TIL about Klaus Barbie, a Nazi war criminal hiding in Bolivia after the war, was tricked into revealing his true identity during a fake interview by being asked a question in French, a language he wasn’t supposed to understand.
Write an article about TIL about Klaus Barbie, a Nazi war criminal hiding in Bolivia after the war, was tricked into revealing his true identity during a fake interview by being asked a question in French, a language he wasn’t supposed to understand. in French
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My question is, why didn’t he just say he knew French even in hiding? Isn’t it false identity 101 to keep your backstory and knowledge relatively close to your own but changing just enough that you don’t immediately get caught?! Seems like a rookie error to neglect something so big!
Years ago, I saw a talk at a conference by Steve Rambam, a private investigator who, as a sideline, tracked down Nazi fugitives. He’d go to the California DMV and manage to get driver’s licenses under cover identities and pose as an academic doing historical research on the war. Once they warmed up to him, they’d admit to all kinds of war crimes, looking back as if those were the greatest days of their lives. They’d usually give up more than enough information to be turned over to The Hague for prosecution.
The fake interview is an impressive trick and seemed to be effective.
There is a movie called Rat Race where a Jewish family visits the “Barbie Museum” and end up stealing Hitler’s car and crashing into a WW2 veteran meet-up.
This guy came up in discussion one time because of the movie Rat Race and a friend of mine, who is, in fact, originally from Bolivia, just busts out with “Oh yeah, my grandfather knew him.”
So that was interesting. And it’s apparently only three steps to get from me to Klaus Barbie.
Unsurprisingly,
> The US Department of Justice report to the US Senate in 1983 opens with the summary paragraph:
> As the investigation of Klaus Barbie has shown, officers of the United States government were directly responsible for protecting a person wanted by the government of France on criminal charges and in arranging his escape from the law. As a direct result of that action, Klaus Barbie did not stand trial in France in 1950; he spent 33 years as a free man and a fugitive from justice.
>The French discovered that Barbie was in U.S. hands; having sentenced him to death in absentia for war crimes, they made a plea to John J. McCloy, US High Commissioner for Germany, to hand him over for execution, but McCloy refused. Instead, the CIC helped him flee to Bolivia assisted by “ratlines” organised by US intelligence services, as well as by Croatian Roman Catholic clergy, including Krunoslav Draganović.
Can’t believe they made a museum for this guy out in the desert near Las Vegas.
I’ll never go to that Barbie Museum roadside attraction again…
The only way I learned of this guy was from the movie Rat Race when the family goes to the “Barbie Museum” and get there and its a bunch of Nazis and not dolls.
You watched the clip on interestingasfuck as well then?
As a kid in Lyon, I remember seeing the cellars of the gestapo building where they tortured people. You could see fingernail scratches in the walls. It was terrifying and I remember it like it was yesterday.
“Don’t play Hitler’s harmonica!”
“Why not, you’re driving his car!”
“Yeah, but I’m not sucking on the dashboard!”
A friend of mine who was a TV quiz question setter last year wrote one of the funniest questions I thought at the time “Famous Nazi war criminal yadda yadda was called Klaus Barbie or Klaus Oppenheimer?” i wish I came up with that one. I think that episode where that question didn’t air just yet, but there’s a solid chance someone fell for it.
Is this what that popular movie was about? Don’t know why they cast Margot Robbie.
Have you ever been to the Barbie Museum?
Klaus Barbie hunted Virginia Hall and then both ended up working for American Intelligence after the war. Must have been an awkward workplace
Stargate SG-1…
SOLDIER: “Vy sovetskiye shpiony?”
DANIEL: “Nyet!”
O’NEILL: “Daniel…?”
DANIEL: “He just asked if we were Soviet spies, and I …. answered…”
Y’all wanna go to the Barbie museum?
The guys hunting him already strongly suspected who he was when they set up the interview via a third party. The real “gotcha” moment wasn’t just that he knew French, a language his alter ego supposedly shouldn’t have understood, it was that they tricked him into handling some photographs during the interview, after which they pulled fingerprints from them and positively ID’d him based on them.
Yes we all saw the same reddit post you did.
Lots of people were really ready to just move on and let this guy live out the rest of his days in peace. Fuck that I wish he could have suffered to the last moment. The awful things he did. The people that shielded him from justice afterwards. It is difficult to want to be a part of the human race.
Twat of the highest order
I just watched the video of the interview https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/s/dGXQ9giqAU
#***”WOW! THE BARBIE MUSEUM.”***
I like to imagine Barbie had a little speech bubble pop up above his head when he realized he’d been caught.