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Mrs. Klarsfeld Gets 2 Months For Attempt to Kidnap Nazi
By John M. Goshko COLOGNE. July 9 (WP)—The trial of Beate Klarsfeld ended today with the Nazi hunter receiving a two-month prison sentence for her unsuccessful attempt in 1971 to kidnap Kurt Lischka, a wartime chief of the Gestapo in Paris. But the verdict came amid signs that Mrs. Klarsfeld, 35, may have won her long struggle to protest that Nazi war criminals are living as free men in West Germany. Obviously spurred by the international publicity given the trial, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt announced last night that he would seek to win parliamentary ratification before the end of the year for a French-German agreement dealing with war crimes. If approved, the agreement will close a legal loophole that has enabled Lischka and other alleged-war criminals to escape prosecution. Giscard in Bonn Mr Schmidt's announcement came during the visit to Bonn of President Valery Giscard d'Estang of France, who last week took the unusual step of intervening personally in the Klarsfeld trial. Mr. Giscard d'Estaing sent the West German government a message expressing his concern over failure to ratify the agreement and over the prosecution of Mrs. Klarsfeld, the the wife of a French Jew. She was born in Berlin and is not Jewish. His message was officially rejected as an interference in the independence of West German court. But it was followed yesterday by another public protest against the trial delivered by Foreign Minister Yigal Allon of Israel while speaking in the-Knesset. These protests, coupled with demonstrations staged by Mrs. Klarsfeld's supporters in the courtroom, appear to have had the effect she desired. During two-week trial, she freely admitted the attempt to kidnap Lischka in Cologne and said that the intent was to publicize the fact that the French-German agreement, signed in 1971. has since been bottled up in the Bundestag. Lischka. 65, was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment by a French court, in 1950 for his role in the deportation of approximately 100,000 French Jews to Nazi death camps. The West German constitution prevents Lischka's extradition to France, and war criminals found guilty by a court from one of the three World War II Western Allies—Britain, the United States and France— cannot be tried In West German courts for the aamt crimes. The pending Bonn-Paris agreement would eliminate tbis provision in respect to Prance. When the verdict was announced in the courtroom rose to their feet, singing "La Marseillaise." The streets outside the court-house were thronged with demonstrators, many of them French and German survivors of concentration camps. They carried signs denouncing "the German travesty of justice" and demanding that Lischka rather than Mrs. Klarsfeld be tried. Defining the Issue The three-judge court, in rendering its decision, said that the only issue was whether Mrs. Klarsfeld had violated West German law by participating in an assult against Lischka. |
