NO MORE IMPUNITY FOR NAZI CRIMINALS IN FRANCE

WHEN THE GERMAN ARMY withdrew from French territory, so did the German police. Among these men were the leaders of the Sipo-SD, which included the Gestapo.

This department’s sinister reputation spread so quickly that the name “Gestapo” was often used to describe the entire Sipo-SD. While French military tribunals were able to judge the few German criminals they managed to capture, the majority kept their distance from the French occupation zone in Germany and often lived under a false identity. Some of them had been policemen or intelligence agents before 1939. After 1945, they were protected by their former colleagues who had remained in—or returned to—the ranks of the German police. As for the leaders of the new West German intelligence service, the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst), now devoted to the struggle against communism, they had—with the United States’ blessing—hired as many “anti-subversive” specialists as they could find. These specialists were former members of the Gestapo and the SD, which explains why so many Nazi war criminals were able to come out of hiding and live with impunity. From 1948 on, all those who had gone to ground in the Soviet zone headed for the American zone, where well-paid employment awaited them.

The SS general Franz Six, sentenced at Nuremberg to twenty years’ forced labor for the mass murder of Jews and Russian civilians, was soon freed. Reinhard Gehlen, appointed by the Americans as leader of the BND, hired Six to be one of his highest-ranking assistants.

There is a tendency to assume that men like Six were not hunted down after the war because they were too old. But that is to forget that Nazis put a great emphasis on the energy of youth. Franz Six did not turn forty until 1949, while Helmut Knochen, his protégé, was only thirty-one when Heydrich named him head of the Sipo-SD in occupied France.

Brought back to Paris in 1947, Knochen was judged at the same time as General Karl Oberg, head of the SS and the German police in France. Given the vast scope of their crimes, the only possible verdict was the death sentence. The earlier the trial occurred, the more likely the sentence was to be carried out. But Franz Six, a powerful man once again, remained loyal to his friend Knochen. At that time, the United States held considerable sway over France, so Knochen and Oberg did not appear in court until 1954. They smiled smugly as their verdicts were read out. Yes, they were sentenced to death, but they knew they would not die. And, indeed, their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. In 1962, the thaw in relations between de Gaulle and Adenauer, the French and West German leaders, led to Oberg and Knochen being pardoned and returning to Germany after seventeen years in prison.

The vast majority of German war criminals were never even arrested. In 1954, when the Federal Republic of Germany became practically independent, the problem of those criminals’ punishment became acute. Many of them had been sentenced in absentia by French military tribunals. In total, between September 1944 and October 1954, 1,026 Germans were convicted in absentia for war crimes. The French authorities feared that, if the German courts became competent to judge these cases, they would be extremely lenient toward them. With so many Nazis still working as judges, men sentenced to death were likely to have their cases dismissed or their sentences suspended. For that reason, in article 3 of the convention of October 29, 1954, France made it impossible for the German courts to be competent to judge cases in France concerning German war criminals. As soon as this convention was signed, the criminals in question just went back to Germany.

France demanded that the German government extradite these criminals, but the Federal Republic’s lawyers pointed out that article 16 of the law approved by France when it was an occupying power stated that the West German government could not extradite its own citizens.

After attempting to find its way out of this legal maze, the French government finally located a loophole, in the form of a judgment by the German supreme court on February 14, 1966, providing for the possibility of concluding a special agreement to remove all obstacles to the administration of justice. Grudgingly, the Bonn government agreed that the German judicial system should once again become competent to judge those in absentia verdicts. The signature of that agreement was delayed for a long time for spurious reasons: none of the German chancellors that followed—neither Adenauer nor Erhard nor Kiesinger—really wanted to deal with this problem, preferring to let time pass so that the criminals would escape the justice of men.

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THERE WERE JUST the two of us; we had to follow the same path we had taken in the Kiesinger affair. Once again, we were facing a clash with West German political society. We had to compel the German parliament to ratify the legal agreement signed with France on February 2, 1971, when two of the three parties represented in the Bundestag were opposed to it and the fate of the liberal–social democrat coalition hung in the balance. When we had obtained this ratification, which would transform the agreement into law, we would then have to force the German justice system to do its duty: to try to sentence these criminals.

As with the slap, we decided to raise awareness of the problem with a momentous act: we would abduct the former Gestapo officer Kurt Lischka and bring him back to France to be tried. Our cause was legitimate, but once again it was David versus Goliath. Our strategy was simple, if delicate: act illegally and repetitively, but with tact, in order to give ourselves a platform. We knew we risked prison, but in doing so we would create a situation in which the real criminals remained free while the victims’ representatives were punished for acts that paled in comparison with those committed by the criminals. If we could hold firm, public opinion would swing our way and would demand the ratification of the agreement, even though the French government had long ago given up on the possibility.