Klaus Barbie was born in Bad Godesberg, today part of Bonn, Germany. The Barbie family came from Merzig, in the Saar. In origin, they were probably a French Catholic family called Barbier that had left France at the time of the French Revolution. His younger brother Kurt died of chronic illness in June 1933 at the age of eighteen. In 1914, his father Nickolaus Barbie went off to battle. He returned an angry, bitter man. He had been wounded in the neck at Verdun and had been captured by the French, whom he hated. He never recovered his health, which was later diagnosed as cancer and his son Klaus never forgave. Nickolaus was a school teacher. Until 1923 he went to the school where his father taught. Afterward, he attended a boarding school in Trier. In 1925, his whole family moved to Trier. In 1933, Barbie's father and brother both died. The death of his abusive, alcoholic father derailed plans for young Barbie to study theology or otherwise become an academic, as his peers had expected. His relationship with his father was difficult and brutal, so it was a relief when he went off to Trier to continue his education. During his youth, Klaus was small and quiet. He was passably intelligent without being brilliant. He was reasonably popular without being considered a leader. While unemployed, Barbie was drafted into the Nazi labor service - Reichsarbeitsdienst.
In 26 September 1935, he joined the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the special security branch service of the SS {Nr. 272 284} which acted as the intelligence-gathering arm of the Nazi Party. On 1 May 1937 he joined the Nazi party {Nr. 4 583 085). He was sent to serve in Amsterdam in the German occupied Netherlands. In 1942, he was sent to Dijon and in November of the same year he was sent to Lyon, where he became the head of the local Gestapo. In April 1939, Barbie became engaged to Regina Margaretta Willms, a 23-year-old daughter of a postal clerk.
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Barbie
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