Serge Klarsfeld

Serge Klarsfeld (born the September 17th 1935 with Bucharest in Romania) is a writer, historian and lawyer of the cause of the deportees in France. His Happy wife (born Happy Auguste Künzel , the February 13rd, 1939 with Berlin, - married in 1963) and is known for him under the name of “hunters of Nazis”, to have taken along in front of the courts Klaus Barbie and to have played a fundamental role in the lawsuit Papon. Their son is the lawyer Arno Klarsfeld.

Serge Klarsfeld is Jewish, he escaped the Gestapo with Nice in 1943 but his/her father was off-set and killed with Auschwitz. He is graduate higher learning in History with the Sorbonne. He is also graduate Institut of political studies of Paris, he is arts doctor and lawyer at the bar of Paris.

His Beate wife made known herself of the public in 1968, by slapping the West German chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, which was a member of the Nazi party during the Second world war and which had worked for the propaganda of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the time. She entrusted to a journalist on this act symbolic system: “I went to Berlin and I slapped the chancellor with the congress of his party. I shouted “Kiesinger, Nazi, resigns”. The media were present. Symbolically, I represented the young generation which slapped the “father” Nazi. It was an spectacular action. A slap, it is not a violence, but that marked the people German and shown that German youth refused that former Nazis occupy of the important stations in their government. ”

Serge Klarsfeld was stopped in Germany and Syria when it tried to obtain the extradition of Aloïs Brunner. His wife and are to him also on the initiative of the lawsuits against Klaus Barbie, Rene Bousquet, Jean Leguay, Maurice Papon and Paul Touvier.

They were victims the July 9th 1979 of an attempted murder by the network Nazi ODESSA which asked for the stop of their work to find the Nazi criminals. This same year, Serge went to Teheran to protest against the execution of Juifs Lebanese.

Klarsfeld conducted campaign in 1986 against Kurt Waldheim, officer in the Wehrmacht during the second world war, elected official chair Austria.

In 1996 it also protested against Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić.

In France they created in 1979 the Association of wire and girls of the Jewish deportees of France (FFDJF), which is charged to defend the cause of the descendants of deportees. In 1981, association inaugurated in Israel the Memorial of the deportation of the Jews of France, a vast monument which carries the name, the date and the birthplace of the 80.000 French victims of the extermination. Around, 80.000 trees form a Forest of the memory. They have work for the recognition of wire and girls of deportees while obtaining in particular:

recognition by Jacques Chirac in a speech of the July 16th 1995, responsibility for the France in the fate of the Jews during the Second world war;
a decree (2000-657 of July 13rd, 2000) instituting a measurement of repair for the orphans whose parents were victims of persecutions anti-semites.

Serge Klarsfeld is also vice-president of the Fondation for the Memory of Shoah.

Random links: