An Upstanding Citizen

In La Paz, as in many other cities, it was carnival time last week. Masked dancers cavorted through the streets, children dressed up in demons' costumes and whole plazas were carpeted with confetti. In the midst of this celebration, a stocky, thick-necked German named Klaus Altmann sat glumly in a cell of the high-walled San Pedro jail. Newly arrested after nearly 30 years as a fugitive, he confronts the prospect of a French murder trial.

There is "irrefutable evidence," according to the La Paz district attorney, that Altmann is really Klaus Barbie, the SS captain who ran the Gestapo in Lyon from 1942 to 1944. Among Barbie's crimes were the deportation of thousands of Jews and the torturing to death of several hundred Maquis, including Resistance Leader Jean Moulin. A French military court sentenced him to death in absentia in 1954. Four years earlier, however, Klaus Altmann had migrated from Berlin to Italy to Bolivia, where he went into business and acquired Bolivian citizenship.

Barbie was half-forgotten until 1971, when a Munich court handling litigation by some of Barbie's victims finally decided that it could take no action in the case. That aroused the ire of Beate Klarsfeld, then 32, a Berlin-born Protestant who had married a French Jew. "I don't wish to be ashamed of my people," she said. "It is my duty not to allow war criminals to be considered as fine upstanding citizens." Mrs. Klarsfeld held press conferences, organized demonstrations, circulated photographs and generally made such a fuss that she finally got a letter from a German in Lima, Peru, saying he had seen Barbie there under the name of Altmann. That prompted the French to ask for his extradition. Before the request reached Lima, Altmann retreated to Bolivia, which has no extradition treaty with France. The French nonetheless sent another request to La Paz.

After brooding over the case for more than a year--while Altmann swaggered around in a green Tyrolean hat, usually accompanied by a tough young bodyguard--the Bolivian Supreme Court finally demanded that the question of Altmann's identity be officially settled. Altmann admits to using the name Barbie as a pseudonym; he also has a birth certificate in that name and has received mail from the Barbie family in Germany. But he is a Bolivian citizen who claims that he has broken no Bolivian law. The French argue, however, that the fugitive acquired Bolivian citizenship by fraud and that despite the lack of an extradition treaty, Bolivia must honor its World War II pledges of joint Allied action against war criminals. There is yet another possibility: Bolivia has an extradition treaty with Peru, which wants Altmann for gold smuggling, and Peru has an extradition treaty with France.

"There will be a great deal of procedure," says Beate Klarsfeld. "And it will be a long time, if ever, before Barbie gets extradited. There probably aren't any other Nazi war criminals like Barbie hiding in Bolivia or Peru today because they do not have to. The top Gestapo official for all of France, Kurt Lischka, lives openly as a respectable citizen in West Germany today."

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