page_title: Beate Klarsfeld
section_title: Other activities
hierarchical_section_title: Beate Klarsfeld / Biography / Other activities
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Journaliste Beate Klarsfeld (West-Duitsland) op Schiphol met beschuldigingen tegen Ernst Achenbach . Beate Klarsfeld met document 7 april 1970
context_page_description: Beate Auguste Klarsfeld is a Franco-German journalist who, along with her French husband, Serge, became famous for their investigation and documentation of numerous Nazi war criminals, including Kurt Lischka, Alois Brunner, Klaus Barbie, Ernst Ehlers, Kurt Asche, amongst others.
  In March 2012, she was a candidate for The Left in the 2012 German presidential election against Joachim Gauck, which she lost 126 to 991.
context_section_description: In February 1971 Klarsfeld demonstrated in front of the Charles University in Prague against "Stalinisation, persecution and anti-Semitism". As a result, she was temporarily banned from entering the GDR. That same year in Germany, with her husband and several other people, she tried to kidnap Kurt Lischka, who was responsible for the deportation of some 76,000 Jews from France. Lischka was living openly under his own name in Cologne. Klarsfeld planned to deliver him to justice in Paris, as a previous conviction in France blocked further legal action against Lischka in Germany. Although the kidnapping was unsuccessful, it served to draw media attention to Klarsfeld's cause. She turned herself in to the German authorities, saying that they must arrest either her or Lischka. In 1974 she was sentenced to two months' imprisonment for the attempted kidnapping, with Lischka testifying at her trial. After an international outcry, her sentence was suspended. Lischka remained at large until 1980, when he was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment.
  In the 1970s, Klarsfeld repeatedly pointed to the involvement of the FDP politician Ernst Achenbach in the deportation of Jews from France. In 1976, she succeeded in her political activity. She ended her activity as a lobbyist of Nazi criminals shortly before her scheduled deployment as West German representative in the European Community in Brussels. In 1984 and 1985 she toured the military dictatorships of Chile and Paraguay, to draw attention to the search for the suspected Nazi war criminals Walter Rauff and Josef Mengele. In 1986  Klarsfeld spent a month in West Beirut,  Lebanon, and offered to go into custody in an exchange for Israeli hostages .
  in 1986, she campaigned against the candidacy of former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, the Austrian Federal President, who was accused of having been involved  in war crimes as an officer of the Wehrmacht. She attended his campaign events and after his election she disrupted his appearances in Istanbul and Amman, where she was supported by the World Jewish Congress.
  On 4 July 1987, a resolution took heed of Klarsfeld's initiative and condemned SS war criminal Klaus Barbie (known as the Butcher of Lyon). Barbie was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. This success credited Klarsfeld as the "main result" of their actions. As early as 1972 they had uncovered his whereabouts in Bolivia. Her gift was the foundation of the memorial Maison d'Izieu (Children of Izieu), in memory of the victims of Barbie's crimes. In 1991, she fought for the extradition of  Eichmann's deputy Alois Brunner, then living in Syria, for the murder of 130,000 Jews in German concentration camps. In 2001, through the efforts of Klarsfeld, Brunner was sentenced by a French court in absentia to life imprisonment.
  In July 2001, Klarsfeld called for a demonstration in Berlin against the state visit of the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
  Beate and Serge Klarsfeld published a commemorative book in which the names of over 80,000 victims of the Nazi era in France. They strove successfully to have the pictures displayed of about 11,400 deported Jewish children in the years 1942 to 1944. The French railway SNCF welcomed the project and displayed the pictures at 18 stations as a traveling exhibition (Enfants juifs Déportés de France). The German Railways (DB), the legal successor of Deutsche Reichsbahn, turned down a corresponding exhibition at DB-stations "for security reasons" and referred them to the DB Museum in Nuremberg. The former DB CEO Hartmut Mehdorn argued the issue was much too serious, for display in German railway stations. Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee spoke out in favor of the exhibition. At the end of 2006 Tiefensee and Mehdorn agreed to support a new, DB owned exhibition on the role of the Reichsbahn in World War II.
  The special Deutsche Bahn traveling exhibition "Special Trains to Death" has been shown since January 23, 2008 at numerous German train stations. Since its opening, this exhibition has seen over 150,000 visitors. The hunt for Kl
caption: Beate Klarsfeld (1970)
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