Beate Auguste Klarsfeld (née Künzel; born 13 February 1939) is a Franco-German journalist and Nazi hunter who, along with her French husband, Serge, became famous for their investigation and documentation of numerous Nazi war criminals, including Kurt Lischka, Alois Brunner, Klaus Barbie, Ernst Ehlers [de] and Kurt Asche.

[citation needed] The Berlin apartment in which she lived was bombed and relatives in Sandau gave shelter to Beate and her mother.

From the age of about fourteen years, Beate began to frequently argue with her parents because they did not feel responsible for the Nazi era, focused on the injustices and material losses they had suffered, and, while blaming the Russians, felt no sympathy for other countries.

During a year of unpaid leave after the birth of her son, she became increasingly involved with feminist literature and with the emancipation of women in Germany.

In an article published on 14 January 1967 in the French newspaper Combat, Beate Klarsfeld, at the time a foreign member of the SPD, came out against Kiesinger occupying the post of chancellor and in favour of Willy Brandt.

In these and other pieces for Combat in March and on 27 July of that year she accused Kiesinger of having made a "good reputation" for himself "in the ranks of the Brown Shirts" and "in the CDU".

She also asserted that Kiesinger had been chiefly responsible for the contents of German international broadcasts which included anti-Semitic and war propaganda, and had collaborated closely with SS functionaries Gerhard Rühle [de] and Franz Alfred Six.

[7] On 2 April 1968, from the public gallery in the Bonn Bundestag (German parliament), Klarsfeld shouted "Nazi Kiesinger, resign!"

The West Department of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) Central Committee immediately informed Walter Ulbricht, its leader, of Klarsfeld's plans.

[8][9] On 9 May, Klarsfeld participated in a panel discussion with Günter Grass (who had urged Kiesinger to resign in 1966), Johannes Agnoli, Ekkehart Krippendorff [de], Jacob Taubes and Michel Lang (a student from the "Jewish Working Group for Politics") at Technische Universität Berlin.

She said that she had wanted to give voice to that part of the German people – especially the youth – who were opposed to a Nazi being the head of the Federal Government.

[15] Berlin was selected as the location because Klarsfeld and her husband expected that as a French citizen she would only be punished mildly, given the four-power status of the city.

[20] Klarsfeld justified the act in a poem that she recorded on 23 November 1968, saying that her slap was on behalf of 50 million dead of World War II as well as for future generations.

Klarsfeld planned to hand him over to justice in Paris, as a previous conviction in France blocked further legal action against Lischka in Germany.

As the rapporteur of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Bundestag until 1976, Achenbach was responsible for the Franco-German Supplementary Agreement to the Transition Treaty signed in 1971, and successfully prevented its ratification until 1974 when he was discredited by the campaigns led by the Klarsfelds.

[30][31] In 1984 and 1985 Beate Klarsfeld toured the military dictatorships of Chile and Paraguay, to draw attention to the search for the suspected Nazi war criminals Walter Rauff and Josef Mengele.

In 1986, she campaigned against the candidacy of former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim to the post of the Federal President of Austria, on the grounds of his being accused of involvement in war crimes as an officer of the Wehrmacht.

In 1991, she fought for the extradition of Eichmann's deputy Alois Brunner, then living in Syria, for the murder of 130,000 Jews in German concentration camps.

[citation needed] In July 2001, Klarsfeld called for a demonstration in Berlin against the state visit of the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The French railway SNCF welcomed the project and displayed the pictures at 18 stations as a traveling exhibition (Enfants juifs Déportés de France).

At the end of 2006 Tiefensee and Mehdorn agreed to support a new, DB owned exhibition on the role of the Reichsbahn in World War II.

[citation needed] In October 2015, she was designated as UNESCO Honorary Ambassador and Special Envoys for Education about the Holocaust and the Prevention of Genocide.

"[44] In 1991, former Stasi officers Günter Bohnsack and Herbert Brehmer made public in an article for Der Spiegel that Klarsfeld received the "incriminating evidence against the former Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger" from East Germany.

[46] Klarsfeld confirmed that she was not an informer, she said the German Democratic Republic (GDR) offered her access to archives about Nazi criminals in Potsdam.

[47] On 7 March 2012, Welt online published under the article heading "2000 D-Mark for the famous German slap in the face" an internal statement of the SED Politburo member Albert Norden.

[49] Asked about the allegations, Klarsfeld called it outrageous to reduce her commitment for Kiesinger's Nazi past to support by East German officials.

[51] The managing director of Die Linke, Caren Lay, described it as an "absurd charge", to discredit Klarsfelds commitment as "commissioned by the GDR".

[50] The deputy chairman of the parliamentary faction Dietmar Bartsch said Klarsfeld sought to put the slap Kiesingers a sign, but achieved a great deal more.

He opposed equating GDR and Nazism, calling it legitimate that Klarsfeld was supported in her "fight against Nazis" by France, Israel, and also by East Germany.

Klarsfeld was against Joachim Gauck, whose candidacy of CDU / CSU, SPD, FDP and Greens had been supported and the 991 votes received.