Serge Klarsfeld

Serge Klarsfeld (born 17 September 1935) is a Romanian-born French activist and Nazi hunter known for documenting the Holocaust in order to establish the record and to enable the prosecution of war criminals. Since the 1960s, he has made notable efforts to commemorate the Jewish victims of German-occupied France and has been a supporter of Israel.

Serge Klarsfeld was born in Bucharest into a family of Romanian Jews that migrated to France before the Second World War began. In 1943, his father was arrested by the SS in Nice during a roundup ordered by Alois Brunner. Deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, Klarsfeld's father died there.

The young Serge was cared for in a home for Jewish children operated by the Œuvre de secours aux enfants, a French Jewish humanitarian organisation. His mother and sister also survived the war in Vichy France and were helped by the underground French Resistance beginning in late 1943.

He helped found and has led the Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France (Association des fils et filles des déportés juifs de France) or FFDJF. It is one of the groups that has documented cases and located former German and French officials for prosecution such as Klaus Barbie, René Bousquet, Jean Leguay, Maurice Papon and Paul Touvier, who had been implicated in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of French and foreign Jews during the Second World War. The Klarsfelds were among organised groups who filed cases decades after the war, sometimes as late as the 1990s, against such officials for crimes against humanity.

In the years before 1989 and the break-up of the Soviet Union, the Klarsfelds (Serge Klarsfeld and his wife Beate) frequently protested against the Eastern Bloc's support for the PLO and anti-Zionism.

Recognition for their work has included France's Legion of Honour in 1984. In 1986, their story was adapted as an American television film starring Tom Conti, Farrah Fawcett and Geraldine Page. In 2008, a French television movie was made about them.