The Barbie Tapes - Film Screening & Discussion

Join us for a screening of Foeke de Koe’s The Barbie Tapes, a documentary about the secretive 1979 journey of Gerd Heidemann, a German undercover journalist, and Karl Wolff, the highest-ranking SS officer still alive, to seek out Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo official known as the ‘Butch of Lyon’.

The journalist brought a recorder along to South America and kept it running all through their journey. If, unintentionally, he was already recording the voicetrack for a political thriller. These tapes, hidden for decades in a basement in Hamburg and now – through the facilitation of Professor Thomas Weber – housed at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, form the heart of the film.

The tapes are intimate, unsettling and unique: a high-ranking perpetrator of some of the worst Nazi crimes speaking in freedom, outside courtrooms, without pressure or interrogation. What comes alive in the tapes is a hidden postwar world that still echoes into the present. The Barbie Tapes is a searing exploration of the inner lives of extremists.

The film will be followed by a discussion and audience Q&A led by:

Foeke de Koe is an award-winning Dutch documentary filmmaker and

Thomas Weber is Professor of History and International Affairs at the University of Aberdeen and a Visiting Fellow of the Hoover Institution.

This event is co-hosted by the Hoover Institution