The Just and Unjust

If West German law locksteps to its literal conclusion, a Nazi-hunter will go to jail while the convicted war criminal she tried to kidnap and spirit away to France will stay free. The hunted Nazi is Kurt Lischka, 65, the wartime Gestapo chief in Paris, who was tried in absentia by a French court in 1950 and sentenced to life imprisonment for his part in the deportation and extermination of 100,000 French Jews. The hunter is Beate Klarsfeld, 35, German-born Protestant wife of a French Jew, who moved to Paris in 1960 and has made a career of trying to bring Nazis to justice.

Beate's first encounter with German authorities came in 1968, when she was arrested for slapping then Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger, an exonerated onetime member of the Nazi Party. Though Beate was tried and sentenced to a year's imprisonment (later changed to probation), her hatred of Nazis grew even greater. She and her law-student husband, whose father died at Auschwitz, began to compile dossiers on unpunished German war criminals. In 1971, Beate launched almost singlehanded a campaign to catch and arrest "the Butcher of Lyon," ex-SS Captain Klaus Barbie, who had fled to Peru, then Bolivia. Released from jail several months ago, he is now free in Bolivia.

That same year Beate also tried to kidnap Lischka, now a senior bank clerk in Cologne, and transport him to France. Under German law he can neither be extradited nor retried in a German court. The kidnap attempt, on a Cologne street, failed when Lischka's shouts frightened off Beate's four male accomplices.

Beate, who has dual French-German citizenship, finally was tried, convicted and sentenced on narrowly legalistic grounds last week in a Cologne courtroom. Presiding Judge Victor de Somoskeoy, ignoring an expression of concern from French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, gave her two months in jail. Not even the prosecution had sought a jail term; it had urged that Beate be put on probation for six months. Though the sentence has some support in Germany, it set off protests in both Israel and France: Davar, a leading Israeli daily, criticized the court for "sticking to the dry letter of the law"; in Paris, left, right and center united to condemn what the daily newspaper Combat called a "revolting" verdict.

Still, Beate may win in the end. She is likely to get probation if she promises to stop breaking the law. Lischka's future is bleaker. The trial, and Giscard's friendship with West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, may have built up enough pressure to force the Bundestag to ratify a treaty it has sat on for three years. The treaty would permit the retrial in German courts of some 300 war criminals convicted in absentia by the French, including Lischka.

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