Welcome to Nevek-Klarsfeld

Welcome to NEVEKLARSFELD, the unique website that permits you access to details concerning over 350,000 Jews of Greater Hungary and their fate during and following the Holocaust.

The data may provide opportunities to find links to many of the second and third generation.

This is the website that the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation has realized, based on the published series of Nevek which is an ongoing project over the last decade, under the direction of Serge Klarsfeld.

The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation was created in New York in 1979 by an intimate group of the supporters of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld's efforts in the prosecution of Nazi war criminals first in Germany, Latin America and later their collaborators in France; the struggle against anti-semitism wherever it may be and the strong support of the State of Israel.

In 1976 the Klarsfeld campaigned in Cologne for indictments of Lischka and his accomplices who deported the 75,000 Jews from France, and in Schleswig for the trial of SS leaders who deported 25,000 Jews from Belgium, Ernst Ehlers, wartime head of the Nazi police in Belgium, and Kurt Asche, head of the anti-Jewish department of the Gestapo in Brussels. When tracked down by the Klarsfelds, Ehlers was serving as a judge in the Administrative Court of the West German state of Schleswig-Holstein.

The Klarsfelds demonstrated in West Germany against the neo-Nazi party known as the Deutsche-Volks-Union. Serge became the first Jew to be publicly beaten in Germany since the war, when he leaped on the stage at a neo-Nazi rally in the Burgebraukeller hall in Munich and demanded that the rally allow a Jew to speak. The incident provoked public shame of dramatic proportions in West Germany, and the Munich meetings ceased.

In 1977 Serge was arrested in Frankfurt on charges stemming from his campaign to bring Kurt Lischka to trlal.

In 1979 Kurt Lischka, Herbert Hagen and Ernst Heinrichsohn deputy to Lischka in organizing the deportations, finally go on trial in a German in Cologne for their crimes against Jews in France. Among the lawyers in the courtroom was Serge Klarsfeld, representing hundreds of Jewish families whose members were deported to their deaths by the three former Nazi officials. Serge Klarsfeld was the source for much of the evidence presented in the court. Hundreds of French Jews travelled to Cologne to attend the court's session. At the end of Serge's summation, one of Hagen's lawyers came up to Serge and shook his hand, and was immediately fired. In 1980 the three Nazi criminals were convicted and sentenced to prison.

Concurrent with their activities in the domain of prosecution of Nazi war criminals the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation began its monumental activities in the commemoration of the names of the victims of the Holocaust. One by one the fate of the 75,000 individual Jews deported from France convoy by convoy based on the original typed lists prepared for each deportation train was documented.

The Memorial to the Deported Jews of France was published first in French in 1978 and then in English. The Memorial contained the family names, first names, place of date of birth and nationality of each deportee. A new version updated with the last known address of each of the victims will appear before the end of 2002.

In 1980 after four years of agitation by Serge and members of the Belgian Jewish community a West German court in Kiel prepared to open the trial of Ernst Ehlers and Kurt Asche, heads of the Gestapo's anti-Jewish section in Brussels. On the eve of the trial, Ehlers commited suicide. Asche a key figure in the organization of the Jewish deportations from Belgium was convicted after a trial lasting six months and was sentenced to seven years in prison. The depth of the Nazi crime against Jews in Belgium is documented by the Memorial to the 25,124 Jews deported from Belgium was published by the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation.

In 1989 eight missing deportation lists were found by Serge in Prague, completing the research information he needed for publication of his Memorial to the Jews Deported from Bohemia-Moravia.

In 1991 inspired by Serge's 1978 Memorial Book of Jews Deported from France, the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation supported the publication of the Memorial to the Jews Deported from Italy.

In 1994 Paul Touvier faced justice in a Versailles courtroom for his execution of seven Jews in 1944 while a leader of the armed Vichy Milice in Lyons. Touvier was the first Frenchman to be convicted of crimes against humanity and was given the maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

Serge published "The Memorial to Jewish Children Deported from France". 11,400 children were seized by French police and deported to the Nazi death camps. Only 300 of these children were found alive in 1945. Some of these children died nameless too young to tell anyone who they were and some thirty five years after the war their names were still unknown. Photographs of an additional thousand were found later and published in a supplement. A new updated version of the book has recently been published in French.

Over a decade ago the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation under the strong impetus of Serge Klarsfeld undertook a monumental commemoration task: the acquisition and publication of the names of more than 600,000 Jews who were deported from Greater Hungary. In 1989 together with Dr. Gavriel Bar-Shaked Serge Klarsfeld travelled to Budapest to continue the quest for the acquisition of the original deportation lists.

This web-site is the culmination of five volumes published to date in the Nevek Series and their Indices. We are currently engaged in the publication of the names of the deported Jews from the Bekes county. We hope that later in this year we will succeed in publishing the lists from the county of Szolnok and the comprehensive list of the Jews deported from Greater Hungary to the Mauthausen Concentration Camp.

The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation will continue to put at the disposal of those interested in documenting the fate of Hungarian Jewry during the Holocaust all those lists which we were able to acquire and computerize. We will consider that the task of the Nevek Project is complete only when the fate of the Last Jew has been put to paper and made available to the public.

nevek@barak-online.net

http://www.klarsfeld.org