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Nazi hunter to oppose Malden Holocaust revisionist
THE BOSTON GLOBE / TUESDAY, DECEMBER 11, 1990 By Jordana Hart Beate Klarsfeld does not want to be known as a Nazi hunter. She is seeking justice, she insists, not the quick and easy revenge of a hunt. Klarsfeld, 51, who describes her-self as a "housewife," is among the world's most successful Nazi hunters, one who has lifted the lid on the lives ex-Nazis worked hard to hide. With her husband Serge, a lawyer, she has found fugitive ex-Nazis, who eventually have been brought to trial in France. The work of the Klarsfelds has led to the conviction and imprisonment of numerous former SS officials and French collaborators, including former Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie. Klarsfeld's activism takes many forms. She has chained herself in protest outside parliament buildings in Eastern Europe and Latin America and planned the abductions of accused Nazi war criminals. She has been arrested scores of times and deported from Syria, Lebanon and other countries because of her activism. "Fighting anti-Semitistn, this is a moral obligation for Germans no matter what their ideologies," she said. "The Germans have a special engagement toward their past. Each of us inherits the good done by our people, but also the bad." In 1990, the Klarsfelds - she the daughter of a Christian German soldier, he the son of a French Jew who died at Auschwitz - continue to track down and prosecute former Nazi officers and collaborators under France's stringent War Crimes Act. Their latest target is former SS Officer Alois Brunner in Syria, a henchmen of Adolf Eichmann. More recently, the couple's activities extend beyond the aging ex-Nazis serving time in French prisons for crimes against humanity. Klarsfeld flew in from Paris last night to demonstrate this morning outside Maiden District Court. Her targets are Fred Leuchter Jr., a Maiden resident, and the Holocaust revisionist movement, an international assemblage that claims the Holocaust is a hoax. Leuchter, 47, who describes himself as an expert on execution ma- chinery and the author of a 1988 report denying that the Nazis exterminated Jews in gas chambers, is scheduled to appear for pretrial conference today on state charges that he practices engineering without proper certification. Leuchter has pleaded not guilty to the charges, as scores of protesters, most of them Holocaust survivors, gathered outside the Maiden courthouse. As she has done in protests across three continents, Beate Klarsfeld stood before the courthouse that rainy October day, holding a sign. And she will stand with them again today, she said. "For the revisionists, Leuchter has become a big hero," Klarsfeld said in an interview. "We have done a lot of work and spent a lot of money" to establish Leuchter's lack of engineering credentials and expertise, which he has used to lend his report an aura of scientific credibility. "We know the revisionists have their conferences and are running around passing out brochures. There should be someone to go against that," she said. Leuchter, who has attracted wide national publicity, has denied being a revisionist. He has also hired Texas lawyer Kirk Lyons to file a civil rights suit against Klarsfeld and the Jewish activiststs, claiming they have defamed him and forced him out of business. Klarsfeld is honorary chairwoman of Holocaust Survivors and Friends in Pursuit of Justice in Albany, N.Y., the group that brought Leuchter to the attention of Massachusetts authorities. Through the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, based in New York, Klarsfeld and the Albany group published a book last month titled "The Truth Prevails," about the rise of the revisionists and Leuchter's reputation among them. Balancing his wife's activism, Serge Klarsfeld, director of the Jewish Documentation Center in Paris, painstakingly follows the Nazi paper trail, documenting criminal cases against those accused of killing Jews. Once locations and identities of the accused are certain, the couple begins a campaign of public protest in an attempt to get extradition or criminal proceedings under way. It took almost two decades to bring Barbie to trial after he was tracked by Beate Klarsfeld in Bolivia in 1971. Barbie was found guilty in 1987 of personally ordering the deportation of 44 Jewish children and seven adults in 1944 from the French village of Izieu to Auschwitz in Poland. Serge Klarsfeld found the original deportation order signed by Barbie, and he represented the Jewish victims and their families in court Barbie received a life prison term, which he is serving today. The pressure of time - the fact that in a few years all of the accused as well as Holocaust survivors will have died of old age - keeps Klarsfeld on her mission. "Even through a peaceful death, it is better than having them alive, because it is offensive for victims that Nazis are living somewhere free," she said. |
