A Nazi-hunting couple's audacious scheme to take down a top SS officer

It was a chilly March day in Cologne in 1972 when a group of five set off in pursuit of an outlandish goal: kidnapping former SS officer Kurt Lischka. The team hoping to snatch Lischka in broad daylight was no highly trained team of undercover agents. Instead, it consisted of a political scientist, a photographer, an Orthodox Jewish doctor and the group’s leaders, Beate and Serge Klarsfeld. Several of them were Holocaust survivors.

The Klarsfelds were a semi-vigilante duo dedicated to bringing Nazi war criminals to justice. Serge, a Romanian-born French Jew, had lost his father to the death camps at Auschwitz. His wife, Beate, a German woman whose father had voted for Adolf Hitler and fought for the Wehrmacht army, sought to make amends for the sins of her family by refusing to stand by while Nazi criminals lived with impunity in postwar Europe.

Focusing first on war criminals who had acted in France, the Klarsfelds had spent years doing the slow, meticulous work of building a case against the top Nazis. The young couple had spent much of their newlywed years together in the dusty archives of the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation, the archival wing of the Holocaust memorial in Paris. Sorting through box after box of paperwork, the Klarsfelds pored over the signatures and initials on telegrams, letters and military orders from the war. They tried to determine which signatures showed up most frequently — anything that would help them reconstitute the chain of command that orchestrated the deportation of some 76,000 Jews from France. One name came up again and again: Kurt Lischka.

Lischka rose quickly through the ranks of the Nazi hierarchy after joining the SS in 1933. He made a name for himself as an expert on “Jewish affairs,” and in 1938 — a year he was promoted three separate times — he oversaw the mass deportations of German Jews following Kristallnacht, a series of violent attacks against Jewish people and property. That same year, Lischka deported more than 20,000 Jews from Berlin to the eastern front, where many of them died of starvation or exposure to the cold, a consequence that one of Lischka’s supervisors called “ingenious.”

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