AT HOME IN PARIS, around 1:00 a.m. on July 6, 1979, we heard an explosion. We were not sleeping. In the underground parking garage, our car was blown up, and all the cars around it were damaged. We found out later, after the investigation, that there had been an explosive device equipped with a timer, presumably intended to explode in the morning, as I was taking our daughter, Lida, to kindergarten. We received lots of death threats during this period.
The organization Odessa claimed responsibility for the car bomb and sent us a letter threatening further reprisals: “We warn you: our German comrades are waiting for you in Cologne. They will be armed and their determination will be as absolute as the hatred they feel for you. They have taken the blood oath: if Klarsfeld comes to our city, we will kill him!!! So, Mr. Klarsfeld, do you still intend to go to Cologne? Yeah? Then go ahead! GO AHEAD!!!”
So I went.
* * *
THE TRIAL BEGAN on October 23, 1979.
At 6:45 a.m., three hundred deportees and children of deportees marched through the streets of Cologne, chanting and holding up banners demanding that the Nazi criminals be convicted. The atmosphere in the courthouse was chaotic. The courtroom where the trial was due to take place was far too small: there was room for only seventy journalists, who had come from all over the world, and about fifty members of the public. There was soon fighting between the protesters and the police tasked with maintaining order.
That first day was a successful one for us. The clumsiness of the German legal authorities justified the morning’s protest, which was designed to show that the Jews of France could put an end to this trial if they were unhappy with the way it was going. Furthermore, the reduced capacity of the courtroom enabled us to fill it for each hearing, bringing together for the first time in German legal history the Jewish victims, the Nazi criminals, and their judges. Also for the first time, the judges were the kind of people we had been demanding: four men and one woman (the judge, Heinz Fassbender, his two assessors, and two jurors) under forty-five years of age. And another first: the criminals were there, all three of them, and they came to each hearing.
When we realized that the judge was hostile to the defense lawyers’ delaying tactics, we decided to give him the chance to show another side to German justice. From the second hearing on, the protests grew calm. This made a big impression on the media and on German public opinion.
Sometimes, however, I would deliberately provoke outbursts from the crowd. As Kurt Lischka’s two lawyers rolled out a series of pointless legal arguments against the way the trial was being run, there were howls of protest from the crowd gathered outside the courthouse. Even though the guards closed all the windows and drew the heavy red curtains, it was impossible to silence the shouts of “Lischka Mörder, Hagen Mörder, Heinrichsohn Mörder” that went on for more than four hours.
All of the witnesses, with the exception of the French people summoned by the court, had been members of the Nazi police. Presumably the judge hoped to obtain the truth by questioning them. But we knew that they would simply claim that they had not done anything wrong and that they knew nothing about the activities of the three accused. That was why I surprised several of these witnesses with evidence of their wrongdoing; for example, when Söllner, a Gestapo member from Alois Brunner’s team, stated that he had not seen any children at the camp in Drancy, I proved that more than twenty-five hundred children had been deported during his time at the camp.
During the hearing for Nährich, who had been the chief of the German military command’s police, Judge Fassbender realized that he was on the wrong track. He got nothing from that witness. When my turn came to question him, I asked, “Did you classify the Jews into categories in the camp at Compiègne? Did you prepare the escorts for convoys? Did you draw up rulings on the need to wear yellow stars?” Nährich answered no three times. I then presented him with a series of documents written and signed by him, which proved the exact opposite. The judge told him to leave without taking an oath, otherwise he would be forced to charge him. Then he asked me if I had any documents relating to the other witnesses. I gave them to him. When confronted with these documents, Kübler (liaison officer with the French police), Illers (head of the Gestapo in Paris in 1943), and Moritz (Gestapo member in Paris, Marseille, and Orléans) all refused to testify so as not to be forced to lie under oath.
While Laube (who drew up the list of hostages to be shot) and Knochen (head of the security police) claimed to be sick, Jüngst (Oberg’s aide-de-camp) testified in favor of Hagen. His words made a big impression because he appeared sincere and admitted he did not like Hagen much as a person. I asked him, “Do you know if Hagen put any pressure on Vichy to denaturalize the Jews?” No. “Did you write reports on the Jewish question and send them to the Gestapo?” No. “Can you recognize your own signature?”—and I handed him a report on the Jewish question that he had sent to the Gestapo, relating Hagen’s attempts to denaturalize the Jews. And that was the end of Jüngst.
This trial was notable for two essential elements that distinguished it from other trials of Nazi criminals. Not since 1945 had hundreds of Jews come (from abroad!) to attend the trial—in Germany—of one of their persecutors. The only Nazi who’d had the privilege of being judged among Jews before was Eichmann, in Jerusalem. But now his boss Hagen, who took him to Palestine in October 1937, and his predecessor as the head of the Gestapo’s Jewish Affairs Department, Lischka, were also surrounded by Jews. All those nights we had spent on the train from Paris to Cologne with the sons and daughters of Holocaust victims had been worth it.
The trial’s second distinction was the existence of so many documents from the CDJC in Paris. Those documents had come from the Gestapo’s anti-Jewish section in France, and they were extremely important. They constituted the basis of my documentation and allowed us to establish the precise responsibilities of each accused man.
One of the highlights of the trial was the moment when the three French plaintiffs gave their moving and terrifying testimonies about the deportation of thousands of children separated from their parents and herded onto trains like animals. During these testimonies, even some of the defense lawyers’ eyes filled with tears, but the criminals remained impassive: Lischka continued to shield his face with one gigantic hand while endlessly taking notes with the other; Hagen sat utterly immobile, while Heinrichsohn slumped over, red-faced. Mrs. Daltroff-Baticle and Mrs. Husson, who together took care of the deported children at Drancy, recognized the photograph of Heinrichsohn, taken in 1942, from among a hundred or so pictures of other Gestapo members. Like those two witnesses, Georges Wellers was categorical: it was definitely Heinrichsohn who supervised the majority of Auschwitz convoys in 1942.
Lischka chose not to say a word or to cooperate with the court in any way whatsoever. Hagen refused to respond on the pretext that these matters were confidential and he would need special authorization to speak about them.
On January 31, 1980, we organized a massive protest in Cologne: a special train left Paris, while buses carried people from other parts of France. Around fifteen hundred French Jews marched from the train station to the courthouse. The last time that many Jews had been seen on German streets was during the arrests that followed Kristallnacht.
Prosecutor general Cohnen’s closing speech asked for prison sentences in line with those defined in the Bismarck penal code. The actual sentences were even a bit more severe: twelve years for Hagen, ten for Lischka, six for Heinrichsohn. The verdict of the Cologne trial came as such an immense relief, particularly as it was followed—to the surprise of the German people—by the incarceration of the three convicted men.
“Relief” is the right word, because this was not a matter of satisfaction. There could be no punishment, no matter how severe, commensurate with the gravity and scale of the crimes committed by Lischka, Hagen, and Heinrichsohn.
Thirty-five years after the end of the war, it was not easy for judges and juries to condemn their fathers’ generation. But they did, and that was the proof that even the most overdue Nazi trials can produce positive results, on both a legal and a historical level. It was the proof that the German people were ready to assume their responsibilities to the Jewish people and that they were increasingly opposed to racist totalitarianism. It was on that point that I concluded my closing speech: “It is true that the road we have had to take to reach this trial has been difficult for us and for you; but you should know that, throughout this long journey, the Jews of France have never lost confidence in the German judicial system.”
The Jerusalem Post commented:
The verdict is also a personal victory for Beate and Serge Klarsfeld. In more than ten years of private effort they flushed the three men out of their hiding places in prosperous civilian jobs in Germany itself. They almost singlehandedly forced the German Bundestag to pass the legislation making it possible to retry the men in German courts, after they had all been sentenced in absentia in French courts.
At the prison in Ossendorf, where several of our group had been briefly imprisoned in order to ensure that he would go there one day, Heinrichsohn found it hard to accept swapping his position as mayor and lawyer for a prison cell, which he shared with Lischka (but not Hagen, who was incarcerated at the prison in Bochum). In a letter to his cousin, Heinrichsohn wrote:
Like you, I would never have believed it possible that I would be arrested or convicted. I really didn’t do anything wrong. I am innocent. But that does me no good at all. I was convicted and now I am imprisoned. So I must bear my fate. I am a victim of my generation. In my place, anyone else would have acted in the same way.
Heinrichsohn died soon after his release.