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Serge (September 17, 1935, Bucharest, Romania) and Beate (February 13, 1939, Berlin, Germany) Klarsfeld, French researchers engaging in Holocaust documentation and anti-Nazi activism. The couple, married in 1963, live in Paris.

Serge Klarsfeld, a Jew, spent the war years in France. In 1943, his father was abducted by the SS in Nice during a roundup ordered by Alois Brunner, and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was gassed. Young Serge was cared for in a home for Jewish children operated by the OSE (Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants) organization; his mother and sister also survived the war.

Beate was born Beate Künzel, the daughter of a Wehrmacht soldier. In 1966 she was fired from her job at the Deutsch-Französisches Jugendwerk (Franco-German Alliance for Youth) after she started campaigning against the then West German Chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger for his Nazi past. She gained international attention when she slapped Kiesinger in 1968, for which she was sentenced to a year in prison, though the sentence was suspended.

In August 1970 she was arrested in Warsaw by the Communist Polish authorities and thrown out of Poland for protesting against alleged Polish antisemitism.

In West Germany in 1971, the Klarsfelds tried to abduct Kurt Lischka (Deputy Chief of Police in France 1940 - 1943) from West Germany to France (where he was sentenced in absentia in 1950 to lifetime forced labour). Beate Klarsfeld was charged with assault and battery and coercion and was sentenced to two months in prison; the sentence was suspended after international interventions and protests. Lischka remained unchallenged until his sentence in 1980.

The Klarsfelds were the targets of car bombing at their home in France on July 9, 1979. No one was in the car when the bomb detonated, and no one was injured in the blast. Individuals purporting to represent the pro-Nazi ODESSA secret international organization took credit for the attack and demanded that the Klarsfelds stop pursuing (former) Nazis.

Serge Klarsfeld was arrested in West Germany and Syria when he pursued extradition proceedings against Alois Brunner. The Klarsfelds were involved in seeking prosecution for Klaus Barbie, René Bousquet, Jean Leguay, Maurice Papon and Paul Touvier for their wartime deeds.

In 1984, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld were awarded France's Legion of Honor by President Mitterrand.

The Klarsfelds campaigned against former United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, elected President of Austria in 1986 amid allegations that he covered up his wartime activities as an officer in the Wehrmacht. Despite the accusations brought forward by the Klarsfeld couple, hard evidence that Waldheim committed specific war crimes was never found, although the belief did persist that Waldheim's past left him subject to blackmail.

Serge and Beate Klarsfeld are known internationally for their anti-Nazi activities and protests of racism. In 1996, they joined the outcry against Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić for alleged war crimes and genocide in the former Yugoslavia. The Klarsfelds' support for the State of Israel has been condemned by anti-Zionists.

The Klarsfelds' anti-Nazi campaign was dramatized in a 1986 film entitled Nazi Hunter: The Beate Klarsfeld Story. Their activities have been called too harsh and too rashly condemning by several courts in Western Europe. Likewise, there has been criticism against the Klarsfelds' activism methods by other Nazi hunters and government officials.

• The Children of Izieu: A Human Tragedy. New York: Harry N. Abrams Publishers, 1985. ISBN 0-8109-2307-6 Translation of Les enfants d'Izieu (1985)
• French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial. New York: New York University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-8147-2662-3 Translation of Le mémorial des enfants juifs déportés de France (1995)

• Nazi hunter
• Simon Wiesenthal
• Efraim Zuroff
• Tuviah Friedman Institute of Documentation Haifa Israel

• The Klarsfeld Foundation (biographies and chronology of activities)
• http://www.systemkritik.de/bmuhl/forschung/brd/hartmut_mehdorn.html Excerpts from the Judicial Activities of the Human Rights Activist and System Critics Bernd Michael Uhl in respect to the refusal of the Deutsche Bahn director Hartmnut Mehdorn to present on railway stations of the FRG the documentation about the train deportations into the Nazi concentration camps