Serge Klarsfeld

Serge Klarsfeld (born 17 September 1935) is a Romanian-born French activist and Nazi hunter known for documenting the Holocaust in order to establish the record and to enable the prosecution of war criminals.

In 1943, his father was arrested by the SS in Nice during a roundup ordered by Alois Brunner.

Deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, Klarsfeld's father died there.

The young Serge was cared for in a home for Jewish children operated by the Œuvre de secours aux enfants, a French Jewish humanitarian organisation.

His mother and sister also survived the war in Vichy France and were helped by the underground French Resistance beginning in late 1943.

He helped found and has led the Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France (Association des fils et filles des déportés juifs de France) or FFDJF.

It is one of the groups that has documented cases and located former German and French officials for prosecution such as Klaus Barbie, René Bousquet, Jean Leguay, Maurice Papon and Paul Touvier, who had been implicated in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of French and foreign Jews during the Second World War.

Since the 1960s, he has made notable efforts to commemorate the Jewish victims of German-occupied France and has been a supporter of Israel.

Serge Klarsfeld was born in Bucharest into a family of Romanian Jews that migrated to France before the Second World War began.

According to the State Commissioner for the Stasi Archives of Saxony, they cooperated with the Stasi in the 1960s in blackmailing West German politicians for Second World War activities.

Serge married Beate Künzel in 1963 and settled in Paris.

Their son, (born 1965), became a human rights attorney and worked for Nicolas Sarkozy while he was minister of the interior.

In 2012 the archivist of the Stasi revealed that Beate Klarsfeld's attack on German Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger by publicly slapping him on 7 November 1968 was carried out in agreement with and the support of the government of East Germany, which was conducting a campaign against West German politicians (see Braunbuch).

Beate Klarsfeld was paid 2,000 DM by the Stasi for her actions.

Both Serge and Beate Klarsfeld were revealed to have been regular Stasi contacts.

In the 1970s the Klarsfelds considered kidnapping Barbie in much the same way the Mossad did Eichmann but the plan fell through.

They decided instead to bring international pressure to force his extradition.

In 1974, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld were both convicted in West Germany on felony charges of attempted kidnapping of Kurt Lischka, a former Gestapo chief whose prosecution in Germany was prevented by legal technicalities, in Cologne in order to transport him to France for prosecution.

After conviction of felony charges, they were each sentenced to two months in prison.

Following international protests, the sentence was suspended.

Activism by the Klarsfelds and by descendants of Lischka's victims eventually resulted in changes to the laws.

On 9 July 1979, the Klarsfelds were the targets of a car bombing at their home in France.

No one was in the car when the bomb detonated, and no one was injured in the vicinity of the blast.

Individuals purporting to represent the Nazi ODESSA claimed responsibility for the attack.

They are notable in the postwar decades for having been involved in hunting and finding German Nazis and French Vichy officials responsible for the worst abuses of the Holocaust, in order to prosecute them for alleged war crimes.

Several officials were indicted due in part to the work of the Klarsfelds; they included the following, with the years of their convictions or deaths in brackets:

In 1980, Lischka was convicted of a felony in West Germany and sentenced to prison.

The Klarsfelds' activities and methods generated controversy.

Recognition for their work has included France's Legion of Honour in 1984.

In 1986, their story was adapted as an American television film starring Tom Conti, Farrah Fawcett and Geraldine Page.

In 1986 the Klarsfelds campaigned against former United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, who was elected President of Austria amid allegations that he had covered up his wartime activities as an officer in the Wehrmacht.

In the years before 1989 and the break-up of the Soviet Union, the Klarsfelds (Serge Klarsfeld and his wife Beate) frequently protested against the Eastern Bloc's support for the PLO and anti-Zionism.

The Klarsfelds were among organised groups who filed cases decades after the war, sometimes as late as the 1990s, against such officials for crimes against humanity.

By 1995, only four senior French Vichy officials had been indicted for war crimes, and by that year, only Paul Touvier had stood trial.

In 1996, during the warfare in the former Yugoslavia, the Klarsfelds joined the outcry against Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić for alleged war crimes and genocide of Bosnian Muslims.

Like Touvier, the former Vichy official Maurice Papon was convicted of war crimes in 1998.

The Klarsfelds continued to publicize the wartime activities of prominent politicians in Germany and Austria.

In 2008, a French television movie was made about them.

On 1 January 2014, the Klarsfelds' Legion of Honour ranks were upgraded: Serge became Grand officier.

On 26 October 2015, the UNESCO designated the Klarsfelds as "Honorary Ambassadors and Special Envoys for Education about the Holocaust and the Prevention of Genocide".