Klaus Barbie

Klaus Barbie was a German SS and Gestapo officer who served in occupied France during the Second World War and became chief of the Gestapo in Lyon in 1942. From the Hôtel Terminus and other Gestapo premises, his command pursued Resistance organisations, Jewish families and other people targeted by the Nazi occupation. Prisoners were routinely tortured during interrogation, and Barbie became particularly associated with the brutal repression of the Resistance in and around Lyon.

His victims included members of Jean Moulin’s Resistance network; Moulin was arrested at Caluire in June 1943 and died after torture while in German custody. Barbie was also implicated in deportations, including the April 1944 raid on the children’s home at Izieu. After the war he was employed for a time by United States counter-intelligence before escaping to Bolivia under the name Klaus Altmann. Bolivia extradited him to France in 1983, and in 1987 a Lyon court convicted him of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to life imprisonment. He died in prison in Lyon in 1991.

Alex Gerlis’s Agent in the Shadows places Barbie’s Lyon Gestapo apparatus behind a fictional investigation into the betrayal of Resistance figures following the Caluire arrests. John R. McKay’s Codename Greyman likewise uses the danger posed by the Gestapo under Barbie as part of its wartime Lyon setting, where Resistance agents carry out sabotage and clandestine work while trying to avoid arrest.