THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

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career in the armed services in favor of
teaching.
It was an NBC Nightly News
story on Barbie in January 1983 that
re-awakened Dabringhaus' long-
dormant memories. Seeing a war crim-
inal who was now living a mil-
lionaire's life in Bolivia, a life that the
U.S. had helped make possible, was an
agonizing, disheartening experience.
Dabringhaus contacted NBC and went
public with his story. In the 20 months
since, the bizarre and somewhat
frightening tale of the American gov-
ernment's use of Barbie and others
like him has become the driving force
in Dabringhaus' life. It formed the
basis for his book, Klaus Barbie: The
Shocking Story of How the U.S. Used
this Nazi War Criminal as an Intelli-
gence Agent, published by Acropolis
Books last spring.
Dabringhaus is absolutely livid
about the 35-year cover-up perpet-
rated by the government on the
American public concerning the use of
war criminals for intelligence-
gathering purposes. "I am beginning
to think that this kind of attitude, this
Watergate mentality, has become an
integral part of our capitalistic sys-
tem," the retired WSU professor of
German language and cultural history
said. "We beat the other guy to the fast
buck if we can, and we do the same
with our policies.
"Barbie was a calculating, brutal
man who believed he was Germany's
greatest intelligence officer. He was
very proud of his 'accomplishments'
during the war. •
"Here is a guy who killed count-
less Jews and members of the French-
Resistance, including (Resistance
leader) Jean Moulin, and we treat him
like royalty."

The United States, according to
Dabringhaus, paid Barbie $1,700 per
month in addition to providing him
with a house in Augsburg, Germany
and other amenities. Though his own
relationship with the Nazi war crimi-
nal was relatively short-lived, Dab-
ringhaus has since learned that Bar-
bie was employed by the U.S. for three
years, almost as long as Barbie worked
for Hitler. When the government was
finally through with Barbie, they
aided him in his escape from Europe.
"In March 1951," Dabringhaus -
said, "A group of five CIC officers ar-
ranged for Barbie's escape to Bolivia
via the 'monastery route,' a Vatican-
connected escape route for Nazi war
criminals from Austria to South
America." The U.S. set up Barbie, his
wife and two children with a new home
and provided him with a new identity
(Klaus Altman) and the documenta-
tion to support it, all at the expense of
American taxpayers.
Dabringhaus, though gentile, was
brought up in a very liberal home in
Germany with parents who seemed to
be sympathetic to the plight of the

country's Jewish population under the
growing threat of Nazism. His father,
a German labor leader and ardent
supporter of Weimar Republic, liter-
ally saw the handwriting on the wall
in the form of Nazi handbills calling
for a Germany that was Judenrein.
The family emigrated to the United
States in the early 1930s, settling first
in Cleveland and then Detroit.
So it came as quite a shock to Dab-
ringhaus when, shortly after estab-
lishing contact with Barbie, he
learned of his new protege's wartime
activities from Kurt Merk, an associ-
ate of Barbie's who was also working
for the CIC. •
"Merk claimed that he saw 200
Frenchmen strung up by their thumbs
until they were. dead in the basement
of the Lyons prison under Barbie's
jurisdiction."
Dabringhaus reported the story to
his immediate superiors, thinking it
might even lead to a promotion. It was
at this point that the young, somewhat
naive Army Intelligence officer caught
the first glimpse of an attitude that
would prevail for more than three de-
cades.
"I got told to keep quiet," Dabrin-
ghaus says. They told me: 'Take it
easy. We know he might well be a war
criminal, but he's still useful to us.
When his value is diminished, we will
turn him over to the French.'
As a good soldier," Dabringhaus
said contemptuously, "I took that as an
acceptable answer. Later, I realized
that not only were they using Barbie
— they were using me as well." It took
nearly 32 years and a typical Third
World-Western country deal (Bolivia
sent Barbie to France in 1983 in ex-
change for money and wheat) to com-
plete the mission that Dabringhaus'
superiors had so matter-of-factly as-
sured him he needn't worry about.
According to the recently retired
professor, the U.S. government, to this
day, claims that he never came for-
ward with any information concerning
Barbie's war crimes. The report he
filed on the Merk incident is, he said,
"conveniently missing."

What did Americans gain by the
use of Barbie and his cohorts? Not
much, according to Dabringhaus, who
characterizes U.S. intelligence opera-
tions in Europe after World War II as
highly unprofessional, as well as un-
ethical.
When I got the assignment as
Barbie's control agent I had absolutely
no briefing, no preparation. They just
gave me a complicated set of cloak-
and-dagger-like instructions for pick-
ing him up and setting him up in Au-
gsburg. We were so unprofessional in
our approach to the whole thing. It was
as if the Nazis were in control of the
situation and not the U.S. agents."
Dabringhaus feels that the Cold
War and the increasing American
paranoia vis a vis the Soviet Union in

the late 1940s and early 1950s were
primarily responsible for the use and
misuse of Nazis like Barbie. But, he
claims, with better strategies, the
enlistment of war criminals to combat
the threat of Communism would not
have been _necessary. We sent the
wrong people over there," the former
WSU professor says. "The fighting
troops were discharged immediately
after the war and replaced with occu-
pation forces who couldn't speak the
language and had no knowledge of
European cultural history or the polit-
ical system.
The division between East and
West was immediately apparent if you
were over there. We were totally un-
prepared for this and the Russians
definitely accomplished one of their
goals — scaring the U.S. forces
stationed in Europe."
The eight months he served as
Barbie's control officer were largely a
waste of time in terms of the informa-
tion that the war criminal managed to
provide, Dabringhaus said. Once,
when he was being pressured to come
up with something, Barbie went so far
as to copy a report from a Yugoslavian
news agency, information that was
readily available to U.S. Intelligence
sources for far less than the monthly
salary they were paying Barbie.
Dabringhaus does credit Barbie
with helping the U.S. infiltrate the
Nazi party of Augsburg, which, by
1948, had deteriorated to the point
that there were only a few active
members left. But, he said, this was
hardly the sort of thing American offi-
cials had in mind when they set up the
Gunther Bernau Organization, as the
network of SS informants working for
the government became known. (Be-
rnau was a colonel in the SS, who, after

Friday, November 9, 1984

The Justice
Department's Ryan
Report disputes
Dabringhaus'
assertion that
Barbie was paid
$1,700 per month,
citing a much lower
figure.

Continued on next page

GERMAN QUARTERLY REFUSES AD

Has the American Association of
Teachers of German became a front
for the. neo-Nazi movement in the
United States — or is the organiza-
tion simply wary of promoting mate-
rial on a controversial subject such as
the link between on a controversial
subject such as the link between a
Nazi war criminal and the U.S. gov-
ernment?
The Washington-based Ac-
ropolis Books, publisher of Klaus
Barbie by Wayne State University
Prof. Emeritus Erhard Dabringhaus,
questioned the tenets of the teachers'
organization recently when an ad-
vertisement for the volume on the in-
famous "Butcher of Lyons" was re-
fused by the association's German
Quarterly Magazine.
In a letter to the publisher ex-
plaining the refusal, Robert A. Gov-

15

ier, executive director of the teachers'
association and advertising manager
for the magazine, said he had decided
"not to accept advertising which
might prove offensive to our mem-
bership." Amplified explanation re-
vealed that the German Quarterly
had run into trouble earlier this year
when it ran an ad from a Holocaust
revisionist group in California, the
Institute for Historical Review.
Dabringhaus, a former member
of the teachers' association, called
the refusal a "misunderstanding"
and said that he thought the maga-
zine would reconsider the advertise-
ment if it were submitted for a future
issue.
In further correspondence with
Acropolis Books however, Govier
said that he would "probably not run
the ad under any circumstances."

