ARRESTED IN DACHAU, TRIED IN COLOGNE

ARREST WARRANTS AND voluntary arrests were part of our strategy. The next symbol of our struggle was my arrest inside the Dachau camp.

There had been a warrant for my arrest in Germany since I took our group to protest in Cologne in May 1973, so it would be easy to get arrested. But what we wanted was for the Israeli government to demand my liberation and to announce that it was infuriated not only by the fact that the Germans were arresting me, but also by the place where the arrest would take place and by the date: it was Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

I left Paris on April 16, 1974, accompanied by two of our loyal supporters: Henri Pudeleau and Henri Wolff. They stood beside me in Dachau, in their concentration camp uniforms. In Munich, the police received an anonymous tip-off: “Beate Klarsfeld, who is under an arrest warrant, is in the Dachau camp right now.” A few minutes later, several police cars turned up. Three policemen entered the camp and arrested me before a crowd of journalists and photographers. I was taken to the Bavarian state prison, and the next day four policemen drove me from Munich to Cologne, where I once again found myself in the Ossendorf Prison.

The next day, in Tel Aviv, protesters outside the German embassy yelled, “Nazis in, Beate out!” Israeli politicians from the left and right came out in support of my cause. On April 23, there was another protest outside the German embassy in Paris. But none of this altered the situation. I feared that the German courts would postpone my trial until October and that I would spend the next six months in prison; that way, they would be able to sentence me to six months and free me at the same time, which would satisfy German public opinion. I was not exactly enthused by this prospect, particularly as one of my cellmates was a former extermination camp guard. On May 2, fifty former deportees took a coach from Paris to protest outside my prison, where they left fifty red, white, and blue bouquets before heading to the Bundestag.

The same day, the interim French president Alain Poher expressed his “profound distress” over my detention, while in Israel a petition calling for my release was signed by several hundred thousand people. In prison, I received hundreds of letters of support from Israel. Le Monde published a petition signed by some very famous names, including Jacques Chirac and François Mitterrand.

In prison, while the Baader-Meinhof girls trashed their cells and clashed with the guards, I was faultlessly polite and kept my cell meticulously clean. Willy Brandt had just been forced to resign because of the Guillaume affair, when his trusted aide Günter Guillaume was found to be an East German spy. Christel Guillaume, the spy’s wife and accomplice, was sent to Ossendorf, where she was put in the cleanest available cell—mine.

On May 6, in spite of Henry Kissinger’s arrival in Jerusalem, a special session of the Knesset was held to deal with my case. The session ended with a unanimous resolution, sent to the Bundestag, demanding my immediate release and the ratification of the Franco-German legal agreement. As my lawyer, Shmuel Tamir, was also a politician and wasn’t free to leave Israel for some time, he was replaced by another renowned lawyer, Arie Marinsky, who immediately set out for Paris to prepare my defense with Serge.

Marinsky and my German lawyer, Jürgen Stange, went toe to toe with the intransigent judge, Victor de Somoskeoy, who saw only a breach of the law. After eight hours of intense negotiation, Marinsky obtained my temporary release in return for Israeli politician Benjamin Halevi’s guarantee that I would return for my trial in early June. Marinsky told the Jerusalem Post: “Beate Klarsfeld is in real danger. The German legal machine can be inflexible to a scarcely imaginable degree. It might seem unthinkable that an idealist like Beate Klarsfeld could be imprisoned, while some of the cruelest criminals in history, like Lischka, remain free … The Germans cannot stand the idea of one of their own people reminding them of things they would rather forget. There is a conspiracy of silence in Germany.”

After three weeks in prison, I was reunited with my family, free once again to look after our house and go shopping at the Porte de Saint-Cloud market. I had often been compared to Antigone, but Antigone was single. I was married with two children, one of them an eight-month-old baby. The real heroine was my mother-in-law.

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MY TRIAL BEGAN in Cologne on June 25, 1974. These were the key moments:

June 25—Many of my supporters protest outside the courthouse. The judge has not yet decided whether he will allow the defense witnesses.

June 27—During the trial, the judge spots my lawyer, Marinsky, handing two notes to the Israeli consul. He demands that the notes be read out loud. Marinsky agrees. The first one says: “Is there any mail for me?” The second one says: “Could you go out and buy me some aspirin?” Marinsky goes on, “If I ask for or receive instructions, it will not be from Jerusalem, but from Bialystok, where my entire family was murdered by the Germans.”

The same day, the new French president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, intervenes in my favor. He sends a letter to the German foreign minister stating that he is concerned about my trial, asking for the French witnesses to be heard by the judge, and reminding him that the Bundestag has still not ratified the Franco-German legal agreement of February 2, 1971. The judge agrees to hear the French witnesses.

July 1—The courtroom is packed. Jean Pierre-Bloch is there, as are many of my supporters, including some Jewish students who have traveled here from Paris. Lischka is on the stand. The judge denounces the French president’s letter as “an intrusion on the court’s independence.”

Questioned by Marinsky, Lischka remembers nothing or refuses to answer. The audience rises: “Murderer! Nazi!” There is total chaos. The trial becomes front-page news.

July 2—The judge, having read this morning’s newspapers, is much more careful. Georges Wellers is called to testify about the sufferings of French Jews. Joseph Billig details Lischka’s Nazi career. Their testimonies are important, but the German journalists are not really interested. We need a new shock to get their attention back.

July 3—The judge again complains about the French president’s “intolerable” intervention. The lawyer appointed by the court to join my defense counsel stands up in support of the judge: “This is a tactic reminiscent of the Nazi period.” I protest: “This man is not my lawyer—he’s the judge’s lawyer!” At the end of the deposition by René Clavel, a former Resistance fighter, the judge accuses him of having parodied the Nazi salute while taking his oath. Turmoil in the courtroom: the police manhandle former deportees and Resistance heroes.

Achenbach tells the media in French and German, “We demand a general amnesty for humanitarian and Christian reasons. As the Bundestag’s rapporteur for my committee, I will carefully examine the proposal for ratification, and that will take time—a lot of time.”

July 5—The judge decides that, due to recent events, the trial will take place behind closed doors. I get to my feet: “Those incidents only happened because of the inhumanity with which you are handling this trial.” Furious, he wants to sentence me to prison for contempt of court.

The prosecutor asks for a six-month suspended sentence.

Marinsky’s defense speech is remarkable. He explains why an Israeli lawyer had to be there to defend me, what I represent for the Israelis, what Lischka represents for Germany, the crimes he committed and why it is necessary to put an end to his impunity by ratifying the agreement of February 2, 1971. He concludes with these words: “I pray also that a new Germany shall take root and that this plea for justice shall be heard.”

My last words to the judge are “You have a unique opportunity to show the Bundestag that it is its duty to ratify the agreement and strengthen the meaning of justice in our country. For me and my friends, it wasn’t easy to break the law in order to obtain justice. It won’t be easy for you to acquit me when you know that I committed an illegal act, but if you do, you will demonstrate that, unlike so many other German judges before you, you were able to see beyond the letter of the law.”

July 8—The day before the verdict. At the Franco-German summit between Helmut Schmidt, the new chancellor, and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Schmidt announces—to everyone’s surprise—that he has promised the French president that the agreement will be ratified before the end of the year. This was supposed to be an economic summit, but it has turned into a legal one instead.

July 9—The verdict is delivered at 2:00 p.m. I am sentenced to two months in prison, with no obligation to serve the thirty-seven days I have already spent in prison (sixteen in 1971; twenty-one in 1974) and with no obligation to go to prison now for the remaining twenty-three days, as my case must be submitted to the federal court of Karlsruhe. Outrage in the courtroom, where my supporters sing “La Marseillaise.”

The conclusion of the next day’s editorial in Le Monde struck a powerful note among the politicians in Bonn: “It is not with the Germany of Lischka and the Cologne judges that the French people wish to make a European union, but with the Germany of Willy Brandt and Beate Klarsfeld.”

On July 10, outside the German embassy in Paris, more than two thousand people chanted their support for me. Surrounded by policemen, Serge standing close to me, a huge bouquet of flowers in my arms, I was the center of attention. But I wasn’t fooled: I had known too many days after moments of triumph when Serge and I had found ourselves alone, or almost, when the time came to take the next, tricky step.

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RATIFICATION WOULD TRANSFORM the Franco-German legal agreement into law; it had been named “Lex Klarsfeld,” which was the most sincere tribute I could imagine.

There was an international backlash to the verdict against me: Achenbach was forced to resign his position as rapporteur for the Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee, and his political career went into decline. The press conference I held in Bonn on New Year’s Day 1975—during which I gave every German deputy a special edition of the Le Monde Juif devoted to Achenbach—prevented him from taking part in the debate on ratification in the Bundestag.

At that debate, on January 30, the Free Democrat–Social Democrat coalition held firm, and ratification was voted through. And yet, that was not the end of the story. The right-wing Christian Democrats planned to vote against the measure in the Bundesrat, roughly West Germany’s equivalent of the U.S. Senate, where they had a majority. All we could do now was to keep making revelations about the Nazis.

On February 4, in Jerusalem, I gave a press conference at which I revealed that the man in the West German Foreign Office in charge of preparing Euro-Arab talks was Hans Schirmer, Kiesinger’s predecessor as assistant director of the Nazis’ foreign propaganda unit, which used to broadcast messages to the Middle East, such as “The Jews are the mortal enemies of the Arabs […] Your salvation can only be delivered by the Axis powers, who are ready to rid you of the Jewish plague.” Soon afterward, Schirmer retired due to ill health.

On February 21, 1975, the deputies in the Bundesrat voted unanimously for ratification.