Klarsfeld Foundation

On February 13, 1939, Beate Klarsfeld, Franco-German journalist, was born in Berlin, Germany. From the article:

"This introduction to the Klarsfelds is taken from the Foreword to French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial (New York: NYU Press, 1996). It was written by American journalist Peter Hellman, who has reported on the Klarsfelds since 1979.

Serge Klarsfeld and his wife Beate are best known to the public as Nazi hunters. It's a term they're not fully comfortable with, since the restoration of the names and faces of the victims is more important to them than the punishment of the murderers. Still, over three decades, the actions of this couple against Nazi criminals, focusing on the "desk murderers" rather than on lowly camp guards, have been astonishingly effective. As private citizens, they wield neither political nor police power, depending instead on dramatic acts of moral symbolism to get results. The first and purest example was Beate's public slapping of West German Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger in 1968. That slap was a reproach to the presumption that a man who had been an ambitious Nazi propagandist should lead a new, democratic Germany. Kiesinger lost the 1969 general election to Willy Brandt, who had been an opponent of and a refugee from Nazism.

In the early 1970s, the Klarsfelds focused global attention on Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo officer known as the "Butcher of Lyons," then in his comfortable Bolivian hiding place. They persevered in a lonely, ten-year campaign to bring Barbie to justice, culminating in his dramatic extradition to France in 1983 and his trial four years later. Another long effort finally brought the trial in Cologne in 1979 of Kurt Lischka, Ernst Heinrichsohn, and Herbert Hagen, three Nazis responsible for the deportation of Jews from Occupied France, who, until then, had been living free and unpunished in postwar Germany. The couple also carried out on-site campaigns against such Nazi criminals as Walter Rauff, inventor of the mobile gas chamber, who had found refuge in Chile, and Alo‹s Brunner, a trusted henchman of Adolf Eichmann, hosted by Syria. Brunner was another key figure in the deportation of Jews--especially children--from France. He also headed a special unit which arrested Jews in Nice in 1943. Among those arrested was Serge's father, Arno, who offered himself for arrest in order to save his wife and children who were hiding behind a false panel in their apartment. He was murdered in Auschwitz."