The Nazi Hunters (33 page)

But it was the earlier battle to discredit Kiesinger that proved pivotal to elevating the Klarsfelds’ activism into an international news story, with Beate cast in the role of agent provocateur. This was no accident. While they continued to publish articles denouncing Kiesinger and Beate’s arbitration hearings afforded her the opportunity to repeat their allegations against the chancellor, she was frustrated by the fact that the press did not seem particularly interested in their crusade. “I recognized that my exposures would have small impact unless I did something so sensational that the papers would want to report it,” she recalled. Or, as Serge put it: “Because we were weak, we had to take strong actions.”

In Kiesinger’s case, this meant not just a strong action but a highly risky one. Beate reserved a ticket in the visitors’ section of the West German parliament under her maiden name so as not to arouse suspicion, and traveled to Bonn for the March 30 session when she knew Kiesinger was scheduled to speak. Her plan was straight-forward: to heckle him in front of a full house of parliamentarians. But once she was actually in the parliament, she recalled, “I was afraid I would not have the courage to open my mouth.”

She overcame that when the moment she had chosen came. “Kiesinger, you Nazi, resign!” she shouted as loudly as she could—and then repeated her words. Kiesinger stopped speaking and the security guards quickly
jumped her, covered her mouth, and dragged her out of the hall. She was held in a nearby police station for three hours and then released. The newspapers on the following day showed her gesturing with her fists and then the scene as the guards tackled her. Back in Paris, she helped organize a demonstration in front of the West German embassy where students held up signs “Kiesinger Is a Nazi.” Meanwhile, leftists in West Germany showed up at a local election rally shouting similar slogans.

Beate was pleased and encouraged, determined to do more. This was 1968 when theatrical, often violent demonstrations had become increasingly commonplace. During one demonstration in West Germany, she vowed to the audience to “publicly slap the Chancellor.” Many of those in attendance sneered at what they took to be her empty, foolish rhetoric. But she was serious.

In November 1968, Kiesinger’s Christian Democrats held their party convention in West Berlin, and Beate set her sights on that venue. Raissa, her mother-in-law, tried to talk her out of her mission, warning her that she could be killed. Serge went along with the plan but recognized the risks. Besides, he knew that she could not be dissuaded. Arriving in West Berlin, she mingled with the press corps and managed to get a pass from a photographer. Holding a notebook to make it look like she was a reporter, she edged her way to the front of the hall where Kiesinger and other senior officials were seated on the platform. After convincing a security guard that she was just taking a shortcut behind them to reach a friend, she walked up behind the chancellor. As he looked around, she screamed “Nazi! Nazi!” and delivered her slap.

Pandemonium broke out. As Beate was pulled away, she heard the chancellor say: “Is it that Klarsfeld woman?” Once she was in custody, Ernst Lemmer, one of Kiesinger’s Christian Democratic colleagues, asked her why she had slapped the chancellor. When she answered that she did so “to let the whole world know there are some Germans who will not be put to shame,” he simply shook his head. To the reporters outside, Lemmer declared: “That woman, who could be very pretty if she were not so sickly looking, is a sexually frustrated female.” Later, he wrote a letter of apology to the magazine
Stern
that had quoted his statement. “When I
made that remark, I did not know that Frau Klarsfeld is married and has a child, or that her father-in-law perished in Auschwitz.”

Beate was given a one-year prison sentence, but was freed the same day.
She appealed and eventually was given a four-month sentence, which was promptly suspended. But prison time was far from the greatest risk she had faced. Looking back at that episode, Serge pointed out that Kiesinger’s bodyguards “had guns out but couldn’t shoot” since too many people were there. Nonetheless, there was no guarantee that all of them would show such restraint. This was the same year that Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated, so a woman slapping the chancellor could easily be mistaken for a potential assassin. “It would not have taken much for them to strike me down,” Beate admitted.

The following year Kiesinger’s Christian Democrats lost their parliamentary majority to the Social Democrats led by Willy Brandt, who took over as chancellor. “Once defeated, Kiesinger was immediately forgotten,” Beate noted with satisfaction, adding that she had played “a modest but tangible role in this victory of the forces of progress.”

Beate was elated to see Brandt, her favorite politician, in power. The new chancellor pardoned her, putting an end to the suspended sentence for the Kiesinger slap. But neither she nor Serge had any intention of letting up on their campaign to expose former Nazis. Or to avoid taking more risks while pursuing that mission. Serge, who often stayed in the background gathering evidence, would be an equal partner when it came to taking the lead in their next dangerous escapade.

• • •

For obvious reasons, the Klarsfelds were particularly intent on seeing that the senior SS and Gestapo officers who had been responsible for the arrest and deportations of Jews from France not live out the rest of their lives in peace.
But because of the complex legal arrangements between France and Germany, many of them appeared to be doing just that.

The French side had initially written in a provision that they would not provide German courts with records of Germans accused of crimes in France, effectively preventing them from being tried after they returned
to West Germany. In the early postwar era, the French had feared that sympathetic German judges, many of whom had served Nazi justice earlier, would let them off the hook. But this proved totally counterproductive. Since the Germans also had a provision that barred them from extraditing their nationals, the result was that convicted or suspected German war criminals who had served in France could live without fear of retribution once they returned to their homeland.

A battle ensued to change the Franco-German agreement, with the French reversing themselves and requesting that German courts be given jurisdiction over those who had committed war crimes in France. The Klarsfelds lobbied for this much overdue fix of a dysfunctional system. Along with Wiesenthal and others, they also argued for an extension of the German statute of limitations for war crimes, which—if unchanged—would allow countless war criminals to breathe easy.
Both battles dragged on for years, but ultimately produced significant victories, first partial ones, and then in 1979 the complete abolition of the statute of limitations for murder, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

But none of that came easily, and a major factor in the final result was the Klarsfelds’ aggressive tactics as they went after the criminals themselves. They waged a campaign to expose the crimes of several prominent former Nazis, primarily focusing at first on Kurt Lischka, Herbert Hagen, and Ernst Heinrichsohn.
As Serge put it, these three SS officers bore a major portion of the responsibility for the deportation of Jews from France. “
The Paris Gestapo was Lischka,” noted Beate; he was in charge of the entire security apparatus in France. Hagen, who had close ties to Eichmann, was in charge of the SS’s information section dealing with Jewish issues and also had been in charge of the police in the Atlantic region of France. Heinrichsohn, while of lower rank, had been particularly brutal with children.

The remarkable part of the saga of these men is that they were living in the open in West Germany, clearly not afraid that their past crimes could still come back to haunt them. Beate found out that Lischka was living in Cologne, and obtained his address and telephone number simply
by calling information. As she told an Israeli television correspondent in France: “
It’s only in detective stories that Nazis live a hunted life, quivering in far-off Patagonia every time a door squeaks.”

But if the trio and others in similar positions were not looking over their shoulders then, they soon would be.
Beate prepared a new article for
Combat
, and Israeli television indicated it would welcome a film about Lischka and Hagen if they could get footage of them. Accompanied by an Israeli cameraman, the Klarsfelds parked opposite Lischka’s apartment building in Cologne at 8 a.m. on February 21, 1971, figuring they would confront their quarry as he left the building. By 2 p.m. there was still no sign of him, but in the meantime Beate had phoned his apartment and Lischka’s wife had answered. That was enough to prove that someone was home, and Beate hung up. After ringing several doorbells of their neighbors, the raiding party was buzzed in.

Reaching the top floor of the four-story building, they faced a blond woman who was anything but welcoming. But when Beate told her that they had arrived to interview her husband for French television, she called out: “Kurt, come and see what these people want.”

Lischka, a very tall man with short cropped thinning hair, appeared right away. Beate used her maiden name as she introduced herself as the interpreter for the French journalist “Herr Klarsfeld.” Lischka clearly did not recognize the Klarsfeld name, but he was wary, asking to see Serge’s press identity card. The “crew” had come prepared, and Serge pulled out a press card he had obtained from
Combat.

Serge quickly dispensed with any pretense that this was merely a fact-finding visit. He told Lischka that, in the wake of the signing of the new German-French treaty, he was making contact with Nazi criminals sentenced in absentia in France, and that Lischka was the first person on his list. “But before we start a campaign against you, we want to know whether you have anything to say in your defense,” Serge concluded.

Lischka maintained his calm at first, saying he did not have to account to him or a French court. “If I eventually have to account for my actions to a German court I will do so,” he added. “I have nothing to say to you.”

Serge tried to press him to acknowledge his role in the persecution
of French Jews, but Lischka didn’t allow the cameraman to film him. The atmosphere had become extremely tense, and Beate thought that Lischka might smash the camera if they tried to use it.

The Klarsfelds had one more card to play. “Would it interest you to see orders that you yourself signed?” Serge asked, noting that those documents had survived in Paris and bore Lischka’s signature. He added that this could lead to his trial and conviction.

Lischka could not resist looking at the stack of papers that Beate held out to him. With his wife reading them over his shoulder, his hand shook visibly as he looked them over. “Doubtless he was seeing his past rise up before him—a past that we had been the only ones to reconstruct from our countless hours in the archives,” Beate noted.

On one level, this encounter was a failure: they had not managed to get any footage of Lischka or get him to respond to any questions. But they had made their first approach, and clearly had shaken him up.

That same day Beate phoned Herbert Hagen’s house in Warstein, a town 125 miles northeast of Cologne. When Hagen’s wife answered the phone, Beate asked whether her husband would agree to an interview with a French journalist. There was “no chance” of such an interview, the woman responded, adding that “my husband does not understand why you want to interview him.”

The next day the Klarsfelds and their cameraman drove to Warstein and parked about a hundred yards from the house, hoping to intercept Hagen whenever he stepped out. They waited for several hours and shadowed someone who turned out to be the wrong man. But a man who was clearly Hagen finally walked out of the house to the garage and got into a large Opel. As the car emerged from the driveway, Beate jumped in front of it. “Herr Hagen is that you?” she asked.

Hagen nodded and then caught sight of the cameraman filming him. He stopped the car, got out and looked like he was about to assault him. Then, realizing that such an action could backfire, he hesitated, allowing Beate to say that Serge was a French journalist who wanted to ask him a few questions.

In excellent French, he told Serge: “Sir, you have no right to film me
here in front of my house.” He added that he was not in hiding. “I have gone back to France more than twenty times since the war.”

“It’s too bad the French police didn’t notice your name,” Serge responded. “You should have been arrested.”

When Serge tried to ask him questions about his duties in France, Hagen, like Lischka, insisted he had nothing to say. “All I want is to live quietly,” he added. But the Klarsfelds had no intention of giving up that easily on either man.

• • •

A month later, the Klarsfelds—along with Marco, one of Serge’s friends from his student days, a doctor and a photographer—drove back to Cologne in a rental car. They had all agreed to participate in a scheme that, if successful, would attract major attention to the fact that someone like Lischka had paid no price for his crimes as an SS officer in France. The plan: to kidnap him. Serge brought along a pair of handcuffs and Marco brought two blackjacks. The operation would involve seizing Lischka on the street, pushing him into a car, and then switching to another car before returning to France. “We looked about as much like a commando unit as a council of bishops,” Beate observed.

When Lischka got off a trolley, the “unit” surrounded him and Beate shouted “Come with us! Come with us!” He automatically took a couple of steps toward the car, then pulled back. The photographer struck him on the head with the blackjack. Lischka shouted for help, and dropped to the ground, although more out of fear than anything else. All of this attracted more and more attention as people surrounded the Klarsfeld group. A policeman pulled out his badge. At that point, Serge yelled “Into the car!” The group ran away leaving Lischka behind; they didn’t stop running until they made it back to France.