Latvian former policeman whose Arajs Kommando, under the SS Security Service, murdered about half of Latvia’s Jews
Born in Baldone to a Latvian blacksmith and a mother from a wealthy Baltic German family, he served in the Latvian Army, studied law at the University of Latvia and was a policeman until 1938. When the Germans entered Riga in July 1941 he was introduced to Stahlecker and recruited a unit from his student fraternity and the Pērkonkrusts, which took part in burning Riga’s synagogues on 4 July. The Arajs Kommando murdered some 26,000 people in Latvia and then Belarus, and he was made an SS-Sturmbannführer in 1943. Interned in a British camp until 1949, he lived under a false name and worked at a printing company in Frankfurt. In 1979 the Hamburg State Court sentenced him to life imprisonment for leading the Jews of the Riga ghetto to their deaths on 8 December 1941; he died in prison in Kassel in 1988.
Career timeline
- 1930Service in the Latvian Army
- 1938Left the Latvian police
- 1941–1943Commander of the Arajs Kommando
- 1979Life sentence, Hamburg State Court
The Nazi Gestapo chief who made Lyon a center of terror
At his 1987 Lyon trial, he denied the Izieu roundup and said: “I fought the Resistance. It was war.”
Klaus Barbie was an SS and Sicherheitsdienst officer who commanded the Gestapo in occupied Lyon, organizing systematic persecution of the French Resistance and Jews. He arrested and tortured Jean Moulin at Caluire and was responsible for deporting 44 Jewish children and their teachers from Izieu to Auschwitz. After the war, U.S. intelligence used him in anti-communist operations and helped him escape to Bolivia, where he avoided justice for decades before his 1987 Lyon trial and life sentence for crimes against humanity. His case exposes both the continuity of Nazi criminal networks and the impunity produced by Cold War anti-communism.
Career timeline
- 1935Joined the SS and began service in the Sicherheitsdienst
- 1940–1941SD service in Amsterdam, targeting Jews and communists
- 1942Assigned to Dijon for security work in occupied France
- 1942–1944Head of the Lyon Gestapo, repressing the Resistance and deporting Jews
- 1947–1951Agent of the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps
- 1951–1983Lived in Bolivia as Klaus Altmann
- 1987Lyon trial, convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life
- 1991Died in Lyon prison
