Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  ‘For me,’ said Kreisky in 1986, ‘this whole “Wiesenthal Complex” . . . isn’t worth another word. I happen not to like the man and that is my right. Just because we share the same religion, it doesn’t mean that we have to love each other. Do all Catholics?’

  Kreisky could easily infuriate Wiesenthal, whose only child lives with her family in Israel and whose granddaughter and grandsons have all served in the Israeli Army, just by disparaging Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, as ‘that Polish lawyer’ and ‘the son of a little Polish tailor’. Or by complaining that ‘Israel is run by Russian and Polish Jews.’ Or by proclaiming: ‘I have no Jewish fellow citizens; I know only Austrian countrymen.’

  Said Wiesenthal: ‘One of Kreisky’s favourite themes is that the Jews are not a people. He says this is scientific truth and one day he’s going to write a book about it. He belabours journalists with endless sermons on this subject and most of them are too polite to interrupt or challenge him.’

  One Israeli editor did, however. Menachem Oberbaum of Al Ahram asked Kreisky in 1975 how, as a statesman and diplomat, he could criticize Israel, the Jewish people, Begin, and Wiesenthal in such strong terms.

  Kreisky’s reply was nothing if not vehement: ‘Tell me once and for all, Mr Editor, do you come to me wanting information from the Chancellor of the Republic or are you here to interrogate me? When you want to make an interrogation of me, then I’ll cancel everything [on the schedule]. The Jews publish so much that is terrible about me that I won’t allow this [to happen]. Would you have the nerve to question the French Prime Minister in such a way? This is such impudence that I would gladly throw you out. Why must I really stand for your Questions and Answers? . . . Now I’ve had enough. I’m not here to answer like a defendant to the Jewish – the Israeli media.’ He concluded his tirade with one of his most memorable utterances: ‘The Jews are not a people, and if they are, they are a lousy people.’

  Calming down to the melting-point, Kreisky answered the rest of Oberbaum’s question quite candidly: ‘When I hear the name Begin or Wiesenthal, I simply lose control of myself.’

  To Wiesenthal, it was quite clear that he and Begin were ‘for Kreisky the same “Jews from the east” that we are to many Viennese and he will have nothing to do with us.’

  In the autumn of 1975, when Bruno Kreisky stood for re-election, he struck a bargain with Friedrich Peter, head of the small right-wing Freedom Party: if Kreisky’s Socialists failed to win a majority in Parliament, his Reds would govern in a coalition with Peter’s Blues. Peter would be appointed Vice Chancellor and his party would be given the Foreign Ministry, too. Since the Freedom Party was riddled with Nazis, this alarmed many – but not Simon Wiesenthal. ‘Just wait,’ he reassured friends. ‘First, we must have the election and then we will see the results – but I can guarantee there will be no such coalition.’

  Simon gave this assurance because, upon returning from his summer vacation early that September, he had found a new acquisition crowning the clutter on his desk. It was a 1942 roster of the First SS Infantry Brigade, which Wiesenthal calls ‘one of the most notorious extermination units of the war.’ In ‘special actions’ against civilians in the Ukraine in 1941–2, it had massacred 13,497 men, women, and children, whose corpses were classified as ‘Jews, gypsies, partisans, bandits, and suspected enemies.’ From near the middle of the list, one name jumped out at him: SS Lieutenant Friedrich Peter, an Austrian born 13 July 1921.

  When that date matched Peter’s campaign biographies, Simon made further inquiries and quickly confirmed that this was the same Friedrich Peter who had never denied an SS past, but had hinted he was ‘only a lieutenant’ in the Waffen SS. It did not take Wiesenthal long to establish that Peter had been a corporal in the brigade’s Fifth Company on Thursday, 4 September 1941, when, according to a regimental logbook which had, ironically, been issued by a Socialist publishing house in Vienna as a warning against resurgent Nazism:

  . . . the village of Leltschitky was, thanks to strong reconnaissance power, reached and taken without casualties. Seized: sixty rifles, eleven machine guns, fifteen hand grenades, 22,115 bullets; in addition, thirty-eight prisoners were executed and 1,089 Jews shot to death.

  ‘The massacre,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘took place just outside the town. The Jews had to dig deep trenches and then climb in, so they could be shot in their grave and buried efficiently.’ Not all the victims, however, were shot, but those that weren’t were buried alive when the next group of victims had to cover the grave over with sand before digging their own.

  For his work in the brigade’s ‘winter campaign 1941–42’, Friedrich Peter earned an Iron Cross and a battlefield commission. More than three decades later, Simon Wiesenthal recognized that ‘I had a stick of dynamite in my hand. If I made it public during the campaign, Kreisky and Peter and everybody else would accuse me of meddling in politics.’ Anticipating that the volatile Austrian vote might react in favour of Peter or Kreisky as a backlash against the interfering Jew, Wiesenthal decided to maintain silence until after the election, but to show his good faith by delivering Peter’s dossier beforehand to the apolitical President of Austria: Dr Rudolf Kirchschläger (predecessor to Kurt Waldheim).

  A lanky, pious man who spoke with a quaver that often sounded as if he were about to cry, Kirchschläger wept real tears when Wiesenthal presented him with the Peter papers on Monday, 29 September 1975, a week before the election. ‘The President read a few pages and began to shudder and then burst into tears,’ Wiesenthal recalls. ‘Then he thanked me for not going public with it before the election, so the people would vote on the issues and not on one man’s past. He made me feel like a patriot.’ Simon said he would make Peter’s past public after the election out of fear that he might come to high office then or at a later time. The President, with Simon’s permission, sent photocopies of the dossier to Peter and Kreisky. He also indicated to Wiesenthal that he might reject any naming of Peter as Vice Chancellor: calling elections and accepting governments are among the few real powers of the largely ceremonial Austrian Presidency.

  In that critical week before the election, Simon says that Peter was very uneasy and offered to bow out of the bargain, but Kreisky told him anything Wiesenthal said could be disregarded. The deal was still on.

  Sunday, 5 October’s election results nullified all arrangements. The Reds won ninety-three of the 183 seats in Parliament; the Blacks eighty; and Peter’s Blues ten. Kreisky could govern with a clear majority and no partners.

  On 9 October, Wiesenthal gave a press conference in the Hotel de France on the Ringstrasse and handed journalists his documentation of Peter’s war record. From his party headquarters, Peter told reporters that he had not participated in his unit’s dirty work, had known nothing of atrocities, had heard nothing from his comrades-in-arms, and must have been on home leave when the Leltschitky massacre occurred. Wiesenthal was quick to retort that no leaves were granted by the First SS Infantry Division while it was in ‘combat’ against civilians during the 1941–2 ‘special actions’ and that Peter’s Fifth Company was in the centre of virtually every daily extermination during that time. That night, on Austrian television, Peter declared: ‘I have never taken part in such an operation, but have only fulfilled my duty as a soldier.’

  (Peter’s plea of Pflichterfüllung, ‘fulfilment of duty’, may have fallen more sympathetically on President Kirchschläger’s ear than Wiesenthal surmised. For, as a captain in the German Army in 1945, Kirchschläger had fulfilled his duty without question by leading 1200 teenagers, the last of Hitler’s reserves in Austria, to certain doom from Soviet tanks at the gates of Vienna on the eve of the city’s surrender. Badly equipped and without enough weapons to go around, some 200 youths died and another 800 were wounded, as was Captain Kirchschläger. Nowhere did this infamous ‘Charge of the Lightly-Armed Brigade’ appear in his official biography.)

  After Wiesenthal’s revelation and Peter’s denial in 1975, the response f
rom Chancellor Kreisky – at a press conference with foreign journalists – was massive overkill:

  ‘Look, to close out this whole long chapter, I must say that all this is for me a baroque affair that has materialized only through the efforts of Mr Wiesenthal, whom I know just from secret reports – and they are very negative, positively evil.’

  Asked what he was talking about, Kreisky rambled on: ‘I can assure you that Mr Wiesenthal maintained a different relationship to the Gestapo from mine – provably! More I cannot say now, but the rest I will say in court . . . I hope it will be a big trial, for, let me tell you, a man like him has no right after all that to play the role of a moral authority. Furthermore, I state that he has no right to earn his living from persecuting other human beings . . . He has no right to meddle in Austrian politics. The man must go!’

  As Kreisky went on to call Wiesenthal a spy and a mafioso bent on bringing everybody to court, a reporter from United Press International broke in to ask incredulously: ‘Are you saying that Wiesenthal was a Gestapo agent?’

  ‘I maintain,’ said Kreisky, ‘that, in that time, Mr Wiesenthal lived in an area under the Nazi sphere of influence without being persecuted.’

  This was reverse character assassination worthy of the Hitler era. Perhaps not as ominous because the consequences weren’t immediate, but, even in a democracy – particularly in a democracy! – such a public denunciation by the head of government, calling for Simon’s disappearance, was an open invitation to any crazy or Nazi to take a pot-shot at Wiesenthal and even for the police to look the other way. Vienna is an orderly city with an abundance of social services, but it has its share of people who walk down the street backwards shouting to themselves. In late 1975 and well into 1976, it seemed to me that most of them were proclaiming that ‘the Jew, Simon Wiesenthal, must go!’

  What made this even more terrifying, says Wiesenthal, was that ‘in the time of Kreisky, Austria was not a democracy because he so dominated it. Even the Jews here, some of them were so angry at me for making trouble and most of them were worried this would lead to big anti-Semitism.’

  Though outraged, Simon Wiesenthal was a little less surprised than many by the nature of the attack on him. Five years earlier, when he was criticizing Kreisky for naming four Nazis to his Cabinet and Kreisky was calling him a ‘Jewish fascist’, he had learned of feverish inquiries in international Socialist circles for any leads connecting him to a pre-war Jewish-fascistic youth group in Poland. This research unearthed a Polish Jewish youth group called Betar, whose members wore greyish brown blouses and blue trousers. ‘Unfortunately,’ said one Swiss report, ‘Wiesenthal did not belong to it; besides, it was not at all fascistic.’71

  Not even this, however, had prepared Wiesenthal for the onslaught of public insults from Kreisky, who disparaged him as ‘Simon Wiesenthal, so-called Engineer’, and still questioned his right to Austrian citizenship: ‘One must at last close the door on these things. Some day there must be an end to this – then how is it that Wiesenthal is allowed to live here anyway?’ Most reprehensible to Simon were the accusations and allegations, slurs and insinuations against him without a shred of documentation: the antithesis of the way he worked.

  On Austrian television, the Chancellor told millions that Wiesenthal’s methods were ‘deplorable’ and the attack on Peter was, in reality, aimed at Kreisky himself. He had known Peter for years. He believed this stalwart democrat’s assurances that he had been involved in no criminality at all – and Peter’s word was enough for him. Not for Wiesenthal, however. ‘The fact that Friedrich Peter had, until now, never acknowledged his service in the First SS Infantry Brigade,’ said Simon, ‘didn’t seem to disturb the Chancellor at all.’

  Wiesenthal says that the next six weeks were ‘the worst time I had experienced since the war. I was a leper in my new homeland and only the thought that I hadn’t survived Hitler just to escape from Austria kept me from emigrating. What I was up against was Kreisky at the peak of his popularity with a hypnotic, downright magical hold on the people. They saw him as father, emperor, and god in one. Self-critical Austrian intellectuals hung on his lips for every single word; they called him the “Sun King”. The journalists of the country, with a few exceptions, ate out of his hand. And, whenever others attacked me, he cheered them on. I had the public image of an insatiable avenger who, every morning, got up and ate some poor innocent little Nazi Party member for breakfast.’ (When asked point-blank whether he did indeed devour a neo-Nazi a day, Simon once replied: ‘No, I don’t eat pork.’)72

  Around that time, a polling institute in Linz reported the results of its national public opinion survey of Austrian reactions to the Kreisky-vs-Wiesenthal controversy: fifty-nine per cent supported Kreisky; twenty-nine per cent were neutral; thirteen per cent had no opinion; and only three per cent supported Simon. Among younger interviewees (ages sixteen to twenty-nine), six per cent were for Wiesenthal, but among the over-fifties, his support was so negligible that the computer couldn’t even register one per cent.

  ‘WIESENTHAL DISCREDITS AUSTRIA ABOARD’, the nation’s bestselling daily, the tabloid Kronen-Zeitung, howled in a front-page headline. A Freedom Party weekly ‘exposed’ the regimental war diary as ‘a forgery’ planted by the Czechoslovak secret police. One of the few editors who did speak up – Peter Michael Lingens of profil, who used to be Simon’s secretary and who wrote that Kreisky’s slurs were ‘undignified and immoral’ as well as ‘monstrous’ – was sued by Kreisky, who won at every level of the Austrian courts. Fined a sum equivalent to almost 4000 dollars, Lingens – in a move that would not have occurred to many Austrian lawyers – took his case to one of Kreisky’s pet institutions: the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. In 1986, more than ten years after the case was initiated, Lingens won in Strasbourg. The European Court, after studying the statements of both sides, said that Lingens had the right of free expression of opinion to call Kreisky’s utterances ‘monstrous, immoral, and undignified’. The government of Austria was told to vacate the fine and pay Lingens’ court costs of some $23,000.

  ‘Do you know how Kreisky “justified” calling me a mafioso?’ Simon asked me rhetorically in early 1989. ‘In Lingens’ case, he explained that the abduction of Adolf Eichmann had been conducted like a Mafia operation. Then, in the same presentation, he says, “Wiesenthal had nothing to do with the abduction of Eichmann.” Look, his calling me a mafioso didn’t bother me as much as other people. Three waiters make a strike: their customers call it a Mafia. But, for a Jew to call another Jew a collaborator is to call him a murderer.’

  Friedrich Peter sued Wiesenthal as well as profil and the Kurier for slander. At sporadic court sessions over the next seven years, Wiesenthal produced documents indicating that Peter’s SS Brigade killed close to 400,000 people during his twenty months in its service, and showing that another 167 members of the unit were living in Austria. In 1976, Kreisky took former SS Lieutenant Peter with him on a State visit to Czechoslovakia which included a stop in the Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp, where many of the Jewish Chancellor’s relatives perished or passed en route to extermination; Peter stood stony-faced through the short ceremony. In 1977, President Kirchschläger decorated Peter with Austria’s highest gold medal for service and, a year later, Peter retired as head of the Freedom Party, though retaining his positions as Member of Parliament and party speaker there. In 1983’s re-election campaign, Kreisky announced he wouldn’t govern in coalition and, when the Socialists failed to achieve an absolute majority, he stepped aside after thirteen years as Chancellor to let his Socialist deputy, Fred Sinowatz, form a government with the Freedom Party’s more respectable new chief, Norbert Steger (born 1944), as Vice Chancellor. Around the time his party achieved a share of power (which lasted until 1986), Peter had his lawyer write to Wiesenthal’s lawyer saying that the suit was being dropped because Peter had lost interest in pursuing it.

  Simon Wiesenthal tried to sue Bruno Kreisky, but th
e Chancellor’s parliamentary immunity protected him, no matter where and what he spoke. Parliamentary immunity is stronger in Austria than even diplomatic immunity; a drunk-driving deputy who shows his status to a policeman will be waved forward to weave onward – the assumption being that he is going about his government business. Though Kreisky said he would gladly waive his immunity for the ‘big trial’ against Wiesenthal, he never did and it never materialized. Meanwhile, Kreisky said he would order a special parliamentary commission to investigate not Peter, but Wiesenthal. Information later surfaced that, three days after Wiesenthal’s disclosures, the Austrian federal police shadowed and eavesdropped on him in the transit buffet of Vienna’s Schwechat Airport as he greeted two friends he encountered while waiting for a flight to Frankfurt:

  WIESENTHAL told the two passengers rather loudly that he would not tolerate PETER’S continuing to function as a politician, since he belonged to a murder unit during the war. Furthermore, said WIESENTHAL, he would not permit KREISKY’S behaviour against him. He would therefore investigate associates of KREISKY more closely. The investigations would take several months, but, if the occasion arose, KREISKY would have to bear the consequences.73

  The unlikely truce-maker in this uncivil war between Austria’s two best-known Jews was Simon’s ailing wife Cyla. After nearly two months of not picking up a newspaper, never turning on TV, seldom leaving the house since being heckled while shopping, and declining to see her friends because she knew what they had on their minds, she told Simon she wanted to lead the normal life of a woman nearing seventy: to sit in a coffee-house, stroll in the park, go to the theatre. She asked him to settle the case. Simon argued that they hadn’t survived Janowskà and Mauthausen only to capitulate to Kreisky.