IN BERLIN, REINHARD HEYDRICH, head of the RSHA, the Reich Main Security Office, is concerned: Paris is the weak link in the police chain that he is tightening around Germany’s recently conquered territories. He summons Heinrich Müller, the Gestapo chief, and the two of them discuss the subject. I imagine their conversation:
“I need someone in Paris, to work with Knochen. A supremely competent man who can take over the Gestapo there.”
Müller thinks about this, then barks out, “SS-Sturmbannführer Kurt Lischka!”
“He’s running the Gestapo in Cologne, isn’t he?”
Heydrich remembers this tall, blond officer, a perfect Aryan specimen. “Yes. He’s an excellent organizer and one of our leading specialists on the Jewish question. Just turned thirty. Very dynamic.”
Müller knows what he’s talking about. Lischka was in charge of the deportation of twenty thousand Jews to the Polish border, which ended with many of them—babies in particular—dying there because they did not have Polish passports and so were not allowed to enter the country. It was this tragedy—in which his parents died—that inspired the young Jew Herschel Grynszpan to assassinate a Nazi diplomat in Paris: the incident that sparked off the infamous Kristallnacht in November 1938.
* * *
BORN IN BRESLAU in 1909, Kurt Paul Werner Lischka entered the Gestapo in 1936. A hard worker, he was quickly promoted. In 1961, the Israeli prosecutors asked Adolf Eichmann, “Who created and directed the RSHA’s Jewish Affairs Department IV-B4 in 1939?”
“Regierungsrat Kurt Lischka. He was Theodor Dannecker’s direct superior at the time.”
Dannecker, under Lischka’s direction, was responsible for the implementation of the Final Solution in France, where he was head of the Gestapo’s Jewish Affairs Department.
* * *
OUR WORK AT the CDJC began with the need to identify Lischka’s signature and, in particular, his signed initials. This latter was important because numerous initialed documents do not bear the signatory’s name. In this way, we were able to reclassify many documents whose signatures had been cataloged as “illegible” as well as some others that had been wrongly attributed to Dannecker, who wrote down Lischka’s notes and orders. Our conclusion: the Parisian Gestapo was Lischka.
In fact, the entire German police apparatus in France was in Kurt Lischka’s hands. He was, notably, all-powerful when it came to executing hostages and torturing prisoners.
* * *
ON JANUARY 20, 1941, there was a conference on the Final Solution, where Lischka and Dannecker represented the Sipo-SD. A contemporary document recounts:
SS-Sturmbannführer Lischka indicated that, as far as the new measures applicable to Jews in France were concerned, the goal was to solve the Jewish problem in Europe following the directives put in practice in the Reich. To this end, the plan was to create a central Jewish Office in France that would take care of the following tasks:
1. Dealing with all police questions regarding the Jews (inventories, files, surveillance).
2. Economic control (elimination of Jews from economic life; collaboration in the reassignment of Jewish businesses to Aryans).
3. Propaganda (anti-Jewish propaganda in France).
4. Institute of Anti-Jewish Studies.
* * *
ON APRIL 2, 1942, Lischka refused an exceptional request from the German embassy to release Roger Gompel, a Jew they considered “notable,” stating that he could not make any exceptions “otherwise the French will think that there are no German anti-Semites except for the Führer himself.”
Two weeks before this, Lischka had written to General Speidel, former chief of staff to Field Marshal Rommel:
Following our proposal, the RSHA has declared itself ready to accept five thousand Jews from France in addition to the one thousand Jews from Compiègne …
A large number of the Jews to be deported can be taken from the Drancy camp, and the camps near Orléans, Pithiviers, and Beaune-la-Rolande.
It will therefore be possible to begin replacing these Jews in the camps and to carry out further roundups in order to thin the ranks of Paris’s Jewish population.
LISCHKA
On May 15, 1942, Lischka wrote to Eichmann about the Sipo-SD’s need for train carriages to transport Jews. Despite pressing military demands, the heads of the Gestapo expended all their considerable energy obtaining trains that would cross Europe loaded with Jews. And obtain them they did.
Contact was established with Lieutenant General Kohl, head of the railway department (ETRA). Kohl is an implacable enemy of the Jews and he has guaranteed that we will have the carriages and locomotives necessary for their transportation. Consequently, at least ten trains will soon be in a position to leave France … I would like to be informed if and when a large number of Jews can be received and at which camp.
Given that further roundups are necessary and that the room available for them is limited here, I would be grateful for an immediate delivery of five thousand Jews.
STURMBANNFÜHRER LISCHKA
The word “delivery” was frequently used by Lischka during and after the war, as he became an authorized signatory for a cereal company, and the bureaucratic and logistical mechanism for the delivery by train of wheat and Jews is practically the same.
Lischka left France on October 23, 1943. Back in Berlin, he was promoted to the position of Gestapo department head. Implicated in the execution of Czech Resistance fighters, Lischka was imprisoned in Prague before being freed in 1950.
* * *
TWO DAYS after our visit to Lischka, we return to 554 Bergisch-Gladbacher Strasse in the Mercedes belonging to our cameraman Harry Dreyfus. It is 7:00 a.m. and very cold. At 7:50, Lischka leaves the apartment building. We are hiding behind a fence near the metro station. He is dressed in a long coat, hat, and glasses and carrying a black briefcase; he looks exactly like someone who once worked for the Gestapo.
Lischka comes toward the station but crosses the road as soon as he spots us. He speeds up, and we follow him, filming him as we go. Suddenly, Lischka stops and then sets off in another direction, and then in another, while we stay close on his heels. Then he breaks into a run, and so do we. Kurt Lischka, suddenly confronted with his own past, is now fleeing down the streets of his own town.
The sequence we filmed that day produced a big emotional reaction when it was broadcast in Israel, and it is still shown on television even now whenever the fate of Nazi criminals is discussed.
The next day, we leave at 6:00 a.m. for Warstein, about 125 miles northeast of Cologne, to film Herbert Hagen. Beate had called his house the previous night and spoken to his wife. “Would your husband agree to be interviewed by a French journalist?” The answer, it turned out, was no, and “My husband does not understand why you would want to interview him.” Beate ended the conversation there.
We arrive in Warstein at 8:30 a.m. and park our car about a hundred yards from Hagen’s house. There, we wait for five hours before Beate, who is starving, goes off to a café, and we see a man in a tweed jacket emerge from the house and head toward a crowd of people gathered to watch a passing parade. Thinking it is Hagen, we run after him. But when we get closer, we realize our mistake. This man is too young to be the former Nazi. We walk back toward the car, but just as we are passing Hagen’s house, the door opens and a man in a coat, hat, and glasses comes out, walking quickly down the front steps and into the garage. He gets into a large Opel, and Beate, who has come back from the café, throws herself in front of the car as it rolls out of the garage, blocking it on the driveway. “Mr. Hagen? Is that you, Mr. Hagen?” He looks up, says yes, and then notices the camera trained on him. He opens the car door and moves threateningly toward us. Then just as he is about to grab the camera, he changes his mind and composes himself: if he were to damage the camera, we would file charges, and his name would be in the press.
Beate points at me and says in German, “This gentleman is a French journalist; he wants to ask you a few questions.” Hagen gets back in the car and waits for his wife. Then he speaks to me in fluent French, sounding outraged.
“Monsieur, you have no right to film me in my street, outside my own house.”
“Mr. Hagen, there are Germans who were given life sentences for doing more than filming in the streets.”
“But, monsieur, I am not in hiding. I have been back to France more than twenty times since the war.”
“It’s a shame the French police didn’t notice your name, otherwise you would have been arrested. What I want is to ask you a few questions, in particular whether you acknowledge having been the head of the Gestapo in Bordeaux, General Oberg’s right-hand man, head of the SS and the German police in France, and head of the SD’s Jewish Affairs Department.”
“Monsieur, I have nothing to say to you,” he replies, with a tense smile. “If you wish, you could get in touch with my son, who is a journalist in Cologne.”
Then, sitting behind the wheel of his car, he adds, “All I want is to be left in peace.”
When his wife and teenage daughters walk out past the car, Hagen drives after them, offering me a final, icy “Goodbye, monsieur.”
* * *
THAT NIGHT, REMEMBERING what he said about his son, Beate calls the house in Warstein. Mrs. Hagen answers. “We know who you are, Mrs. Klarsfeld. Call my son: he’ll give you all the explanations you need. He’s a left-winger, like you.”
After doing some research into us, Jens Hagen agrees to meet us. He is a thin young man, casually dressed, with a long beard and long hair. He writes for left-wing newspapers. In English, he tells us, “I’d like to know what you can tell me about my father. I don’t know very much, because there are some things he never talked with me about.”
I take out the Hagen dossier and show it to him. “These are documents that he wrote and signed during the Nazi era.”
Shoulders slumped, utterly silent, he begins to read. As he turns the pages, he looks shell-shocked. Clearly, his father had never told him the truth.
“My father was an idealist,” he says. “He was led astray, but he’s not a criminal. He never killed anyone. My father was so anti-militaristic that when he was in Yugoslavia, he didn’t even carry a weapon when he led raids against the Resistance.”
Beate replies, “I disagree. I think your father was so militaristic that he deliberately didn’t carry a weapon so his men would think him brave and be more ready to follow him.”
Jens turns back to the documents. The more he reads, the more he realizes the evidence is undeniable. He even sheds a few tears over that pitiless dossier.