Serge (born 17 September 1935, Bucharest, Romania) and Beate (born 13 February 1939, Berlin, Germany) Klarsfeld are activists known for engaging in Holocaust documentation and anti-Nazi activism. They were involved in finding Klaus Barbie, René Bousquet, Jean Leguay, Maurice Papon, and Paul Touvier to seek prosecution for their war crimes.
In 1984, they were awarded France's Legion of Honour by President Mitterrand.[1]
In 1986, their story was adapted for a television movie starring Tom Conti, Farrah Fawcett, and Geraldine Page.[2]
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Serge Klarsfeld, a Romanian Jew, spent the war years in France. In 1943, his father was arrested by the SS in Nice during a roundup ordered by Alois Brunner, and he was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was killed. Young Serge was cared for in a home for Jewish children operated by the OSE (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants) organization; his mother and sister also survived the war in Vichy France, helped by the underground French Resistance beginning in late 1943.
Beate was born Beate Künzel, the daughter of a Christian, German-born, regular Wehrmacht soldier. In 1960, she went to Paris as an au pair girl, where she was confronted with the consequences of the Holocaust. Later she went on to work for the Deutsch-Französisches Jugendwerk (Franco-German Alliance for Youth).
Serge and Beate were married in 1963 and made their home in Paris. Their son, Arno Klarsfeld, born 1965, is a human rights attorney, and he worked with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, during Sarkozy's tenure as minister of the interior.
In 1966 Beate was fired from her job at the Deutsch-Französisches Jugendwerk (Franco-German Alliance for Youth), simply for denouncing the West German Chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, for his involvement in Nazi propaganda during the Third Reich. At that time, several leading West German politicians had Nazi backgrounds, but for the first two decades after the war, that had been conveniently forgotten. She gained international attention when she slapped Kiesinger during a party convention in 1968. That evening, Beate Klarsfeld was sentenced to one year in prison for insulting the Chancellor and for the premeditated infliction of bodily harm. In 1969, the basic punishment upheld the original opinion of the court but was reduced to four months probation in a "merciful judgement," as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung stated. At that time, Horst Mahler, now a Holocaust denier, was her attorney.
In August 1970, Beate was arrested in Warsaw by the Polish authorities and deported for having protested against what she perceived as Polish state antisemitism (which was officially described as anti-Zionism in the Soviet bloc). This was considered as a direct insult to the Polish socialist state and to Polish nationhood; she was accused of being a German spy trying to cause uproar in the People's Republic of Poland.
In 1971, Serge and Beate tried to abduct Kurt Lischka, a former Gestapo chief from Cologne, West Germany, and hand him over to the French authorities (his prosecution in Germany being prevented by legal technicalities resulting from a prior conviction). The Klarsfelds were convicted of felony charges and sentenced to two months in prison in 1974. Following international protests, the sentence was suspended. This incident and later activities by the Klarsfelds and by descendants of Lischka's victims eventually resulted in a revision of the legal situation and, in 1980, in Lischka's felony conviction and sentence.
The Klarsfelds were the targets of car bombing at their home in France on 9 July 1979. No one was in the car when the bomb detonated, and no one was injured in the blast. Individuals purporting to represent the Nazi ODESSA claimed responsibility for the attack (though this is doubtful) and demanded that the Klarsfelds stop pursuing (former) Nazis.
The Klarsfelds campaigned against former United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, elected President of Austria in 1986 amid allegations that he covered up his war time activities as an officer in the Wehrmacht.
Beate Klarsfeld was arrested and deported from Syria in 1991 after she traveled to Damascus to publicize Syria's harboring of Alois Brunner,[3] who, as commander of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris from June 1943 to August 1944, was responsible for sending some 140,000 European Jews to the gas chambers. Brunner was condemned in absentia in France in 2001 to a life sentence for crimes against humanity.
In 1996, the Klarsfelds joined the outcry against Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić for alleged war crimes and genocide in the former Yugoslavia.
In December 2009, Serge defied an existing consensus within the Jewish community by saying that the beatification of Pope Pius XII was an internal matter of the Church and that Jews should not get too involved in the process.[4]
In January 2012, Klarsfelds, along with prominent French-Armenian singer Charles Aznavour, director Robert Guédiguian, and philosophers Bernard-Henri Lévy and Michel Onfray signed an appeal to French Parliament asking them to ratify the bill that will penalize anyone denying the Armenian Genocide. [5] [6]
In France they created in 1979 l'Association des fils et filles des déportés juifs de France (Association of the sons and daughters of Jews deported from France) or FFDJF, which is responsible for defending the cause of the descendants of deportees. In 1981, the association inaugurated a memorial in Israel of deported French Jews which bears the name, date and place of birth of 80,000 French victims of the Nazi extermination. About 80,000 trees form a forest of remembrance.
Their work on behalf of sons and daughters of deportees include formal recognition by President Jacques Chirac in a 1995 speech [2] acknowledging the responsibility of France for the plight of Jews during the Second World War and a law (2000-657 of 13 July 2000) establishing a remedy for orphans whose parents were victims of anti-Semitic persecution. Serge Klarsfeld is also Vice-President of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah.
On July 7, 2010, Serge Klarsfeld was awarded the title of commandeur de la Légion d'honneur by Prime Minister François Fillon at Hôtel Matignon, the official residence of France's Prime Minister.[7][8]
In 2009, representatives from Die Linke nominated Beate Klarsfeld for the Federal Cross of Merit. However, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle turned the request down.[9]
The Klarsfelds' activities of finding and pursuing Nazi war criminals was made the object of a 1986 film entitled Nazi Hunter: The Beate Klarsfeld Story. The movie showed that the one-year sentence imposed upon Beate Klarsfeld could not be enforced upon her under a technicality: as the incident took place in West Berlin and she was a French citizen, the court had no jurisdiction over her. West Berlin at that time was governed by the Quadripartite Agreement between the Four Powers and not West Germany. The German courts there could try only German nationals).
The documentary La traque des nazis regarding Simon Wiesenthal's and the Klarsfelds' history appeared in 2007.[10]
In 2008, the drama La traque, written by Alexandra Deman and Laurent Jaoui and directed by Laurent Jaoui, was made about the true story of the Klarsfelds.[11]
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