On this day: Klaus Barbie arrested - The Jewish Chronicle

Known as the “Butcher of Lyon”, Barbie was the local head of the Gestapo in Nazi-occupied France during the Holocaust.

Estimated to be responsible for the murders of 4,000 people, among his many hideous crimes, he tortured members of the French resistance and personally arranged for 44 Jewish children in an orphanage to be sent to Auschwitz.

After the war, Barbie fled to Argentina and then Bolivia, where he assumed the name “Klaus Altmann” and was rumoured to have aided the intelligence efforts of the country’s ruling dictatorship. He was sentenced to death in absentia twice by French courts.

However in the early 1970s he was tracked down by a French Nazi-hunting duo – husband and wife Beate and Serge Klarsfeld. Mr Klarsfeld’s father fought in the Resistance during the war and was deported, but did not survive.