Beate Klarsfeld

Beate Klarsfeld was born in 1939 in Berlin

Beate Auguste Künzel was born in Berlin in 1939, the only child of Kurt Künzel, an insurance clerk, and his wife Helen. The family was not Jewish. As a teenager she often argued with her parents because they did not feel responsible for the Nazi era.

In 1960 she moved to Paris as an au pair, where she learned about the Holocaust. In 1963 she married Serge Klarsfeld, a lawyer and historian whose father was murdered at Auschwitz. From 1964 she worked as a secretary at the Franco-German Youth Office.

In 1967 she wrote articles in the French newspaper Combat against Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a former Nazi Party member, and was fired. In 1968 she shouted at him from the Bundestag gallery, and on 7 November 1968 she slapped him at a CDU conference in Berlin. She was sentenced in an accelerated hearing, and on appeal the penalty became 4 months, suspended.

With her husband she tracked Nazi criminals such as Kurt Lischka, Alois Brunner and Klaus Barbie. She found Barbie's hiding place in Bolivia in 1972, and he was tried in 1987. In 1986 she joined a campaign about Kurt Waldheim's past, and the couple published the names of 80,000 Jewish victims from France.

In 2012 she was the candidate of The Left for president of Germany and lost to Joachim Gauck by 126 to 991. She received Israeli citizenship in 2016.