Klaus Barbie was born Nikolaus Barbie in 1913 near Bonn, a frustrated theology student whose plans collapsed after his brother and father died in 1933. He joined the SS and its intelligence arm, the SD, and served in Amsterdam before being assigned to Lyon in 1942, where he ran the local Gestapo from the Hotel Terminus and earned the nickname the Butcher of Lyon.

Unlike the desk-bound bureaucrats of the era, Barbie personally engaged in torture and was responsible for the deportation of up to 14,000 Jews and resistance fighters. Recruited by U.S. intelligence after the war and later shielded by West German intelligence, he fled to Bolivia via the rat lines, advised dictators, and was finally exposed by journalists, extradited, and tried in Lyon in 1987.

• How personal grievance and a derailed career made Barbie a willing instrument ...