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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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My lawyers also refused to plead. Then everything
happened very quickly. The court adjourned to deliberate, and returned with the
verdict everyone expected – except Prosecutor Neelsen, who still demanded
a year's imprisonment – four months in jail, sentence suspended. (I was
later to be pardoned by Brandt when he came to power.) The court explained its
leniency by the fact that I had acted "out of conviction."
Serge spent
a week of his vacation going back and forth to Hamburg to oversee the printing
of a pamphlet with a red cover: Kiesinger or Subtle Fascism, the French
edition of my earliest research. We published it ourselves under our rights as
authors of the German edition.
On September 8, President Pompidou was
paying an official visit to Bonn, an occasion on which Kiesinger's Nazi past
once more had to be revealed. On September 5, Serge brought home a big suitcase
full of copies that still smelled of the binder's glue. We made the rounds of
the ministries, the legislative assemblies, the Elysée Palace, and the
government offices to give them to the top politicians in France and to the men
who would be going to Bonn with Pompidou. The German correspondents in Paris
also received copies, and they wired Bonn that the French officials would be
reading B.K.'s book on Kiesinger on the flight to the German capital.
September 7. I reached Bonn. I had asked the Hamburg printer to
send me, under my maiden name, a whole carton of the red booklets, and I found
it waiting for me at the Bonn railway station. With the help of two young ADF
members, I set out to distribute them at the press conference that was to
follow the Franco-German talks. Laden with the heavy packages, we arrived at
the Press Building a little late.
The guard stopped us. "Where are you
going?"
"Günter Diehl, the government spokesman, has instructed us
to deliver these books."
We went up to the second floor. About a
hundred German and foreign reporters were already in the large conference room.
No one paid any attention to us. We slipped in and methodically handed out the
booklets, beginning at the rear of the room. The reporters began to get
excited. By the time the guards noticed that it was not an official document we
were handing out, it was too late. Most of
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
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