In 1968, a young German woman walked onto a West Berlin convention stage and slapped Chancellor Kurt-Georg Kiesinger, shouting Nazi. Born in Berlin in 1939 to parents who voted for the regime, Beate Klarsfeld was apolitical until she moved to Paris, met French historian Serge Klarsfeld, and became what she called a German of conscience.

This deep dive traces her transformation into a relentless investigator of war criminals, from exposing Kiesinger's propaganda past to the attempted kidnapping of Kurt Lischka, the hunt for Klaus Barbie, and her fight against institutional forgetting, alongside the Cold War controversy over Stasi archival help.

• The archival research that documented Kiesinger's Nazi-era propaganda role
• Why she chose a symbolic slap staged in legally distinct West Berlin
• The Lischka double-jeopardy l ...