by Alan Levy
‘In the moment when the Germans first came into my city in Galicia,’ he said in heavily accented but always eloquent English, ‘half the population was Jewish: one hundred fifty thousand Jews. When the Germans were gone, five hundred were alive. Five hundred in a hundred fifty thousand! One out of three hundred! Many times I was thinking that everything in life has a price, so to stay alive must also have a price. And my price was always that, if I lived, I must be deputy for many people who are not alive.’
We talked that day about his latest ‘clients’, as he calls Nazis he’s brought to justice; until they’re in custody, he labels them, with matching irony, ‘the heroes’. One of the clients – in Graz, Austria’s second-largest city – was pleading that he did only what everyone in his unit was doing, but Simon said: ‘Camaraderie ends when crime begins.’
Then we talked of ‘leftist fascism’ and how the Russians and their Stalinist puppets in Eastern Europe issued decrees with the same wording used by the Nazi occupiers. As Simon put it: ‘The world is round. If you go right, right, right, you come out on the left.’
We talked of his past and we talked of his unpaid helpers around the world. One, in Australia, was a nun: ‘I don’t ask her background, but I am sure it is maybe Jewish.’
He told of a fifteen-year search for ‘a very little killer’ he had just unearthed as a Buddhist monk in Katmandu: ‘I have heard what that life is like; he is either punished every day or he repents every day. So I will close his file. To bring such a man before a court can only build him sympathy.’
By the end of a couple of hours together, Simon and I were on a first-name basis – a relationship which, in Austria, can take years, or forever, to ripen. It was late afternoon and he offered me a ride home in his small car. On our way out, we met an elderly couple who averted their eyes and said nothing when Simon greeted them.
‘They are Jewish,’ he whispered when we were one landing down. ‘I meet them in the elevator and they are looking on me like I am their murderer.’
What had happened, he explained on the ride home, was a ‘blackmail letter’ campaign by ‘the heroes’ addressed to everybody in the building on Rudolfsplatz except Wiesenthal. The letter warned his fellow tenants that, ‘when the Documentation Centre is bombed, you and your apartments are likely to perish in the blast, too.’ All the neighbours – including the Jewish couple, who’d survived the death camps – had signed a petition and started a legal action to evict Wiesenthal as a threat to their security. (They succeeded a few months later, before die case ever came to court, when Simon moved one block away to the Salztorgasse.)
I invited him to my home for our next meeting. Whether or not he carries six million dead Jews on his coat-tails when he enters a room, there was something of a stage play or a grainy old black-and-white film about the way Wiesenthal bustles into any scene – as though something momentous is about to happen or be announced. My daughters, then ten and eleven, took his topcoat and hat. A minute or two later, one of them tiptoed into the living-room and whispered, ‘Daddy, that man has a gun in his pocket.’
I asked Simon and he said, yes, the police had told him, in lieu of a bodyguard he’d declined, to carry the snub-nosed revolver he now showed us and then pocketed in his tweed jacket. (My daughters always frisked his topcoat on subsequent visits and never again struck heavy metal.) He certainly had good reason to carry his own protection. The neo-Nazi World Union of National Socialists had recently put a price of $120,000 on his head – dead, not alive. As a fugitive in Bolivia, Klaus Barbie, ‘The Butcher of Lyon’, once inquired into paying for Wiesenthal’s assassination and, in Brazil, one of Dr Josef Mengele’s hosts offered to ‘put a steel cable to the leg of Simon Wiesenthal and drag his carcass behind my car.’ Later, Simon learned of a Palestine Liberation Organization plot to kidnap and kill him, but the world’s most notorious terrorist at the time – a mysterious Venezuelan named Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, but called ‘Carlos’ – was said to have vetoed the contract because the target was, after all, anti-fascist. Still later, in 1982, a bomb planted by neo-Nazis would destroy much of Simon’s modest home in a garden district of Vienna and shatter what was left of his wife’s health. (The following year, when Wiesenthal testified at their trial, one of the culprits leaped to his feet and tried to throttle him on the witness stand.)
Over vermouth and mineral water, he told how he’d been visited by an Austrian who’d served five years in the French Foreign Legion (fighting in the decisive Vietnamese battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954) and another four and a half years in an Austrian prison for rape. On the day he was freed, a man named Robert was waiting at the gate to offer him a job: 100,000 Deutschmarks (almost $35,000 at the time) to kill Wiesenthal.
The Legionnaire, having been ‘put on ice for four and a half years just for rape’, didn’t want to risk a murder rap, though he wasn’t averse to fraud. So he came to Wiesenthal and said: ‘I have been offered one hundred thousand marks to kill you. Maybe we can make a deal and split the money.’
‘You mean I die and my widow gets fifty thousand?’ Wiesenthal asked incredulously.
‘You don’t die. You don’t play dead,’ his caller assured him. He would meet with Robert and the four businessmen backing him – three Germans and an Austrian – and negotiate an advance. Then Wiesenthal would call a press conference and reveal plot and plotters. He and the Legionnaire would split the advance – and let the ‘heroes’ try to get their money back!
Wiesenthal agreed, but brought in the Austrian police, too. They infiltrated two meetings and took pictures. The ‘heroes’, it turned out, were playing the Legionnaire for a fool, too. Not only did they decline to give him an advance, but the eavesdropping ascertained they had no intention of paying him when the job was done, either. Nevertheless, Wiesenthal took them to court to put their plot on the public record. Both Robert and the native businessman fled Austria, as did the three Germans, who had been using false names.
‘The “heroes” are tired,’ Wiesenthal concluded. ‘I know it when they need outside help like a French Foreign Legionnaire to do their dirty work for them. But do you know something else? I am tired, too. I cannot teach my work to other people. There is nobody to succeed me, nobody left who is much younger, who would have my experience or could find out all that I carry in my head. But I will never retire . . . If I ever close my Centre here, I will have nothing to do but wait for my death. Besides, there are others waiting, too. For if I closed my office, it would be a Nazi holiday and a Jewish defeat – a defeat for humanity, a defeat for justice, too. And, believe me, the “heroes” will celebrate it as a victory – and they will begin again that much sooner.’
He denied he was ‘some kind of modern Don Quixote or Jewish James Bond. Yes, my work is an adventure, but there are no romantics about it. You could make thriller after thriller out of my files, but I am not like James Bond because the results are not immediate; they can come in years, they may take generations. And Don Quixote I am not. Yes, many times I am fighting against imagination or a world that doesn’t understand, but my fight is not without results.’
On his way out, he confided: ‘I will tell you a secret. For a man who was in a ghetto and in concentration camps and lost all his blood relatives, my biggest personal satisfaction is not in having a Nazi arrested. It comes when two Nazis have a quarrel and one threatens the other with “I will go to Simon Wiesenthal about you.” And he does! They are my best informers.’
At subsequent meetings, I was treated to a display of intellectual fireworks by a collector of circumstantial evidence on why, for example, Christopher Columbus’s crew had to be on board the Pinta, the Nina, and the Santa Maria a day ahead of schedule and why Hitler hated the Jews. On the latter, Wiesenthal had this to say:
‘I am sure Hitler had syphilis. His paranoia in the last days of the war was typical of a man with syphilis. I have the feeling – though I have no real evidence for it yet – that he contracted this syphilis in the time he was in Vienn
a before the war. I have been reading all these people like Joachim Fest and others who write books about Hitler that are supposed to tell you all, but in thousands of pages I see not one single word about the sickness of Hitler.’
Actually, the 1960 revised edition of Alan Bullock’s Hitler: A Study in Tyranny did allude to his catching a venereal disease from a prostitute, but Wiesenthal first heard the theory propounded in the mid-sixties in Munich by a City Councilman named Fackler, who said he’d heard it from Ernst Hanfstaengel, a Harvard-educated local Nazi to whose country home Hitler fled after his abortive Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. According to Hanfstaengel, his good friend Hitler told him that, as a lance-corporal fighting in Flanders’ fields in the First World War, he’d nearly been court-martialled for ‘self-mutilation’ when syphilis was diagnosed, but had escaped trial by proving he already had the condition before entering the Bavarian Army and therefore hadn’t done anything new in the war to jeopardize his military service.
In Albert Speer’s later years, Hitler’s master builder and diarist of Nazi times had struck up what could not be called a friendship, but a research relationship with Wiesenthal.3 So Simon didn’t hesitate to try out his theory on Speer, whose reply came from Heidelberg in an elegant envelope with an ‘A.S.’ monogram and no return address:
I can’t answer your question completely. Hitler in my presence never spoke of a syphilitic disease, though this does not mean he might not have had one some time earlier. What I can tell you is that his private doctor, Theo Morrell, used to hang his shingle on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin as ‘Specialist in Skin and Venereal Diseases’. From the moment he became the chief official physician of Hitler in 1936, however, that listing of his specialty disappeared.
This intrigued Wiesenthal, who told me: ‘I am working on it in my spare time. If I can find a solution in another five or ten years, I would be very happy because this would give the whole story of Hitler and the Jews a different picture.’
‘But where do the Jews enter that picture?’ I asked him.
‘Ah!’ said Simon, slapping his knee. ‘I haven’t told you something else. A few years ago, I have a talk with a man who went to school with Hitler. I ask him what Hitler was like in school and he says, “Normal. But maybe this hatred began after he got this infection from a Jewish whore.” . . . So I am looking now for names and details. I am just in the first stages, but I am telling you that if I can find out with evidence that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was the aftermath of an infection from a Jewish prostitute, then all the Nazi racial theories sink a layer lower in the sewer. All the Nazis were anti-Semites, but hardly any of them had any personal experience with Jews. If Hitler did, this gives an answer to why he hated Jews the way he did.’
When I met him, Wiesenthal’s research had brought him in contact with an expatriate physician, Edmund Ronald, then living in Portugal. In the early 1950s, while working in a Seattle hospital, Dr Ronald had met a young Austrian doctor from Graz who said his late father, also a doctor, had treated Hitler for syphilis long ago. After Austria had been annexed by Germany in 1938, Gestapo agents had confiscated all of his father’s files on that particular patient, but the father had informed his son that Hitler told him he’d caught the disease from a Jewish prostitute before World War I. Though Dr Ronald gave Wiesenthal the name of his source, the young doctor from Graz later settled in the US and has not proved traceable.
In 1977, there was a medical debate over whether Hitler was sterile or impotent and Dr Ronald wrote from Bordighera, Italy, to the International Herald Tribune that
Hitler was rather unlucky in his sexual affairs. He caught – according to Dr Anwyl-Davies, the eminent London venereologist – syphilis from a Jewish prostitute in Vienna in 1910 and had to have anti-syphilitic treatment on and off for the next twenty years and it is not certain that he [was] ever completely cured.
Dr Ronald, who subsequently died, went on to note that Hitler’s love affair with his Viennese niece, Angela ‘Geli’ Raubal, ended with her unexplained suicide in 1931 at the age of twenty-three. Wiesenthal suspects she killed herself after her uncle infected her with syphilis.
Wiesenthal’s work on Christopher Columbus had been more concentrated and productive. ‘In my research on anti-Semitism throughout history,’ he explained, ‘when I concentrated on the Spanish Inquisition, I discovered an amazing coincidence. The two most important events of 1492 – both of which determined the entire future of Spanish history and much of world history – were the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and the discovery of America. All Jews had to be off Spanish soil by midnight of August second.
‘Now Columbus didn’t sail for “India”, as they called all of Asia in those days, until August third, as scheduled. But his sailors had orders to report on the night of the second. This was not customary: a sailor’s last night in port was sacred to him and was usually spent with his family or girlfriend before he came on board next day. I asked myself why.
‘The tides weren’t right for an earlier departure. And why did Columbus personally supervise the roll-call? So I began to look at the roll he called. One tenth of his crew was Jews; some of them, I learned later, may have been rabbis. But, even though nine-tenths of the crew wasn’t Jewish, there was no priest aboard. Very unusual at sea!
‘Then I am looking into the financing of his voyage. This business of Queen Isabella hocking her jewels to pay for it is all legend. With the help of Marrano ministers of hers, the mission was entirely financed by Jewish money.’ A Marrano (from the Spanish word for ‘pig’ or ‘damned’) was a Jew who, in Wiesenthal’s words, ‘outwardly pretended to be a Christian, but secretly remained a Jew’, while a Converso was ‘a convert who broke off all relations with Jews and assimilated’. Both were suspect. It had been the discovery of Marranos partaking of a Passover seder in 1478 that led to the creation of the Spanish Inquisition, which used the rack, the pyre, the wheel, branding-irons and blinding-rods as well as bizarre pure-blood laws (direct ancestors of Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws of racial purity) to get to the very bottom of a victim’s religious beliefs.
‘I began to ask myself,’ Simon went on, ‘why the Jews financed Columbus when all others had refused for years. Who was he and what did the Jews want from him?’
Cristoforo Colombo (1451–1506), an Italian mariner known to Spaniards as Christóbal Colón, came from a family of ‘Spanish Jews settled in Genoa’, according to his contemporary biographer, Salvadore de Madariaga, who believes the Colóns converted to Christianity during Spanish persecutions in the fourteenth century. Around 1479, Columbus married a Portuguese noblewoman of Marrano descent. After some preliminary study, Wiesenthal went to Spain to examine materials preserved in the Biblioteca Columbina (Columbus Library) in Seville. In the archives, Simon found a dozen intimate letters from Columbus to his son, Diego. All of them bore not just the obligatory cross at the top, but also a strange boat-like symbol in the upper left-hand corner.
With the help of an American Jewish scholar named Maurice David, Wiesenthal deciphered it as two Hebrew characters, beth and hei, standing for baruch hashem, meaning Praised be the Lord. It was, Wiesenthal thinks, Columbus’s way of reminding his son: ‘Do not forget where you come from. The cross is a tribute to the religion you now follow, but within the circle of your family give the sign beth hei, so that they remember their origins.’ In one of the letters, Wiesenthal adds, he discussed with Diego the possibility of marriage to a Marrano.
‘I spent a lot of time in Seville,’ Wiesenthal went on. ‘I had in my hands all his writings that have survived – not just letters, but books he had read, with his jottings in the margins, and books he valued enough to have copied for himself at his own expense: usually by hand, because this was very soon after Gutenberg.4 Now why would you imagine that a Christian sailor five hundred years ago would make a copy of a work by Rabbi Samuel Jehudi urging Jews to accept conversion, even forced baptism? There were just too many coincidences.
‘In all, I find two hundred
and fifty references by Columbus to Jews. He knew the Jewish calendar, the Jewish prophets, and his diary showed a deep knowledge of Jewish history. The beliefs of Columbus were a mixture of Christianity and Judaism. In a book of history by Pope Pius the Second, he makes a marginal note that the year 1481’s Jewish equivalent was 5241. He writes that Adam lived to be one hundred fifty years old and, when he tells how the Second Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed in the year Seventy by the Romans, he calls it Casa secunda, the Second House. Only Jews use that phrase; in no non-Jewish publication have I ever met this idiom, Second House.
‘But the most important marginal note I find is the one that tells me Columbus knows the diary of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, who travelled in the east three centuries before him and came to the conclusion that the ten lost tribes of Israel were in “India”. I have this book in my own library. So now I go back to the register of the crew and look a little closer. Not only are there a number of Jewish names, but later I learn that several in Columbus’s crew spoke Hebrew and a couple of them may have been rabbis. And who was the interpreter on board? Luis de Torres, who had been interpreter for the Governor of Murcia, which had a large Jewish population. It took me two weeks to confirm that Luis de Torres had been the governor’s interpreter of Hebrew. Now the only possible explanation of this is that Columbus expected to reach countries in which Jews lived and governed.’
From research on Columbus that began around 1965, Wiesenthal was convinced ‘that the Jews, concerned about their deteriorating situation in Spain,5 were looking for a homeland, a place to flee to, where they would find a protector. And so, in the belief that the ten lost tribes had found refuge in “India”, they financed the expedition of Columbus: a man they could trust.’ Simon says Columbus was surely a Converso and quite likely a Marrano: ‘I am convinced he was following the Law of Moses. But I’m not saying to the bitter end that I’m sure he’s Jewish. I make the matter open.’
