Special thanks to Beate Klarsfeld for her contribution to this article.
The period after the end of the Second World War in the Federal Republic of Germany was characterised by a widespread rejection of responsibility, persistent anti-Semitism and the inactivity of state authorities who did not really make an effort to prosecute former Nazi perpetrators[1]. Shoah survivors and their descendants were therefore confronted with the challenge of having to work on their own initiative to come to terms with the genocide of the preceding regime[2]. In contrast to the Jews living in Germany, the French Shoah survivors – including many who had survived as children and young people in hiding – were particularly determined to speak out in public with the aim of bringing former SS officials in the Federal Republic to justice. Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, who met and fell in love at a metro station in Paris in 1961, led this fight for recognition and justice. Their motivation stemmed in particular from their biographies. As a young boy, Serge Klarsfeld had witnessed how the commando of SS-Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner picked up his father while hiding in his family’s flat in Nice on 30 September 1944. Arno Klarsfeld was subsequently deported to Auschwitz and died there. Beate Künzel was born in Berlin in 1939 into humble circumstances; her father was a soldier in the Wehrmacht. She became involved out of empathy with her husband and his mother, but also, as she repeatedly emphasised, wanted to take a stand explicitly “as a German”[3] and take responsibility on behalf of the former perpetrator society. Given the continuing silence in the Federal Republic of Germany, the couple came to the conclusion that provocative actions were needed to raise public awareness. How else could attention be drawn to former SS figures, who lived tranquilly and well integrated in the middle of the bourgeois milieu of the Federal Republic?
At the beginning of 1971, the Klarsfelds launched their campaign against the former SS functionaries Kurt Lischka, Herbert Hagen and Ernst Heinrichsohn. Kurt Lischka and Herbert Hagen had organised anti-Jewish raids together with the Vichy police during the occupation in Paris and signed deportation orders at their desks. Ernst Heinrichsohn, who became CSU mayor of Miltenberg in Bavaria in the 1970s, had attracted particular attention as a young man in the Drancy camp near Paris for his brutality towards the children interned there. Initially, the Klarsfelds confronted Kurt Lischka at home in Cologne-Hohlweide and Herbert Hagen in Warstein in the Sauerland region with the deportation orders they had signed previously. They were turned away, neither of them wanted to talk to them. Shortly afterwards, the couple tried again to confront Lischka on the way to his workplace. This time, the Cologne cameraman and Shoah survivor Harry Zvi Dreyfus was with them[4]. His film footage shows Lischka fleeing from the camera and covering his face with the briefcase.
On 21 February 1971, the Klarsfeld couple then attempted to kidnap Kurt Lischka. This time they were accompanied by the photographer Elie Kagan[5], who had survived the deportations as a child while in hiding in Paris. The aim of the kidnapping was to put Lischka at the desk in his former study in Paris where he had signed the anti-Semitic resolutions at the time. Although the kidnapping attempt failed, the headlines about this spectacular action spread rapidly through the international media[6].
Militants des la Mémoire
On 11 May 1971, leaflets were thrown from the public gallery at a protest in the German Parliament in Bonn to protest against the nomination of FDP member of parliament Ernst Achenbach as European Commissioner. The demand for the immediate ratification of the supplementary agreement to the Franco-German transition treaty signed by Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt on 2 February 1971 was also underlined, as only then could charges be brought against the former SS functionaries Lischka, Hagen and Heinrichsohn, who had been convicted in absentia in France in the 1950s. The Klarsfeld couple now came forward together with a group of descendants of Shoah survivors. The “Militants de la Mémoire” occupied Ernst Achenbach’s office in Essen on 24 June 1971. However, the lawyer and former Nazi functionary was not recalled as rapporteur of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Bundestag until 1975[7]. Meanwhile, on 9 July 1974, a Cologne court sentenced Beate Klarsfeld to two months imprisonment for the attempted kidnapping of Kurt Lischka; however, this sentence was suspended following international protests[8].
The group “Militants des la Memoire” quickly became an important meeting place for French people affected by the Shoah from very different age groups. Former resistance fighters who had survived Auschwitz or Buchenwald were members of the group, as were young Jewish activists who were organised in the Ligue internationale contre l’Antisémitisme (LICA, now Ligue internationale Contre le Racisme et l’Antisémitisme/LICRA). Léa Feldblum, who had been deported from the Jewish children’s home in Izieu as a young woman along with six other educators and 44 children, had survived Auschwitz herself and now became an important spokesperson for the group. Fortunée Benguigui and Ita Rosa Halaunbrenner, accompanied by her second eldest son Alexandre, also represented the group in public. Ita Rosa Halaunbrenner’s husband had been executed by Barbie’s henchmen in Lyon and three of the couple’s children were deported, two girls from the Izieu children’s home near Lyon and their eldest son Leon to Auschwitz-Birkenau[9].
The militant protests of the Jewish activists ultimately led to a real scandal between the German and French governments. On 30 January 1975, the German Bundestag finally decided to ratify the Supplementary Agreement to the Transfer Treaty of the German Treaty. This cleared the way for Lischka, Hagen and Heinrichsohn to be brought to trial at a German court. However, the “France complex”[10] – the name given to the public prosecutor’s investigations into Nazi crimes by the Central Office in Ludwigsburg – encompassed far more people, as around 200 top functionaries of the Security Police (Sipo) and the SD had been deployed in France between 1940 and 1944. When Serge Klarsfeld tried to hand over files with evidence against the former SS functionaries Fritz Merdsche and Hans-Dietrich Ernst[11], who were responsible for the deportation and shooting of Jews in France, to the Frankfurt public prosecutor on 4 February 1976, he was arrested on the basis of an outstanding arrest warrant for the attempted Lischka kidnapping.
On 19 May 1976, the trial of nine young members of the Militants de la Memoire began at Cologne District Court on charges of vandalising Lischka’s office the previous year. Beate Klarsfeld was on trial again, now together with Auschwitz survivor Gertrude Drach and Parisian Rabbi Farhi. On the day the trial began, 15 young French activists once again smashed the windows of Lischka’s office and gathered in front of the courthouse to express their solidarity[12]. On the witness stand, 24-year-old Élisabeth Hajdenberg spoke on behalf of the descendants: “All the raids, all the Lischkas in the world have not been able to destroy us. You must acquit us. To condemn a rabbi and an Auschwitz survivor would be an insult to the six million dead who were murdered because they were Jews.”[13]
This trial marked a historical caesura for three reasons. Firstly, for the first time in the Federal Republic of Germany, Shoah survivors and their descendants stood trial as defendants for their protest actions against former Nazi perpetrators. Secondly, the Jewish defendants justified their militant actions as necessary and legitimate. Thirdly, the descendants aggressively confronted the West German society with the demand to take judicial responsibility for the Nazi crimes and to prosecute the perpetrators responsible for the deportations from France[14].
Until the start of the Cologne trial against Lischka, Hagen and Heinrichsohn in October 1979, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld concentrated on searching archives for further documents from the Nazi era in order to be able to prove the responsibility of the three former SS men even more precisely[15]. These sources were initially secured primarily as evidence for the upcoming trial. However, the research also provided numerous starting points for reconstructing the torn family histories of the Jewish comrades-in-arms. On the one hand, the parents and relatives of the children from Izieu learnt exactly how the deportations had taken place and collected photos and memories in remembrance of their murdered children. And those who had survived the deportations from France as children and young people in hiding learnt which transport their parents had been deported on and when they had arrived in Auschwitz or Sobibor. To this day, commemorative events are held every year on the days when the deportation trains left Paris, at which the names, dates of birth, the day of deportation and the day of arrival at one of the Nazi extermination camps are read out in public.
Prior to the Cologne trial, the Militants de la Memoire officially changed their name to (Association des) Fils et Filles de Déportés Juifs de France (FFDJF). Annette Zaidman, born in Paris in 1934 as the daughter of immigrated Polish Jews, had survived the Velodrome d’Hiver raids herself, but lost her father and brother in Auschwitz. She was one of the active co-founders of the organisation, which has officially acted as the voice of French Jewish descendants since January 1979 and continues to represent their interests in public to this day[16]. The registered association had 500 members when it was founded. In the Bulletin de Liaison de Fils et Filles de Déportés Juifs de France, which first appeared in June 1979[17], two demonstrations were announced for 6 June 1979 in North Rhine-Westphalia. First, the group travelled to Düsseldorf because of the court case against the former guards of the Majdanek concentration camp, which had been going on for four years. Afterwards, a protest was organised in Cologne to demand that the trial against Lischka, Hagen and Heinrichsohn should be reopened.
The beginning of the Lischka trial at the Cologne District Court on 23 October 1979 marked the start of a concentrated phase of action. Serge Klarsfeld[18] remembers: “The sons and daughters of the deportees lived with us in the following weeks in the rhythm of the night train Paris-Cologne and back.” The verdict that Judge Faßbender handed down against Lischka, Hagen and Heinrichsohn on 2 February 1980 could be seen as recognition of the many years of commitment shown by the descendants. Looking back, Serge Klarsfeld[19] wrote: “We started this campaign with only two people, but by the end of it, a thousand descendants of deportees had gathered around us. We had turned an individual initiative into a joint action and created the instrument and the group that would make our future easier and enable us to tackle our goals together in the decades to come.”
From traumatic family histories to political agency
Which prerequisites were needed for the French-Jewish descendants to develop such strength and loudly voice their demands in public in the Federal Republic of Germany? How did the members of the FFDJF manage to translate their traumatic family histories into political power? The cultural context of memory and the high level of integration of the Jewish population into French society certainly played a significant role. Serge and Beate Klarsfeld also emphasise that the reference to Israel had a strengthening effect. However, it was above all the concrete relationships in the social sphere that were important. Coming together and exchanging ideas at the FFDJF group meetings was particularly helpful for those who had lost their parents and relatives in the Shoah as children and young people and had grown up in post-war French society without any specific knowledge about their origins. Understandably, not all descendants had the strength to become politically active and speak out publicly. While many only took the courage to go public after a long personal process, photographer Elie Kagan, for example, took a different path. He became aware of his own family history through his political engagement against the bloody Algerian War and later decided to research it and campaign for historical justice.
Individual ways of dealing with trauma are always diverse and multi-layered, generally arduous and full of detours. The need to derive ethical and political standards for shaping societies arose from this broader horizon of experience. The group around Serge and Beate Klarsfeld therefore repeatedly protested against anti-Semitism, racism and neo-Nazism and warned against authoritarian, right-wing and fascist developments in Europe.
Jews whose relatives were murdered, but who themselves survived the Shoah, live with this painful memory of the violent tearing apart of their families and the knowledge of the brutal murder of their loved ones. By addressing this loss, they develop the necessary power of speech and action – especially in encounters with other victims – to demand that the majority society take legal responsibility for the Nazi crimes. Only by recognising this demand, which lends historical authority to the victims’ perspective, can a culture of justice be established that can develop normative and preventative effectiveness.
With an exhibition on the Lischka Trial in the Memorial Centre of the City of Cologne in 2006, which was created by a group of students together with the author of this article and in cooperation with the FFDJF, the memory of the Nazi trial was symbolically brought back to the site of the event[20]. This memory was to be further consolidated in 2011 when a plaque was embedded in the wall of the former courtroom of the Cologne District Court in the presence of the FFDJF and the then presiding judge Faßbender. However, this plaque only refers to the trial itself, but not to the political commitment of the French-Jewish descendants who were instrumental in driving the trial forward. It therefore remains a central necessity to place the recognition of the victims and their descendants at the centre of the commemoration.
[1] cf. Klein, 2006
[2] cf. Fehlberg & Klein, 2021
[3] Winkler, 2023
[4] Klein, 2013, pp. 154-159
[5] cf. Kagan & Rotman, 1989
[6] cf. Klein, 2013, pp. 121-128; Klein, 2023; Klarsfeld, 2015, p. 249
[7] cf. Klarsfeld, 2015, p. 293; Klein, 2008
[8] cf. Blank 1974, p. 7
[9] cf. Klarsfeld 1985; Klarsfeld, 2015, p. 306
[10] cf. Brunner, 2004
[11] cf. Brunner, 2004, p. 74 and p. 63
[12] cf. Klarsfeld, 2015, pp. 376
[13] cited in: ibid., p. 379
[14] cf. BdA/VVN, 1976
[15] cf. Klarsfeld, 1977; Billig, 1979
[16] cf. Klarsfeld 2015, p. 395
[17] cf. Bulletin I, 1979, p. 3
[18] Klarsfeld, 2015, p. 407
[19] ibid., p. 207
[20] Klein, 2013
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