Couple pens memoir of hunting down Nazis
Print Edition
France’s most famous Nazi hunters, Serge Klarsfeld and his German wife Beate, this week launched their “Memoirs” about their decades spent tracking down Hitler’s henchmen and dragging them into the public glare.
The book, published in France to a flurry of media attention, recounts how Klarsfeld, a Jew born in 1935 in Bucharest, escaped the Holocaust after his family moved to France but saw his father taken away to die in the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp.
In 1960, while studying at the prestigious Science-Po university in Paris, Klarsfled met Beate Kuenzel, the daughter of a former German soldier, on a metro platform.
“Serge told me, there’s no need to be ashamed to be German, but you need to become politically involved” to redress the country’s wartime legacy, Beate told AFP on Monday.
Together, Serge Klarsfeld added, the couple decided to help “bring down the chancellor” of Germany at the time, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a former Nazi party member who had been a top official responsible for radio propaganda under Joseph Goebbels.
On November 7, 1968, Beate publicly slapped Kiesinger during a Berlin congress of his political party and called him a Nazi. The chancellor held on to power until elections the following year saw Willy Brandt take office.
They also hunted Klaus Barbie, a Gestapo officer known for his wartime torture of prisoners, who had escaped to South America.
In 1971, the Klarsfelds revealed Barbie was living in Bolivia, and in 1983 he was extradited to France and four years later convicted in a trial and died behind bars.
Serge Klarsfeld said “divine intervention” had led him to find a damning telex signed by Barbie that showed him ordering the deportation of 44 children.
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