book: Soldiers, Spies, and the Rat Line: America's Undeclared War Against the Soviets.

[Doug Millison]

http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=185691020097674

James V. Milano and Patrick Brogan. Soldiers, Spies, and the Rat Line:
America's Undeclared War Against the Soviets. Washington and London:
Brassey's, 1995. xii + 242 pp. Index, appendix. $23.95 (cloth), ISBN
1-57488-050-0; $17.95 (paper), ISBN 1-57488-304-6.

[...] Milano was a young Army intelligence officer in Salzburg during the
early part of the Allied occupation of Austria. During the war, he had used
his fluent Italian to debrief prisoners of war captured during the
invasions of North Africa and Italy. In 1945, he was put in charge of
American military intelligence efforts against the Soviets in occupied
Austria. The "rat line" of the title refers to his efforts to smuggle
deserters from the Red Army to South America. Later, after Milano left
Europe, his successors used his rat line to smuggle another type of
rat--Klaus Barbie, the infamous "Butcher of Lyons"--to safety in Bolivia.
[...]

Milano realized the potential moral drawbacks of paying great sums of money
to his Croatian fascist--a man who presumably used the American money to
spirit war criminals out of Europe to safety in South America. But he
rationalized these problems. "The American intelligence agencies in Austria
were not in the business of catching Yugoslav war criminals. Their job was
gathering current intelligence on the Soviet armies, not exacting
retribution for past crimes" (p. 53). To his credit, even he admits that
this was a "rather specious" justification. Milano was no Nazi sympathizer:
he was horrified when he visited the Nazis' former concentration camps, and
he deliberately turned a blind eye to Jews who were organizing their own
"rat line" of holocaust survivors to Palestine. But he always believed that
the need to combat the Soviet threat outweighed any concerns about aiding
fascist murderers.  [...]

As Milano explains, Barbie was a mass murderer who ferreted out the hiding
places of hundreds of French Jews before sending them to their deaths. He
personally beat to death one of the leaders of the French Resistance. Yet
Barbie convinced American officials in postwar Germany that he could help
them spy on the Soviets. When the French police began to close in on the
"butcher of Lyons," Milano's successors used the rat line to send him to a
new life in South America. After thirty years of comfortable living in
Bolivia, Barbie was found by Nazi-hunters and sent to trial and eventual
prison in France. [...]