Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  ‘But we were young then,’ Cyla pointed out. ‘And it doesn’t matter what people think, so long as we can finally enjoy a little peace in our old age.’

  The president of B’nai B’rith74 in Vienna, a mutual friend of both men, negotiated an uneasy peace between them. Wiesenthal abandoned his efforts to force Kreisky into court while the Chancellor dropped the idea of an investigatory commission and told Parliament grumblingly: ‘Incidentally, I want to make it clear that I have never identified Wiesenthal as a Nazi collaborator.’

  In 1982, when Israel invaded southern Lebanon, Kreisky declared in an interview: ‘Israel’s standing is bare of any ethics. Its leadership has shown its true face. The warfare in Lebanon has actually cost Israel the support it secured and received during the past few decades. The insanity of its rulers, who are only relying on their arms, is causing fear in the world at large. With this Israel I don’t want to have anything to do any more. Never again!’

  In a 1986 interview with me, ex-Chancellor Kreisky elaborated succinctly on why ‘this Israel is not my Israel: it has, in my view, a semi-fascist ideology, a policy of force, a regime of apartheid, and it uses the support of the masses for its own ends. I have no sympathy for any of this.’

  This viewpoint, of course, did nothing to endear Kreisky to Simon Wiesenthal, but it did endear him to Austrians who said, as one heard all too often: ‘We’d have nothing against the Jews if they were all like Kreisky.’ Or, as Simon Wiesenthal put it succinctly: ‘Every anti-Semite had to have a Jew he likes.’

  Dr Daim, the Viennese depth psychologist, has examined why Kreisky was particularly well liked by many Austrian Nazis: ‘For them, it was a sort of redemption to elect a Jew. And for that very reason, the Nazis were already lucky to have Kreisky, for he alone was in a position to make them socially acceptable again. A Jewish Chancellor could put an end to a past with which they didn’t want to have anything more to do’ – if Wiesenthal hadn’t risen to protest Kreisky’s gift of absolution. To make matters worse, Daim adds, ‘Kreisky, in the way he attacked Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, enabled these people to start thinking of Jews as war criminals.’

  Notorious in Austria for his controversial ‘psychograms’ of Kreisky, Daim actually ‘interviewed’ his subject at the height of the furore over Wiesenthal’s 1975 exposure of Peter. ‘It was hardly an interview,’ Daim recalls. ‘My topic was his attitude toward the Nazis and he spoke for more than an hour without my even having a chance to interrupt and ask a question. But when our time together was nearly up, I managed to thank him for talking about the Nazis and then I asked him: “Mr Chancellor, now what is your relationship to the Jews?’ And he replied very sharply: “That has nothing to do with it.” But I said, almost as sharply: “Mr Chancellor, it has a direct bearing. One cannot speak about the Nazis without speaking about the Jews.” So then he talked in generalities about “these highly intelligent people” and so on.’

  ‘Kreisky is a modern King Midas,’ said a People’s Party politician. ‘When he takes a Nazi in his hand, suddenly he’s no longer a Nazi.’

  Every now and then, Kreisky repeated one or another of his allegations and insinuations against Wiesenthal – and, each time Simon found out about it, he went through the motions of trying to sue. By November 1986, he could tell me: ‘I’ve sued him five times, but each time Parliament won’t lift his immunity.’ To avoid making it six, I didn’t bother to mention my visit to Kreisky’s home on Friday, 24 January of that year: two days after the ex-Chancellor’s seventy-fifth birthday.

  His 250-year-old rented villa with a discreet modern swimming-pool in the back was already under wraps for winter hibernation. Its tenant would soon be flying off to Mallorca, where he maintained an island home.

  The Viennese villa hadn’t changed much, but Kreisky had. Upon leaving the Ballhausplatz, he’d let what was left of his reddish greying hair grow long to form a fringe which met a foxy-looking beard he’d grown while hospitalized for a kidney transplant. His eternal-Lumpenproletariat look had yielded to a rakish demeanour which, to me, conjured up a bizarre image of Ezra Pound as an elder Jewish wise man.

  When we talked about Wiesenthal, he confided that ‘my information on him is very, very bad, but I don’t want to have a trial with former Nazis as witnesses he will accuse, because the people who know all about him are that. There is one in Germany who commanded a camp. He knows a lot about Wiesenthal, but he keeps silent because he also knows what Wiesenthal will use against him if he comes to court.’

  In an interview in profil later that year, Kreisky re-affirmed his accusations and Wiesenthal took him to court once again. The case was still pending in the fall of 1988, when Kreisky pleaded that he couldn’t come to court in Vienna because he was promoting the second volume of his memoirs at the Frankfurt Book Fair. As it turned out, Wiesenthal was presenting the second volume of his memoirs in Frankfurt, too.

  ‘Look,’ Wiesenthal protested, ‘I also was in Frankfurt, but I could be in Vienna, too, for the trial.’ But the case was postponed until January 1989. ‘What happened next?’ Wiesenthal reported rhetorically. ‘He was twice, without apology, not coming to the trial. The judge spoke to the lawyers and said if Kreisky does not appear, he will give to me the verdict. So then his lawyer is bringing certification from his doctor that he is sick and cannot come from Mallorca. But two days later he is in Vienna presenting his book. When he does come to court, the judge suggests maybe he should apologize to me and get it over with. And what does he tell the judge? “Shortly before my death, I will apologize for this.”

  ‘The man hates me, but I am not a hater,’ insisted Simon, two years Kreisky’s senior, but in much better health. ‘Still, for this apology, I will wait around.’ He was still waiting when Bruno Kreisky died of heart failure in Vienna on 29 July 1990, at the age of seventy-nine.

  34

  Waldheim the conscience

  Throughout the 1970s and most of the 1980s, Simon Wiesenthal wrestled with Jewish self-hate in the person of Bruno Kreisky, his most formidable and dangerous postwar enemy. In the second half of the eighties and well into the nineties, having outlasted Kreisky, his most formidable challenge was Jewish overkill. It took the form of the American Jewish Congress in New York and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies in Los Angeles. And it took the face of Kurt Waldheim, about whom Wiesenthal personally made a principled stand which cost him Stateside lecture bookings, a rift with his own Wiesenthal Centre, and maybe even the Nobel Peace Prize. But, thanks to adept manoeuvring on his part as he turned eighty, he won respect, and even reverence, from his fellow Austrians.

  As a diplomat and politician for most of his life, and as Secretary General of the United Nations for a decade, Kurt Waldheim was all things to all people. After all the twists and turns that took him in 1986 to both the Presidency of Austria and the summit of opprobrium, there are, according to Simon Wiesenthal, two things Waldheim never was: a Nazi or a war criminal.

  ‘I must be the conscience of the world,’ Kurt Waldheim proclaimed shortly after he was elected head of the UN in late 1971. Conscience was, in retrospect, an appropriate choice of word by Waldheim. At its old French and Latin literal roots, the word means ‘with knowing’. In Waldheim’s native German, however, the word Mitwisser (literally, ‘with-knower’) means ‘accessory’.

  His entry in the 1972 edition of Who’s Who in Austria had at least one major omission:

  Waldheim, Kurt, b. 21 December 1918, St Andrä-Wördern, Austria; s. of Walter W., civil servant, and Josefine W. n. Petrasch; m. 1944 Elisabeth Ritschel; Educ.: High Sch., Graduation from Consular Academy 1939; doctor of laws 1944; Career: entered Foreign service 1945; 1948–51 First Secretary Austrian Embassy Paris; 1951–55 Chief of Personnel Department, Foreign Ministry; 1955–56 Permanent Observer to the United Nations; 1956–58 Envoy in Canada; 1958–60 Ambassador to Canada; 1960–62 Head of Political Division West, Foreign ministry; 1962–64 Head of Political Section, Foreign Office; June 1964–January 19
68 Ambassador to the United Nations; 1968–70 Federal Minister of Foreign Affairs; 1970–71 Ambassador to the United Nations; 1971– Secretary General of the United Nations.

  This impressive record was followed by sixteen lines of awards. There was no mention of military service in World War II. I had heard that Waldheim had served in the German Army, but was not a Nazi. Since a friend of mine in New York had written that ‘it’s bizarre to listen to the UN these days and hear it presided over by a man who speaks English with the same accent as Paul Henreid’, I made a note to fill in the wartime gap when I interviewed Waldheim in the summer of 1972 at his country home on the Attersee, a mountain lake in the Salzkammergut region of Austria.

  Not that the omission was alarming. Who’s Who in Austria had also neglected to mention Waldheim’s 1971 campaign for the Presidency of Austria as candidate of the People’s Party (so the postwar Blacks call themselves) against the beloved Socialist incumbent, Franz Jonas. Although I had just arrived in Austria, one could sense that Waldheim was destined to lose. ‘He’s a good man – too good to be President of Austria’, I kept hearing, sometimes followed by ‘He’s too stiff’ or ‘He spends too much time outside of Austria.’ When Waldheim did lose, the only surprise was that the margin was close, with Waldheim winning 47.2 per cent of the vote.

  Losing that election was one of the best things that ever happened to Waldheim, for it made him available that autumn when the UN chose a successor to U Thant, who was bowing out of the $62,500-a-year post with a bleeding ulcer. As a compromise candidate whose most publicized qualification was his inoffensiveness to the five permanent members of the Security Council – Britain, France, the US, the Soviet Union, and newly arrived Red China – Waldheim was expected to be as passive as his Buddhist predecessor. But nobody who knew him expected him to tiptoe in U Thant’s footsteps.

  To Newsweek cartoonist Ranan Lurie, Waldheim admitted at a sitting: ‘Yes, I know I am colourless. But I must emphasize: I am not passive. If people were to look into my private life and my background, they would find out that I have to be active . . . However, I know from experience that you cannot force issues. I must be careful – but please let us not interpret caution as cowardice.’ While questioning him, Lurie noted: ‘He takes time to think out his reply. He is a sincere and open man; he does not try to evade questions.’

  In Austria in 1986, as the Presidential election neared, two jokes surfaced in the anti-Waldheim campaign: a definition of ‘Waldheimer’s Disease: you grow so senile you forget you were a Nazi’ and ‘the man is so thick-skinned that he doesn’t need a backbone to stand erect.’ Neither was accurate, but it took four decades to fill in the gaps in Waldheim’s biography – and autobiographies.

  For Kurt Waldheim, the war really began where he often implied it ended: in the 1941 campaign against Russia after Hitler betrayed Stalin and the ‘non-aggression’ pact their two dictatorships had signed in August 1939, just days before they had invaded, divided, and gobbled up Poland. At 3 a.m. on 22 June 1941, Lieutenant Waldheim and his cavalry unit and their horses plunged into the River Bug – which had served as the dividing line between the German and Soviet zones of occupied Poland – and made their way across the water into the city of Brest-Litovsk. After four days of ‘sanitizing’ the Byelorussian city by wiping out snipers in its streets, sharpshooters in its citadel, and a Red Army squadron holed up in its railway station’s cellar, Waldheim’s mounted reconnaissance unit AA45 moved eastward.

  By October, when the first snows fell and AA45 had been depleted by many casualties, Waldheim had received two medals and was put in charge of his division’s First Mounted Squadron: 244 horses and 242 soldiers. In November, the temperature fell below zero – and stayed there. As Napoleon found out in 1812 and Hitler was about to learn, the Russian winter works to no invader’s advantage. At the beginning of December, when his division reached the area south-west of Orel, it was surrounded by the Red Army.

  On Wednesday, 10 December 1941 – three days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and a day before Germany and Italy would declare war on the United States – a Russian grenade exploded near Waldheim and a splinter of it wounded him in the right leg. He was evacuated by sled, with an orderly trying to wash his wound in the snow and urging him to move his leg, despite the pain, to avoid losing it to frostbite. It was eight days before he and ninety other casualties reached a field hospital after German troops had punched a hole in the Russian encirclement. By then, the wound was infected. Though semi-conscious, Waldheim woke up when the first doctor to examine him said: ‘I think I’m going to have to amputate the leg. If only I had real wool to wrap it in, then the surgeon might be able to save it.’

  ‘I have real wool,’ said Waldheim, reaching into his knapsack and producing a cherished scarf which a Dutch classmate at the Consular Academy, Susanne Kempers, had once improvised for him.

  When he was anaesthetized for surgery, there was still some question whether he would come out of it with both legs. But he awoke to the lilting accent of a Viennese surgeon saying: ‘My boy, one more day and your leg would have been gone.’

  The Russians were advancing on the field hospital when Lieutenant Waldheim, successfully operated on, was to be evacuated on the last hospital train out. In a 1988 interview with me, he recalled his departure vividly: ‘I was lying on the ground on straw, but just when the medical orderlies came to pick me up and carry me to the train, the doctor said: “Look, the man behind you has lost his leg. Your wound is not so bad. Would you agree to our taking him instead of you?” The man was shouting with heavy pain, so I couldn’t say no. Then I lay back and waited to be captured. But, hours later, at four o’clock in the morning, suddenly somebody came in and said: “There’s another train. It’s not a hospital train, but a cattle train and we’ll try getting the wounded people out on it if that’s all right with you.”’ Relieved to travel westward cattle-class rather than eastward as a POW of the Russians, Waldheim was ‘lifted on to a stretcher and so I was also rescued, but I couldn’t know that beforehand. So you see, this was something that impressed me, shocked me, and concerned me directly: would I survive or not? And this I can remember as fresh as if it happened yesterday.’

  This crucial episode does not appear in any of his memoirs. In 1985’s In the Eye of the Storm, Waldheim wrote:

  I was evacuated home, but it took several months in a sanatorium in the mountains before my leg started to heal properly. I walked with a bad limp, and, to my undisguised relief, was discharged from further service at the front. I made a formal request to be permitted to resume my law studies . . . and, rather to my surprise, this was granted. I still had my pay as lieutenant and this helped to see me through.

  And, in an earlier book, The Challenge of Peace (1977):

  The knowledge that I was serving in the German army was hard to bear. Deliverance from my bitter situation came when our unit moved into active combat on the Eastern front in 1941. I was wounded in the leg and medically discharged.

  ‘It was impossible to leave Austria,’ Kurt Waldheim wrote disarmingly and deceptively in In the Eye of the Storm:

  The borders had been closed and were heavily patrolled. Even ordinary movements were restricted and the authorities dealt arbitrarily with anyone who did not conform to the regulations. This complicated my studies for a doctorate in law because the university library had been dispersed as a result of the bombing raids and the books and documents I needed had been hidden in obscure and often widely scattered places. I had to dig out the information for my dissertation . . . in bits and pieces. The physical assembly of the source material proved more exhausting than the research and the writing; I finally obtained my degree in 1944.

  In response to a 1980 inquiry by Representative Stephen J. Solarz, a Democratic Congressman from New York, Waldheim replied blithely: ‘I myself was wounded on the eastern front and, being incapacitated for further service at the front, resumed my law studies at Vienna University, where I graduated in 1944.�
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  What Waldheim failed to mention both times (and on numerous other occasions) was that, between the beginning of 1942 and 14 April 1944, the date he received his Doctor of Laws degree, he spent no more than eight of those twenty-seven and a half months as a student. Where was he and what was he doing during the rest of that time?

  In mid-March 1942, Lieutenant Waldheim completed his convalescence and returned to active duty – in Yugoslavia, which had been overrun eleven months earlier by Germany and three neighbours aligned with the Axis75 through choice or necessity: Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Classified as unfit for combat but qualified for staff duty, Lieutenant Waldheim was dispatched to the south central Yugoslavian town of Pljevlja, where his new unit, the Bader Combat Group, was working with the Italian Army’s rugged alpine division, the Pusteria Mountain Infantry, to wipe out guerrilla resistance and its civilian support in the Dubrovnik-Sarajevo area. Since Italian was the strongest of Waldheim’s three foreign languages (French and English were the others), he was put to work as an interpreter, with no command authority, in a radio truck manned by a Signal Corps team of technicians. Of his two months there, he contends: ‘I committed no crime in the whole time. I sat there and the German command gave orders to the Italian units and the Italians gave messages back, so they needed someone to translate . . .’

  Named after Paul Bader, the commanding general of German forces in Croatia, the Bader Combat Group was notorious for its harsh treatment of civilians as well as partisans. It had the authority to destroy villages and deport whole communities to concentration camps when sabotage occurred, or to take all males hostage and execute up to ‘one hundred Serbs for each German killed, fifty Serbs for one German wounded.’ Always, ‘the most terrifying means of punishment’ were the official guideline. A Bader Group quartermaster’s report dated 20 May 1942 shows that, under German supervision, the Italian Pusteria Division turned 488 Yugoslav civilians over to the SS in Sarajevo for deportation to Norway as slave labour.