Paris--France's most famous Nazi hunters, Serge Klarsfeld and his German wife Beate, this week launched their "Memoirs" about their decades spent tracking down Hitler's henchmen and dragging them out of hiding into the public glare.
The book, published in France to a flurry of media attention, recounts how Klarsfeld, a Jew born in 1935 in Bucharest, escaped the Holocaust after his family moved to France but saw his father taken away to die in the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp.
In 1960, while studying at the prestigious Science-Po university in Paris, Klarsfled met Beate Kuenzel, the daughter of a former German soldier, on a metro platform. The two, who married three years later, decided to bring fugitive Nazis to justice.
"Serge told me, there's no need to be ashamed to be German, but you need to become politically involved" to redress the country's wartime legacy, Beate told AFP on Monday.
Together, Serge Klarsfeld added, the couple decided to help "bring down the chancellor" of Germany at the time, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a former Nazi party member who had been a top official responsible for radio propaganda under Joseph Goebbels.
But what could they do? "The traditional methods didn't work," Beate said. So the two decided to make a dramatic gesture.
AFP
