The Nazi Hunters (32 page)

Arno and Raissa, Serge’s parents, were Jews from Romania who had settled in France in the 1920s; Arno was Armenian and Raissa was from an ethnic Russian area in Bessarabia. Serge was born in 1935 in Bucharest, when his parents were visiting relatives there. His father enlisted in the Foreign Legion in 1939, fought against the Germans during their swift conquest of France in 1940, escaped from a POW camp, and joined
the Resistance in Nice. But the entire family was in danger not because of anything he had done, but simply because they were Jews.

In June 1943, SS Captain Alois Brunner was sent to France to oversee the roundups of Jews there; he would soon send an estimated 25,000 Jews to death camps in the East. Working closely with Eichmann, he had already performed similar tasks in his native Austria and Greece, where the number of his victims was even higher. When Brunner began rounding up Jews in Nice, Arno prepared a thin plywood partition that served as the false back of a deep closet; behind it, there was just enough space for the whole family to hide.

On the evening of September 30, 1943, German troops surrounded the area where the Klarsfelds lived and started going from apartment to apartment. When they arrived next door, the Klarsfelds heard the screams and desperate pleas of their neighbors, including their eleven-year-old daughter, who had the temerity to ask the Germans for some identification. A Gestapo officer broke her nose with his pistol, resulting in more panic. Her father shouted out the window for the French police: “Help us! Save us! We are French!”

Hearing all this from the family’s hiding place in the closet, Arno made a quick decision. “If the Germans arrest us, I will survive because I am strong, but you won’t,” he told his wife and Serge, and Serge’s sister, Tanya. Raissa tried to stop him, but he crawled out of the closet. When the Germans pounded on the door, Arno opened it without hesitation. Serge heard a German asking him in French: “Where are your wife and children?” Arno responded that they had gone to the countryside while the apartment was disinfected.

The Germans immediately began a search of the apartment, and one of them even opened the closet. But he only poked around the clothing without reaching the partition. Later, when Serge documented the roundups by Brunner and others of French Jews, he wrote: “
I knew him well, and yet I have never seen him.” He added that the thin plywood partition was “all that stood between him and me that night.” Looking back at that moment, Klarsfeld noted that he could not be sure that Brunner was in the apartment. “He could have been there personally, but I had no
proof of that,” he said, pointing out that Brunner worked with a team of Austrian SS officers and Frenchmen paid by the Gestapo. But regardless of who entered the apartment, Brunner was the man orchestrating the arrests, the subsequent transport of the prisoners to the Drancy detention center, and then their one-way journey to Auschwitz.

Raissa fled with the two children to the Haute-Loire, a region in south-central France. They lived in Saint-Julien-Chapteuil, a small village that was “a very hospitable place for Jews,” according to Serge. Perhaps so, but Raissa still tried to keep their Jewish identity secret. She claimed her husband was in a POW camp and she sent the children to the local Catholic school. Once she felt that Nice was no longer a target for roundups of Jews, Raissa moved back with Serge and Tanya to their apartment there. Nonetheless, she took nothing for granted. She told the children: “If the Germans will come, you will go in the hiding place and I will open the door.”

Serge’s family story prompted Beate to ponder what she should conclude as a German. She did not feel responsible for Nazism as an individual, “but insofar as I was one tiny part of the German nation, I became aware of new obligations,” she recalled. But when she speculated whether she should stop considering herself a German, Serge rejected the idea out of hand, saying that would be too easy. “It was exciting as well as difficult to be a German after Nazism,” Beate concluded.

Serge also told her about Hans and Sophie Scholl, the German brother and sister who organized a group that staged a desperate act of resistance in Munich in 1943, distributing anti-Nazi leaflets. They were quickly arrested, condemned, and sent to the guillotine. For Beate, this served as an inspiring example of Germans who had refused to submit to Hitler’s regime. “Although it seemed meaningless and sterile in 1943, the significance of their act has grown with time until it reached Serge and, through him, me,” she wrote. “In them I saw myself.”

None of that was immediately apparent, however. Serge and Beate were married on November 7, 1963, and started what looked like normal jobs. Serge became a deputy director of the French Radio and Television System (ORTF) and Beate began working as a bilingual secretary at the
Franco-German Alliance for Youth (OFA), a newly created organization that had the backing of both Chancellor Adenauer and French President Charles de Gaulle. The idea was to forge new ties at all levels between the formerly warring neighbors.

As Beate recalled, there was nothing yet to indicate the real trajectory that their lives would take. “We had set the scene to live a stable, orderly life like that of thousands of other young couples,” she noted. In 1965, Beate gave birth to a boy. The couple decided to name him Arno, in honor of Serge’s father.

• • •

It didn’t take long to see the first signals that the Klarsfelds would not settle for a stable, ordinary life. Beate did not hide her increasingly leftist political views, which included not only supporting Brandt’s Social Democratic Party but her defiance of the taboo against treating East Germany as a legitimate partner. As part of her OFA job, she compiled a list of Franco-German cultural associations for a handbook for German au pairs that she was preparing; one of the associations she listed was a French friendship association with East Germany. The West German publisher hastily recalled the edition to redo the listing, omitting what was seen as a deliberately provocative mention. “You must be out of your mind!” she was told.

She also publicly voiced her feminist views. In an article in the publication
Women in the Twentieth Century,
she wrote: “I have come to wonder what made me and plenty of other German women leave our homeland.” While conceding that there were often prosaic reasons like studying a new language and culture, she concluded: “I think the efforts we made reveal a more powerful and often unconscious motivation—the desire to be free.”

As for the role of women in her homeland, she wrote: “Since the war, women have made a real contribution to the creation of a new Germany, which has turned out to be not so new after all and in which now, as in the past, they play hardly any role in politics.” She also warned that public opinion “is now in the process of taking a dangerous turn which will once
again lead to a domesticated woman dedicated to providing her husband with the greatest possible comfort and to her natural reproductive function.”

None of this played well with her conservative bosses, who reported to a board of directors that included at least two German Foreign Ministry officials who were former Nazis. When she went back to work after her maternity leave ended in 1966, her job in the information department was cut for “budgetary reasons.” She was once again assigned to lowly secretarial work, typing and answering phones.

But it was a far more momentous event in 1966 that triggered Beate’s transformation from a somewhat troublesome low-level employee with unconventional views to a crusading activist intent on atoning for her country’s Nazi past.
That was the year when Kurt Georg Kiesinger became chancellor, despite the fact that he had been a Nazi Party member starting in 1933 and served as the deputy director of the Foreign Ministry’s radio division during the war, disseminating Nazi propaganda. In his defense, Kiesinger claimed he had become disillusioned early with Nazi doctrine and that he was even denounced for holding dissident views.

There were voices of protest as Kiesinger was preparing to take power. The philosopher Karl Jaspers declared: “
What seemed impossible ten years ago is now happening almost without opposition.” While conceding that it was inevitable that some former Nazis would rise to high positions, he continued, “if a former Nazi should become chief of state, it would mean from now on the fact that a man has been a Nazi would be of no importance.”

For Beate, the elevation of Kiesinger felt like a personal challenge. She thought of Hans and Sophie Scholl, who had given their lives to protest Hitler’s regime, and treated this as an example of how to strike back quickly, even if the chances for success were slim. “Above all, it is necessary to be brave, follow your conscience, keep your eyes open, and act,” as she put it. When Kiesinger paid his first official visit to Paris in January 1967, she penned what turned into a series of articles for
Combat,
a leftist newspaper that had been started by the French Resistance during the
war. “As a German I deplore Kiesinger’s accession to the Chancellorship,” she wrote. “Sociologist Hannah Arendt used the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ in speaking of Eichmann. To me Kiesinger represents the respectability of evil.”

In an even more incendiary article, she wrote: “If the USSR recognized the danger Kiesinger represents to democracy in Germany in the future, and if it truly wanted to get rid of him, there is no doubt that would be morally justified in the eyes of the world.”

On August 30, 1967, a month after that article appeared, Beate was fired from her job at the Franco-German Alliance for Youth. When she was leaving her office, none of her co-workers said good-bye or shook her hand; they clearly did not want their bosses to see that they had anything to do with her. She hurried to see Serge, who had switched jobs and was then working for Continental Grains, a multinational cereal firm. While he had not engaged in public protests the way Beate had, he, too, had become more aware of the import of his father’s legacy. In 1965, he visited Auschwitz. “In 1965 nobody from the West was going to Auschwitz,” he recalled decades later. “But I felt I had to keep that link with my father.”

Serge had learned how his father had died almost immediately when he arrived at the camp. Struck by a
Kapo
, a prisoner serving the SS officers, Arno had hit back. This cost him his life. Recognizing that his father had provided him a life lesson in courage, he vowed to himself that he would always honor the memory of the Jews who died in the Holocaust, and he would always defend Israel. When war broke out on June 5, 1967, he went to Israel to volunteer to help. By the time he arrived, the Six Day War was already almost over and he did not get directly involved, but the show of solidarity was important for him.

All of which formed the backdrop of the crisis in the Klarsfeld household when Beate was fired from her job in late August. While many of their friends advised them to accept what had happened and move on with their lives, Serge rejected such a course. “
How can I take your being fired without making some protest?” he told Beate. “You’re the first woman in France since the war ended to tell the truth about a Nazi. That would be the worst kind of submission.”

• • •

The Klarsfelds launched what became a long legal battle to fight Beate’s dismissal. Since she had become a French citizen, she appealed to senior French officials to help her, finding little sympathy there. But the main focus of the Klarsfelds’ efforts was both to demonstrate that she had been fully justified in so vociferously denouncing Kiesinger and his Nazi past and to step up the pressure on the German chancellor.

To that end, Serge took time off from his job to travel to East Berlin, where the East German Interior Ministry gave him access to the documents they had on Kiesinger’s role during the Third Reich. When he returned to Paris, he brought a large folder containing copies of the key documents. Much of that material was used in a book they hastily assembled to publicize Kiesinger’s Nazi past, particularly emphasizing his role in coordinating Nazi propaganda efforts.

This was the beginning of a relationship with the East Germans that would continue sporadically as the Klarsfelds intensified their campaign to expose former Nazis in West Germany. Their critics accused them of doing the propaganda bidding of the East German regime, which was always delighted to see the Bonn government embarrassed. Beate provided them with plenty of ammunition. For example, she wrote in
Combat
on September 2, 1968, that Germany should be reunified “
into a truly socialistic, democratic, and pacifistic nation”—language that echoed East German rhetoric.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening up of the files of the Stasi, the East German secret police, and the SED, the Communist Party, there were additional accusations that the Klarsfelds had received funding from the East Germans. “Beate Klarsfeld, Armed by the Stasi and the SED,” a headline in the conservative daily
Die Welt
proclaimed on April 3, 2012.

The Klarsfelds readily admit that they received East German help in gathering documents, especially in the Kiesinger case. The East Germans also published two of their books about Nazi criminals they were targeting because of the crimes they committed in France during the occupation; the Klarsfelds then sent copies of those books to West German parliamentarians and officials. Such actions both bolstered the Klarsfelds’
publicity campaign and helped them in their legal battles. “We do not deny the support of East Germany,” Serge said. But the Klarsfelds point out that they collected documents and received help elsewhere as well—in France and the United States, in particular. “
We kept our freedom of thinking,” Serge insisted.

In fact, Beate would soon discover that her protests were less appreciated when she traveled to places like Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1970 to denounce the “anti-Zionist” campaigns of the communist governments there that were nothing more than thinly disguised appeals to anti-Semitism. Her attempts at public protest in the Eastern bloc, including chaining herself to a tree in Warsaw and distributing leaflets to passersby there and in Prague, led to her arrest and expulsion from both countries.