Kickstarter Campaign Funds Startling Portrait of Nazi and U.S. Spy Klaus Barbie
Alexandria, Va. (PRWEB) August 05, 2013 -- A campaign supported by the crowd sourcing platform Kickstarter financed the edition of The Devil’s Agent: Life, Times and Crimes of Nazi Klaus Barbie. It is indicative of the innovative ways books and other creative media are being financed and made available to the public through crowd funding.
The Devil’s Agent, a new book by Peter McFarren and Fadrique Iglesias, reveals a startling inner and outer portrait of this horrific political figure using previously unpublished letters written from Barbie’s cell in Lyon, France, documents released since the removal of the Berlin Wall confirming his work as a U.S. and West German spy and over a hundred photographs of his family, business associates and Nazi friends.
In the 1940s, Klaus Barbie was a mid-level Nazi officer who tortured and murdered his victims with sadistic pleasure. The unrepentant war criminal was the most important Nazi to continue operating as a public figure even after World War II.
The Devil’s Agent details Barbie’s family history, the role he played as a Gestapo officer in German-occupied France, his responsibility for the murders of more than 14,000 Jews and French Resistance fighters during the Holocaust, his work as a spy for U.S. military intelligence from 1947 to 1951, his flight from Europe after the war (facilitated by the U.S. Government, the Vatican and the International Red Cross) and his settlement in Bolivia, with his wife, Regine, and two children. It describes McFarren’s encounters with Klaus Barbie in 1981, when he and his colleague Maribel Schumacher were arrested in front of the Nazi’s Bolivian home for attempting to interview him for a New York Times story.
Barbie came to symbolize greed, inhumanity, hatred, abuse of power and collective and personal evil during the half century he operated in Europe and Latin America. His most sadistic and monstrous acts were committed during World War II, but it was in Bolivia that Barbie established a reputation as a cunning, ruthless and violent operative who acted without scruples or a moral compass. He trafficked in tanks and weapons and supported the hunt for the Argentine-Cuban guerrilla leader “Che” Guevara. He collaborated with cocaine trafficking kingpin Roberto Suárez Gómez, authoritarian right-wing military governments and a network of former Nazis, paramilitaries and mercenaries from Europe and South America to overthrow a Bolivian civilian government in 1980 – while enjoying the political protection of every dictator he served.
Delving more deeply into the complex persona of Nazi officer Barbie, how he embodies personal and collective evil, and the twisted underworld he helped build than any previous account, The Devil’s Agent is both an eye-opening study and a brutal reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust and the criminal mindset behind it that continues to plague the world today.
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About the Authors
Peter McFarren is a journalist, photographer, filmmaker, and social entrepreneur who has written about Klaus Barbie since 1980 and worked on several documentaries and many books about him. He currently lives in Cairo, Egypt.
Fadrique Iglesias is a columnist and writer specializing in cultural and arts management. He currently works as an expert on international development and culture in Washington, DC, and lives in Virginia, USA.
The Devil's Agent * by Peter McFarren and Fadrique Iglesias
Life, Times and Crimes of Nazi Klaus Barbie
Publication Date: June 5, 2013
Trade Paperback; $23.99; 622 pages; 978-1-4836-3642-9
Trade Hardback; $34.99; 622 pages; 978-1-4836-3643-6
Members of the media who wish to review this book may request a complimentary paperback copy by contacting the publisher at (888) 795-4274 x. 7879. To purchase copies of the book for resale, please fax Xlibris at (812) 355-4079 or call (888) 795-4274 x. 7879.
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