Beate Auguste Klarsfeld (born 13 February 1939) and Serge Klarsfeld (born 17 September 1935) are French/Franco-German Nazi hunters well known for their efforts to document and investigate perpetrators of the Holocaust in France. The founders of the Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France (Association des fils et filles des déportés juifs de France) or FFDJF, they are best known for exposing the infamous Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and for their efforts to prosecute former Vichy France officials decades after the fact.
Biography[]
Beate Klarsfeld was born Beate Künzel in Germany in 1939. She grew up during the Second World War and experienced the bombing of Berlin, where she was living at the time. She later broke with her parents due to their refusal to accept responsibility for supporting the nazi government during the war and moved to France to work as an au pair, where she met Serge Klarsfeld.
Serge Klarsfeld was born to Romanian Jews in 1935. The family migrated to France in order to avoid the anti-Semitic fascist dictatorship of Ion Antonescu. However, during the Second World War France was occupied by Nazi Germany and Jews began being rounded up and deported to extermination camps. Serge's father was arrested during a round-up ordered by SS commander Alois Brunner and deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp, where he was murdered. Serge and the rest of his family hid with a French humanitarian organization in the Nazi collaborationist state of Vichy France until France was liberated towards the end of the war.
In the 1960s, Serge met and married Beate Künzel, who later stated that he helped her to become "a German of conscience and awareness" when previously she had known almost nothing about the genocide of Jews by Nazi Germany. The couple had two children, Arno Klarsfeld and Lida Myriam. The two of them were outraged by the realization of how many Nazis and Vichyite collaborators involved in the Holocaust had escaped justice and dedicated their lives to hunting them down.
Nazi hunting[]
The final straw for the Klarsfelds came in 1966, when Kurt Kiesinger, a former member of the Nazi Party, became Chancellor of West Germany. The following year, Beate published an article for the French newspaper Combat revealing Kiesinger's Nazi ties. A public campaign headed by the Klarsfelds exposed that Kiesinger had been in charge of Nazi propaganda broadcasts which included anti-Semitic propaganda intended to incite soldiers on the Eastern Front to take part in actions against the Jews. It was alleged that Kiesinger had continued these broadcasts even after becoming aware of the extermination of the Jews. The campaign reached its head when, during the annual party conference in 1968, Beate Klarsfeld entered pretending to be a journalist and ran up onto stage while Kiesinger was making a speech, slapped him in the face and shouted "Nazi, resign!" This campaign led to Kiesinger being voted out of power the following year. Beate received a suspended prison sentence for assault.
Following the Kiesinger affair, Beate and Serge began gathering files on Nazis who had been active in France during the war, as well as collaborators involved in the Holocaust who had not been prosecuted. One of their main targets was Klaus Barbie, the head of the Gestapo in Lyon who was notorious for his brutal torture-murders of French Resistance fighters and his role in the deportation of 44 Jewish children to death camps in Poland. In 1971 with the help of a German prosecutor, they were able to discover a photo that appeared to show Klaus Barbie in Peru which was soon identified as a businessman known as "Klaus Altmann". The Klarsfelds publicly denounced "Altmann" as Barbie, baiting him into revealing himself to the international media and being tricked into implicating himself by journalist Ladislas de Hoyos. Barbie retreated to Bolivia, where he was protected by the military dictatorship he worked for, and remained a free man until the fall of the dictatorship in 1982, when he was arrested. Beate negotiated with the French and Bolivian governments to have Barbie extradited to France, where he was sentenced to life imprisonment for war crimes in 1987.
Three other major targets of the Klarsfelds were Kurt Lischka, Herbert Hagen, and Ernst Heinrichsohn, the heads of the Gestapo in Paris who had been responsible for the deportation of thousands of French Jews to death camps. Serge managed to track down all three men and found that they were living openly under their old names in Germany, immune from prosecution because of a legal loophole: they had been convicted of war crimes in absentia by a French court, blocking legal action against them in Germany due to double jeopardy in spite of none of them having even been arrested. The Klarsfelds travelled to Cologne, where Lischka was living, and began chasing after him with a camera in the hope that footage of Lischka going about his life a free man would put pressure on the German government to change the law so that he could be prosecuted. However, the planned law change did not materialize, so the Klarsfelds decided on a more radical solution: they would kidnap Lischka and take him to France to face punishment.
In 1971, the Klarsfelds jumped on Lischka in the street and attempted to drag him into their car. However, the attempt failed and they were forced to flee, hoping that the attempt would at least lead to media attention about Lischka. When the attempt was largely ignored, Beate returned to Cologne and turned herself in to the police in order to raise awareness about Lischka's crimes, telling the police to arrest either her or Lischka. She was convicted of kidnapping, but only received a suspended sentence due to international pressure. Her arrest gave her the chance to hand over a file to the police containing evidence of Lischka's crimes. The case succeeded in raising awareness about Lischka, allowing Beate and Serge to rally public support for the proposed law change and put pressure on the German government. The law change was prevented from passing by far-right politician Ernst Achenbach until 1975, when he was discredited after an investigation by Serge proved he had been involved in rounding up Jews. Lischka, Herbert Hagen and Ernst Heinrichsohn were ultimately put on trial and jailed in 1979 after a lengthy public campaign by the Klarsfelds, with much of the evidence against them being documents gathered by Beate and Serge.
The Klarsfelds were responsible for exposing the crimes of a number of prominent politicians who had collaborated with the Nazis in Vichy France. Those who they helped to locate or expose included Paul Touvier, Klaus Barbie's right-hand man who was convicted of crimes against humanity in 1994, Maurice Papon, former secretary-general of Bordeaux police who was jailed in 1998 for his role in deporting 1,600 Jews, René Bousquet, secretary general of Vichy French police who was murdered while awaiting trial for his role in deportations, and Bousquet's lieutenant Jean Leguay, who died during criminal proceedings. They also unsuccessfully campaigned for the arrest of Kurt Waldheim, President of Austria and former United Nations Secretary-General, for his alleged involvement in war crimes in Serbia, and for the extradition of Alois Brunner, the SS commander who had overseen the deportation of Serge's father (he would ultimately spend the last few years of his life imprisoned in Syria). The Klarsfelds also tried locating Dr. Josef Mengele in Uruguay but they were unable to uncover any evidence and were forced to abandon their search.
Both Klarsfelds have received several awards from various bodies for their work hunting Nazis, including the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the French National Order of Merit, the Order of Saint-Charles and National order of the Legion of Honour.