French President Emmanuel Macron has presented Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld with the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor. Klarsfeld, and his wife Beate dedicated their lives to bringing Holocaust perpetrators to justice.
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France's most famous Nazi hunter, Serge Klarsfeld was awarded the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor in a ceremony led by French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday.
Klarsfeld, 83, received France's highest award, while his wife, 79-year-old Beate Klarsfeld, received the National Order of Merit. She had already been awarded the Legion of Honor in 2014.
The Chief Rabbi of France Haim Korsia was among those who attended the ceremony at the Elysee Palace. The event was limited to family and close friends and associates.
Serge Klarsfeld was born September 17, 1935, in the Romanian capital of Bucharest. He escaped the Holocaust after his family moved to France but witnessed his father being taken away to die in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz.
He became a naturalized French citizen in 1950, and 10 years later, while studying at the prestigious Sciences Po in Paris, he met Beate Kuenzel, the daughter of a former German soldier, on a metro platform.
"Neither could have succeeded without the other," their daughter Lida once said.
One of their most high-profile cases involved the capture of the notorious Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, a former Gestapo officer known as the "Butcher of Lyon."
In 1971, the Klarsfelds revealed that Barbie was living in Bolivia. In 1983 he was extradited to France where four years later he was convicted in a trial, and later died behind bars.
Serge and Beate Klarsfeld found Klaus Barbie hiding in BoliviaImage: AP
They also pursued members of France's Vichy regime who collaborated with the Nazis. Officials included Rene Bouquet, Jean Leguay and Marice Papon, despite obstruction from former President Francois Mitterrand.
It was Mitterrand's successor Jacques Chirac who finally recognized France's role in the deportations, a declaration Serge Klarsfeld said owed much to his and Beate's campaigning.
The men who led Nazi Germany
The German National Socialist Workers' party profoundly affected the course of 20th-century world history with their ideology, propaganda and crimes. Who were the key leaders of the movement?
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Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945)
As Hitler's Propaganda Minister, the virulently anti-Semitic Goebbels was responsible for making sure a single, iron-clad Nazi message reached every citizen of the Third Reich. He strangled freedom of the press, controlled all media, arts, and information, and pushed Hitler to declare "Total War." He and his wife committed suicide in 1945, after poisoning their six children.
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Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
The leader of the German National Socialist Workers' Party (Nazi) developed his anti-Semitic, anti-communist and racist ideology well before coming to power as Chancellor in 1933. He undermined political institutions to transform Germany into a totalitarian state. From 1939 to 1945, he led Germany in World War II while overseeing the Holocaust. He committed suicide in April 1945.
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Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945)
As leader of the Nazi paramilitary SS ("Schutzstaffel"), Himmler was one of the Nazi party members most directly responsible for the Holocaust. He also served as Chief of Police and Minister of the Interior, thereby controlling all of the Third Reich's security forces. He oversaw the construction and operations of all extermination camps, in which more than 6 million Jews were murdered.
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Rudolf Hess (1894-1987)
Hess joined the Nazi party in 1920 and took part in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, a failed Nazi attempt to gain power. While in prison, he helped Hitler write "Mein Kampf." Hess flew to Scotland in 1941 to attempt a peace negotiation, where he was arrested and held until the war's end. In 1946, he stood trial in Nuremberg and was sentenced to life in prison, where he died.
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Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962)
Alongside Himmler, Eichmann was one of the chief organizers of the Holocaust. As an SS Lieutenant colonel, he managed the mass deportations of Jews to Nazi extermination camps in Eastern Europe. After Germany's defeat, Eichmann fled to Austria and then to Argentina, where he was captured by the Israeli Mossad in 1960. Tried and found guilty of crimes against humanity, he was executed in 1962.
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Hermann Göring (1893-1946)
A participant in the failed Beer Hall Putsch, Göring became the second-most powerful man in Germany once the Nazis took power. He founded the Gestapo, the Secret State Police, and served as Luftwaffe commander until just before the war's end, though he increasingly lost favor with Hitler. Göring was sentenced to death at Nuremberg but committed suicide the night before it was enacted.
