The Nazi Hunters (31 page)

Strictly speaking,
The Reader
is not autobiographical; Schlink did not have a similar romance as a teenager. But in his Heidelberg high school, he had a “beloved and admired English teacher” who had been in the SS. In those days, he had believed that this “great teacher” could not have been implicated in anything shameful during the war. After the teacher retired, Schlink learned otherwise—but he is still unwilling to discuss the specifics since he was given the information in confidence. Schlink soon recognized that this was a common experience for his generation: “You love someone, you admire someone, you owe someone, and then you find out.” He added: “For many, it was a lot closer, the father or the uncle.” This, too, was the legacy of Auschwitz and everything it stood for.

• • •

Jan Sehn had a regular routine when he was leaving his director’s office in Kraków’s Institute of Forensic Research to travel abroad. He would hand over the keys to most of the drawers in his desk to Maria Kozłowska, his younger colleague and neighbor, but not to the middle section, which held his private papers. Much to Kozłowska’s surprise, he changed the drill as he was embarking on another trip to Frankfurt in late 1965. “The last time he was leaving, he gave me the keys to the middle section as well,” she recalled. Then, as if still pondering the meaning of his action, she spelled out the obvious: “I had all the keys.”

For Kozłowska, her boss’s action took on particular significance in retrospect because Sehn died during that visit to Frankfurt. On December 12, 1965, as he was getting ready for bed, he sent out his official bodyguard, who was also tasked with monitoring his contacts with foreigners by the Polish communist authorities, to pick up a pack of cigarettes. When the bodyguard returned, Sehn was dead. He was only fifty-six. As his stunned colleagues in his institute in Kraków mourned him, Kozłowska said, there was speculation “that maybe someone helped him in this dying.”

She and most of her colleagues dismissed that theory since there was no evidence to support it. Besides, Sehn was a chronic smoker and was
known to have undergone treatment for heart problems earlier. The assumption was that he had died of a heart attack. The unanswered question, though, was whether his decision to entrust all the keys to Kozłowska signaled that he had some premonition about his fate.

Sehn had received anonymous letters threatening him on several occasions. Some consisted of cut-out printed letters to spell out the messages. Some were in German and others in Polish, but Kozłowska was under the impression that most of them were written by German speakers. Presumably, they were from people who were incensed by his efforts to bring Auschwitz personnel and other war criminals to justice.

But Sehn was a far less controversial figure—and much less of a public figure—in Poland than Bauer was in West Germany. Although Bauer had let his younger prosecutors handle the Auschwitz trial, he spoke frequently in public, including on television, about the need for those who were responsible for mass murder to be held to account. “
The trial should show the world that a new Germany, a new democracy, is willing to protect the dignity of every human being,” he declared at the beginning of the proceedings. At the same time, he made no secret of his exasperation with the way the defendants in the Auschwitz trial behaved.
In an interview in the midst of the trial, he pointed out that the prosecution had been waiting “for one of the defendants . . . to address the witnesses who had survived and had their whole families annihilated with one humane word . . . it would have cleared the air.” That never happened.

Bauer also pressed for a cleansing of the West German judges and prosecutors, whose ranks were still filled with former Nazis. Exasperated by his generation’s apparent indifference to that kind of continuity between the old and the new, he spent more and more time discussing the wider implications of the efforts to bring Nazis to justice with young people with whom he had an easy rapport. He often joined them in pubs or living rooms for long sessions as he smoked cigarette after cigarette and nursed his wine.
When the youth protests gained momentum in 1968, some of his detractors accused him of instigating the ensuing violence.

Many Germans were angered by Bauer’s actions and words. He received far more threatening letters than Sehn did, along with threatening
phone calls—although he had an unlisted number. “
When I leave my office, I find myself in a hostile foreign country,” Bauer remarked. During the Auschwitz trial, a swastika was painted on the wall of his apartment building; when it was wiped clean, it kept reappearing. Bauer kept a 6.35mm pistol in his apartment for his protection, and he was assigned a bodyguard. Reporting an alleged assassination plot, the
Frankfurter Rundschau
headlined its October 14, 1966, story: “
The Attorney General Was Supposed to Be Murdered.”

But Bauer was never intimidated. He openly talked about the need for more trials of Nazi criminals in the coming years, and about Germany’s “
burning anti-Semitism.”
In 1967, he blocked the confiscation of the
Braunbuch,
“Brown Book,” at the Frankfurt Book Fair; that volume, which was published in East Germany in 1965, contained the names of about 1,800 prominent West Germans who were alleged to have held official positions in the Nazi period. The government in Bonn denounced it as propaganda, but Bauer held firm. By then, the West German chancellor was Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who had joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and worked in the propaganda department of the Foreign Ministry during the war. The contrast between Bauer’s pronouncements and the general atmosphere that could allow a former Nazi to assume the country’s top post could not have been greater.

Bauer always stressed that he was not criticizing his countrymen for failing to actively undermine Hitler’s regime. But he still set a standard that implicated millions of them. “
There is only a duty to passive resistance, only a duty to refrain from doing evil, only a duty not be an accomplice to injustice,” he declared in one of his last speeches. “Our trials against the Nazi criminals are based exclusively on the assumption of such a duty to disobedience. This is the contribution of these trials to defeat the unjust state in the past, present and future.”

On July 1, 1968, Bauer, who was just a couple of weeks away from his sixty-fifth birthday, was found dead in his bathtub; he had apparently died about twenty-four hours earlier. There was immediate speculation that he had been killed or committed suicide, but the coroner who examined
the body ruled out both theories. Like Sehn, Bauer was a chain-smoker. He also suffered from chronic bronchitis, and, as the 2014 Frankfurt exhibition about his life pointed out, he sometimes mixed sleeping pills with alcohol. Bauer always shrugged off concern about his unhealthy habits. Asked by a reporter how many cigarettes he smoked, he replied: “
How long do I need for a cigarette?” When the reporter offered a guess of five minutes, he declared: “Then divide 18 hours by 5 minutes, and you have my consumption.”

But not everyone was convinced that Bauer died as a result of the toll that such habits took on his body. In her powerful documentary about him that premiered in 2010, Ilona Ziok pointed out that no autopsy was performed and featured testimony from those who raised doubts about his death. Rolf Tiefenthal, Bauer’s Danish nephew, is shown admitting that there is only speculation on that score but added: “His enemies, his many enemies, could have helped him, could have forced him to take his own life or they could have murdered him. There were reasons enough for that.”

In the current debates in Germany about what aspects of Bauer’s life should be highlighted, there is a sharp divide about his death as well. The 2014 Fritz Bauer exhibition at Frankfurt’s Jewish Museum appeared to accept the coroner’s verdict. Ziok never leveled a direct accusation of foul play in her documentary and conceded that there is “
no proof” of that. But asked point-blank whether she believes he was killed, she replied: “Yes.”

At Bauer’s funeral, Robert Kempner, the German-born Jewish member of the U.S. prosecution team at Nuremberg, spoke about his legacy. “
He was the greatest ambassador that the Federal Republic ever had,” he declared. “In contrast to many short-sighted men, he had a clear vision of what needed to be done to help Germany and he helped it.” The weekly
Die Zeit
pointedly noted: “
He won us much honor abroad, which we didn’t deserve.”

Until the recent revival of interest in Bauer’s life, many Germans knew nothing about him. In Poland, Sehn is almost completely forgotten
except by those who continue working for the institute he once headed, which was subsequently renamed the Jan Sehn Institute of Forensic Research. And what no one in either country seems to have noticed is that both of these men who once cooperated in their efforts to bring Nazis to justice died in Frankfurt, two and a half years apart in circumstances that remain murky to this day. The conspiracy theories may be entirely wrong, but those similarities are eerily disturbing.

“
Because we were weak, we had to take strong actions. And the strongest action is to go on the spot where the enemy is powerful and to tell the truth there.”

French Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld

B
eate Klarsfeld was certainly not brought up to be a risk taker. Born in Berlin on February 13, 1939, just months before Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland that signaled the start of World War II, she was too young to have many memories of the conflict. But she does recall, shortly before the fighting finally ended with Germany’s surrender, “
reciting little poems in honor of the Führer in kindergarten.”

Her father served in the Wehrmacht in France in 1940, until his unit was transferred to the Eastern Front the following year when Hitler ordered the attack on the Soviet Union. But he had the good fortune to develop a case of double pneumonia, leading to his return to Germany where he worked as a bookkeeper for the army. After a brief stint in British captivity at the end of the war, he rejoined his family in a village where they had taken refuge during the Allied bombing of Berlin. In late 1945, they returned to Berlin, where Beate enrolled in elementary school and
played hide-and-seek with her friends in the bombed-out buildings and piles of rubble.

As she recalled, she was “a conscientious and well-behaved student” in elementary school. “In those days no one ever spoke of Hitler,” she added. Both teachers and parents largely avoided the whole topic of what had happened in Germany under his rule. Her parents had not joined the Nazi Party, but they had voted for Hitler like so many of their countrymen. “Still, they felt no responsibility for what had happened under the Nazis,” she noted. Instead, they and their neighbors bemoaned their losses in the war with “never a word of pity or understanding for other nations.” Growing up, she heard no real explanation for their situation. Instead, she kept hearing people say: “We have lost a war and now we must work.”

As a teenager, unlike her parents, who supported Chancellor Adenauer’s Christian Democrats, she favored Willy Brandt’s Social Democrats. But that had more to do with the fact that Brandt’s “young open face contrasted with those of the other politicians” than with any understanding of his party’s politics. She was developing a typical teenager’s impatience with what she saw as “the stifling atmosphere” of her household. Her father was drinking heavily and her mother wanted her to start looking for a suitable husband. Instead, after attending a commercial high school, she took a job as a stenographer in a large pharmaceutical firm. Her ambition was to earn enough to strike out on her own.

In March 1960, at the age of twenty-one, she landed in Paris, where she studied French and worked as an au pair. She slept “in a disgusting attic and trembled in fear of the spiders,” she recalled. But, not surprisingly, she quickly fell in love with the city, finding it both so much livelier and more elegant than West Berlin. She also quickly fell in love with her future husband.

On May 11, 1960, two months after her arrival in Paris, Beate was waiting at the Porte de Saint-Cloud, her usual metro station. A young man with dark hair was staring at her. “Are you English?” he asked. As Beate noted later, “Of course it was a trap.” The young man, Serge Klarsfeld, later admitted that it was a familiar tactic used to engage German
girls in conversation. Once they replied “no,” it was difficult to cut things off. By the time Serge got off at his stop near the School of Political Science, where he was finishing up his graduate work before embarking on what he expected to be a career as a history professor, he had Beate’s phone number.

In Buenos Aires on that same day, the Israeli team moved in to capture Eichmann. At the time, neither Serge nor Beate knew anything about that, of course. But sitting together in their son’s Paris apartment in 2013, reviewing their life’s work, they could not help but feel that this was more than mere coincidence. The couple who would later gain fame—and, as others saw it, notoriety—as new, highly confrontational Nazi hunters had first connected on the day that the Mossad had sprung into action in Argentina.

• • •

Three days later, on the couple’s first date, they went to see the movie
Never on Sunday
—and then began sharing their life stories for the first time while sitting on a bench in the Bois de Boulogne. That’s where Beate learned that Serge was Jewish and his father had perished in Auschwitz. For a young German who, as she admitted, was largely “ignorant of my own country’s history,” this came as a jolt. “I was surprised and moved, but also in a certain sense shrank back a little,” she noted. “In Berlin I had heard hardly anything good about the Jews. Why was this complication befalling me now?”

But Serge would not be put off, gently educating her during their endless discussions. “We never stopped talking,” Beate recalled. “He brought history, art, the whole world of ideas into my life.” Most of all, he filled her in on her country’s recent history, “the terrifying reality of Nazism,” as she put it. And that reality was all too apparent in his life story.