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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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other Nazis had sat or were still sitting on the
OFA's board of directors. My research was not in vain. In the CDJC card index,
under the heading of German Criminals, I found the name of Fritz Rudolf Arlt,
who was an administrator of OFA from 1964 to 1966.
Arlt had had a
remarkable S.S. career. He was not only an exponent of theories on the Jews,
but also S.S.-Standartenführer and a colonel in the Death's Head Regiment
of the S.S., stationed principally in Katowice, a few miles from Auschwitz, as
an authority on racial policy. On November 9, 1941, he was posted as lieutenant
colonel to the headquarters of Heinnich Himmler, the Reich's commissioner on
racial problems. Arlt was adjudged a war criminal in Poland and in the
U.S.S.R., where he was convicted by default.
When the OFA was created,
Arlt was made one of its directors. Reappointed in December 1965, ArIt shortly
thereafter resigned on the publication of an article in Elan describing
his Nazi past, about which not one word had even been whispered in France or in
the OFA. There was no scandal. None of the OFA employees was informed that a
Nazi criminal of the worst kind was one of their directors. I could appreciate
the difference between the treatment I got and Arlt's. He had been an active
participant in atrocious crimes, but to the other OFA directors he was a man to
be respected and perhaps even feared.
As the weeks went by, I found that
other former Nazis were sitting on the OFA board of directors, notably Foreign
Ministry officials: Karl Kuno Overbeck, who was a member of the S.A. and also
of the political division of Ribbentrop's ministry; and Luitpold Werz, who had
joined the Nazi Party on October 1, 1934, as No. 2,873,248.
There was,
therefore, a logic behind my dismissal from OFA. Later I learned that
Chancellor Kiesinger's cabinet had put pressure on OFA to get rid of me.
My hearing in the Eighth Arrondissement court took place on
February 19, 1968. The night before, I had telephoned about forty reporters who
had already been made aware of the case through my pamphlet. The French and the
international press came to the hearing in considerable numbers. My message,
Kiesinger's Nazi past, and my protestation of innocence reached hundreds of
thousands of readers.
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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