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Nazi-Hunting Is Their Life

NAZI-HUNTING IS THEIR LIFE
   For 12 years, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld — he a Jew, she a German — have dedicated themselves to preparing dossiers on and confronting unpunished Nazi war criminals, including three now on trial in Cologne.
   By Peter Hellman
   On Dec. 7, 1973, a French lawyer named Serge Klarsfeld arrived in cold, snowy Cologne from his home in Paris. Near the great Gothic cathedral in the center of town, Klarsfeld stood and watched a parked car belonging to Kurt Lischka. For years, Lischka had led an uneventful life as a businessman. In 1940, he had been the young Gestapo chief of this city. A year later, he had been promoted to be Gestapo chief of Paris and deputy chief of all France. He had been central to the deportation of more than 73,000 Jews to Auschwitz and other killing centers.
   Among these deportees was Klarsfeld's father, Arno, who, late one night in 1943, had been taken from the family apartment in Nice by Gestapo agents while 6-year-old Serge, his sister and mother huddled in terror behind a secret wall.
   Like other leading Nazis, Lischka had disappeared at the end of the war. The French, however, convicted him in absentia of war crimes for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. No attempt was made by the French, however, to find Lischka and carry out the sentence. The Germans themselves had been forbidden by the victorious Allies to prosecute their own war criminals. In 1971, a treaty between France and Germany allowed the Germans to prosecute Nazis who had committed war crimes in France — but, as Serge stood there in the snow and cold, the Bundestag had not yet ratified it. This left a peculiar legal vacuum and no-
   body except for Klarsfeld and his wife, Beate, seemed to care.
   For more than an hour, Klarsfeld waited. At 4 P.M., Lischka, a towering, broad-waisted man of 61, came toward his car. Klarsfeld, moving quickly, drew a revolver and placed it between Lischka's eyes, forcing the bigger man against the car. What expression was on Klarsfeld's plumpish, almost baby-like face is known only to Lischka. Klarsfeld himself remembers that Lischka's eyes bulged wildly. The man assumed, with reason, that he was to die.
   Klarsfeld did not pull the trigger, prolonging the silent moment. Then, before putting the gun away and walking off, he laughed in Lischka's face. That evening, he was back home in a small apartment on Avenue de Versailles with Beate, their two children and their dog and cat.
   In the morning, Klarsfeld sent an express letter to the Cologne prosecutor, explaining that putting a gun between Lischka's eyes was an absolute demonstration that neither he nor his wife wanted personal vengeance. What they wanted was for Lischka to be brought to justice — not by the French, or Israelis, or by a Nuremberg-style tribunal — but by Germans. If there really was a new Germany, the Klarsfelds believed that it had to be ready to judge the worst representatives of the old.
   For 12 years, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld have been busy uncovering Nazi criminals, documenting their crimes and then, through adroit priming of the media, making it very difficult for the public or prosecutors to look the other way. In 1968, Beate publicly slapped a German Chancellor — an act that was more dangerous and courageous than most people realized at the time. In 1970, she and Serge blocked a powerful Bundestag member from taking the German chair in the European Economic Community. And, in 1972, the Klarsfelds led a serio-comic attempt to kidnap Lischka in Cologne.
   After a decade of effort, the Klarsfelds are on the brink of their greatest victory. In Cologne, thanks to their efforts, Germans are trying a triumvi-
   rate of the leading Nazis in their midst. They are Herbert Hagen, Ernst Heinrichsohn and Kurt Lischka. Each had command duties relating to the deportation of Jews from France. Each had been tried and convicted in absentia after the war to no avail. They are charged now, under the German criminal code, with having been accomplices to murder, for which the maximum penalty is 15 years imprisonment.
   Tomorrow the trial enters its third week. The prosecution dossier relies heavily on the Klarsfelds' research.

   Serge's credentials as a Nazi-hunter are obvious. Beate's are less so. She is a Christian born in Berlin in 1939 to a father who was to be a soldier in the Wehrmacht and to a mother who to this day does not approve of what her daughter is doing. "My mother once said to me," says Beate, with a glint of irony in her steady green eyes, " 'It's a good thing your father died when he did. Otherwise, you would have killed him." "
   Though the Klarsfelds are well known in Europe, and Beate is an adopted heroine of Israel, where she was nominated in 1977 for the Nobel Peace Prize, the couple re-mains all but unknown in America. They are not comfortable about being compared
   to the better known Simon Wiesenthal. They point out that they not only document war crimes but, unlike Wiesenthal, also confront the criminals as well, often at great risk to themselves. In any case, they are certainly his successors as chief Nazi-hunters of the world. And since what Wiesenthal has called the "biological solution" to the Nazi problem inexorably takes
   its toll of aging criminals, Serge and Beate will also be the last of the hunters.
   Beate and Serge agree that had they not met, neither would be pursuing their unique calling. They do come at it from different directions. "For me as a Jew," explains Serge, "our search for these criminals means that those long ago murdered will at last have a measure of justice done on their behalf. For Beate, as a German, it means that her country must be willing to take responsibility for its own crimes without which its honor cannot be restored.''
   They met on a Paris Metro platform in 1960. Serge was then a graduate student in political science. Beate, who had quit a secretarial job in Berlin to study French in Paris, was an au pair to a French family. She had never finished high school. It did not disturb Serge to learn that this young woman with the creamy complexion and ash-blond hair was German. Beate, by her own estimate, knew little about the immediate German past and even less about Jews. They were married in the cold war year of 1963, when the issue of punishing Nazi war criminals was not high on any agenda. West Germany was the prime buffer against the Eastern bloc. War-trained former Nazis, whether or not they might be classified as war criminals, were natural candidates to be enlisted in intelligence operations against the Communist East, just as German scientists had joined the technological struggle. Beate herself was then working for an organization, established by Adenauer and de Gaulle, called the French-West German Youth Service. This was no time for politicians to dwell on the dark side of the German past.
   For the Klarsfelds, however, politics were a very personal matter. For the first time, Beate was learning from Serge about the ideology and actions of the Third Reich. It was all brought home in stark microcosm, of course, by the story of the Klarsfeld family's inability to survive intact. Beate, in turn, was making her teacher more alert to Ms subject. Beate's questions made Serge look even harder at his past.
   In this atmosphere of mutually raised consciousness, the couple reacted with incredulity in 1967 when Kurt Georg Kiesinger — known to have been a top propagandist for the Nazi Foreign Ministry — was elected Chancellor of the Federal Republic. Among the few prominent Germans to protest were the novelist Gunter Grass and the philoso-
   pher Karl Jaspers. As the critics pointed out, it was inevitable that some Nazis would reach high positions in the Government simply because not enough non-Nazis were yet available. But the chancellorship? That was too much. Beate began to attack the Chancellor in pieces she wrote for the leftist newspaper Combat. In one she wrote that if Eichmann represented the banality of evil, then "to me, Kiesinger represents the respectability of evil."
   These broadsides did not go down well with Beate's supervisors at the French-West German Youth Service. On Aug. 30, 1967, some eight months after her series of articles began to be published, she was fired. Luckily, Serge was then working for the French National Radio and Television System, so one salary remained to them. But the couple found themselves more worried by the precedent than by loss of income. "This was the first time, so far as we knew," explains Serge, "that a woman who was a French citizen living in Paris was fired for calling a Nazi a Nazi.''
   They met on the day of her firing at a cafe on the Rue des Saussaies. Just as their marriage had been one turning point, this was another. "We made up our minds then and there to fight," says Beate. "it was a decision reached in a moment and with scarcely a word spoken. But it was a total commitment. We would fight not to ease our conscience, but to win. Serge's career, our family life, our material security, all would take second place."
   For a young couple in Paris to resolve to play a role in the toppling of a Chancellor in Bonn seemed like a pipe dream. It would not even be easy to make out Kiesinger as a villain. He had not been a guard at a concentration camp. But to the Klarsfelds, that was exactly the point: it was the white-collar Nazis who had ordered or inspired the acts of cruelty. Kiesinger, however, had always denied he was even that, claiming that very early on he had parted with Nazi doctrine. So far, there was no detailed evidence to prove otherwise. But Serge, knowing that the relevant documents would be hard to find in West Germany, ar-
   ranged to search the East German state archives in Potsdam. That Government was only too happy to undermine Kiesinger's position.
   Klarsfeld, having been given every courtesy in Potsdam, returned to Paris with a raft of documents that showed Kies-inger's Nazi career to have been considerably more active than he had made out. From the time he had become a party member in 1933, he had ascended steadily in the propaganda arm of the Foreign Ministry. By 1941, he was a director of Interradio, the Nazi propaganda unit, a prime mission of which was sowing racial hatred throughout the world — for example, that "the Jew Roosevelt aspires to worldwide Jewish supremacy." At the end of the war, Kiesinger was arrested in Berlin by the Allies. After 18 months of imprisonment, however, he was officially "denazified" — by a panel that included his own father-in-law.
   Beate began to make regular trips on the overnight train to Germany, where, as she says, she campaigned against the Chancellor "like a mongrel on his cuff." Her suitcase bulged with the documentation —printed up at the Klarsfelds' own expense — detailing Kies-inger's roll as a key and unrepentant propagandist of the Reich. She spoke at endless rallies of the New Left, which was then at its most active in Germany. Preferring facts to slogans, she was a good but un-riveting speaker. As months went by, speeches became exhausting and repetitive. The press had been propagandized into ennui. Beate came to wince at the prospect of waking up yet another morning "dry mouthed and amid strangers" on that overnight train. She sensed she would have to do something new and dramatic.

   One afternoon in April 1968, she used her maiden name to get a pass to the visitor's gallery of the Bundestag. There, as Kiesinger spoke, she leaped up and shouted, "Nazi! Nazi!" until she was dragged off. To those who saw her as a natural firebrand, the act might have seemed to come easily. In fact, Beate claims it was incredibly hard to get out the first shout in such decorous surround-
   ings. But now she resolved to do something even harder. She made a public promise to slap the Chancellor in the face. It would not be an emotional gesture: its purpose had been carefully thought out by Serge and Beate. It would be a dramatic expression of a young German's unwillingness to accept such a man as Chancellor.
   Even Beate's mother-in-law, Raissa, until then a full supporter of her efforts, began to hedge. Beate was not only a wife but a young mother. Arno, named for Serge's late father, was 3 years old. Sometimes Beate took him on her trips. But more often, it was Raissa who cared for him while Serge was at work. Now she pleaded with Beate to give up the idea of the slap. But Beate was convinced that if she really was to upscale the campaign against Kiesinger, it could only be in this way.
   Several times, in that fall of 1968, Beate had failed to get close enough to Kiesinger to keep her promise. Once, at a campaign rally, the crowd seemed so partisan, so vociferous, that she was simply too afraid. Finally, at a meeting in Berlin's Congress Hall, Beate, attaching herself to a Stern photographer and scribbling in a reporter's notebook, got to the foot of the podium, where Kiesinger sat preparing a speech. There she induced a guard to let her cross the hall by way of the podium.
   As when she had shouted amid the formality of the Bundestag, she felt herself frozen with tension. She had not known it would be so hard. But then she did it. She slapped the Chancellor full on the face, screaming, once again,' 'Nazi! Nazi!" Then she was dragged away. Only later would she learn that one of Kiesinger's bodyguards had drawn his gun but could not fire because Kiesinger blocked his sightline to Beate.
   To the surprise of the Klarsfelds, Kiesinger called further attention to the incident by pressing charges against Beate. In a series of court appearances, Beate caused consternation in Government circles by emphasizing the Chancellor's Nazi past at every opportunity. "Frau Klarsfeld," she was asked at one point, "how did you happen to decide
   to use violence against the Chancellor of our country?"
   "Violence, your honor, is the imposition of a Nazi Chancellor on German youth."
   When Kiesinger failed to appear in support of his own complaint, the case was dismissed. On Sept. 28,1969, three months later, Kiesinger was defeated at the polls by Willy Brandt, a leading anti-Nazi politician. In February 1971, Brandt and French President Georges Pompidou signed a treaty permitting Germany to prosecute Nazi war criminals on its own—even if the French had already convicted them.
   The signing of the treaty paved the way for the Klars-felds to go after the Nazis who had been active in France. However, their fight against Kiesinger was also an important personal milestone for them. "When we began," says Serge, "our friends thought we were crazy. 'You'll never get anywhere against such powerful persons,' they said. Now we had shown ourselves, as well as them, that truth is strong."

   Following the Kiesinger affair, the Klarsfelds conducted an intensive, three-month campaign to block the appointment of a well-connected lawyer and Bundestag member, Ernst Achenbach, as West German representative to the European Economic Community housed in Brussels. Though Achenbach acknowledged having been chief of political affairs at the German Embassy in Paris during the war, he claimed — as Kiesinger had — that he had taken no part in the uglier side of Nazism. But, digging in archives they found in Paris, the Klarsfelds found memos signed by Achenbach proving that he had been instrumental in the deportation of at least 2,000 Jews.
   Dashing from one E.E.C. city to another, using coin-operated copying machines, Serge and Beate left behind a trail of copies of the incriminating documents. Achenbach withdrew his name. Only when the Klarsfelds heard this news did it occur to them that they had never seen the man they had brought down — not even on television.
   Then the Klarsfelds turned to the more arduous task of
   forcing justice on other former Nazi kingpins of occupied France. From 1945 to 1954, the French had tried 1,026 Nazis in absentia. Most were assumed to be back on German soil, but even if German courts had shown any inclination to prosecute these Nazi war criminals, the Allies did not allow them to: if such trials had occurred, Nazis could have ended up judging Nazis.
   The French, for their part, made no moves to have the convicts returned for punishment. To all the Allies, Communists were a more immediate threat than former Nazis — who, in any case, tended to make devoted anti-Communists. When in 1954 the Allies approved what became the West German constitution, they took no issue with a provision forbidding extradition of German citizens. As a result, those 1,026 criminals could neither be prosecuted in Germany nor punished in France. They were free. "One of our hardest jobs is making people believe that men with direct participation in genocide were neither punished nor in hiding," says Serge.
   That freedom, however, made the hunt easier for the Klarsfelds. Seeking the current No. 1 man on their list, Kurt Lischka, Beate had only to call information in Cologne from her home in Paris. In February 1971, accompanied by a television correspondent, the Klarsfelds knocked on his door. An icy exchange ensued. Serge gave Lischka copies of documents he had signed years earlier as an Ober-sturmbannfuhrer in Paris. With his wife looking on, Lischka read them expression-lessly. Sensing his hostility, the correspondent feared to use his camera, suspecting that Lischka, in his own home, might not hesitate to break it.
   Two days later, the same group caught Lischka as be left for work. As the photographer began filming him, Lischka ran and zigzagged. Beate remembers thinking how odd it was to see the man, chased by nothing more than a camera, behave like a beast at bay.
   Between their two encounters with Lischka, the Klarsfelds and their cameraman had driven for several hours to
   Warstein, where they had located the former S.D. (Security Police of the S.S.) Wunderkind, Herbert Hagen. In charge of the anti-Jewish section of the S.D. in 1936 at the age of 23, he could boast of having had Adolf Eichmann as his assistant. In 1937, the two men had gone to Palestine to study the "Jewish Problem." Some months after the 1940 German occupation of France, Hagen arrived in Bordeaux, where he established that arm of the S.D. police which directed the arrest of all Jews in the region. In the spring of 1942, Hagen went to Paris to become a chief aide to Gen. Karl Oberg, the top S.S. man in France. His prime function would be the hunting down of Jews. Hagen was still not yet 30 years old.
   Now a graying and poker-faced man of 58, Hagen did not run as Lischka had when met outside his house by a whirring television camera. He strode toward the correspondent, as if to break the camera, then seemed to think better of it. Maintaining an icy composure, Hagen insisted that he was not hiding from French justice, but had openly gone to France more than 20 times since the war. If there were any further questions, he said, they could be referred to his son, Jens, a leftist journalist in Cologne, who "is a radical like you, Frau Klarsfeld." Jens, indeed, later told them that his father, ever interested in the "Jewish Problem," had traveled to Israel on a tourist visa.
   Although confronting and filming Hagen had been a coup, it was the Gestapo chief Lischka who remained the Klarsfelds' prime target. If
   Lischka could not be extradited, then maybe — like Eichmann — he could be kidnapped.
   One day in March 1971, a team consisting of the Klarsfelds and three men, haphazardly enlisted, headed for Cologne in a rented car. The other amateur kidnappers were a political scientist, a photographer and an Orthodox Jewish doctor. The doctor was there to sedate Lischka prior to putting him in the car trunk for the ride back to France. The rehearsal, carried out in a wooded area outside Cologne, did not bode well. After one of the team, acting as Lischka. had been thrown into the trunk and the lid slammed, a muffled voice came from within: "The key is in my pocket." A dashboard release spared them an embarrassing trip to a locksmith.
   The plan was for two men each to grab one of Lischka'a arms as he walked toward his house. A third would blackjack him. Thrown into the car, he would be driven to the wooded area and transferred to a second car for the trip to France. But the wielder of the blackjack apparently was unable to bring himself to hit Lischka hard enough to knock him out — even though he had first removed Lischka's hat. A head taller than his. attackers, Lischka was unmanageable. As he bellowed for help, a policeman came by and the team ran to the car. In a fittingly madcap finale, the policeman ran after the blackjacker, who still had Lischka's hat.
   "Give back the hat!" he shouted.
   The blackjacker threw it over. As the car sped off, the policeman shouted back, Thank you."

   As it turned out, the Klars-felds were relieved that the plot had failed. Delivering Lischka to the French was not their first choice. They wanted the Germans to deal with Lischka. They would even have been satisfied if this escapade had created an embarrassment for the Government and forced the Bundestag to approve the extradition treaty. Opposition to the treaty in that body was led by Ernst Achenbach, still smarting from his E.E.C. defeat the previous year.
   The Cologne prosecutor was less than eager to arrest the would-be kidnappers. Nor did he wish to make Lischka out to be the innocent victim. Beate gave him no choice as, accompanied by reporters, she presented herself at his office for arrest. For 16 days she remained in jail, awaiting trial, before a barrage of public opinion, especially in France and Israel, forced her release. This time, even Israelis, who had heretofore been suspicious of this young German woman's motives, protested en masse. Beate ultimately received a two-month suspended sentence for the kidnapping, but only after serving an additional 21 days prior to trial.
   That same year, Beate led a group of young French Jews— many were children of deportees — to Achenbach's law offices, where they hung Nazi banners from the windows. Early in 1972, another group plastered Hagen's home with Nazi posters. That fall. Serge was arrested for his part in the kidnapping attempt, but was released the same day.
   In the spring of 1973, Beate was back at Lischka's office with a group of former deportees. They wore the striped uniforms of Auschwitz slaves. But despite the embarrassment this caused the Government, Lischka could not yet be brought to justice as long as the treaty allowing German punishment of war criminals was not ratified.
   Discomfited by all this, the new Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, promised French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing in the summer of 1974 that he would push the Bundestag to ratify the treaty. It did so on Feb. 2, 1975, four years after its signing by Brandt and Pompidou. Beate went to Bonn to be in the gallery for the vote, but 15 policemen had been assigned to keep her out.

   In the spring of 1976, the Klarsfelds located another German officer who had served in Paris. Ernst Hein-richsohn had been a young member of the Gestapo's anti-Jewish section specializing in the selection of the very old and the very young for deportation. A woman named Odette Daltroff-Baticle, charged with caring for the youngest deportees until the moment they were loaded aboard the train, remembers Heinrichsohn's always being there to send them off: "It was astonishing to see this young man, so elegant strutting about in his riding outfit. The children were crying and begging for their mothers but he had no sympathy; he was like stone. He did not even need to be there. He came for pleasure."
   To locate Heinrichsohn 32 years after he had disappeared from Paris, Beate made the astute guess that this man, who had been such a precise memo writer, had become a lawyer. She made inquiries at German bar associations and, on her 20th call, found him in Bavaria. Two weeks later, a chartered bus from France pulled up unexpectedly in front of Heinrichsohn's office in the normally quiet town of Miltenberg. Led by the Klarsfelds, 60 young Jews poured out carrying placards. They tore down the sign marking Heinrichsohn's office and replaced it with a swastika. Then they set up an angry, insistent chant of "Nazi! Nazi!" Heinrichsohn hid behind his bolted door.
   The Klarsfelds are strong on documentation — without that strength, their media events would be more splash than substance. In the last two years, a number of books have issued from the Klarsfelds' cluttered, comfortable old office on the Rue de Rivoli, a
   block east of the Louvre. Two, edited by Serge, detail the broad scope of the Final Solution and take apart the persistent arguments that it was a myth. Klarsfeld has also produced a definitive 11-vol-ume collection of documents relating to the Final Solution as it was implemented in France.
   Klarsfeld's most startling opus, pulished in 1978, is a paperbound book, nearly the size of the Manhattan telephone directory, called the "Memorial of the Deportation of Jews of France." It is a listing of more than 80,000 names of Jews deported to the East or killed in France. Each entry includes name, birth date and birth place. The deportees from the main transit camp at Drancy alone came from 37 countries, ranging from France (22,193) and Poland (14,459) to the United States (10) and Tahiti (1). The oldest was 93, the youngest newborn.
   It is only by the slenderest chance that the lists of names of the deportees survived. Each passenger list for the 85 convoys sent to the East was typed in four copies. Two went with the convoys and were destroyed, as was the copy kept at the transit camp. But the Germans allowed the Jewish community council in Paris to keep a copy. By the time the Germans fled the city in 1944, the defunct council was forgotten. So were its copies of the lists. When Serge found them in a crate in a French Jewish archive not far from his office, they were faded and crumbling. With a few young volunteers, the Klarsfelds put each page in a plastic folder before attempting to transcribe the names. Sometimes the names were all but illegible, but the team refused to lose a single one.
   "These were people who had no graves," explains Serge. "This is the only memorial they may ever have. It shows that they did exist. That is one reason why we have done this. The other is to have a record for the trial. Nazi supporters like to scoff at the figure of six million. Here, from the French side, is the proof."
   The memorial book is not only a gravestone and a legal paper but also the main cur-
   rent source of income for the Klarsfelds, supplementing the trickle of funds that comes in through the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation. They have sold some 5,000 copies at $32 for a total of $160,000. But it goes out as fast as it comes in — for production and mailing costs, for distribution of free copies of all the books to libraries and newspapers worldwide, for office and family expenses and for their enormous phone bills. When Beate is far from Paris, she calls home at least once a day and, if stresses are high, more than once. Despite her calm bearing, Beate is a woman who quickly misses her family and is often lonely, exhausted and afraid.
   The telephone can also provide protection. "When Beate was about to arrive uninvited in Syria to protest the treatment of Jews there," explains Serge, "I was afraid that the police might simply whisk her away at the airport and she might never be seen again. Only the presence of foreign reporters discourages that sort of thing. In this case, I called the German press office in Damascus to say that Beate was arriving.
   " 'What should I do?' asked the woman who answered. From the way she said it, I realized that she thought I was from her home office.
   " 'Get out to the airport fast. Then file the story."
   " 'Yes, sir,' she answered. And that was how Beate had someone to watch her when she came off the plane and how we got a story out of it in Germany."

   The Klarsfelds rent a modest, $200-a-month apartment near the southwestern edge of the city. Arno, 14, and his sister, Lida, 6, each have a bedroom ; their parents sleep on a sofa bed in the living room. Family expenses are kept minimal by gifts from supporters — Beate's always handsome clothes, for example, and the living-room furniture. Until this summer, the only major family luxury was a 6-year-old Renault. But on July 5, at midnight, it was blown apart — plastique, as the French say — by a time
   bomb. The neo-Nazi group called Odessa has claimed credit for the bombing, warning that unless the Klarsfelds cease their activities, they themselves will be next. "These .people aren't so brave," says Serge with a shrug. "I don't think they'll do it."
   Just the same, the Klarsfelds are looking for another apartment now, since there are hotel windows across the street from which an attack could come. Meanwhile, Beate swears they will never buy another car.
   Serge and Beate are pleased at the media coverage that preceded the trial in Cologne. Der Spiegel published six pages in September based on the Klarsfelds' dossier on the
   defendants and Stern has even hired a lawyer-journalist to cover the trial. The prosecution team and the three judges are all too young to have been part of the Nazi era. Under the German system, they are joined by two citizen jurors on the panel.
   Nobody involved with this proceeding wants it to go the way of the trial in Dusseldorf of aides at the Maidanek death camp that began in 1976 and still continues — a bog eating up years and aging witnesses. In Cologne, the court has set aside only 35 trial days for the proceeding, meaning that it should be over by early winter. Unlike the Maidanek case, this one is based not on emotional but easily challenged accounts of the victims but on une-
   quivocable orders, memos and telegrams of the accused.
   While the Klarsfelds do not expect a whitewash at Cologne, they have taken no chances. Serge has lined up a spectrum of Jews and other French groups who make day trips to Cologne to pack the courtroom. A court officer who was snowing the room to Beate one day last month shrugged off the need for any special security precautions. "Anyone who wanted to shoot the defendants could have easily done so by now,'' he said.
   Beate's steady green eyes did not blink and she kept silent. On the way back to Paris that evening, she said, "He's worried about the defendants. I'm worried about my husband. I'm going to ask for an armed guard for him at the trial." Each Klarsfeld, incidentally, always assumes it is the other who is in danger.
   On that same day, events took the ugliest turn since the summer's bombing of the family car. At noon on a Paris street, a leftist, French-Jewish writer named Pierre Goldman was shot dead. While in prison for the double murder of two pharmacists during a robbery, Goldman had written a book called "Obscure Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France." Though he admitted to robberies, he forcefully argued that he had never shot anyone. At a retrial in 1976, he was acquitted of murder charges. After finishing out a sentence for armed robbery, he was free. In certain quarters this was viewed, apparently, as an insult to the efforts of the French police. At any rate, the group claiming credit for the execution calls itself "Honor to the Police."
   The potential connection between this event and Klarsfeld is that he has just embarked on a most delicate new campaign — bringing to trial 70-year-old Jean Leguay, the French police commissioner during the Nazi occupation. The French police carried out
   most of the arrests of Jews prior to deportation. In the infamous roundup of 12,884 men, women and children in July 1942, for example, the Gestapo never had to lift a finger. The charge against Leguay is "crimes against humanity."
   It was one thing for the Klarsfelds to go after Germans. But taking on a Frenchman from the top of the police establishment is another matter. "If Pierre Goldman was target No. 1 of 'Honor to the Police,'" said Beate, "then that must make my husband target No. 2."
   The night Goldman was shot, Serge did not leave his office until 11 o'clock. He had been working on a book about the fate of French hostages held by the Nazis, trying to finish it before the Cologne trial. But he would be set back a week because he had to go to Israel to try to raise $25,000 to pay the German lawyer who will share the plaintiffs' table with him at the trial. "I'm not very good at fund raising," Serge admits as he locks up the office. "I would rather go to be arrested in Iran, where we hear Jews are in trouble, than ask for money in Israel." It is a perfect night in a string of perfect nights in Paris. The Louvre basks in a creamy light and the Rue de Rivoli is all but deserted as Serge looks for a taxi. Suddenly, two men materialize, approaching quickly, wearing raincoats. There is no reason for raincoats on such a night. Though Klarsfeld notices them, he pays them no heed and they pass on at the same pace. As he steps into a taxi, he sees what must be a very jumpy look on the face of the reporter who has been with him. Klarsfeld says no more than he did when he put a gun between Kurt Lischka's eyes. But he does pause long enough to offer a shrug and a smile that is anything but fatalistic. It seems to say that if there was a time for fear, it passed long, long ago.

   Peter Hellman is the author of the forthcoming "Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles," portraits of Christians who saved Jews from the Nazis.