The Nazi Hunters by Andrew Nagorski

Author:Andrew Nagorski [Nagorski, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2016-05-09T18:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A Slap to Remember

“Because we were weak, we had to take strong actions. And the strongest action is to go on the spot where the enemy is powerful and to tell the truth there.”

French Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld

Beate Klarsfeld was certainly not brought up to be a risk taker. Born in Berlin on February 13, 1939, just months before Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland that signaled the start of World War II, she was too young to have many memories of the conflict. But she does recall, shortly before the fighting finally ended with Germany’s surrender, “reciting little poems in honor of the Führer in kindergarten.”

Her father served in the Wehrmacht in France in 1940, until his unit was transferred to the Eastern Front the following year when Hitler ordered the attack on the Soviet Union. But he had the good fortune to develop a case of double pneumonia, leading to his return to Germany where he worked as a bookkeeper for the army. After a brief stint in British captivity at the end of the war, he rejoined his family in a village where they had taken refuge during the Allied bombing of Berlin. In late 1945, they returned to Berlin, where Beate enrolled in elementary school and played hide-and-seek with her friends in the bombed-out buildings and piles of rubble.

As she recalled, she was “a conscientious and well-behaved student” in elementary school. “In those days no one ever spoke of Hitler,” she added. Both teachers and parents largely avoided the whole topic of what had happened in Germany under his rule. Her parents had not joined the Nazi Party, but they had voted for Hitler like so many of their countrymen. “Still, they felt no responsibility for what had happened under the Nazis,” she noted. Instead, they and their neighbors bemoaned their losses in the war with “never a word of pity or understanding for other nations.” Growing up, she heard no real explanation for their situation. Instead, she kept hearing people say: “We have lost a war and now we must work.”

As a teenager, unlike her parents, who supported Chancellor Adenauer’s Christian Democrats, she favored Willy Brandt’s Social Democrats. But that had more to do with the fact that Brandt’s “young open face contrasted with those of the other politicians” than with any understanding of his party’s politics. She was developing a typical teenager’s impatience with what she saw as “the stifling atmosphere” of her household. Her father was drinking heavily and her mother wanted her to start looking for a suitable husband. Instead, after attending a commercial high school, she took a job as a stenographer in a large pharmaceutical firm. Her ambition was to earn enough to strike out on her own.

In March 1960, at the age of twenty-one, she landed in Paris, where she studied French and worked as an au pair. She slept “in a disgusting attic and trembled in fear of the spiders,” she recalled. But, not surprisingly, she quickly fell in love with the city, finding it both so much livelier and more elegant than West Berlin.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.