TO MAKE PROGRESS in Germany, we needed to create shock waves. The first kind of shock wave was the illegality of our protests, which had to be psychologically violent. That violence was justified if it enabled us to highlight the legitimacy of our protest and our call for justice. To achieve that, we had to be the ones who took the brunt of the violence—being arrested, going on trial, being sent to prison—while the real criminal remained free because the German parliament refused to vote for a law that would allow him to be tried. The second form of shock wave consisted in finding the Nazi war criminals who operated in France and showing how their impunity permitted them to take honorable, respectable jobs.
In October 1972, we started working on both of those forms of shock wave simultaneously. Our research led us to Dr. Heinrich Illers, an SS captain, Lischka’s assistant, and head of the Paris Gestapo in 1943. In 1942, it was he who chose which men were to be shot at Mont-Valérien; in 1944, it was he who organized the “convoy of death” that took Resistance fighters to Dachau. In August 1944, he ordered two deportation convoys from Compiègne, despite the intervention of the Red Cross, which pointed out the Nordling-Choltitz agreement made between the Swedish consul and the German military command. One point of that agreement was that there would not be any more convoys of deportations. “The only orders I take are from the head of the SS,” he replied.
Illers had disappeared, and the French military courts had abandoned the case because they could not identify him. When we noted in one document that he was named as “Dr. Illers,” we went through the lists of lawyers and judges, and there discovered “Dr. Heinrich Illers,” presiding judge in the social affairs court in the Land of Lower Saxony and … expert in problems relating to victims of war.
Now we needed his photograph. We asked a young German woman, Lisa, who had looked after Arno two years earlier and who lived in Munich, to go to his house.
When she got there, she saw Illers doing the gardening and asked him if she could take a photograph of his beautiful house; he agreed. We made dozens of copies of the picture, and one week later his image appeared in Der Spiegel.
To make sure that this man really was the same Heinrich Illers, Beate called him.
“I’m writing a dissertation about the German military administration in France. Were you part of that?”
“Yes.”
“Could I ask you some questions about the hierarchy of the Sicherheitspolizei? Helmut Knochen was the chief, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And Kurt Lischka was his assistant, as well as being Kommandeur in Paris?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“So who was Lischka’s assistant and the head of the Gestapo in Paris?”
“Karl Bömelburg.”
“That’s not what it says on the organization chart I have on my desk. Bömelburg was the head of the Gestapo in France. In Paris, the head of the Gestapo was Dr. Heinrich Illers.”
“Unmöglich!” (Impossible!)
I was close to Beate during this conversation, and I listened carefully to Illers’s responses. That last shouted word was so loud and sincere-sounding that I was impressed, even if I didn’t believe him.
* * *
TO DRAMATIZE OUR revelation, I decided to secretly enter West Germany, where there was a warrant out for my arrest due to my participation in the attempted abduction of Lischka, and to hold a press conference in Bonn—at the Hotel am Tulpenfeld, a journalists’ hangout near the Bundestag. At that time, Bonn was West Germany’s political capital. In order not to be arrested at the border, I booked a sleeper carriage on a night train and used the passport of a friend of mine who was the same age as me. I was accompanied by a former deportee.
I knew that passports were checked at the border and the police would not check that the passenger matched the passport. Beate, who was not wanted by the police in West Germany, sent out invitations to journalists specifying that, even though there was an arrest warrant out for him, Serge Klarsfeld would hold a press conference at 2:00 p.m. during which he would make certain revelations.
At precisely two o’clock, I made a theatrical entrance to the conference room, accompanied by Heinrich Böll, Beate’s firmest supporter and a future Nobel Prize winner. As soon as I reached the microphone, two policemen presented me with the Haftbefehl, the arrest warrant. They were perfectly polite.
The journalists wanted to hear what I had to say, and the two detectives agreed to wait until the press conference was over. They stood close to me while I spoke, and their blurred images were printed in all the newspapers the next day. Beate handed out the dossier we had prepared on Illers. His photograph would be on every front page.
When the press conference was over, the detectives took me to a courthouse cell in Cologne. The judges recommended that I be released on bail, but I refused to spend even a single mark. As they absolutely did not want to keep me in prison, they decided that the bail paid a year ago by Beate should be divided in two: half for her, half for me. This was completely irregular, but it allowed them to get rid of me without delay.
That day, Heinrich Illers retired from his job. One investigation was opened against him in Paris, now that he had been identified, and another in Germany.
Our charming, intelligent, and daring friend Lisa, happy to have contributed to the cause, decided to work alongside us. Her support would prove extremely valuable to us, particularly in Bolivia.
* * *
ON DECEMBER 15, 1972, I was back in Bonn, this time accompanied by ten former deportees, who were there to support the ratification of the Franco-German legal agreement. At their head was Georges Wellers, president of the Auschwitz III–Monowitz association and editor of Le Monde Juif (The Jewish World) magazine; Julien Aubart, who was deported at twenty and who became my best friend until his death in 1977, at the age of fifty-three; and two of his comrades from Auschwitz, Henri Pudeleau and Henri Wolff, who also supported us until their premature last breaths. These three—Aubart, Pudeleau, and Wolff—were our moral guarantors. They mobilized dozens of camp survivors to protest in Germany. That day—the day when Brandt’s new government was introduced at the Bundestag after the legislative elections—we protested in the forbidden zone. A mob of policemen descended on us, but they didn’t dare use violence in front of all the deputies and journalists. I took advantage of this fact to send a few of their helmets flying before they managed to subdue me. At the police station, the ex-deportees were asked the routine question “Have you ever been arrested before?” and each one answered with the date and reason for his arrest by the Gestapo and his camp identification number. That evening, the police escorted us to the border.
* * *
ON FEBRUARY 11, 1973, I was with Julien Aubart in Hamburg to unmask August Moritz, a Gestapo member in Paris, Orléans, Marseille, and Lyon. He was celebrating his sixtieth birthday that day. SS Untersturmführer Moritz had arrested the Jewish French politician Victor Basch and his wife and delivered them to the Milice—the French militia—who summarily executed them. Moritz agreed to speak with us. He defended himself by stating that he was now on the far left and that he had rebuilt the archives of the VVN, the Berlin-based association for victims of Nazism; that he had even been to hear Beate speak at the University of Hamburg in 1968; that he had spent four years in prison as an East German spy; last, that he was innocent and his conviction in France was unjust. I suggested he give himself up to the French authorities, and he refused: his first duty, he said, was to his family, his job, his reputation. I then asked him if he had had any responsibilities regarding the Jews. He assured me he hadn’t. I handed him photocopies of a dozen documents bearing his signature; they were addressed to the head of the Gestapo’s Jewish Affairs Department in Paris. For example, on January 10, 1943, Moritz had asked him, “To which camp should we send the Jews we have arrested?” After a long silence, Moritz admitted that he had signed these documents. “But I never killed anyone.” I pointed out that the Jews were sent to the gas chambers by a vast police and administrative machinery. Hitler, Himmler, and Eichmann had not killed a single Jew between them in the strictest sense, but they had helped the death machine function.
A legal investigation was opened on his case.
* * *
ON MAY 7, 1973, guided by Beate—who was six months pregnant at the time—Julien Aubart, Henri Pudeleau, and four young LICA members walked up to Lischka’s office, behind the central train station in Cologne. Our two friends, wearing concentration camp uniforms, tied themselves to the windows and shouted, “Lischka! Nazi Mörder!” People stopped to stare. Some police came and roughed up Julien and Henri. Almost as soon as they were inside the police station, the police started punching them. It takes courage for those who have survived the camps to voluntarily end up in the hands of German police with no respect for the victims of their Third Reich predecessors. After one night in a cell, our two friends and their four accomplices were tried and sentenced to pay the Krücken firm—Lischka’s employer—the sum of two thousand marks to repair the office’s windows. They never paid anything.
Our strategy was to repeatedly show, through our illegal protests, that there was a clash between our desire to have the Franco-German legal agreement ratified, allowing Nazi war criminals to be judged in West Germany, and the desire of the German politicians to protect those criminals by not ratifying it. The balance of power was not in our favor, but protest after protest, we strengthened our cause.
On June 13, Julien and I were in Bonn to distribute fifty dossiers on Ernst Achenbach, who had just been nominated rapporteur of the Franco-German legal agreement within the Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee. It was he who would decide, on behalf of that committee, whether or not to ratify the agreement. We gave out dossiers to everyone on the committee, but that did not prevent them from voting for Achenbach.
In West Germany, the twenty-year statute of limitations was supposed to begin with the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949. Crimes against humanity were exempt from this statute of limitations except if they had happened prior to 1949. In 1969, after a lively debate and under international pressure, the statute of limitations for crimes against humanity was pushed back ten years; this meant that in 1979 parliament would have to make a decision on the subject. So Achenbach’s pressure group was already active, attempting to convince the German deputies that “thirty years were enough.”
* * *
ON AUGUST 15, 1973, our daughter, Lida-Myriam, was born, eight years after Arno. It was another responsibility, of course, but we were very happy.
I was now able to devote myself full-time to our battle. As of May 1972, I was unemployed. I was one of the few at that time—France was going through its last period of full employment—to claim benefits at the mayor’s office in the seventeenth arrondissement. In the fall of 1974, when I claimed benefits for the last time, there was a long line of unemployed people behind me.
* * *
IN ISRAEL, WHERE I went with Jean Pierre-Bloch a few days after the end of the ’73 Yom Kippur War, I realized how close the country had come to defeat. Israel was saved by the sacrifices of the tank commandos in the Golan and Ariel Sharon’s strategic genius. I also learned that Israel’s discreet diplomatic approaches to Bonn, intended to hasten the ratification of the Franco-German legal agreement, had come to nothing.
I was in despair; this was the only period when I really doubted. I decided to show the German government that, if they did not ratify the agreement, they would bear the responsibility for a tragedy: we would kill Lischka or Hagen, or some other Nazi criminal, and the Bundestag would be to blame. But first I had to prove that I was serious. Lischka was licensed to carry a weapon, so I chose him as my target.
On an icy day in December, I stood in the train station in Cologne, a revolver in my pocket—a Walther, which Julien had procured for me. Beate and my mother had tried to dissuade me, but I was resolute.
I waited for Lischka to come out of his office, then I followed him to his car and rushed at him, revolver in hand. He was wearing gloves, and he didn’t have time to draw his weapon. I pointed my gun at his forehead; he collapsed onto the hood of his vehicle. His eyes were full of terror; he believed his time had come. I pulled the trigger. But the gun was not loaded. I laughed, and then ran back toward the train station. He did not get up and follow me, and none of the passersby who had witnessed the scene reacted. In the station, I caught a train that crossed the Belgian border and deliberately sat in the same compartment as the policemen who were there to check passports.
The next day, the presiding judge at the court of Cologne and the prosecutor general received a letter in which I begged them to warn the relevant authorities, emphasizing that they could not avoid a terrible scandal if the agreement wasn’t ratified and if the German courts did not try Lischka and Hagen. The response was not long coming: a new arrest warrant was put out for me. All the same, I knew that my fake murder was a step forward, and my morale returned to its normal level.
Would I have killed someone if we had not succeeded in bringing those men to trial? I believe I would have. My determination to go all the way in order to ensure that our cause did not fail was the same determination Beate had felt when she risked her life to slap the chancellor, surrounded as he was by bodyguards ready to shoot anyone who attacked him.
When you commit to a great, just cause, you cannot give up without, in some way, giving up on yourself. If I’d done that, I would never have recovered. If hope had brought me to a dead end, despair would have opened the road. But at what price? The destruction of my soul, in all probability, because no one kills with impunity, even if the person they kill is a murderer living with impunity.