Macron honours Franco-German Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld

French President Emmanuel Macron has honoured renowned Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, who for years worked to bring Nazi war criminals to justice, with high French honours during his state visit to Germany on Monday.

The Franco-German couple received the honours during Macron's visit to the French embassy in Berlin on Monday.

With their decades of commitment, the Klarsfelds had ensured that those responsible for the persecution of the Jews were convicted and that the victims were given a face and a lasting memory, said Macron.

Beate Klarsfeld, an 85-year-old German citizen, was appointed Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, while her husband, 88-year-old French citizen Serge Klarsfeld, received the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour.

"They are fighters for remembrance and fighters for justice. They have fought against forgetting and for the victims of the Holocaust to once again become the subject of history," said Macron, adding that the pair had enabled both France and Germany "to look their history in the face."

The Klarsfelds were responsible for exposing Nazi criminals in hiding. In the 1970s, for example, they tracked down the former head of the Nazi secret police, Klaus Barbie, who was living in hiding in Bolivia.

The Gestapo chief's brutality during the Nazi occupation of France earned him the nickname of "The Butcher of Lyon."

Alongside Simon Wiesenthal, the Klarsfelds are probably the best-known hunters of Nazi criminals.

Beate Klarsfeld met Serge, the son of a Jew murdered in Auschwitz, in 1960 while working as an au pair in Paris.

Both authored numerous publications, including a volume on more than 80,000 victims of Nazi persecution in France. They also compiled information and photos of France's murdered Jewish children in another monumental book.

The couple, who live in Paris, were awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2015 and have received numerous other honours for their decades-long commitment to the memory of Nazi crimes and against anti-Semitism.

Beate Klarsfeld is also well-known in Germany for slapping then-German chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a former Nazi Party member, during an appearance in Berlin on November 7, 1968.

Klarsfeld attacked the chancellor to draw attention to his Nazi past, which included work in the broadcasting department of Hitler's Reich Foreign Ministry during World War II.

"Her fight against forgetting has changed Germany's conscience," Macron said of Beate Klarsfeld's lifelong work.

Macron also credited Serge Klarsfeld's tireless efforts for providing evidence of the complicity of the French authorities with the Nazis in the persecution of the Jews.