Serge & Beate Klarsfeld: World Famous Nazi Hunters, Tracking Down Hitler's Henchmen: Memoirs

- Interview with Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, France's most famous Nazi Hunters, 2015. (8 mins). The Klarsfelds have just published their memoirs, recounting the decades spent tracking down Hitler's henchmen after World War II and dragging them out of hiding into the public square.

Serge Klarsfeld is a Romanian- born Jew whose father was killed at Auschwitz. Beata is the daughter of a former German soldier in World War II.
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- Serge Klarsfeld (b. 17 Sept. 1935) is a Romanian-born French activist & Nazi hunter known for documenting the Holocaust in order to establish the record & to enable the prosecution of war criminals. Since the 1960s, he has made notable efforts to commemorate the Jewish victims of German-occupied France & has been a supporter of Israel.

Serge Klarsfeld was born in Bucharest into a family of Romanian Jews. They migrated to France before the Second World War began. In 1943, his father was arrested by the SS in Nice, in the south of France during a roundup ordered by Alois Brunner. Deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, Klarsfeld's father died there. Young Serge was cared for in a home for Jewish children operated by the Œuvre de secours aux enfants, a French Jewish humanitarian organisation. His mother & sister also survived the war in Vichy France, helped by the underground French Resistance beginning in late 1943.

He helped found & has led the Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France (Association des fils et filles des déportés juifs de France) or FFDJF. It is one of the groups that has documented cases & located former German & French officials for prosecution such as Klaus Barbie, René Bousquet, Jean Leguay, Maurice Papon & Paul Touvier, who had been implicated in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of French & foreign Jews during the Second World War.

The Klarsfelds were among organised groups who filed cases decades after the war, sometimes as late as the 1990s, against such officials for crimes against humanity. In the years before 1989 & the break-up of the Soviet Union, the Klarsfelds frequently protested against the Eastern Bloc's support for the PLO & anti-Zionism. Recognition for their work has included France's Legion of Honour in 1984...https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serge_Klarsfeld
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- Beate Auguste Klarsfeld (née Künzel; b. 13 Feb. 1939) is a Franco-German journalist & Nazi hunter who, along with her French husband, Serge, became famous for their investigation & documentation of numerous Nazi war criminals, including Kurt Lischka, Alois Brunner, Klaus Barbie, Ernst Ehlers [de] & 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.

Beate Auguste Künzel was born in Berlin, the only child of Kurt Künzel, an insurance clerk, & 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 & was moved in 1941 to the eastern front. In the following winter, because he had contracted double pneumonia, he was transferred back to Germany & worked as an accountant.. From the age of about 14 years, Beate began to frequently argue with her parents because they did not feel responsible for the Nazi era, focused on the injustices & material losses they had suffered, &, while blaming the Russians, felt no sympathy for other countries.

- Move to Paris: In 1960, Beate Künzel spent a year as an au pair in Paris. By her own admission, at that time politics & 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 & 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"...https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beate_Klarsfeld
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- NAZI HUNTER, an individual who tracks down & gathers information on alleged former Nazis, or SS members, & Nazi collaborators who were involved in the Holocaust, typically for use at trial on charges of war crimes & crimes against humanity. Prominent Nazi hunters include Simon Wiesenthal, Tuviah Friedman, Serge Klarsfeld, Beate Klarsfeld, Ian Sayer, Yaron Svoray, Elliot Welles, & Efraim Zuroff. With the onset of the Cold War following World War II, both the Western Allies & the USSR sought out former Nazi scientists & operatives for programs such as Operation Paperclip & Operation Osoaviakhim. Cooperative former Nazis, such as Wernher von Braun & Reinhard Gehlen, were occasionally given state protection in return for valuable information or services..

Nazi hunters sought out fugitives on their own or formed groups, such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Methods used by Nazi hunters include offering rewards for information, reviewing immigration & military records, & launching civil lawsuits. In later decades, Nazi hunters found greater cooperation with Western & South American governments & the state of Israel. By the end of the 20th c. pursuit of former Nazis declined, because most of the generation active in Nazi leadership had died. The Simon Wiesenthal Center publishes an annual report on Nazi war criminals. - Some notable targets of Nazis hunters have included:

- Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyon", was extradited from Bolivia to France in 1983, after earlier attempts by Serge & Beate Klarsfeld to track him. Until Bolivia's transition to democracy, he had been protected by the US & German intelligence services for anti-Soviet intelligence purposes, & employed by the Bolivian army under an alias. Sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987, he died in 1991.
- Adolf Eichmann was pursued by Wiesenthal before being captured & smuggled from Argentina in 1960 by the Israeli spy agency, Mossad, & was tried in Israel, where he was executed in 1962.
- Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death", was sought in various South American countries by Mossad, Wiesenthal, & the Klarsfelds. He evaded capture until his accidental death in Brazil in 1979; his remains were identified in 1985.
- Erich Priebke, an SS officer responsible for the mass murder of Italian civilians, was interviewed openly in Argentina in 1994, by ABC Primetime Live host Sam Donaldson. He was subsequently extradited to Italy &, in 1998, sentenced to house arrest for life...https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_hunter