FRANCE-NAZI HUNTERS Nazi hunters Beate, Serge Klarsfeld given top German honour in Paris

Record ID: 146514

  • Title: FRANCE-NAZI HUNTERS Nazi hunters Beate, Serge Klarsfeld given top German honour in Paris
  • Date: 20th July 2015
  • Summary: PARIS, FRANCE (JULY 20, 2015) (REUTERS) ****WARNING CONTAINS FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY*** EXTERIOR OF GERMAN AMBASSADOR RESIDENCY FEDERAL CROSS OF MERIT FEDERAL CROSSES OF MERIT VARIOUS OF GERMAN AMBASSADOR TO FRANCE, SUZANNE WASUM-RAINER, MAKING SPEECH WITH NAZI HUNTERS SERGE AND BEATE KLARSFELD NEXT TO HER BEATE KLARSFELD WATCHING SERGE KLARSFELD WATCHING WASUM-RAINER PINNING FE
  • Embargoed: 4th August 2015 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: France
  • Country: France
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVA7X9W70GUSFEMIGIB5EDS9B9SR
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Germany on Monday (July 20) awarded husband-and-wife Nazi-hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld its highest distinction, the Order of Merit, for four decades of work bringing war criminals to justice.
    The Klarsfelds created a database of deported Jewish children and won fame in the 1970s for helping to locate former Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, known as the "Butcher of Lyon" for torturing and executing prisoners in France.
    In 1968, Beate Klarsfeld famously received a one-year prison sentence, later reduced, for slapping then-Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger in a confrontation over his war-time role in the Nazi propaganda effort.
    "It's a satisfaction because I slapped the Chancellor Kiesinger, I was condemned to a one year prison term, I protested in countries of South America, in the Middle East to support the Israeli people, so I have been imprisoned, I have been considered as a criminal but today being awarded it means that everything I did is recognised so I was not wrong," Beate Klarsfeld told Reuters after the ceremony at the residence of the German ambassador to France in the presence of friends of the family and fellow workers on Holocaust memory projects.
    German-born Beate Klarsfeld said she had been largely oblivious to her country's World War Two crimes before she moved to France in the 1960 and met Serge, a Romanian Jew whose father had been killed in Auschwitz.
    "We are happy to have received this honour. After having been arrested many times in Germany, the German people have understood that what we had done was beneficial to the German society and to the Franco-German relations, to the link between Germany and the Jewish world and Israel. So, all's well that ends well," Serge Klarsfeld said.
    German ambassador to France Susanne Wasum-Rainer thanked the couple for their contribution to "rehabilitating" the image of Germany.
    "I am pleased that it has been possible today on July 20th to recognize the two Klarsfelds in this way. I am happy, satisfied and also a bit proud of Germany for having done this. Proud that Germany... The core of the two Klarsfelds' work is that today we can recognize them for everything they did and that people who committed Nazi crimes are arrested. I am happy that this was possible although Beate had this personal history with the German state," Wasum-Rainer said.
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