Nikolaus Barbie was a member of the SS serving in Vichy France for the Gestapo during the second world war. He killed tortured and killed upwards of 14,000 people and became known as the butcher of Lyon.

His crimes were so horrific he was ordered back to Berlin for disciplinary actions and retraining by the SS- once by the order of Adolf Hitler himself on hearing that Barbie had trained his German Shepherds to sodomize prisoners he was interrogating and was furious about it. Dare I say... furherous.

Unaware of his crimes the United States employed him briefly as an anti-communist counterintelligence agent in west Germany during the earliest parts of the cold war. When his crimes came to light Barbie used his CIA connections to escape to Bolivia where he helped various regimes put down communist groups including a brief meeting with Columbian drug lord Pablo Escabar who he developed a friendship with.

Eventually he was extradited back to France where he was given twelve consecutive life sentences for his crimes. He died in 1997, his final words were allegedly "I am a barbaric man, in a barbaric world. My life's been sadistic, and that's terrific."

Later that year Norwegian pop band Aqua made a song honoring him and had to change the lyrics at the last minute.

youtu.be/e21N7N89aS8