On 7 November 1968 Beate Klarsfeld walked through the security cordon at the West Berlin Congress Hall, where the Christian Democratic Union party congress was assembling for its annual meeting, took a seat near the front of the hall on a press accreditation she had obtained legitimately, watched the West German Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger walk to the rostrum to deliver his keynote address, stood up at the moment Kiesinger reached the podium, walked the four metres separating her from the chancellor, and slapped him hard across the face. Nazi! Nazi! she shouted in the silence that followed. She was twenty-nine years old. She had been born in Berlin to a Wehrmacht clerk who had served on the Eastern Front. Her husband Serge was the son of a French Jewish lawyer who had been deported from Nice on convoy 61 to Auschwitz on 30 November 1943 and had been gassed there. The slap was the moment when the question of senior West German politicians’ Nazi pasts became, in West German politics, an inescapable public question rather than a topic for occasional press articles. Kiesinger had been a member of the Nazi Party from 1933 and had served during the war in the Foreign Office’s broadcasting section, drafting and transmitting Nazi propaganda. He had not held a senior position in the regime. He had not been involved in any operational role in the killing. He was, however, a former member of the Nazi Party who had become Chancellor of West Germany twenty-three years after the war. The slap, which Beate Klarsfeld was prepared to deliver and to be arrested for, made the question public.
The Klarsfelds operated as a partnership for the next fifty-six years. Beate, who had moved to Paris in 1960 as an au pair and had met Serge at a Paris Métro station, brought to the partnership a German linguistic capacity, a willingness for direct public action, and a German postwar generational anger at her own country’s reluctance to confront its past. Serge brought a French Jewish lawyer’s working knowledge of legal procedure, a documentary-research method developed in his postwar education, and a personal stake in the work that had been bequeathed to him by his father’s death at Auschwitz. They divided the work between them. Beate ran the public actions and the German-language correspondence; Serge ran the legal cases, the archive, and the historical research. The partnership produced over five decades the most substantial body of postwar Nazi-hunting work undertaken by any private operation.
The Lischka attempted abduction
The most consequential single Klarsfeld operation, after the Kiesinger slap, was the attempted abduction of Kurt Lischka in Cologne in March 1971. Lischka had served as the Gestapo chief in Paris from 1940 to 1943 and had been the senior German official responsible for the deportation of Jews from France during the period in which Serge Klarsfeld’s father had been deported. He had been condemned to death in absentia by a French court in 1950. He had been living openly in Cologne since 1953, working as a senior executive at the Nordcement firm. The West German government had refused, throughout the 1960s, to extradite him to France or to prosecute him in West Germany. The Klarsfelds had concluded by 1971 that conventional pressure would not produce action and that direct intervention was required.
The plan they developed was to abduct Lischka from his Cologne apartment, drive him across the border into France, and turn him over to the French authorities for prosecution. Beate Klarsfeld, two French volunteers, and a press photographer drove to Cologne on 22 March 1971. They identified Lischka leaving his apartment in the morning, attempted to bundle him into the boot of a Citroën DS that had been rented for the purpose, were resisted by Lischka who was a substantially larger man than any of the abductors, and were intercepted by a passing Cologne police patrol. Beate Klarsfeld was arrested. The press photographer, who had already taken the photographs of the operation, was arrested with her.
The attempted abduction produced sustained West German press coverage. The photographs of the partly bundled Lischka and the photograph of Beate Klarsfeld being led into a Cologne police station appeared in newspapers across Western Europe. The political pressure on the West German government to take some action on the cases of Lischka, Herbert Hagen and Ernst Heinrichsohn, all of whom had been condemned to death in absentia by French courts in 1950, became substantial. The German prosecutors filed charges against the three men in 1973. The trial at Cologne ran from October 1979 to February 1980. All three were convicted on the murder of approximately 75,000 Jews deported from France. Lischka drew ten years; Hagen drew twelve; Heinrichsohn drew six. All three served their full sentences. Lischka died in May 1989; Hagen in March 1999; Heinrichsohn in March 1994. The Klarsfeld attempted abduction had not produced the abduction. It had produced the trial.
The Bordeaux dossier and Maurice Papon
The Maurice Papon case was the largest of the postwar French collaboration prosecutions and the case that took the Klarsfelds the longest to bring to trial. Papon had served as the Secretary General of the Bordeaux prefecture from 1942 to 1944 and had directly supervised, in his administrative role, the deportation of 1,690 Jews from the Bordeaux region to the Drancy transit camp and onwards to Auschwitz. Among the deportees had been 223 children. The deportations had been carried out using French police and French civil servants, on Papon’s signed administrative orders. After the war Papon had moved into senior French government positions: head of the Paris police from 1958 to 1967, during which period he had supervised the Charonne massacre of 1962 and the killing of Algerian protesters at the Pont Saint-Michel in October 1961; and Minister of the Budget under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing from 1978 to 1981.
The Klarsfelds began work on the Papon case in 1981, after the publication by the journalist Michel Slitinsky of a partial set of documents from the Bordeaux prefecture archives that demonstrated Papon’s role in the deportations. Serge Klarsfeld spent the next sixteen years assembling the full documentary record. The case rested on French administrative documents that had been preserved in the Bordeaux prefecture archives and that the French government had repeatedly attempted to keep classified. The Klarsfelds obtained the documents through litigation, through tips from sympathetic French civil servants, and through Freedom-of-Information-style petitions to the French archives administration. The compiled dossier ran to several thousand pages.
The Papon trial opened at the Bordeaux Cour d’Assises in October 1997. Papon was eighty-seven. The trial ran for six months, the longest single criminal trial in modern French history. The verdict was delivered on 2 April 1998. Papon was convicted of complicity in crimes against humanity for his role in the deportation of the Bordeaux Jews and was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. He served less than three years before being released on grounds of ill health in September 2002. He died in February 2007 at the age of ninety-six. The conviction was the most senior French government official ever convicted of crimes against humanity. The Klarsfelds had spent sixteen years assembling the case.
The Mémorial
The largest single piece of work Serge Klarsfeld undertook was the compilation of the Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France, a name-by-name record of the 76,000 Jews deported from France between March 1942 and August 1944. The work involved the systematic recovery of train manifests from the Drancy and Pithiviers transit camps, the identification of each individual on the manifests by date of birth, place of birth, address in France at the time of deportation, convoy number, and ultimate destination. Klarsfeld did the work himself over fifteen years using French and German archival sources. He commissioned the printing of the resulting volume at his own expense in 1978. The first edition ran to two thousand pages.
Subsequent editions have been published in 2001 and 2012, with corrections and additions drawn from continuing research. The current edition includes biographical sketches of approximately 11,000 of the deportees compiled by Klarsfeld and his volunteer team. The book is the foundational document of French Holocaust scholarship. Every modern French historian working on the deportations from France has used it. It is held in the reference collections of every major Holocaust archive in the world.
The figures the Mémorial established have been used in subsequent French legal and political proceedings. The 1995 acknowledgment by President Jacques Chirac of French state responsibility for the deportations, the 2000 establishment of the Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation, and the 2014 SNCF compensation agreement, all drew on Klarsfeld’s documented figures.
The end of the partnership
Beate Klarsfeld died in May 2024 at the age of eighty-five after a short illness. She had continued the public work into her eighties, including a 2014 candidacy for the Federal Presidency of Germany on the nomination of the Left Party (which she lost). She had been awarded the French Legion of Honour, the German Federal Cross of Merit, and the Israeli Righteous Among the Nations medal at various points. Her funeral at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris was attended by approximately five hundred people including representatives of the French and German governments, surviving members of the French Jewish community, and a small group of German left-wing activists who had been her allies in the long campaigning work.
Serge Klarsfeld continues the work. He is in his late eighties, still based in Paris, still answering correspondence, still pursuing the remaining cases. He has not produced a memoir of the partnership; the autobiographical material is in the joint memoir Hunting the Truth (2018) that he and Beate published together. He attends his archive at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris on most weekdays. The cases on which he is currently working are mostly historical-research projects rather than active prosecutions; the surviving perpetrators of the era they had spent their lives chasing are nearly all dead.
The wider significance
The Klarsfelds’ work, taken as a whole, was the most substantial private Nazi-hunting operation of the postwar era. They produced more prosecutions than Wiesenthal’s Vienna office. They produced the foundational documentary record of the deportations from France. They forced political reckonings in West Germany, France, Bolivia, and Argentina that the responsible governments had not wanted to undertake. They worked across a fifty-six-year period without taking salaries from any government and without making major concessions to political pressures from any direction.
What they produced, ultimately, was not justice in the sense of proportionate punishment for the killers. The men they brought to trial received sentences too short for what they had done; many died before serving their sentences; many escaped trial entirely. What the Klarsfelds produced was the legal record. They forced the trials onto the public dockets. They put the documents into the public archives. They demonstrated that private citizens with limited resources could, against the indifference and sometimes the active opposition of major Western governments, force the legal system to address the killings of the Holocaust period decade after decade. The work continued. It continues now. Serge Klarsfeld at his desk at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris is the last of the sustained postwar Nazi-hunters. The work after him will be conducted by historians, not by lawyers.
See also
- Vichy France
- Crimes Against Humanity, a New Concept in International Law
- Klaus Barbie
- Righteous Among the Nations
- Nazi Hunters Overview
Sources
- Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, Hunting the Truth: Memoirs of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, Piatkus, 2018
- Serge Klarsfeld, Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France, Klarsfeld, 1978; revised 2001 and 2012
- Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz: Le rôle de Vichy dans la solution finale de la question juive en France 1942 to 1944, Fayard, 1983 to 1985
- Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds: France and the Klaus Barbie Affair, Methuen, 1985
- Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, Harvard University Press, 1991
- Richard J. Golsan, ed, The Papon Affair: Memory and Justice on Trial, Routledge, 2000
- Andrew Nagorski, The Nazi Hunters, Simon and Schuster, 2016