During the Second World War, he was notorious as the Butcher of Lyon, but unlike his Nazi partners in crime, Klaus Barbie never faced instant arrest and justice when the fighting ended.

Despite sending whole families to death camps, the US recruited him as a CIA spy and smuggled him into Bolivia where he helped spearhead a brutal narco-state.

Barbie's initial escape from justice as a mistake that contributed to a cocaine trade which was as vicious as it was lucrative and justice was not served until many years later.

Brutal: German SS officer and Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie was responsible for the deaths of 14,000 people during World War Two. Despite his crimes, the CIA enlisted his help and he went on to be a pivotal figure in a vicious cocaine trade in Latin America

Centre: The Terminus Hotel was the Gestapo headquarters in Lyon, where Nazi Klaus Barbie inflicted terror on the Rhone town

The Daily Mirror's Warren Manger interviewed the American journalist Peter McFarren who co-wrote a biography of the Nazi called The Devil's Agent.

'Barbie may not have been physically involved in shipping kilos of drugs, but he played a decisive role in the growth of the cocaine trade in Bolivia, Peru and Columbia,' Mr McFarren said.

'He was the liaison between these kings of cocaine and the government, military and mercenaries.'

Barbie was appointed leader of Hitler's secret police in 1942 aged 29 when he was charged with hunting down members of the French Resistance.

Delayed justice: Klaus Barbie, seen behind the glass with his lawyer Jacques Verges in the foreground, finally went to court in 1987. After the war, Barbie supplied weapons and met with Colombia's drug lord Pablo Escobar (right) who amassed a £30billion fortune and killed thousands of Colombians to maintain his empire

During the war, he earned his Butcher nickname by torturing people with sexual abuse, electrocution and breaking bones.

When it emerged Barbie might face prosecution for his horrific war crimes, including responsibility for the deaths of 14,000 people, the CIA enlisted the help of the Vatican to change his name to Klaus Altmann, and he fled to Bolivia in 1951.

He became a colonel in the Bolivian army where he enlisted the help of terrorists called Fiancés of Death. He also advised the Bolivian military on interrogation and torture techniques.

He then teamed up with some of the region's most feared drug lords, including Pablo Escobar whom he most likely supplied with weapons, although Barbie's closest ally was Bolivian warlord Roberto Suarez Gomez, whom he met regularly in the early 1980s.

Barbie was paranoid there would be a Communist revolution in Bolivia from where he would be deported to France to stand trial for war crimes. Suarez Gomez wanted the freedom to expand his cocaine empire without fear of prosecution.

So they arranged a military coup to install General Luis Garcia Meza Tejada as commander of the army, then as president in 1980, all funded by cocaine cash.

Mr McFarren says: 'Overthrowing a democratic government with money from the drug trade was unheard of. It set a dangerous precedent of how democracy could be interrupted by the dollars and terrorism of cocaine trafficking bandits.

'In Colombia and Peru there were individual government officials and military police who were part of the cocaine trade. But I can't think of another regime that was completely in the pocket of the trade, and Barbie played a key part in that.'

Barbie was able to live well in Bolivia and even became a public figure.

Target: Barbie boasted of hunting down Communist revolutionary Che Guevara (above)

'He wasn't seen as a horrible Nazi murderer. He became a grandfatherly figure. I saw him on the streets with his wife, hanging out in the local café,' Mr McFarren says.

After the collapse of the military dictatorship, Barbie was extradited to France in 1983 to stand trial. By then 70, he remained unrepentant for his many crimes, declaring: 'When I stand before the throne of God I shall be judged innocent.'

When I stand before the throne of God I shall be judged innocent Klaus Barbie at his trial in 1987

Tried on 41 counts of crimes against humanity, he was found guilty and jailed for life in July 1987. He died four years later of leukaemia and cancer of the spine.

'Most Nazis who escaped prosecution disappeared, often to South America, but they stayed off the radar.