IN THE IMMEDIATE aftermath of the Cologne trial, we continued proceedings against Ernst Ehlers and Kurt Asche, responsible for the deaths of twenty-five thousand Jews in Belgium; against Arnold Strippel, who hanged twenty Jewish children in the basement of a school at the Bullenhuser Damm in Hamburg; against Jean Leguay; and then against Maurice Papon and the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. We also continued to keep watch over Klaus Barbie in Bolivia, waiting until the moment was right to demand his extradition.
Frustrated by the inability of Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton, the authors of Vichy France and the Jews, to gain a precise understanding of the chronology of the Final Solution in France due to a lack of new documentation, I started to prepare the book Vichy-Auschwitz. Around this time we realized it was up to us, the Sons and Daughters, to organize the first single-day group pilgrimage to Auschwitz. This involved the rental of two planes, one Polish and the other French. We also resolved to erect a stone memorial in Israel for the eighty thousand French Jews exterminated during the war, to be surrounded by eighty thousand trees—the Forest of Remembrance—and for the names and personal details of those eighty thousand victims to be engraved on the monument.
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ON THE FIRST day of the Ehlers-Asche trial—November 26, 1980, in Kiel, northern Germany—we marched through the streets of the city to the courthouse with a group of Jews from Brussels. Ehlers, head of the German police in Belgium, committed suicide before the trial started, electrocuting himself in his bathtub; his wife had killed herself just before this. Asche’s trial took place over the course of thirty-six days during a seven-month period. I participated in nearly half of those days. Asche, head of the Gestapo’s Jewish Affairs Department, was convicted on July 8, 1981, and sentenced to seven years in prison.
Arnold Strippel had already spent twenty years in prison for other crimes and could not, according to German law, be incarcerated again after another trial. His war crimes, however, were so vile that we wanted the German courts to charge him, so that the deaths of those Jewish children, rounded up from all over Europe for use in medical experiments and hanged in a school basement, would not simply vanish in the mists of time.
So I went to Hamburg, where I had filed charges against Strippel, and explained to the prosecutors that I had been harassed in Paris by people who reproached me for seeking a legal outcome to the case when what they wanted was to exterminate Strippel. To back up this bluff, we had to send several people who, one by one, walked around close to Strippel’s home, attracting the attention of the police—who could not arrest them, as they had not actually done anything wrong. The Hamburg prosecutor was impressed by these ominous signs and ended up charging Strippel. Soon afterward, he died, a free man, but accused of the heinous crimes that he committed.