Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  In the jeep, Schmidt began to cry. ‘I was only a little person,’ he blubbered. ‘I just obeyed orders. Why pick on me and let the big fish swim free? I’ve done nothing wrong. I swear to you: I risked my own neck just to help prisoners.’

  Now the ex-prisoner he had just helped down the stairs turned on Schmidt with a sarcastic snarl: ‘Yes, you helped prisoners. I saw you often. You helped them on the way to the crematorium.’ Schmidt was silent for the rest of the trip.

  When Austria was partitioned for a decade by the Americans, British, French, and Russians, Mauthausen fell into the Soviet military zone of occupation. The US War Crimes Office moved its operations across the Danube to Linz, the capital city of the province of Upper Austria. Mauthausen inmates working for the Americans were lodged in a Displaced Persons camp in the public school of Leonding, a small town near Linz. That school was where Adolf Hitler had begun his education, and Wiesenthal remembers: ‘We slept on cots in a classroom whose windows looked out on a small house that was the former home of Hitler’s parents. They were buried in the cemetery at the end of the road. I didn’t particularly like the view from the room and moved out of the school after a few days. I rented a modest furnished room on the Landstrasse in Linz. Not much of a room, really, but from the window I could see a small garden.’

  By taking that room with a view at Landstrasse 40, Wiesenthal had once again jumped from frying-pan to fire. Not only was his new address conveniendy just two doors up from the War Crimes Office at Landstrasse 36, but it was only two more doors away from Landstrasse 32, the house where one Adolf Eichmann – born in the German city of Solingen thirty-nine years earlier – had spent his youth and where his father and stepmother still lived. They were known as the ‘Elektro’ Eichmanns, for Karl Adolf Eichmann, head of Linz’s electric streetcar works for many years, now owned an electrical appliance store there.

  Having begun to hear from Hungarian Jews at Mauthausen about Adolf Eichmann as the driving force behind their deportations, Wiesenthal was one of the first on his trail. At Simon’s behest, the Americans searched the father’s house and found no traces of the eldest child. When they sought a photo of the prodigal son – considered the least successful of the five Eichmann offspring – there wasn’t any. Besides, Adolf Eichmann had taken care never to discuss his work or encourage picture-taking.

  On 1 August, Wiesenthal received a tip that Eichmann was hiding at house number 8 in Fischerndorf, a section of the village of Alt Aussee, near the war’s last SS redoubt. He notified Army Counter-Intelligence (CIC), which asked the Austrian police to bring Eichmann in. The police went by mistake to number 38, where they found an SS captain named Anton Burger with a formidable cache of weapons and ammunition. They arrested him and called it a day’s work well done.

  Burger, a former deputy commandant of the Theresienstadt concentration camp at Terezín in what had been (and was again) Czechoslovakia, had also served on Eichmann’s staff. Wiesenthal often cites this case of mistaken identity as an example of the postwar chaos with hot-and cold-running SS men seemingly lurking behind every door. But he was not too surprised, for so much Nazi loot was hidden in the Ausseerland that its population of 18,000 in 1944 had more than quadrupled in 1945. ‘Allowing for a few thousand German soldiers,’ Wiesenthal wondered, ‘who were these sixty thousand civilians who’d arrived during the months before the collapse of the Third Reich?’ The answer was that the people who’d known where the bodies were buried now knew where the SS’s stolen treasure was buried – and wanted to stay close to it.

  When Wiesenthal learned that the Austrians had netted Burger instead of the bigger fish he was seeking, he asked the CIC to do the job itself. An American agent went to Fischerndorf 8 and found a woman named Veronika Liebl, which happened to be Frau Adolf Eichmann’s maiden name. Yes, she was the same Veronika Liebl, she said, but she’d divorced her husband in Prague that April and hadn’t seen him since. She had their three sons – Klaus, Dieter, and Horst – with her and wouldn’t say why she had divorced their father. Wiesenthal told the CIC she bore watching in case her ‘ex-husband’ paid a visit.

  In Linz, Wiesenthal worked mornings for the War Crimes Office and afternoons for a new Jewish Committee, of which he became vice-chairman. Later, its two rooms became the headquarters of the Jewish Central Committee for the US Zone in Austria – and a Mecca for displaced Jews asking the eternal question after a disaster: ‘Who else is alive?’ But unlike an earthquake or even a nuclear attack, the Holocaust had scattered its survivors and victims across the map of Europe, with most records of them strewn to the wind, destroyed, or non-existent.

  The same chaos and lack of communications enabled the criminals who had torn these families apart, usually forever, to live in American custody under their own names, as Dr Josef Mengele and Franz Stangl did, or under such pseudonyms as ‘Memling’ for Mengele and ‘Lieutenant Eckmann’ for Colonel Eichmann. And it meant that the tide of human misery and eternal hope would drive many of these refugees behind what would not formally be identified as an Iron Curtain until 5 March 1946 (by Sir Winston Churchill in a speech in Fulton, Missouri), but was already enmeshing much of Eastern Europe and enveloping hundreds of thousands of innocents in its swirls even before Hitler’s machinery had ground to a halt.

  As with all of Wiesenthal’s postwar organizations, the Jewish Committee’s basic function was making lists, not righting wrongs. From information can come justice – which is why the Soviets were suppressing facts. Survivors who came to Wiesenthal to ask after loved ones or friends were asked where they were from. Lists of known survivors, arranged by city or town, were compiled at Committee headquarters. Wiesenthal and his colleagues worked nights transcribing names from all sources while, outside their door, anxious people waited in line all night for what Wiesenthal called ‘a glance that might mean hope or despair’. Sometimes, there were brawls and scuffles and once, in a fight for the same fist, two men tore it up. On another occasion, two men in fine argued impatiently over who was next to see a list that a third man was studying. When it became a face-to-face confrontation, they suddenly embraced – for they were brothers who had been seeking each other for weeks.

  Wiesenthal recalls ‘moments of silent despair when someone discovered that the person he was looking for had been there only a few days before, looking for him. They had missed each other. Where should one look now? Others scanned the lists of survivors, hoping against hope to find the names of people they had seen killed before their very eyes. Everybody had heard of some miracle.’

  Wiesenthal, who at that time hardly believed in God, rabbis, or miracles, seldom studied his lists, for ‘I had no hope my wife was alive. When I thought of her, I thought of her body lying under a heap of rubble and I wondered whether they had found the bodies and buried her. In a moment of illogical hope, I wrote to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. They promptly answered that my wife was dead.’

  Knowing that his mother had no grave in the ashes of Belzec, he hoped that at least his wife did. A decent burial had become an ambition – even an obsession – to Wiesenthal when, on work details in Lemberg, he was marched past the German soldiers’ cemetery where ‘on each grave there was planted a sunflower, as straight as a soldier on parade.’ (This theme would give thrust and title to his best book, The Sunflower, in 1970.)

  One night in the summer of 1945, while working on the list of survivors from Cracow, he came across the name and address of a former high-school classmate of his and Cyla’s from Buczacz: a Dr Biener. Wiesenthal wrote a letter to Cracow, telling Biener that Cyla was dead. Just in case her body still lay beneath the ruins of Topiel Street number 5 in Warsaw, some 150 miles away, would Biener please go there and see what he could find? Since there was no postal service to Poland, Wiesenthal gave the letter to an illegal courier who specialized in moving mail across Czechoslovakia to Poland for a price.

  Cyla Wiesenthal’s welcome to Poland was typical of the times. After crossing the fronti
er from Czechoslovakia at Bohumin, she and her friend boarded a night train to Lvov. The train went as far as Cracow before a four-hour delay was announced. In the Cracow station, Cyla’s suitcase – containing everything she owned – was stolen.

  To cheer Cyla up, her companion suggested they take a stroll through the medieval city, miraculously spared a few months earlier. Mined and wired for destruction by the retreating Germans, Cracow had survived when Polish partisans cut the main detonator cable at the very last minute. Glorious Cracow, however, was foggy and dreary that summer morning – until Cyla heard her name being called. Out of the fog stepped a dentist named Landek, whom she and Simon had known in Lvov. Landek ‘knew’ that Simon was dead and expressed his condolences. Then he told Cyla that perhaps Dr Biener might know more about how her husband met his end.

  ‘Dr Biener from Buczacz?’ said Cyla. ‘Is he in Cracow?’

  ‘He lives five minutes from here,’ Landek told her, giving her the address.

  Reaching Dr Biener’s home, Cyla asked her friend to wait downstairs so she could receive the grim details of Simon’s demise in private. Then she climbed up three flights and rang a bell marked BIENER.

  When Dr Biener answered, he knew he was seeing a ghost, so he slammed the door in her face.

  Cyla had come prepared to be upset, but not rebuffed. Pounding on the door, she shouted: ‘Open up! It’s Cyla! Cyla Wiesenthal! Cyla Müller from Buczacz! Simon’s wife!’

  Dr Biener opened the door cautiously and said: ‘But you’re dead. I just got a letter.’

  ‘I’m very much alive,’ Cyla assured him. ‘You’d look half-dead, too, if you’d had the train ride I’d had.’

  Dr Biener let her in and explained: ‘Yesterday, I had a letter from your husband. Simon says you died when the Germans destroyed your house in Warsaw.’

  Now it was Cyla’s turn to blanch: ‘Simon? But he’s been dead for more than a year.’

  ‘Then who is writing to me from Linz?’ Biener responded. ‘Here, read his letter.’

  Cyla called to her travelling companion to come upstairs and pinch her in case she was dreaming.

  Simon Wiesenthal has believed in miracles ever since: ‘If my letter hadn’t reached Dr Biener the day before, if Cyla’s train hadn’t been delayed, if she hadn’t gone for that walk, if she hadn’t met Landek, if Dr Biener hadn’t been at home, then the two women would have gone back to the station and continued their journey to Russia. Cyla might have wound up anywhere in the Soviet Union and it would have taken years to find her again, let alone get her out of there.’

  It was much harder to send letters from Cracow to Linz than in the other direction. While Cyla was writing three identical letters to Simon, Dr Biener hunted up illegal couriers who wanted payment in advance, but wouldn’t guarantee delivery. Only one of the letters ever arrived: the one that went the longest way around – via Budapest.

  It took five weeks, but it will take more than Simon Wiesenthal’s lifetime for him to forget the moment he saw his wife’s familiar handwriting on an unexpected letter from the ‘dead’.

  By then, Simon’s employer was the office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency) in Linz. His captain wouldn’t give him permission to travel through the Soviet military zone to fetch his wife because he possessed so much confidential knowledge of American security. The OSS did arrange travel documents for Cyla, but since there was no postal communication, someone very reliable would have to take them to her.

  A friend from the Jewish Committee, Dr Felix Weisberg, a PhD from Cracow, offered to be Cyla’s escort. His romantic mission was as fraught with fear and miscalculation as any in Romeo and Juliet. Crossing Czechoslovakia, Weisberg saw an NKVD road-block up ahead and was warned it was ‘very strict’. Fearing what the Russians might do to anyone carrying Amerikansky dokumenty, Weisberg destroyed them. But the NKVD didn’t even search him, and it was only after he was safely past that he realized he had destroyed Cyla’s Cracow address and couldn’t remember it at all.

  Undaunted, Weisberg made his way to Cracow and posted a notice on the bulletin board of the Jewish Committee there: ‘Would Cyla Wiesenthal please get in touch with Dr Felix Weisberg, who will take her to her husband in Linz?’

  Since a good many people wanted to get out of Poland by then, three women showed up claiming to be Mrs Simon Wiesenthal. ‘Poor Felix Weisberg!’ says Wiesenthal. ‘He had a bigger problem than the judgement of Paris. He didn’t know my wife. I hadn’t given him any physical description of her. Very easy could he have brought back the wrong Mrs Wiesenthal.’

  The woman who told the straightest story was the one Weisberg liked the best, so he bought false travel papers for her on the black market and brought her safely to Linz. There he made her wait outside while he explained all his difficulties at great length and with profuse apologies to Simon, concluding: ‘I lost my wife in the war. If this one isn’t yours, I’ll marry her myself.’

  But when Cyla Müller Wiesenthal stepped into the room, Felix Weisberg slipped away, still unmarried and virtually unnoticed.

  9

  ‘Don’t forget our murderers!’

  Both nearing forty, Cyla and Simon Wiesenthal wasted no time making up for the lost years. Their only child, Pauline Rosa, was born in Linz on 5 September 1946, barely a year after their sudden and suspenseful reunion among the living. ‘Nobody has ever wanted a baby as much as we did,’ Simon says succinctly.

  In the postwar summer of 1946, on a picnic in the rolling hills of Upper Austria, Simon spotted a bush and, behind it, a sunflower. As he drew closer, he saw other sunflowers and now, after more than a year of liberation, he thought back to 1942 in Lemberg: first of the military cemetery, and then of the dying SS man to whom he had denied absolution four years earlier. Surely there was a sunflower growing on his grave and a cross with his name on it. Though Wiesenthal tried to think of the unmarked, unknown last resting places of his eighty-nine relatives who had perished in the Holocaust, he could think only of that young man who had pleaded on his death-bed for a word of forgiveness: an episode he remembered so vividly that he could still see the Stuttgart address on a bag of the SS man’s personal effects which the nurse was sending to his mother the next day, while telling Simon the young man had died.

  With the sight of sunflowers, all of Simon’s questions came back in a rush of doubts. ‘Have I anything to reproach myself for?’ he wondered. He would be travelling to Munich on business two weeks later, and decided to venture 150 miles farther – to Stuttgart – and visit the SS man’s mother. ‘It was not curiosity that inspired me,’ he explains, ‘but a vague feeling of duty . . . And maybe the hope of exorcizing forever one of the worst experiences of my life.’

  Badly bombed, Stuttgart still lay in ruins when Wiesenthal found the indelible address in a particularly devastated district. The fragile woman who received him had been twice bereaved, having lost her husband as well as her only child in the war. Of the latter, she had been told only the official truth: that her son had been wounded in battle on the Russian front and died in a military hospital in Lemberg. Showing her visitor the same bundle he’d seen the hospital nurse wrap, she asked how he had come to know her son.

  Improvising, as he calls white-lying, Simon told her he’d been working on the railroad in the Eastern Yards of Lemberg when he was handed a note from a hospital train with her address and a message to send a son’s greetings to the mother of one of the wounded. ‘So you never actually saw him?’ she said.

  ‘No. He was probably so badly wounded he couldn’t come to the window,’ Wiesenthal improvised.

  Recognizing that he was a Jew, the woman assured him that ‘in this district we always lived with Jews in a very peaceful fashion. We are not responsible for their fate.’ When Wiesenthal started to argue this with her, she deflected him blandly, but in all sincerity, with ‘I can’t really believe the stories they tell. I can’t believe what they say happened to the Jews’, and struck him speechless whe
n she said: ‘So many dreadful things happened, but one thing is certain: my son never did any wrong. He was always a decent young man.’

  Realizing that this exchange of half-truths had brought him not a single step closer to solving his own dilemma, Wiesenthal left ‘without diminishing in any way the woman’s last surviving consolation: faith in the goodness of her son.’ In her circumstances, he adds, to take that from her might also have been a crime.

  Tuviah Friedman – a Polish refugee who started his Eichmann hunt in Vienna around the same time as Simon in Linz, and later, in Israel, headed the Haifa Institute for the Documentation of Nazi War Crimes – remembers the 1946-model Wiesenthal with whom he used to compare notes as ‘an embittered, ruthless, vengeful pursuer of Nazi criminals. I understood him perfectly.’

  A few months later, Wiesenthal took into criminal custody a minor SS torturer who was in an American prisoner of war camp. When the military police searched him while Wiesenthal watched, ‘they found this picture on him’, Simon told a visitor years later, producing a photo of a naked Jew suspended from a meat hook by his penis, with arms and legs dangling. ‘When I saw that this was what he carried around as a memento, I leaped at him with a roar. I lost all control of myself. It’s the only time I ever wanted to kill a man and I almost did. Two American GIs had to pull me off him.’

  By then, the American soldiers who had liberated the concentration camps and shared some of Simon’s outrage had been rotated home and replaced by newcomers from the US or the Far Eastern front. Wiesenthal had trouble communicating the urgency of his or their own mission to his new American superiors: ‘They thought those of us who were intent on seeing justice done were eye-for-an-eye avengers and alarmists who would always see the world through a barbed-wire screen.’ The Cold War had not yet heated up, but, even before seeing Red, these new Americans abroad saw postwar Europe through the red-white-and-blue standards of their own democratic experience. Wiesenthal was shocked when a captain whose job was to educate Germans explained to him: ‘There’ll always be people with different viewpoints. At home we have Democrats and Republicans. Here you have Nazis and anti-Nazis. That’s what makes the world go round. Try not to worry too much about it.’