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Beate Stirs A Hornet's Nest
Jewish Observer July 19, 1974 200 NAZI WAR CRIMINALS MAY BE TRIED Mme Beate Klarsfeld, the scourge of unpunished Nazi criminals, has another month in which to appeal against the two-month prison sentence imposed on her last week by a Cologne court for trying to kidnap the former head of the Gestapo in Paris, Kurt Lischka. This week she was resting in Israel, with her two children, as the guest of the mayor of Jerusalem. In Israel, the 35 year-old former Berliner was accorded a hero's welcome. Newspapers there had given maximum coverage to her trial, at which she had been represented by an Israeli. She had also been received as a hero in France last Wednesday when she returned from Cologne. She was hailed jubilantly by more than 1,000 people, most of them former concentration camp inmates who demonstrated outside the West German embassy against her conviction. Protestant background: With her was her Jewish husband, Serge, whose war-time experiences had fired her indignation. She herself was born in 1939 into a vaguely pro-Nazi Protestant family. At her Cologne trial, she was treated as a nuisance by some West Germans. But she regards herself as a patriotic German intent on washing her country's dirty linen in public. "We are not only the heirs of Beethoven, Goethe and Schiller", she says, "but also of Nazi Germany." Her awareness of what happened under the Nazis was born in France, where she has lived since 1960, and by the experiences of her husband. For nearly a decade, she has campaigned against the de facto amnesty enjoyed in Germany by so many ex-Nazis. French intervention: Interviewed last Friday, she said she was fighting to prevent former Nazis from holding political office; to prevent the virtual rehabilitation of former war criminals who avoid prosecution; to combat anti-semitism; and to support the Jewish people. Despite her conviction in Cologne, her trial had been one long series of successes for her anti-Nazi campaign. Following the intervention of French President Giscard-d'Estaing, the Cologne court was persuaded to admit defence witnesses from France. As a result the main prosecution witness, former Paris Gestapo chief Kurt Lischka, was turned into the real defendant. He had been called to the witness box to describe how Beate and a number of her friends had attempted to kidnap him in 1971 to take him back to France where, in 1950, a court sentenced him in his absence to life imprisonment. Echoes of Eichmann: The high point of the two-week trial was when Beate's lawyer, Arie Marinsky, questioned Lischka, now a 65 year-old business manager, about his career in the Gestapo. He was asked why he refused to talk about his years as head of the Gestapo in Paris, when he is said to have supervised the deportation of 100,000 French citizens to the death camps. As the cross-examination proceeded, it began to sound like an extract from the Eichmann Trial. Beate's final success was the announcement by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt that his Government would seek ratification of the 1971 Franco-German convention enabling German courts to try war criminals who have escaped punishment despite conviction in French courts. Ratification of the amendment has until now been delayed by opposition in the Bundestag. The chief "obstacle' there is Dr Ernst Achenbach, a leading Free Democrat who presides over the Bundestag's Foreign Affairs Committee. After the Cologne verdict and Chancellor Schmidt's pledge on legislation to close the war criminal's loop-hole, Achenbach declared that he wanted a general amnesty for former Nazi war criminals. Position in jeopardy: What made Achenbach's remarks particularly controversial was that during the war he was in charge of the political section of the German embassy in occupied France from 1940 to 1943. A spokesman for his party's youth branch demanded his resignation from the Bundestag. Doubts about Achenbach's ""wartime record have already disqualified him from taking up the post of a Common Market Commissioner, for which he was nominated by former Foreign Minister (and now West German President) Walter Scheel. In the Bundestag, Achenbach is credited with continually hampering the amendment to the Franco-German convention on war criminals. Although he is unrepentant, he now runs the risk of being ejected from his key parliamentary post If that happens, the legislation for which Beate Klarsfeld has been campaigning could be carried by the end of thjs year. As a result, between 180 and 200 former war criminals, now living peacefully in West Germany, could finally face prosecution on their own soil. |
