During the 1970s, West German society was aroused by the campaigns of a group of French activists led by Serge and Beate Klarsfeld who called former Nazi perpetrators to accountability. With spectacular actions, they exposed the identity of three former SS officers who had taken part in the decisionmaking and organization of the deportations of Jews from France to the Nazi extermination camps between 1942 and 1944. Because the majority of West Germany’s political and juridical elites, as well as society in general, continued to turn a blind eye to Nazi crimes and the presence among them of former Nazi officials, it took nearly a decade of campaigning before these three former SS officers who had served in occupied France—Kurt Lischka, Herbert Hagen, and Ernst Heinrichsohn—were finally taken to court in Cologne in October 1979.

This chapter examines the significant role that Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, together with a group of Holocaust survivors and their relatives, played in the transformation of the political-legal and public discourses in West Germany concerning the accountability of SS officials who had commanded and organized the deportations of Jews from France. The activists first organized themselves under the title “Militants de la Memoire,” thus pointing to the idea of social movements that during that time had an important impact on democratization processes. Later, in the run-up to the trial, the French-Jewish group used the self-designation Fils et Filles des Déportés Juifs de France (Sons and daughters of Jews deported from France, or FFDJF) in its public appearance, which called closer attention to processes of Jewish identity formation and the transgenerational legacies of the Holocaust. In order to expose the three SS officials as being responsible for the deportations from France, the group organized several demonstrations in their hometowns, principally Cologne and Warstein (North Rhine–Westphalia), and in Burgstadt (Miltenberg District, Bavaria). Additional action took place with the aim of overcoming the legal barriers fixed in the so-called Transition Agreement (Überleitungsvertrag) between the governments of France and West Germany. A central paragraph in this treaty prohibited Germany from charging war criminals in West Germany who had previously been judged in absentia in France.