In Pursuit of the Desk Murderers
Parisians track down Nazis who ordered deaths
Toolbox
By BRUCE EDWARDS Staff Writer - Published: November 27, 2005
PARIS — If not for a chance encounter at a Paris Metro station, history probably would have forgotten the likes of Kurt Lischka, Maurice Papon and Klaus Barbie. They would have continued to live out their lives after the war in relative obscurity — their past crimes an ever-fading memory.
But when a young German-born au pair bumped into a University of Paris political science student on that subway platform one day in 1960, the course of history changed. And for men like Lischka, Barbie and numerous others, the pair would become their worst nightmare.
For nearly 40 years, Beate and Serge Klarsfeld have dedicated their lives to tracking down those who were major cogs in the Nazi killing machine and "the Final Solution" — the annihilation of the Jews of Europe during World War II.
While their better-known counterpart, the late Simon Wiesenthal, focused much of his efforts on those who ran the infamous death camps like Auschwitz and Buchenwald, the French couple have gone after what Beate Klarsfeld calls the "desk murderers" — those who signed the orders and those who collaborated with their Nazi masters to arrest and deport Jews to a certain death. For her indefatigable pursuit of such war criminals, Beate has twice been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Seated in a slightly worn upholstered leather chair in her large fifth floor office on the Rue Boetie, not far from the Champs Elysees, Beate Klarsfeld is surrounded by ceiling-high bookcases with shelves neatly stacked with file folders of different colors, microfilm and books on the Holocaust and its perpetrators.
The collection represents a Nazi-hunting career that has taken her and her husband to almost every corner of the globe and to some not so hospitable places like Syria, Chile and Paraguay. It has not been an easy job tracking down those who disappeared after the war to take up lives of respectability. Their task was made more difficult because the Cold War was the focus and ex-Nazis were seen as a good investment by the United States and its allies in the fight against communism. There was little interest, Klarsfeld says, in rehashing the past and bringing those who "followed orders" to justice. But as a German and a Christian — married to a Jew whose father died at the hands of the Nazis — Klarsfeld says she became acutely aware of the crimes committed by her countrymen.
"As Germans, we had to do something and to assume some kind of responsibility. I would say it's not political but I would say it's more historic and moral," says Klarsfeld, whose father served in the German army during the war.
For Serge Klarsfeld, his epiphany came when he visited Auschwitz in 1960, the place where his father, Arno, was murdered. It was then that he realized that he should follow the lead of Beate and that those who were responsible for mass murder on an unprecedented scale should be held to account.
And while others may have wanted to forget the past, the Klarsfelds were determined to draw attention to their efforts to bring the former Nazis to justice. That often meant very public displays of protest, risking arrest or worse.
In 1966, Klarsfeld says she was fired from her job at the Franco-German Alliance for Youth after she wrote a newspaper article accusing the new German chancellor, Kurt-Georg Kiesinger, of hiding his past as a key figure in the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda under Josef Goebbels.
"I can tell you in the very beginning when I started my campaign against Kiesinger, I was dreadfully alone," she recalled.
Refusing to give up, Klarsfeld organized a campaign in Germany to oust Kiesinger who was seeking reelection. Disguised as a reporter, she gained entry to Kiesinger's Christian Democratic Union party congress meeting. What took place next made Klarsfeld a force to be reckoned with in the ensuing years.
Klarsfeld confronted Kiesinger with shouts of "Nazi, Nazi" and slapped his face, bringing the German chancellor's wartime past into the public spotlight.
Recalling that incident nearly 40 years ago, Klarsfeld says resorting to dramatic acts of protest was the only way to draw attention to their cause.
"We discovered it's not so easy and public opinion — the Germans didn't want to do anything — and neither did politicians, the newspapers," says the 66-year-old Klarsfeld, a neatly dressed woman with dark blonde hair, whose calm manner belies her intensity and the risky nature of her work.
Klarsfeld was arrested on the spot but received a suspended, one-year jail sentence. Undeterred, she continued her public campaign against Kiesinger who didn't survive "the slap" heard around Germany. He lost the 1968 election to then-mayor of Berlin, Willy Brandt.
Kiesinger was the first in a long line of ex-Nazis forced to confront the Klarsfelds and their pit bull-like tactics. Others targeted by the pair were Kurt Lischka, Gestapo chief for Jewish affairs in France, and one of those responsible for arranging deportations to the death camps.
In 1970, the Klarsfelds hatched a plot to kidnap Lischka from his home in Germany and return him to France for trial, but the plan failed. The Klarsfelds, however, didn't give up. In 1972, Beate led a group of protestors into Lischka's Cologne office. Lischka, according to Beate, pulled out a handgun and threatened them. Some time later, Serge returned the favor by confronting Lischka on the street and sticking an unloaded gun in his face before walking away.
Lischka, however, couldn't escape his past. After Germany ratified a treaty allowing for the prosecution in Germany of war crimes committed in France, Lischka and two other former SS men were tried in 1979 for their crimes, convicted and given prison sentences.
Not all of the willing executioners of the Holocaust were Germans. There were French collaborators as well — those in the puppet regime at Vichy who were responsible for sending 80,000 French Jews — many of them children — to their deaths. Klarsfeld points out that "more than Klarsfeld points out that "more than 80 percent of the Jews arrested in France were arrested by men in a French uniform."
Among those set upon by the couple included Rene Bousquet, Paul Touvier and Maurice Papon — the latter was the wartime secretary general in Bordeaux. Following the war, Papon rose up the political ladder becoming a member of parliament and later attaining a Cabinet post.
For decades after the war, she says Papon was protected by friends in high places within the French government. "When we started to unmask him … we were told we would never get this man to jail because he was after the war protected by (president) de Gaulle … and then one day he was obliged to go to jail and no one expected it," says Klarsfeld,
Papon was convicted in 1998 of crimes against humanity for his role in the fatal deportation of 1,600 French Jews. The 87-year-old was sentenced to 10 years in prison but has since been released from jail for health reasons.
Klarsfeld also turned the spotlight on former Secretary General Kurt Waldheim and his Nazi past. She was arrested several times while protesting his candidacy to become president of Austria in 1986.
But to this day the Klarsfelds most famous catch was the former Gestapo chief in Lyon. Klaus Barbie was nicknamed the "Butcher of Lyon" for his countless atrocities, including the brutal torture and death of French Resistance leader Jean Moulin. But Barbie's trial focused on his deportation of 44 children from a children's home in the hamlet of Izieu to Auschwitz. They never returned.
Barbie would not have escaped justice for decades without the help of the Central Intelligence Agency, who used him after the war as an anti-communist expert. "When the Cold War started the thought was to fight against communism so all these Nazi criminals were anti-communists so they were used," Klarsfeld says. "Barbie was used by the secret service of the United States … and the French had theirs and the British had theirs."
The Klarsfelds eventually tracked Barbie to Bolivia where he was living under an assumed name and protected for years by the right-wing government in power. In 1983, with a change in government, he was finally returned to France.
At Barbie's trial four years later, Serge Klarsfeld was one of the more than three dozen lawyers representing the victims. The evidence of Barbie's involvement in the Izieu roundup was gathered by Serge and helped seal the former Gestapo chief's fate. Barbie was convicted and given a life sentence. He died in prison.
The Klarsfelds' crusade to hold war criminals to account has not been without peril. The couple has been arrested on numerous occasions, deported from countries unsympathetic to their cause and often receive death threats. In 1979, a time bomb blew up their car in a Paris garage. No one was hurt but the message was clear that neo-Nazi and right-wing political types didn't care for their work.
But even some of those closest to Beate were opposed to her Nazi-hunting endeavors. She says that for years even her mother didn't approve of what she was doing but eventually came around to her appreciate her work.
"It's still the generation of Germans who voted for Hitler," she says, noting her father had died before she embarked on her career.
Sixty years after the end of the war, there remains one Nazi fugitive on the Klarsfelds' list: former SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Alois Brunner. The Austrian for a time was Adolph Eichmann's deputy, helping to arrange the deportation and murder of Europe's Jews, including 47,000 Jews from Austria and 43,000 from Greece. In 1943, Brunner was placed in charge of the Drancy transit camp near Paris where he deported 25,000 Jewish men, women and children to their deaths in 14 months.
For the couple, hunting Brunner has a very personal side. In 1943, it was Brunner who commanded the SS units in Nice that arrested Serge Klarsfeld's father, Arno. He like many others would perish at a place called Auschwitz.
Brunner disappeared after the war and, like Barbie, wound up working for a Western intelligence service (West Germany). The Klarsfelds finally tracked Brunner to Syria where he apparently lived for years under the protection of the Syrian government.
Despite the efforts of France and Germany to seek Brunner's extradition, Syria has refused to even acknowledge his existence. Klarsfeld speculated that the Syrian government, under the iron-fisted rule of the late President Assad and now his son, regarded Brunner as an asset.
"When he came from Egypt to Syria he unmasked himself, they had known who he was – an enemy of the Jews with some advice to give," she says. "I think he worked in the arms business after the war so he was very helpful to the Syrians."
Brunner has twice been convicted in absentia in France, the last time in 2002 when he was sentenced to life in prison. Klarsfeld adds, however, that at 93 years of age Brunner is likely dead.
And while the couple are best known for their Nazi hunting work, they have also spent much of their time ensuring that those who perished in the Holocaust are not forgotten.
The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation (www.klarsfeldfoundation.org), established in the late 1970s, has funded Holocaust exhibits and published a number of books, including one researched by Serge Klarsfeld. "The Memorial to Jewish Children Deported from France," is a 1,550 page tome that meticulously details the lives of the Jewish children who never returned home. It's a moving tribute that contains more than 2,000 photos of the 11,400 children (only 300 survived) seized and deported to the concentration camps.They also founded the Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France, an organization which helps support the Klarsfelds' activities in France. In Roglit, Israel, the pair were responsible for the creation of a memorial to the 80,000 French Jews who perished during the war. They also were instrumental in getting the French government to establish a pension fund for the orphans of the Holocaust.
The Klarsfelds' work has not gone unnoticed. Both have received numerous honors, including France's Legion of Honor and the Raoul Wallenberg Prize, named for the Swedish diplomat who helped Jews escape during the war. In 1986, a made-for-TV movie starring Farrah Fawcett chronicled the Klarsfelds' Nazi-hunting crusade.
The couple's work has also become a family affair. Their two children, Arno and Lida, both lawyers, have taken up the cause. It was Arno, who was active in the Papon case, representing a number of victims and their families.
Reflecting on how her life turned after that chance meeting on a Paris Metro platform 45 years ago, Beate says hunting Nazi war criminals was not on her agenda. "When I left Berlin in 1960 as an au pair, I couldn't imagine that one day I'd have all these honors and have accomplished quite a lot," she says.
But more importantly, Klarsfeld says, their work and that of the late Simon Wiesenthal have helped forced the world to confront and remember a dark chapter in history when 6 million human beings perished.
"It's useful, you know, not to forget."
Bruce Edwards has written a number of stories related to World War II, including articles about the 50th and 60th D-Day anniversaries and Holocaust victims' assets. He interviewed Beate Klarsfeld this month in her Paris office.
Contact Bruce Edwards at bruce.edwards@rutlandherald.com.
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