Die Neue Zeit
1st March 2012, 02:06
http://en.europeonline-magazine.eu/left-party-nominates-nazi-hunter-for-german-presidency_193257.html
Berlin (dpa) - Germany‘s opposition Left Party on Monday nominated Beate Klarsfeld, a veteran Nazi-hunter, for the country‘s presidency, ensuring a two-candidate race for the appointment next month.
Klarsfeld, 73, has no real chance of beating Joachim Gauck, 72, who has been nominated by Chancellor Angela Merkel‘s ruling coalition together with two opposition parties. The appointment is to be made by an assembly of 1,240 public figures including all the Bundestag.
She and her husband, Frenchman Serge Klarsfeld, have devoted their lives to privately tracking down Nazis who took part in the Holocaust but returned to postwar life without being brought to justice, and tipping off authorities so they could be arrested.
In Paris, Klarsfeld welcomed the nomination by the Left Party national executive as "wonderful."
"I‘ve was just told that the nomination was unanimous," she told dpa. The party said on its website that two other potential nominees had withdrawn.
The presidency, a largely ceremonial post, is vacant after Christian Wulff resigned because prosecutors were investigating whether he accepted favours as a state premier from a wealthy businessman.
Gauck, a former Lutheran pastor with a strongly anti-communist, pro-freedom message, is practically assured of election on the first ballot, with the opposition Social Democrats and Greens supporting him and only the Left publicly opposed to his election.
The Klarsfelds‘ most celebrated success was to track down Klaus Barbie, a former Gestapo officer known as the "Butcher of Lyon," who was living in Bolivia in the 1970s under an alias.
In 1983, he was arrested and extradited to France, where he was convicted of crimes against humanity in occupied Lyon between 1942 and 1944. Barbie died of leukaemia four years into his life imprisonment.
Klarsfeld was born in Berlin and moved to Paris in 1960 as an au-pair, where she met her future husband, who is Jewish and whose father was deported to Auschwitz during World War II.
In Germany, she shot to prominence when she publicly slapped West German Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger in 1968. Klarsfeld accused him of having been a Nazi propagandist.
She was sentenced to one year in prison for the attack but the sentence was later reduced to four months and suspended.
Klarsfeld spoke of her "great satisfaction" that, despite her strong pro-Israeli views, she had won the endorsement of the Left, which has been critical of Israel.
Berlin (dpa) - Germany‘s opposition Left Party on Monday nominated Beate Klarsfeld, a veteran Nazi-hunter, for the country‘s presidency, ensuring a two-candidate race for the appointment next month.
Klarsfeld, 73, has no real chance of beating Joachim Gauck, 72, who has been nominated by Chancellor Angela Merkel‘s ruling coalition together with two opposition parties. The appointment is to be made by an assembly of 1,240 public figures including all the Bundestag.
She and her husband, Frenchman Serge Klarsfeld, have devoted their lives to privately tracking down Nazis who took part in the Holocaust but returned to postwar life without being brought to justice, and tipping off authorities so they could be arrested.
In Paris, Klarsfeld welcomed the nomination by the Left Party national executive as "wonderful."
"I‘ve was just told that the nomination was unanimous," she told dpa. The party said on its website that two other potential nominees had withdrawn.
The presidency, a largely ceremonial post, is vacant after Christian Wulff resigned because prosecutors were investigating whether he accepted favours as a state premier from a wealthy businessman.
Gauck, a former Lutheran pastor with a strongly anti-communist, pro-freedom message, is practically assured of election on the first ballot, with the opposition Social Democrats and Greens supporting him and only the Left publicly opposed to his election.
The Klarsfelds‘ most celebrated success was to track down Klaus Barbie, a former Gestapo officer known as the "Butcher of Lyon," who was living in Bolivia in the 1970s under an alias.
In 1983, he was arrested and extradited to France, where he was convicted of crimes against humanity in occupied Lyon between 1942 and 1944. Barbie died of leukaemia four years into his life imprisonment.
Klarsfeld was born in Berlin and moved to Paris in 1960 as an au-pair, where she met her future husband, who is Jewish and whose father was deported to Auschwitz during World War II.
In Germany, she shot to prominence when she publicly slapped West German Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger in 1968. Klarsfeld accused him of having been a Nazi propagandist.
She was sentenced to one year in prison for the attack but the sentence was later reduced to four months and suspended.
Klarsfeld spoke of her "great satisfaction" that, despite her strong pro-Israeli views, she had won the endorsement of the Left, which has been critical of Israel.