NEWS OF MY arrest made very little impact in Israel, to begin with. Serge wrote to the Israeli embassy asking for an Israeli lawyer, but we waited in vain for a response. So Serge sent an open letter to the most important journalists in Israel, and this drew results. Several journalists came out in favor of me, the first one being Israël Noiman in Davar:
Open letter to a hardened criminal—the silence surrounding the B.K. affair is a scandal.
Dear Beate and Serge,
I had hoped that more famous and more important people than me would do something more impressive and useful for you than writing a letter. But, to my stupefaction, nothing has happened. That is why I am writing you this letter. Perhaps it will help to wake from their torpor those who ought to act and protest on your behalf? The silence here in Israel cannot be allowed to continue. It is an insult to the victims of the Holocaust. There are many organizations in this country representing Holocaust survivors, but none of them have bothered to publicize the scandal of Beate being arrested for denouncing the fact that Nazi war criminals are living peaceful, comfortable lives even after being convicted of their crimes. Presumably those organizations are too busy planning ceremonies to commemorate the Holocaust and cannot find the time to deal with a matter of such insignificance.
May you be blessed, Beate, for your actions. You will not be alone in the dock of that Cologne court. We will be with you, either in person or in spirit.
[…] The state of Israel must not be absent from that courtroom in Cologne, because your trial is ours.
In May, we learned that the National Lawyers’ Guild in Israel had decided to pay for a lawyer to defend me. Serge went to Israel in order to explain all the details of the case to the union.
But first we had to pay for the flight, and we were penniless. Most of our meager budget went to our telephone bill, which was huge after the many calls to Germany. Serge went to see the director of the CRIF (Representative Council of Israelites in France), an umbrella organization of French Jewish associations, and told him, “I came because I believe it is normal that the Jewish community in France should pay for this ticket, given that Lischka is the man who organized the Final Solution in France.”
“In principle, I agree. But from a budgetary viewpoint, it’s difficult.”
“Did you know that the head of the Gestapo’s Jewish Affairs Department used to come frequently to this building? And I can assure you that he had great difficulties finding enough trains to deport the Jews from France, but he managed somehow. Three weeks before Paris was liberated, when German soldiers were in chaotic retreat, he was able to obtain a train to deport more than a thousand Jews, hundreds of them children.”
Very soon after that, Serge’s plane ticket was paid for.
* * *
SERGE, WHO DID several interviews for Israeli television and radio, constantly repeated, “We do not need an Israeli lawyer to defend Beate but to attack Lischka.” Shmuel Tamir, a deputy in the Knesset and a former Irgun commander, volunteered and was given the job by the union.
Tamir had some very useful experience of such trials. In 1953, as a young man, he had defended Michael Greenwald in the Kastner affair. Greenwald was an Austrian Jew who had denounced Rudolf Kastner—then a spokesman for the Ministry of Trade and Industry—as a traitor, a Nazi collaborator who had helped carry out the Final Solution in Hungary, liquidating 430,000 Hungarian Jews. This seemed inconceivable, as up to this point Kastner—who had moved to Israel in 1952—had been regarded as a hero, having stood up to the demands of Eichmann, who had appointed him as head of the Hungarian Jewish community. Tamir conducted an aggressive campaign, gathering from Europe and America enough documentation to prove Kastner’s responsibility. Kastner thus lost his defamation case and was murdered in March 1957 on a Tel Aviv street.
Kastner had been saved from ultimate disgrace by the false testimony of SS-Standartenführer Kurt Becher, Himmler’s special representative in Budapest, who had actively participated in the extermination of nearly half a million Hungarian Jews. In that way, Becher was even with Kastner, who had given positive character references for the Nazi after the war, allowing him to escape prosecution for war crimes. Becher knew that Kastner would be obligated to cover for him, otherwise Kastner’s role in the slaughter of the Hungarian Jews would have been revealed by Becher. If that had happened, we would have learned how Kastner had persuaded thousands of Jews to peacefully report to the “labor camp” at Auschwitz. Kastner could hardly be unaware of what awaited them there; he also knew that many Hungarian Jews might have been able to save themselves if he’d sounded the alarm.
On February 17, 1958, Israel’s supreme court formally stated that “Kurt Becher was a war criminal, not only in the technical sense of the word, but in its most terrifying aspects.” The money taken from rich Hungarian Jews was banked in Switzerland by Becher before the end of the war. Once he was acquitted, thanks to Kastner’s testimony, he was able to recover this money and use it to found a cereal business in Cologne in 1950. This firm developed very quickly, and by 1971 SS-Standartenführer Becher had become one of the richest men in Germany. Coincidentally, SS-Obersturmbannführer Kurt Lischka, having returned to Cologne in 1950, had become the authorized signatory for Krücken, another cereal company.
* * *
SERGE HAD BEEN fired from Continental Grain, the multinational cereal corporation, one year before our Cologne adventure. Michel Fribourg, an American Jew of French origin and owner of this corporation, at that time controlled 15 percent of the global trade in grain. In May 1971, we learned—practically at the same time—that Kurt Lischka was working in the cereal trade and that Kurt Becher, the German cereal king, had been one of the most prolific liquidators of the Jews. Continental Grain worked actively with both Becher’s and Lischka’s firms. Soon afterward, Serge sent the dossier on these criminals to one of Fribourg’s partners, requesting that he ask his boss to end business relations with those German firms. The partner told Serge that there was no hope of this happening. The company’s attitude was simply “business is business.” We knew that merely denouncing this attitude would have no effect, so we decided to try a different tactic.
In November 1971, the international press, all the world’s largest cereal firms, and the highest-ranking executives at Continental Grain received two dossiers written in English, entitled “Nazi Criminals Running German Cereal Companies: No. 1 Kurt Lischka, No. 2 Kurt Becher.” Each document consisted of a detailed dossier and was preceded by a statement from Fribourg:
I was recently shocked to learn that certain firms with whom the Continental Grain group had been doing business were managed by Nazi criminals who led the extermination of the Jewish population in several European countries. I ordered an investigation. Today, I am able to make available to all the companies in the grain trade and to the international press, the dossiers of Kurt Becher and Kurt Lischka, whose freedom is an affront to the sense of justice felt by any honest man at the bottom of his heart. Out of respect for the innocent victims of such mass murderers, I have decided to cease trade with their firms, and I have no doubt that the rest of the business world will adopt the same attitude.
This statement was followed by my own: “I would like to express my gratitude to Mr. Michel Fribourg, who enabled me to assemble this documentation. I honor the decisions he has taken and the full awareness he has of his responsibilities as a Jew, as an American, and as a man.”
No one doubted the veracity of these statements. It seemed completely normal that a Jew, one of the richest men in the world, would react this way. Everyone knows that the Jews cannot forget or forgive Nazi war criminals. Well, the truth is that they can and do! But, all the same, this is such a widely held assumption that we decided to take advantage of it to achieve our ends.
And they were achieved very quickly. The executives at Continental were proud to have “a boss who dares to break relations with Nazi criminals”; Becher was outraged by this unexpected blow. Whatever happened next, we would be the winners from this operation: either Fribourg accepted all these compliments and actually broke off relations with Becher and Lischka, or he would continue to work with them in spite of everything. In the latter case, people would believe that he was yielding out of weakness or cowardice. Fribourg’s lawyers demanded that I declare that their client had nothing to do with the statement attributed to him. I refused, and they threatened to sue me for forgery. Well, they could hardly sue me for defamation, could they? I had made Fribourg look like a hero. And how could a Jew take to court a non-Jewish German and, in so doing, affirm his desire to do business with the murderers of his own people? I would have had a field day. Fribourg retreated. His representatives made it known that “he never made that statement to Mrs. Klarsfeld, that the quality of the managers of the two German companies had been brought to his attention, and that his company was maintaining its business ties with the firms in Bremen and Cologne.”
And then he continued working with Germany, or at least with Kurt Becher.
Henry Bulawko, president of the Association of Jewish Former Deportees in France, wrote to Fribourg: “I am convinced that you did not know about their past. That being said, now that you have been informed about the ‘quality’ of your German partners, it is incumbent upon you to break off relations with them—and even to do so publicly.”
Fribourg never replied to Bulawko or to the Jews of Auschwitz. Those men, women, and children whose ashes were used to fertilize the wheat fields of Poland counted for nothing next to Becher or Lischka.