Beate Auguste Klarsfeld (née Künzel; born 13 February 1939) is a Franco-German journalist and Nazi hunter who, along with her French husband, Serge Klarsfeld, became famous for their investigation and documentation of numerous Nazi war criminals, including Kurt Lischka, Alois Brunner, Klaus Barbie, and Kurt Asche.
In March 2012, she ran as the candidate for The Left in the 2012 German presidential election against Joachim Gauck, but lost by 126 to 991.
Biography Early life Beate Auguste Künzel was born in Berlin, the only child of Kurt Künzel, an insurance clerk, and his wife, Helen. Her parents were not Nazis, according to Klarsfeld; however, they had voted for the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Her father was drafted in the summer of 1939 into the infantry. From the summer of 1940, he fought with his unit in France and was moved in 1941 to the eastern front. In the following winter, because he had contracted double pneumonia, he was transferred back to Germany and worked as an accountant. Beate spent several months in Łódź with her godfather, who was a Nazi official.
The Berlin apartment in which she lived was bombed and relatives in Sandau gave shelter to Beate and her mother. Her father joined them in 1945. The house and property in Sandau were seized by the Polish government, and the family returned to Berlin. From the age of fourteen, Beate began to frequently argue with her parents because they did not feel responsible for the Nazi era, focused on the injustices and material losses they had suffered.Beate Klarsfeld: Wherever they may be, 1972, Seite 3–4, holocaust-history.org; accessed 12 March 2012.
Move to Paris
In 1960, Beate Künzel spent a year as an au pair in Paris. By her own admission, at that time politics and history were completely foreign to her. However, in Paris she was confronted with the consequences of the Holocaust. In 1963, she married the French lawyer and historian Serge Klarsfeld, whose father was a victim of the Auschwitz concentration camp exterminations. Beate has said that her husband helped her to become "a German of conscience and awareness".Spiegel-Gespräch, a.a.
The couple had two children: (born 1965) and Lida Myriam (born 1973).Vgl. In 1964 Beate began work as a secretary at the new Franco-German Youth Office. There she published a guide for German au pair girls living in Paris. During a year of unpaid leave after the birth of her son, she became increasingly involved with feminist literature and with the emancipation of women in Germany. By the end of 1966, she and her family moved into an apartment shared with her mother-in-law and the three-member family of Serge's sister.Beate Klarsfeld: Wherever they may be, 1972, Seite 16 –21, holocaust-history.org; accessed 12 March 2017.
Action against Kiesinger Following a German government crisis in October and November 1966, and while the Klarsfelds were in Paris, Kurt Georg Kiesinger (CDU member) was chosen as the new German chancellor, supported by a coalition of the political parties CDU and SPD. In an article published on 14 January 1967 in the French newspaper Combat, Beate Klarsfeld, at the time a foreign member of the SPD, came out against Kiesinger occupying the post of chancellor and in favour of Willy Brandt. In these and other pieces for Combat in March and on 27 July of that year she accused Kiesinger of having made a "good reputation" for himself "in the ranks of the Brown Shirts" and "in the CDU". At the end of August, she was fired by the Franco-German Youth Office. The Klarsfelds initiated legal action against the decision and redoubled their journalistic campaign against Kiesinger.Sascha Lehnartz:
To draw attention to Kiesinger's Nazi past, Beate Klarsfeld initiated a campaign with various public gestures. It was revealed that Kiesinger had registered as a member of the Nazi Party in late February 1933 and by 1940 had risen to be deputy head of the political broadcasting department at the Foreign Ministry, a unit responsible for influencing foreign broadcasts. Kiesinger was in charge of liaison with the Reich Propaganda Ministry. Beate Klarsfeld accused Kiesinger of being a member of the board of Inter Radio AG, which had been buying foreign radio stations for propaganda purposes.
She also asserted that Kiesinger had been chiefly responsible for the contents of German international broadcasts which included anti-Semitic and war propaganda, and had collaborated closely with SS functionaries and Franz Alfred Six. The latter was responsible for mass murders in Eastern Europe. She alleged that Kiesinger had continued to produce anti-Semitic propaganda even after becoming aware of the extermination of the Jews.Transcript of oral history interview , Kapitel aus: Beate Klarsfeld: Wherever they may be, 1972, Seite 26–35. These allegations were based in part on the Braunbuch, a work of East German propaganda.
On 2 April 1968, from the public gallery in the Bonn Bundestag (German parliament), Klarsfeld shouted "Nazi Kiesinger, resign!" at Kiesinger, and was arrested to be released soon after. According to archives, she traveled to East Berlin in the end of April 1968 in order "to discuss the preparation of actions against Kiesinger and obtain appropriate support" there with the National Council, the supreme body of the National Front. On 9 May she was in West Berlin, for a demonstration of the extra-parliamentary opposition about Kiesinger's Nazi past. A press conference was scheduled for 10 May. On 14 May, Klarsfeld wanted to organize a "Kiesinger-Colloquium" in Paris. The West Department of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) Central Committee immediately informed Walter Ulbricht, its leader, of Klarsfeld's plans. Subsequently, the National Council was instructed "to provide any relevant assistance to Mrs Klarsfeld". She was eventually supported by the publication of a brochure with a circulation of 30,000 copies. However, the financial help she wished for was not granted.Jochen Staadt: Bundespräsidenten-Kandidatin Klarsfeld – Besuch der alten Dame In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 4.
On 9 May, Klarsfeld participated in a panel discussion with Günter Grass (who had urged Kiesinger to resign in 1966), Johannes Agnoli, , Jacob Taubes and Michel Lang (a student from the "Jewish Working Group for Politics") at Technische Universität Berlin. Klarsfeld, who presented Kiesinger as a major threat to Germany, promised those present to try to slap him publicly. This was greeted with laughter by part of the audience, including representatives of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS). Grass's thesis that a withdrawal by Kiesinger would be a prerequisite for an effective fight against the far-right NPD, was rejected by Agnoli and Krippendorff.Philipp Gassert: Kurt Georg Kiesinger, 1904–1988, DVA, 2006. The conference ended with a 3/4 majority urging Kiesinger to resign.Beate Klarsfeld: Wherever they may be, 1972, Seite 46 –47.
In mid-1968, as a witness in a lawsuit, Kiesinger stated that he had not heard about the murder of Jews until 1942 and that it had not been until late 1944, on the strength of foreign reports, that he had first believed any of it. During a CDU party conference in the Berlin Congress Hall, in West Berlin, on 7 November 1968, Klarsfeld mounted the podium, slapped Kiesinger, and shouted "Nazi, Nazi, Nazi".Beate Klarsfelds privater Feldzug, Die Zeit vom 25.
A few days later, during an interview with Der Spiegel she maintained that she had already planned the slap on 9 May 1968. She said that she had wanted to give voice to that part of the German people – especially the youth – who were opposed to a Nazi being the head of the Federal Government.Amtsgericht Tiergarten verurteilte Beate Klarsfeld wegen Ohrfeige auf Bundeskanzler Kurt Georg Kiesinger zu Freiheitsstrafe von 1 Jahr. Berlin was selected as the location because Klarsfeld and her husband expected that as a French citizen she would only be punished mildly, given the four-power status of the city.
The same day, on 7 November 1968, Klarsfeld received a 1-year custodial sentence in an accelerated hearing, but due to her dual citizenship she was not actually incarcerated.Klaus Dahmann: Beate Klarsfeld: Die "Nazi-Jägerin", dw.de; accessed 25 April 2017. Her defense attorney was Horst Mahler. The judge justified the scale of the penalty – it was the strictest penalty possible under an accelerated procedure – on the grounds that political beliefs should not be demonstrated with violence, and stated that he had not been influenced by the fact of the victim being the Chancellor. Klarsfeld appealed against the verdict, which in late 1969, was reduced to four months in prison, which were suspended on probation.
In recognition of her action, author Heinrich Böll sent red roses to her in Paris. Günter Grass, however, deemed Klarsfeld's action "irrational" and criticized Böll's reaction to it. During a wave of violence gestures and attacks by the student movement following the judgment against Klarsfeld, the judge's windows were pelted with stones, which the SDS called "an adequate response to an unparalleled terror judgment".
Klarsfeld justified the act in a poem that she recorded on 23 November 1968, saying that her slap was on behalf of 50 million dead of World War II as well as for future generations. She wanted it to be understood as a slap in the "repulsive face of ten million Nazis".Die Geschichte einer Ohrfeige, Audiodatei, Neues Deutschland, 8.Beate Klarsfeld: Ohrfeige für Pg. 2633930 (PDF; 128 kB) In: elan, Dezember 1968 (mit Klarsfelds Rede und der Schriftstellererklärung dazu)
Klarsfeld was accompanied by her mother on 11 November 1968 in Brussels where two days later Kiesinger was to speak on the evening of 13 November 1968 to the Grandes Conférences Catholiques. She was advised to leave the country by the Belgian police. In 1969 she joined the Waldshut constituency federal election campaign as a direct candidate of the leftist Aktion Demokratischer Fortschritt against the direct candidate of the CDU, Chancellor Kiesinger. Kiesinger received 60,373 votes, Klarsfeld 644.Alfred Grosser: Geschichte Deutschlands seit 1945.
Other activities
In February 1971 Klarsfeld demonstrated in front of the Charles University in Prague against "Stalinisation, persecution and anti-Semitism". As a result, she was temporarily banned from entering East Germany.Miriam Hollstein: Das Chaos bei der Kandidatenkür der Linken, welt.de; accessed 12 March 2017. That same year in Germany, with her husband and several other people, she tried to kidnap Kurt Lischka, who was responsible for the deportation of some 76,000 Jews from France. Lischka was living openly under his own name in Cologne. Klarsfeld planned to hand him over to justice in Paris, as a previous conviction in France blocked further legal action against Lischka in Germany. Although the kidnapping was unsuccessful, it served to draw media attention to Klarsfeld's cause. She turned herself in to the German authorities, saying that they must arrest either her or Lischka. In 1974 she was sentenced to two months' imprisonment for the attempted kidnapping, with Lischka testifying at her trial. After an international outcry, her sentence was suspended. Lischka remained at large until 1980, when he was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment.