. You are partly guilty because your footage basically prolonged the war.”

Ertl fled to Chile before settling in Bolivia in 1953 with his family, including his wife and three daughters. Two weeks after they arrived, he left on an expedition to the Himalayas, leaving them all behind to fend for themselves; they were unable to speak Spanish. They regarded this behavior on his part as typical. “I actually had four girls in my marriage,” Hans explained, one having died young. “I would have liked to have had a boy.” Monika, the eldest daughter, Hans used as a replacement for “the son I never had. She was like half a boy.” Hans taught her how to use a film camera and brought her along on his expeditions making documentary films. She developed a form of a epilepsy, which Hans blamed on living at a high altitude, nearly 12,000 feet above sea level. “My wife had to tie her to the bed with an old climbing rope of mine,” he recalled, “because she had fits of rage.” He credited the relatively new treatment of cortisone, a steroid hormone that he obtained from a doctor, with curing her condition.

Uncle Klaus

One day, Hans met a man who called himself Klaus Altmann, accompanied according to Hans by “his wife, a very attractive blond woman and two nice, well-behaved children.” Hans asked where he came from; Barbie replied that “it was a long odyssey, a long story” of where he had been in the war. Barbie falsely claimed, “I was drafted into the SS.” Asking what he intended to do in Bolivia, Barbie replied that he was looking for work. Hans helped him secure his first job in Bolivia, working at a remote sawmill in the Los Yungas region—despite knowing nothing about sawmills or woodwork, and being unable to speak Spanish.

Meanwhile, in France, Barbie was twice tried in absentia for wartime atrocities, including massacres and mass shootings. In 1952 and 1954, he was sentenced to death for crimes committed during the Nazi occupation. Barbie became aware of these convictions and began to take precautions. Hans claimed to be unaware of Barbie’s true history: “I had no idea about Klaus Altmann’s past. For years, he was just Klaus Altmann to me. All my children called him Uncle Klaus.”

Vengeance

The death of Monika’s mother in 1958 was a turning point in her life. Left in the emotional and domestic void, Monika was drawn to the neighboring Harries family and soon married their son, Hans Harries. But the marriage was deeply troubled. Despite appearing to embrace a life of social conformity—playing golf and hosting bridge parties—she was privately miserable. Her husband was controlling and emotionally cold, and their inability to have children added further strain. Monika’s sister Beatrix described her experience living with them for a few months: “It was awful with the husband; terrible. I admired her for enduring it. A petty man; nothing pleased him. He always complained about everything. Awful. A strange man. Everything she did was wrong. Monika was an excellent housewife. She could cook, knit, sew, everything, but nothing was good enough. He always wanted everything better.” Hans urged her to divorce her husband: “I said she was destroying her life. But as long as the Harries parents lived, those kind people, she didn’t want to divorce because it would be the end for the old couple. Now, the Harries parents died shortly after each other, and she was free.”

In the 1960s, Monika worked for the Goethe Institute and sold investment funds, but this phase of conventional life also did not fulfill her. Hans described how his daughter “visited rich people and tried to sell them these stocks, these funds. She went golfing with them and was invited everywhere because she was a stunningly beautiful woman.” Along with Lieselotte “Lilo” Bauer de Barragán and Kitty Rector, she founded the Centro San Gabriel in 1967. This center provided daycare for children of working Indigenous women. At Centro San Gabriel, she was responsible for fundraising and the group’s finances, traveling to Germany to secure support. During this trip, she connected with German and South American revolutionary networks, becoming involved in supporting Che Guevara’s surviving guerrillas. By early 1970, Monika began aiding the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), a Bolivian guerrilla group inspired by Guevara’s failed insurgency. According to her associates, including Inti and Chato Peredo, Monika offered her home for clandestine meetings and participated in planning sessions. She became romantically and politically entwined with Inti Peredo and was eventually tasked with reviving the ELN's operations.

Régis Debray, the French writer who was a former guerrilla associate of Guevara’s group, described her as the true leader, more organized and clear-sighted than the men around her: “It sounds paradoxical: although she was certainly ready to subordinate herself, she was the actual boss…In fact, she was the best among the ELN people. Well, sometimes she got angry because she was treated disrespectfully as a woman, but actually she felt more macho than the machos around her. And she proved it.”

Monika visited her father at his farm La Dolorida and asked him for permission to shelter the ELN guerrilla group there. Hans refused, asking her to leave the organization, predicting that her tenure with the group would end badly: “I couldn’t approve of her suddenly showing up here with a group of guerrillas, using my farm—which I had built up with great effort—as a training camp for shooting practice and who knows what else...I strictly refused, because I knew what the Bolivian government had done and would continue to do against the guerrillas, and I didn’t want to get dragged into it.”

The death of Inti Peredo, Guevara’s successor and a revered figure in the ELN, in 1969 devastated her. Monika penned a poem in response called “Christ of September,” likening him to a martyr: “He lives on in the hearts of the people,” she wrote, “whom you won’t be able to kill.” Bolivian Consul General Roberto Quintanilla was viewed as being responsible for Peredo’s murder. Quintanilla had been head of intelligence in Bolivia’s interior ministry under President René Barrientos. In addition, Quintanilla played a key role in the 1967 operation that led to the capture and execution of Che Guevara. He ordered Guevara’s hands to be cut off for identification and a plaster death mask to be made of his face. To avenge these deaths, Monika was handed specific instructions. “When I receive an order, I must follow it,” she said, “even if it leads to the very end.”

Monika, wearing a dark wig, entered the Bolivian Consul General’s office on April 1, 1971 in Hamburg, Germany. Quintanilla was in the process of transferring the office to a successor, but he had time for a beautiful woman, Monika, who said she was an Australian looking to secure a visa to visit Bolivia. Since Quintanilla did not speak English, he asked his secretary to act as translator and requested that she fetch some travel brochures. As the secretary left the room, Quintanilla asked Monika to sit down. Monika instead pulled out a Colt Cobra .38 Special revolver and fired three shots into his chest. Quintanilla began to bleed to death and his wife entered the room, having heard the gunfire. She fought with Monika, who lost her wig, wallet, and weapon in ensuing struggle. Monika managed to escape, but within a month German police had identified her as the suspect and the Bolivian military placed a bounty of $20,000 on her head, quadruple the award they had previously assigned to Che Guevara.

Hearing of the murder, Hans thought about how he had given Monika a .22 mm Colt revolver for her protection two years earlier. He was relieved to find out that the murder weapon had in fact been purchased by Italian businessman and political activist Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. In 1972, the CIA reported learning from arrested ELN members that the “murder was carried out by Monica [sic] Ertl…whose whereabouts are unknown.” Monika spent a year hiding in Chile and Cuba, before learning that Klaus Barbie had been discovered living in La Paz, Bolivia. The man she had known as “Uncle Klaus” as a child was a wanted war criminal. Monika volunteered to be part of a new plot to kidnap Barbie.