Klaus Barbie & Che Guevara

7.19: KLAUS BARBIE & CHE GUEVARA

On the surface, you couldn’t find two more different men. Guevara was an idealistic doctor whose compassion for the poor and downtrodden metastasized into a Marxist revolutionary crusade that led him from victory in Cuba, to frustration in the Congolese jungle, to disaster in the valleys of the Andes.

Barbie was a fanatical Gestapo killer who at the end of the Second World War seamlessly swapped loyalties from the Third Reich to the United States of America. Spirited away from Europe - where he was wanted for war crimes - he was afforded protection in Bolivia. There he would spend the next four decades lending his sick expertise to anti-Communist activities across Latin America.

The destinies of both men would intersect, when “Che” was assassinated in a remote village in Bolivia.