AS WELL AS the Kiesinger dossier, Serge came back from Germany with information that further strengthened my resolve to be judged by a French court rather than the Youth Office’s arbitration committee.
Serge asked the East Germans to check the past of the committee’s German judge, and the documents we received left no doubt: Walter Hailer, the man charged with determining the justice of my dismissal, was himself a former Nazi. Ironically, he joined the party on the very same day as Kiesinger, May 1, 1933. His membership number was 3579848.
In 1967, one of the most eminent judges in West Germany and the president of the administrative court of Baden-Württemberg, Walter Hailer had been a regional orator for the Nazi Party and an SA member, with various administrative responsibilities in France and Belgium during the war.
The party’s own files for 1936 reveal the official perspective on his capabilities: “Dr. Hailer, thirty-one years old, is considered very favorably … No hesitation from a political standpoint.” Hailer worked for Franz Six’s German Institute for Foreign Studies, which was essentially an espionage organization.
I immediately compiled a dossier on Hailer and sent it to the Élysée Palace and to Jacques Rietsch, the judge appointed by the French government to serve on the Franco-German Youth Office’s arbitration committee. Rietsch told me on the phone of his surprise on discovering that his colleague would be expected to judge a case in which he himself was involved.
He was even more surprised when he found out that it was Kiesinger who had appointed Hailer to that position. While he was minister president of Baden-Württemberg, Kiesinger had been asked by the German government to examine the constitution of the Franco-German Youth Office—and had, naturally enough, appointed his friend Hailer to run the arbitration committee.
Alerted by this discovery, I began to wonder if there were other former Nazis in the Youth Office. My instinct proved correct: in the dossier on German criminals at the CDJC, I found the name of Dr. Fritz Rudolf Arlt, who was on the Youth Office’s board of directors between 1964 and 1966. I learned that the magazine Élan had published an article about Dr. Arlt. I phoned the magazine’s editor, Ulrich Sander, who sent me a copy of the article. It was extremely informative.
In 1936, Arlt had written a thesis entitled “Contribution to Racial Psychology,” which closely followed the Nazis’ racist theories. This brilliant speaker had, “on his own initiative,” updated the list of Jews in Leipzig, classified as “full Jews,” “three-quarter Jews,” “half Jews,” and “quarter Jews.” This work, which was very useful for the Gestapo’s Jewish Affairs Department, provided the basis for Dr. Arlt’s next study: “The Ethnological Biology of Leipzig’s Jews.” With the aid of the SD (the Sicherheitsdienst, the SS’s intelligence service, founded and directed by Reinhard Heydrich), Arlt then compiled a list of Silesia’s Jews. Arlt was a member of the SS, as well as the Nazi Party. I even discovered later, in the Koblenz state archives, a document from the SD’s Jewish Affairs Department that reported: “Dr. Fritz Arlt, a Hebrew specialist, proposed teaching modern Hebrew to members of the SD,” enabling them after four weeks of tuition to translate articles from Hebrew. One of his conscientious students was named Eichmann.
But Arlt was no mere theoretician. SS-Standartenführer and Totenkopfträger—an SS “death’s head” colonel—he was notably posted in Katowice, just twenty miles from Auschwitz, as the head of the racial policy department. On November 9, 1941, Heinrich Himmler named him lieutenant colonel in charge of racial questions. In Poland as well as the Soviet Union, Arlt was considered a war criminal.
Arlt resigned from his position as head of the Franco-German Youth Office soon after the publication of the article in Élan. There was no scandal. The Youth Office’s employees were not informed that one of their superiors had been a Nazi war criminal.
* * *
DURING THE WEEKS that followed, I unearthed other former Nazis in the higher echelons of the Youth Office, notably representatives of the Foreign Office: Karl Kuno Overbeck, who was a member of the SA and the policy department of Ribbentrop’s ministry, and Luitpold Werz, who was particularly active from 1944 to 1945 in the Inland-Interior II Department, tasked with helping the SS solve the Jewish problem. My dismissal from the Youth Office, then, followed a certain logic. I found out later that the Youth Office had acted under direct pressure from Chancellor Kiesinger’s office.
My case was brought to the German parliament on October 11, 1967. During the debate, Mr. Barth, the secretary of state for family and youth, had to answer questions from two Social Democrat deputies:
MR. BRUCK: Is it true that a secretary from the Franco-German Youth Office was dismissed for criticizing Chancellor Kiesinger?
SECRETARY OF STATE: It is true that a secretary from the Youth Office was dismissed following a procedure of which the federal government was informed only after the redundancy letter had been sent by the Youth Office’s general secretary.
MR. BRUCK: Am I to conclude that the federal government does not approve of this dismissal?
SECRETARY OF STATE: It is a complex case. In accordance with the treaty of July 5, 1963, the Youth Office is a bi-governmental, independent body. The federal government is not in a position to exercise influence over its affairs.
MR. BRUCK: Could you set out the federal government’s position, all the same? I believe that this dismissal is unconstitutional.
SECRETARY OF STATE: Once again, while this procedure is ongoing we cannot intervene by giving an opinion.
MR. FELLERMAIER: So, once the procedure is complete, is the federal government disposed to outline its own political viewpoint on this matter?
SECRETARY OF STATE: Insofar as a political viewpoint can be taken on this particular case, the federal government is disposed to respond after the procedure is complete.
The federal government never rendered its opinion on the matter.
* * *
MY TRIAL BEGAN on February 19, 1968, in the district court of the eighth arrondissement. The previous day, I had phoned about forty journalists, so the French and international press were well represented in the courtroom. There was even a German television crew there.
Le Monde: “Could Mrs. Beate Klarsfeld, a bilingual secretary from the Franco-German Youth Office, be about to lift the lid on Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger’s Nazi past?”
And so my message, protesting Kiesinger’s Nazi past, reached hundreds of thousands of readers.
* * *
THAT DAY, the district court having declared itself incompetent to judge the case, I appealed to the Twenty-First Chamber of the Court of Appeal.
Four months later, on June 18, 1968, the court of appeal confirmed the district court’s judgment and sent my case back to the Franco-German Youth Office’s arbitration committee. Not only was I not ordered to pay legal fees, but the court demonstrated its sympathy toward me by recommending that the German judge, Walter Hailer, recuse himself, due to the revelation of his Nazi past.
So I was now in the Kafkaesque position of turning to the Youth Office’s own arbitration committee for justice—the last legal option open to me. Effectively, by asking the arbitration committee to recuse the German judge, I had to ask Hailer to recuse himself. This is what I did. I also wrote to the French judge, asking him to declare his German counterpart incompetent.
This move—at once desperate and clever—actually worked: in September 1968, Walter Hailer was recused.
This led to a long, complex legal battle that set several precedents. The Yearbook of the International Law Commission published two long articles—in 1969 and 1970—about the case and its numerous implications.
In September 1967, soon after my dismissal, I had written to the German justice minister Gustav Heinemann. His secretary of state for justice, Horst Ehmke, wrote to me two months later with some advice that I followed very closely, perhaps more closely than he could have imagined:
Dear Madame Klarsfeld,
My personal impression is that an attempt to throw some political light on this complex case would be more likely to prove successful than a protracted legal case or arbitration process.
I realized that he was right: I had to abandon the legal battle and politicize the case in Germany. From that point on, my strategy changed.