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Why Beate Courted Arrest
By ERNIE MEYER Jerusalem Post Reporter Beate Klarsfeld's current struggle against the German authorities is for the ratification of a Franco-Gernan accord om the prosecution of certain types of war criminals. Her arrest on April 17, Holocaust Day, at Dachau, was the result of a calculated step, to focus attention on the larger issue of the treaty. Beate knew that she risked arrest under a court order issued in Cologne following her abortive attempt to kidnap former Gestapo official Kurt Lischka there in 1971 and bring him to justice in France. The background to the 30-year struggle for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals in France was described to The Jerusalem Post by Beate's husband, Serge, as follows: When France was liberated in 1944, almost all German war criminals escaped with the retreating Wehrmacht. These ofticials included members of the Sipo-SD, or Sicher-heitspolzei and Sicherheitsdienst,of which the Gestapo formed a section. These organizations were responsible for the deportation from France of about 100,000 Jews and for the subsequent death of about 90,000 of them. After the war, the French Judiciary decided to try these men in absentia and military courts condemned 3,026 to death or life imprisonment. The trials were conducted in a quick fashion and the judges did not gather too many documents, feeling that there would be time for that once the men were actually apprehended. Membership in a leading position of the Sipo-SD organization was usually consilered sufficient evidence for an in absentia judgment. These criminals, most of whom had changed their names, were never arrested during the time the Allies were in direct control of Germany. In 1954, when the German Federal Republic became independent, the French government did not want a situation in which they could surface in Germany under, their own names. The French feared that German courts, still manned by many ex-Nazis, would give them light sentences or even acquit them, with the clear implication that the French military courts had erred in condemning them. To prevent this, France and Germany signed a protocol in October, 1954, forbidding German courts to reopen the cases of men condemned in absentia by the French. Following this protocol, most of the war criminals openly resumed their true identities and reappeared on the public scene. The best Known of them was General Lammerding, who had ordered the killings at Oradour-sur-Glane and Tulle. The French now asked for the extradition of these war criminals, but the Germans refused on the grounds that the Basic Law of the Republic, approved by the former occupying powers, makes no provision for extradition. France then took another tack and asked the Germans themselves to judge these cases, based on a revision of the 1945 protocol which forbade them to do so. The Germans procrastinated, and successfully delayed any decision in the matter until February, 1971, when the Brandt Government signed a new accord. Under this accord, 312 out of the 1,026 cases may be brought before German courts. The restrictive new criteria are only for cases of men who acted according to "Nazi ideology" or out of "vile" motives. But even these men are still free, because the Bundestag, more than three years later, has still not ratified the treaty. Beate Klarsfeld's current struggle is to arouse world opinon and to put pressure on the Bundestag to act. Final ratification could result in "the great trial" which has not taken place so far on the deportation of 100,000 Jews from France. |
