Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  In the beginning, there was detachment, distancing, and deflection – shifting the martyrdom to GIs in very much the way others may think they dilute the Holocaust by noting that Gentiles and gypsies and good Germans perished, too. All this was quite remarkable for a man who lost his mother’s brother’s family to the gas chambers, another uncle to suicide after the Anschluss, and many other relatives to the Nazi camps. In the end, there would be denial (never denying that he is Jewish, but never acknowledging that he was endangered by being a Jew) and deception (not just self-deception). When I read my 1974 conversation with Kreisky to Wiesenthal in 1987, Simon snorted: ‘Kreisky is an illusionist. Jews were arrested as Jews from the day Hitler was coming to Austria. He got out only because he had friends who were Nazis.’

  Here, Wiesenthal was referring to Kreisky’s first jailing (in 1935–6) as a Socialist by the home-grown ‘Christian Corporate State’ of Dollfuss and his successor, Schuschnigg. From 1933 to 1938, under Austro-fascism, socialists, communists, and Nazis were all looked upon as enemies of the state. Thus, Kreisky found himself sharing a cell with a Nazi named Sepp Weninger and a communist named Auerhahn. They didn’t argue politics. They addressed each other as ‘Friend’, not ‘Comrade’ or anything else. They shared gifts of food from their families. They complained about the same miseries and, when they talked about the long sentences they faced, Weninger said he’d be freed when Hitler came. Auerhahn said Hitler’s failures would surely pave the way for Stalin. Kreisky sat silent, comforting himself with the hope that his Social Democrats would be around to pick up the pieces.

  ‘Hitler was the biggest danger,’ Kreisky told me in our 1974 interview, ‘not just because he boasted that the Jews must be destroyed. This was only a symptom of a general political ideology and we Socialists always said: “Fascism is starting as a civil war and will end as a world war.” In captivity in 1934, the most disturbing note was that many Kreisky met – Nazis, communists, guards, and the professional criminals who ran the jail – seemed to blame their problems on the Jews. Even a few of the imprisoned socialists did.

  Of the three cellmates, Weninger underwent the strictest surveillance, for the ‘illegal Nazi’ was not only politically suspect, but under strong suspicion of having been behind a bombing attack. He was allowed no visitors or other contact with the outside world. Once, when Kreisky was being visited, Weninger asked him to smuggle out a message to his lawyer about where some incriminating evidence was that should be destroyed. The information was written on a cigarette wrapper. As Kreisky entered the reception area, he saw that the guards were making thorough body searches, so he swallowed the cigarette paper – and saved Weninger’s life.

  In 1938, when Kreisky was jailed by the Gestapo for five and a half months, some of his Nazi fellow inmates from two years earlier were now his guards – and Kreisky acknowledges in his memoirs that they eased the pain of prison life for him in 1938 and may even have played a role in his release. When the transports to Dachau began, he was on the shipment list several times, but Sepp Weninger kept crossing him off every posted roster until he was released on condition that he leave the country.

  Weninger became a prominent Nazi in the Ostmark, as annexed Austria was renamed by Hitler. Toward the very end of the war, Weninger served on a tribunal that ordered five balky militiamen, who had resisted dying for a cause that was already lost, to be shot by a firing squad instead. Weninger was sentenced to death as a war criminal. Kreisky, by then an Austrian diplomat in postwar Sweden, sent a plea for mercy on Weninger as a friend who’d saved his life. ‘My exoneration didn’t help him,’ Kreisky said succinctly. Weninger was executed in 1948.

  Still reacting to Kreisky’s disclaimer of ever having been persecuted as a Jew, Simon Wiesenthal went on: ‘And what is this business about Hitler persecuting American soldiers, too? The Nazis didn’t have orders to kill every prisoner of war – except maybe the Russian POWs – but they did have orders to kill every Jew. I have no words for this kind of thinking.’ Simon being Simon and Kreisky being Kreisky, however, Wiesenthal did find the words to diagnose Kreisky as a case of Jewish self-hate: ‘In my opinion, Kreisky is a Jewish tragic figure like we have in every generation. He hates himself because he is Jewish. He is a Jew and an anti-Jew in the same person.’

  Austria’s two most famous living Jews had been on a collision course from the day Bruno Kreisky took office in April 1970, after the newly elected Chancellor had formed a Socialist minority government. In his inaugural address, Kreisky declared bluntly that every citizen must be given the right to reappraise his or her political views – including those held during the Nazi era – in the light of ‘subsequent experience and knowledge’.

  Still, it came as a surprise to many when, a few days later, Simon Wiesenthal revealed to the German news magazine Der Spiegel (The Mirror) and the Austrian Catholic weekly Die Furche (The Furrow) that four of Kreisky’s eleven cabinet appointees – his Ministers of Defence, Interior, Agriculture, and Construction – had been Nazi Party members and two of them, Agriculture Minister Hans Öllinger and Interior Minister Otto Rösch, had darker pasts than that. Öllinger had been a lieutenant in the Waffen SS, the military arm of Hitler’s blackshirts; not only was Rösch – whose new post made him, in effect Austria’s chief of police – a former SA brownshirt, but he had a criminal record as a participant in the founding of a postwar neo-Nazi organization whose main aim was to provide fugitive Nazi war criminals with falsified documents to facilitate their escapes. On 8 December 1947, Rösch, then thirty, had been apprehended with a suitcase full of blank documents and unauthorized stamps, but his defence was that he had no idea of the bag’s contents. In 1949, he was acquitted for lack of evidence.

  Surprised by Öllinger’s record (though apparently not by Rösch’s), Kreisky stuck to his choices and argued that his own past permitted him to judge former Nazis, since he had not only been their political prisoner, but had lost twenty-one of his family members to them. Of Wiesenthal, who had lost eighty-nine relatives to Hitler, Kreisky remarked sarcastically that ‘I’m waiting now for Mr Wiesenthal to prove that I was also in the SS.’

  Investigation showed that Öllinger had quit the Waffen SS in 1940 to join the German regular army and had been quickly denazified after the war. Granted clearance, he served only twenty-nine days as Minister of Agriculture, however, after suffering a heart attack and resigning because of ill health. His replacement as Minister, Oskar Weihs, had joined the Nazi Party as early as 1932.

  Weihs, Öllinger, Rösch, and the other two ex-Nazi cabinet Ministers were all devoted Austrian Socialist Party apparatchiks; Rösch’s membership, in fact, dated back to 1927, a decade before he joined the (then illegal) SA. A genial, silver-haired tennis player and skier, Otto Rösch came into the cabinet with Kreisky in 1970 – serving as Minister of Interior until 1977 and then Minister of Defence – and left office with him in 1983. Though even his enemies tend to concede that Rösch served capably and honourably – and, when I asked Wiesenthal in 1974 whether he had good co-operation from Minister Rösch, he replied, ‘In the last time, I must say yes’ – nevertheless it must be noted that searches for and apprehensions of Nazi war criminals ground to a virtual halt during his seven years as Interior Minister.

  Within Austria back in 1970, few voices other than Wiesenthal’s had been raised against Kreisky’s appointments. True, Dr Erich Thanner, a distinguished editor, lawyer, aristocrat, and veteran of four years in Nazi prisons, had responded with an article headlined: ‘WHO SLEEPS WITH DOGS WAKES UP WITH FLEAS: The Extraordinary Anti-Semitism of Dr Kreisky.’ But the Blacks and the Blues (the traditionally Catholic-oriented People’s Party and the postwar splinter called the Freedom party) rejoiced that, by defending ‘his’ Nazis, Kreisky had lost any advantage to be gained by condemning theirs. It is symptomatic of postwar Austria that the 1970 uproar was not known as ‘the Kreisky affair’ or ‘the Öllinger affair’ or ‘the Rösch controversy’, but as ‘the Wiesenthal case’.

&nbs
p; Hatchet-man for the Socialist counter-attack on Simon was the Party Secretary and newly named Minister of Education and Culture, Leopold Gratz, born 1929 and an alumnus of NAPOLA: the Nazi Party’s élite secondary school for future political leaders (where Otto Rösch served briefly as a teacher). Though never a Nazi or even a Hitler Youth himself, Gratz had been indoctrinated in that era and spoke its language when he addressed the Socialist Party Congress on 11 June 1970, at the Stadthalle, Vienna’s version of Madison Square Garden. Terming Wiesenthal’s Jewish Documentation Centre a secret state police spying apparatus which intrigued against the innocent, Gratz warned ominously: ‘It will soon be seen whether this country still needs Engineer Wiesenthal’s private Inquisition . . . How much longer will we tolerate this private tribunal?’ The crowd cheered and Chancellor Kreisky declared himself ‘fully’ in accord with Gratz, adding that ‘in Austria, a Nazi Party member or an SS man can assume any political office provided there is no criminal evidence against him.’

  Wiesenthal’s response to this was: ‘I understand full well that one can’t exclude half a million people from public life. So I make this formula: the Nazis can live, the Nazis can die, but the Nazis should not govern us. Anyhow, Nazis sit in all public offices – also under Kreisky – so when he even makes them ministers, then he acknowledges that he is giving a blanket acquittal from moral guilt. I am against the theory of collective guilt; but I am also against the theory of collective innocence. Not even the Jews have collective innocence.’

  Six days later, Dutch journalist Martin van Amerongen interviewed Kreisky and asked him whether the Socialists were trying to hunt down the Nazi-hunter.

  ‘Nonsense!’ Kreisky snorted. ‘We’re not hunting Wiesenthal. You in Holland are badly informed about Wiesenthal’s activities. Just from the standpoint of the importance of people’s personal freedom, how can one reconcile this with a private organization that lies in ambush for people? Here one cannot be an onlooker. Wiesenthal is a Jewish fascist. Just the way in which he has reproached our Interior Minister, Otto Rösch, with his Hitler Youth membership70 after so long a time . . . Wiesenthal is an extremely reactionary man with close ties to the People’s Party.’ But he shrugged off Simon’s significance by adding that ‘one finds reactionaries among us Jews just as there are Jewish thieves, murderers, and prostitutes. That’s the way it is. All in all, I don’t find the Wiesenthal affair so crucial.’

  When Amerongen visited Wiesenthal a few days later, he found him in good spirits. ‘Nobody has ever given me a better name in the world than Bruno Kreisky has,’ Simon proclaimed from behind a desk littered with telegrams and letters of support, mostly from abroad. They were not just from Jewish and survivor organizations, but, among many others, the fan club of operetta composer Robert Stolz and an aristocratic Swiss pianist who not only expressed ‘the anger of the world’, but added that she’d ascertained ‘the former German Chancellor Dr [Kurt Georg] Kiesinger is in accord with me.’ Later would come, in Wiesenthal’s words, ‘a series of demonstrative invitations, among them to a luncheon in the US Senate and a dinner in the House of Commons of the British Parliament at which Winston Churchill’s grandson was master of ceremonies for eighty invited guests.’

  The influential American Jewish newspaper Aufbau, published weekly in the German language, called Kreisky’s utterances a ‘tasteless’ attempt ‘to intimidate Wiesenthal.’ A telegram from an American asked Wiesenthal: ‘PLEASE ANSWER MY QUESTION: IS MR GRATZ A SOCIALIST OR A NATIONAL SOCIALIST?’ While Kreisky was calling Wiesenthal a ‘fanatic’, ‘avenger’, and ‘manhunter’, and Gratz was saying he ran a centre for ‘informing, spying and inquisition activity’, Simon’s sources at the Ballhausplatz said that the Chancellor’s office had received 600 to 800 protests, mostly from abroad. ‘Now Kreisky can start a stamp collection, too,’ said Simon, himself a philatelist.

  ‘Do you know,’ Simon went on to Amerongen, ‘that your interview was the first time in years that Kreisky used the expression “we Jews”? He knows only full well that the term “Jew” goes over better in the Netherlands than it does in Austria. Kreisky uses his Judaism only for export.’

  Was he going to sue Kreisky for calling him a Jewish fascist’? Wiesenthal explained that, under Austrian law, the Chancellor, who was also a Member of Parliament, possessed parliamentary immunity even for words spoken outside Parliament, ‘so I can’t sue him unless he lets me sue him.’ When the bad name his intemperate attack on Wiesenthal had created abroad hit home to Kreisky, the Chancellor issued a denial – ten days after the words appeared in print! – that he’d ever called Simon a ‘Jewish fascist’. The Dutch periodical’s editors were worried. ‘Are you going to sue us?’ they asked Simon over the phone.

  ‘I don’t sue you,’ Simon assured them. ‘I will sue him when first I get the chance. I know he said it. You know he said it. He knows he said it.’

  At my own very first meeting with Wiesenthal in 1974, he said that he’d known his adversary only on a handshake basis, though he’d been grateful to him in 1966 when he’d been crusading for a catalogue of Jewish art treasures confiscated by the Nazis and still unclaimed by their rightful owners, to be circulated among Austrian consulates around the world. Kreisky, then Foreign Minister, had supported the project. But ‘four Nazis out of eleven ministers is too much. It’s even higher than the percentage of former Nazis in the Austrian population. His first Cabinet had even more Nazi Party members than [Schuschnigg’s successor, Artur von] Seyss-Inquart had in the first cabinet after the Anschluss. So when I point this out, they attack me in Parliament and the papers. . .

  ‘Look, Kreisky used to say “I am no more Jewish, because in the thirties, I left from the Jewish community.” He is an atheist; you know, he is not baptized. That was when I give a statement that “the only person who does not know that Kreisky is Jewish is Kreisky himself.” It is coming from me, but my phrase is the answer to why he makes such a big problem. Now the Austrian people can say, “When even the Jew Kreisky can forget about SS or Nazi Party membership, then so can we.” But, in Holland, a collaborationist can’t even be the mayor of a village and it’s the same with Quislings in Norway and Vichyites in France. Even in Italy, where fascism got its name and they change cabinets every three months, there hasn’t been a single former fascist minister yet!’

  Wiesenthal’s greatest fear was that Kreisky would inflict collective guilt on the 6000 Jews of Austria: ‘I accept that he will have nothing to do with the Jews, but I am sure that if his politics should go wrong, the people will make the Jews guilty for him. It is not the same fear if Henry Kissinger makes a disaster for the United States because there are so many different groups in the population of America that whatever he does bad for one group is good for another – not like here, where on a particular block, all are Catholics and all are anti-Semite.’

  From the outset of the Kreisky era, Wiesenthal had not been impressed ‘when many of the Socialists tells me, “You see, this is a miracle. We have a Jew for Chancellor.” And I tell them this is not a miracle because the Jews were the founders of the Social Democratic Party in Austria. Always the leadership was Jewish – from Viktor Adler to Otto Bauer. Yes, Adler became a Protestant, but Bauer once said: “I am a Jew, but for me is the Judaism not a nation, not a religion, but a shared fate.” And you cannot leave it because then you are a deserter. This is why he remained a Jew – not to go to synagogue, but because he feel it.

  ‘I was this way for a while, too, after the war,’ Simon admitted, ‘but always in my life I feel Jewish. You know, after 2000 years, so much changes, but what stays common for all Jewish generations over these centuries is the attacks against us – the persecution, from Spain to the Urals, from Latin America to Libya . . . So Kreisky says he learned much from Otto Bauer? One thing he didn’t learn is what Bauer knew and others learned from Hitler: you can change your shirt, but not your skin.’

  In 1988, Simon Wiesenthal declared that Bruno Kreisky ‘has a disturbed relationship to N
azism and Judaism.’

  ‘In all my disputes with Wiesenthal,’ Bruno Kreisky told me in early 1986, ‘I had the feeling that what he wanted the most from me was that I should put loyalty to Israel before my loyalty to Austria. And that I would never do.’

  Earlier, Kreisky had informed me: ‘Wiesenthal is for me less than a zero . . . He is living from telling the world that Austria is anti-Semitic. What else can he do?’

  The antipathies between the two men were obvious. The Chancellor was an assimilated ex-exile seeking to be a political figure of reconciliation between modern Austria and its brown past. The irate Nazi-hunter was a concentration-camp survivor slowly evolving from a symbol of retribution to one of righteousness and ‘feeling Jewish’ enough to serve on the board of the Austrian Association of Jewish Communities, during which time Kreisky broke with a tradition that the Chancellor honoured the High Holy Days with a Jewish New Year’s message to the Association. Kreisky, on the other hand, was a Viennese-born Jew who, like Freud and Mahler (both born in the Czech lands) and many before him, felt at least a little ashamed of the more primitive Jews who flooded their city from the east; for all his education and achievements, Wiesenthal was a transplanted Jew from Galicia. ‘The eastern Jews,’ Kreisky once declared, ‘are alienated from normal ways of thinking.’

  Call this ‘Jewish self-hate’, as Wiesenthal does, or make light of it, as Arthur Schnitzler did (‘Anti-Semitism became popular in Vienna only when the Jews themselves took it up’), but the same tensions exist between Berlin Jews and other German and Austrian Jews and, in Israel, between Oriental and European Jews. Or, as Dr Wilfried Daim, a Viennese analyst who wrote Depth Psychology and Salvation, put it to me bluntly: ‘To a German-speaking Jew like Kreisky, a Polish-and-Yiddish-speaking Jew like Wiesenthal coming out of the East to haunt him is as much a rebuke as if he had a Southern “darky” for a cousin.’