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Beate facing prison while killers go free
By SARAH HONIG Jerusalem Post Reporter The Israeli public should not delude itself into thinking that Beate Klarsfeld will not be sentenced to a prison term when she returns to stand trial in Cologne next month. This warning comes from Tel Aviv lawyer Arye Marinsky, who was sent to Germany by the Israel Bar Association and the Organization of Invalids of Nazi Persecution to aid Mrs. Klarsfeld. He reports that she faces a maximum five year sentence. Beate Klarsfeld, the German anti-Nazi fighter, faces trial on six counts, the chief of which is for an alleged attempt to kidnap Gestapo Paris Chief Kurt Lischka. According to Mr. Marinsky, "'Mrs. Klarsfeld is in real danger. The German legal machine may be inflexible to a point which we may not even imagine. It may seem totally unthinkable to us that an Idealist like Mrs. Klarsfeld should be incarcerated while some of the world's most ruthless murderers, like Kurt Lischka, stay free and unpunished. But it is quite possible that this is just what may happen." The accusations levelled at Beate Klarsfeld are the best example of just how inflexible German law is. One of the charges, for example, is that she drew the swastika sign, which has been illegal in Germany ever since the defeat of the Third Reich. Mrs. Klarsfeld is now accused of having violated no less than an anti-Nazi law. Painted Swastika She painted the swastika on the walls of Kurt Lischka's home. The fact that her actions were motivated by anti-Nazi objectives rather than sympathy for the Nazi cause, which is what the anti- Swastika law was aimed at, is irrelevant in the eyes of the German prosecutors. According to Mr. Marinsky, the German philosophy of "ordenung muss sein" (there must be order) is fanatically stressed to the point of absurdity. "Such things as motive, justice and right are forgotten, and all that remains is a pedantic adherence to the letter of the law." From conversations Mr. Marinsky had with many Germans, he gained the impression that while they are not too outraged by Arab terrorist atrocities, they are very incensed at the fact that a native, Berliner should deviate even slightly from the straight and narrow path, if only for the sake of justice. Moreover, these talks left him with the feeling that Beate is one of the most hated people in Germany today. "The Germans let me know that they are thoroughly fed up with the 'problem of the Nazi'... amends to the Jews. They would like nothing better than for us to stop pestering them about the Nazis. They feel they have paid for all the atrocities with reparations money and that they have now earned peace of mind. This is the predominant mentality. There is not even a vestige of repentance. That a German should remind them of all they want to forget is to them unthinkable." One of the most glaring manifestations of German indifference is what Mr. Marinsky calls "the conspiracy of silence by the German mass media — from the far left to the far right." The German press, according to him, will pounce on any sensation, no matter how remote from Germany. But the fact that the Israeli Parliament took a step unprecedented in the history of Parliaments anywhere in the world when it called on a foreign court to release a detainee was 'completely ignored by the press. "Some comentators put it all down to an East German Communist plot, or else to the Likud," he relates. "It was difficult to impress on anyone that neither Minister of Justice Haim i Zadok, nor Victor Shemtov are Likud men. The Germans just could not care less. If anything did influence them it was demonstrations of former French Resistance I men at the Cologne Jail and the demonstrations in Paris against German tourists. This hurt them because of Common Market interests." Eichmann's judge Mr. Marinsky feete that only the name of Knesset Member Benjamin Halevi makes the slightest impression on the German public because I of his prestige as a former Supreme Court justice and one of Eichmann's judges. It was finally on the basis of his guarantee to be responsible for Beate Klarsfeld's appearance for her trial that she was released. The wall of silence on the part of the German media was only slightly cracked when Mr. Marinsky debated with a German journalist on a radio programme. The latter protested that "Mrs. Klarsfeld should have known that in Germany one must not break the law — this is not Texas." Mr. Marinsky retorted that "Germany proved that two men with bombs could effect the release of the Munich terrorist murderers. It is now up to Germany to prove that the moral weight of 6,000 Israeli invalid victims of Nazi horrors can effect the release of an idealist fighter for justice who had hurt no one." His impression was that this argument fell on deaf ears. Mrs. Klarsfeld herself told the judge just before she was released that "Germans are not only the descendants of Goethe and Schiller but also of Eichmann and Him-mler. We must fight for justice |
