Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Europe’s Life-Long Nazi Hunters Horrified By Rise In Anti-Semitism

Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, two of Europe’s most famous Nazi hunters, are preparing to publish a memoir as they confront Europe’s rising anti-Semitism and xenophobia, the Washington Post reported.

Over five decades the Klarsfelds, who are married, have tracked Nazis from Paris, their home, to as far away as Syria and Bolivia. Their most famous catch, Klaus Barbie, called the Butcher of Lyon, was extradited to France after their extensive lobbying of the French government and convicted of crimes against humanity in 1991.

“All my troubles in the past started when Madame Klarsfeld came to Bolivia,” Barbie said when his trial began.

But now the couple fears that Europe is forgetting the memory of the Holocaust.

“The young today don’t know hunger. They don’t know war,” said Serge Klarsfeld, who is Jewish and whose father died in Auschwitz. “They don’t know that the European Union brought to Europe so much, and they don’t know that the generation that came before them worked so hard for what there is.”

They hope an English translation of their memoir, “Hunting the Truth,” will help change that. The story covers Serge’s memories of watching his father be taken away by the Gestapo, and Beate’s memories of her German Protestant upbringing, and her parents who she says “sleepwalked” through World War II.

The couple has been behind seminal moments in Holocaust awareness history, such as when Beate slapped the West German Chancellor Kurt Keieinger in 1968 for being a member of the Nazi party.

“We fight for values that we will defend the rest of our lives,” Serge said. “After we die, we can’t say what will happen.”

Contact Ari Feldman at [email protected] or on Twitter @aefeldman

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.