BATTLING DICTATORS IN ARGENTINA AND URUGUAY

BRINGING NAZI CRIMINALS to justice was Serge’s most important cause, just as the campaign against Kiesinger had been mine. I fully participated in his protests, but I knew that Serge was leading the campaign and that he would never give up, no matter what it cost him; he would not rest until Lischka and Hagen had been tried.

From the mid-1970s on, for the next fifteen years or so, I would tour the United States and Canada once or twice a year, giving speeches. This provided us with the money we needed to live and to continue our campaigns, but it was pretty grueling. In 1980, for example, between November 4 and December 10, I successively visited New York; Washington, D.C.; Syracuse; Baltimore; Norfolk, Virginia; Cincinnati; Madison, Wisconsin; Bloomington, Indiana; Los Angeles; San Francisco; Richmond, Virginia; Winnipeg, Manitoba; Montreal; Houston; Buffalo, New York; Sarasota, Florida; Miami; and Dayton, Ohio.

One day, while I was in the middle of one of these tours, I discovered that I had been nominated for the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize by fifty-seven members of the Knesset—among them Abba Eban and the future prime minister Menachem Begin—and by forty-four university professors. I was the first non-Jewish German to receive this honor. I knew I had to live up to it.

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MOST OF THE governments in South America were still dictatorships at this time. I had already experienced life in a dictatorship during my visit to Bolivia—and I knew I had been lucky to get out of that country alive. Monika Ertl, the young woman who killed the Bolivian consul in Hamburg—Roberto Quintanilla, one of the men responsible for the murder of Che Guevara—was executed with a bullet in the head after her arrest in 1973, one year after my visit. She had two passports, one Bolivian and one German. The Bolivian police wanted to avoid the diplomatic hassles they’d had with me, so they shot her on the spot.

On May 2, 1977, at the height of the Argentine government’s bloody repression, I flew to Buenos Aires. I wrote an open letter to the Argentine authorities, protesting the country’s growing number of human rights violations, but most of the press refused to publish it. Only Mr. Timmerman, the editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, who would, shortly afterward, be arrested, tortured, and imprisoned for a long time, had the courage to print it:

Five years ago, I went to Bolivia to expose Klaus Barbie, a symbol of the link between the Nazi oppression in Europe and the dictatorships enslaving people in parts of South America. Since then, sadly, the torture chambers, the concentration camps, and the summary executions have spread to Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina.

It is my duty as a German anti-fascist, a French citizen, and a LICA leader, to protest human rights violations wherever they occur: yesterday in Warsaw, Prague, and Damascus; today in Buenos Aires; tomorrow in Montevideo.

I knew I was risking my life by protesting in these places. But to me, it seemed inadequate to protest in front of an embassy when there was the possibility of taking my campaign to the country itself to give my words real meaning.