Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  From Mallorca, Bruno Kreisky talked on the telephone to Time’s Vienna correspondent, Traudl Lessing, and, though no admirer of Waldheim, spoke up for him against the WJC. ‘An extraordinary infamy!’ the seventy-five-year-old Jewish ex-Chancellor growled. But he warned Mrs Lessing not to blame Jewish circles only. ‘The Americans in general have an old score to settle with Waldheim. They never accepted the fact that he had to do the bidding of the majority at the UN.’ Israel, Kreisky added, had always distrusted Waldheim because of the UN’s Middle East policy. As for the reaction in Austria, Kreisky predicted: ‘People will simply say, “we won’t allow the Jews abroad to order us about and tell us who should be our President.’” Though the latest polls showed Waldheim forging steadily ahead of Steyrer, Kreisky added a compassionate afterthought for his former Foreign Ministry colleague: ‘I don’t quite understand why Waldheim had to get himself into this mess.’

  For once, Simon Wiesenthal and Bruno Kreisky were in agreement – about the 4 May 1986 Austrian election. ‘Waldheim will win with the help of the World Jewish Congress,’ Simon told me when we met on 9 April 1986, at the Hotel Doral Park Avenue in New York for breakfast. ‘I know how people feel. I am an Austrian, too. Foreigners don’t have the right to decide who will be our President.’

  Simon told me that, after Herzstein had unearthed the Yugoslav Odluka accusing Lieutenant Waldheim of murder, candidate Waldheim had phoned again and they had talked more than thirty minutes: ‘He wanted to say he didn’t know what had happened to those three villages in Yugoslavia in 1944 until the documents were released in 1986. I said I would wait for more documents. And he asked me again to please believe him that he hadn’t known about the deportations from Saloniki. How could he not have known?’ But Wiesenthal told Waldheim: ‘When this is only a matter of whether I believe you or not, then is this an Austrian affair between you as a candidate and me as a voter. But, if it is a matter of war crimes, then it is everybody’s affair – the Yugoslavs’, the Americans’, the world’s – because people from other countries were the victims.’

  Now Wiesenthal told me at his breakfast table: ‘In the moment I saw that there are accusations about Yugoslavs, I immediately become engaged. The same day, I drafted a two-hundred-word telegram to the Prime Minister of Yugoslavia [then Milka Planinc]. She happened to be in Vienna at the time. And I ask her to say why they have done nothing when there are such terrible accusations. What I say in the cable is that what I am doing is not for and not against Waldheim. As a citizen of Austria, I wish to know the truth. But the next day after she gets my cable, she is saying Yugoslavia is not mixing in Austrian elections. So I tell Waldheim: “You have to tell the Yugoslavs to let the world see everything. It’s in your best interest.’” Wiesenthal’s guess was: ‘If the Yugoslavs dropped the case, the only conclusion is that they had nothing.’ He had no use for the possibility of blackmail: ‘If they are using him for blackmail, then his dossier would never remain in the archive so a journalist in Yugoslavia could come and look at it.’

  With a sigh, Simon said he wasn’t looking forward to contending with the present state of ‘Waldheim hysteria’ in the US: ‘That a man with my reputation has not the possibility to talk with people in a logical way about Waldheim says more about the hysteria than about Waldheim. Immediately, they say: “Ah, you protect Waldheim!” And I say: I wish to know the truth. Do what you wish, I will not change my attitude since forty years. I never accuse somebody without evidence and I never play the prosecutor and the judge for the same person. My line was always: the documents must be hard, but my language moderate – because, when both are hard, my judges will think, “This is a hater.” And you know that I am not.’

  There was a quaver in his voice and, to dispel emotion, he glanced at his breakfast-table New York Times and said a little more calmly:

  ‘Look, for me, before I was ever coming to this country, was American press and American media the eminence of fairness. But I don’t see this fairness now! There are big headlines, but in the article is not the contents that makes the headline true.’

  He blamed the hysteria on World Jewish Congress demagoguery and said: ‘If I had worked the way they do, I would be finished two years after I start. So this press conference will not be easy. I do not look forward.’

  Later, at Simon’s forty-minute meeting with Javier Perez de Cuellar, Waldheim’s successor at the UN – for which Rabbi Hier of the Wiesenthal Centre82 had flown in from Los Angeles – Perez de Cuellar began by expressing his personal admiration for Simon’s forty years’ work on behalf of justice.

  ‘First we were talking about the troubles of Kurt Waldheim,’ Simon reported, ‘and the Secretary General told me that they were releasing to Israel and Austria – and now the United States has asked and will get it, too – the documents in possession of the United Nations that date from end of 1947 to beginning of 1948. I told the Secretary General that this was only a part of the file on Kurt Waldheim and the most important files are still in Belgrade.’

  Perez de Cuellar agreed to intervene in the matter – to begin with, by calling the Yugoslav ambassador. (He did, but Yugoslavia’s ruling Presidium declined ‘to interfere in the internal affairs of our neighbours.’) ‘I told Perez de Cuellar that this has not only to do with Austria and Yugoslavia,’ Simon informed me later, ‘“You must do something for the United Nations. Was a criminal for ten years the head of the UN?’”

  Then Wiesenthal and Hier raised the other issue – which Simon introduced by telling Perez de Cuellar: ‘It looks to me like in a thriller: 40,000 dead bodies in a cellar. These are the documents that were started collected in 1943 in London – first through the governments-in-exile of the occupied countries of Europe and then from the Jewish Agency, which took the testimony of people who escaped from those countries; and also from the French resistance, Dutch resistance, and other resistances; from Sweden, Hungary: documents, names, and descriptions of crimes. In 1948, the United Nations War Crimes Commission was closed and the papers were put away, even though they had a big historic value. Now, almost forty years later, they cannot remain in an archive in a cellar.’83

  Perez de Cuellar asked Wiesenthal to draw up a memo outlining how and to whom, other than governments, the UNWCC files might be made available. The very next day, at Perez de Cuellar’s request, the Waldheim files were opened to the US, Austrian, and Israeli governments; Israel was also granted access to the files of Alois Brunner, the Austrian SS aide to Eichmann who was still living in Syria, and Hermann Klenner, an East German diplomat and former Nazi Party member who was serving as vice president of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva. Months later, the archive was opened to scholars, historians, and researchers.

  At his press conference, however, Wiesenthal found the New York journalists much less interested in hearing about Perez de Cuellar than about his predecessor. ‘Have you come to any conclusions about Waldheim?’ Simon was asked.

  ‘How could I?’ he replied. ‘Look, when I receive a dossier, I don’t read it like a crime novel. I look at the first and last page to see the accusation and the conclusion – and then I go back to the beginning and read it all the way through, trying to see if one leads logically to the other . . . From this [UNWCC] document here, without the full Yugoslav documentation, what we have is an accusation from 1948 and nothing more.’

  ‘As an Austrian citizen, how do you view the latest rise in Waldheim’s popularity?’

  Wiesenthal paused for a moment and then replied: ‘You know, sixty-five per cent of the Austrian population are born after the war or were small children. And they feel very uncomfort[able] when are coming voices from abroad that give them advices whom they should elect. They feel adult enough to choose. . .’

  Asked if the World Jewish Congress was premature, Wiesenthal said yes in the light of evidence thus far. Was there evidence? ‘I don’t know.’ Then he pointed out: ‘By 1948, the Yugoslavs knew he was already a small secretary in the Austrian Foreign
Ministry. And they were going after everybody they could. In 1949, the Yugoslavs claimed for a number of people in Germany and Austria and other places and they started looking for Artukovic, who has just been extradited from California. But why did they not claim for Waldheim? The answer to this can only be given in Yugoslavia.’

  After more than an hour of fielding rapid-fire questions in English, Wiesenthal was tiring and the queries were repeating themselves. When the press conference was over, I congratulated Simon and said goodbye. ‘They weren’t as hostile as I expected,’ he remarked. ‘Nobody even accused me of coming to protect him.’

  But the next day’s New York Daily News headline was: ‘NAZI HUNTER SAYS: “HANDS OFF KURT!’”

  38

  The prisoner of the Hofburg

  At Simon Wiesenthal’s request, the respected, sometimes revered, incumbent President of Austria, Rudolf Kirchschläger – who could truly call himself ‘the man Austria trusts’ – had agreed to review all the evidence for and against Waldheim and to issue some sort of preliminary evaluation before the election. On 22 April 1986, with the voting for his successor a dozen days away, Kirchschläger went on national television to deliver his conclusions after closeting himself for ten days with three sets of papers: the UN War Crimes Commission files on Kurt Waldheim; a five-hundred-page ‘preliminary set’ of ‘war documents transmitted to me by the World Jewish Congress, mainly from US war archives’, and a defence prepared by Waldheim’s son Gerhard.

  As a former judge, Kirchschläger told his people: ‘Do not expect from me any verdict. I have no right to pronounce a guilty verdict or an acquittal. Both would contradict the constitutional principle of the rule of law.’ Furthermore, he had not conducted a hearing with witnesses. Nevertheless, he declared, ‘if I were placed in the position of State Prosecutor, I would not dare . . . to level charges in an ordinary court on the basis of the pieces of evidence submitted to me.’

  Kirchschläger gave six principal reasons why he wouldn’t go into court: the order for ruthless reprisals (‘expiation measures’) bore a different departmental reference number from Waldheim’s branch . . . Lieutenant Waldheim was never a counter-intelligence officer, as claimed in the charges; nor was he ever deputy head of Section Ic, but just an aide . . . ‘As an aide, he had no power vested in him to order retaliatory measures’ . . . ‘All this must have been known to the key witness [the late Sergeant Johann] Mayer, owing to his assignment as personnel clerk’ . . . Given his circumstances as a German captive under suspicion, Mayer might well have given false testimony to improve his own situation . . . and ‘finally – and this seems to be decisive for me – the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which was the prosecutor then, obviously has not undertaken any steps towards actual prosecution.’

  Saying he had taken on the assignment ‘to inject some calm into the very vehement international reporting by the mass media, which has gripped the entire Western world and, to a certain extent, the Third World as well’, Kirchschläger acknowledged only partial success. ‘The wave of information has acquired a life of its own, which can be contained only with great difficulty. However, the press conferences of the World Jewish Congress, which were held daily or at two-day intervals in New York, have come to an end.’ Also abating, he added, were the tensions provoked by ‘mass solidarity towards an action that was interpreted as external interference in the presidential election campaign’, which ‘inevitably also had an impact on our Jewish fellow citizens.’ Here, the tall, austere outgoing President sounded a stern warning in his most teary quaver:

  ‘Today I again beseech all fellow citizens, and primarily those who bear political responsibility, to promote with all their strength this process of bringing internal calm. Throughout our history, anti-Jewish sentiments have never brought us any benefits or blessings. In addition, they are most deeply inhumane.’

  Whether one’s choice was Kurt Waldheim or Kurt Steyrer – or one of the two fringe candidates: ‘Greens’ nominee Frieda Meissner-Blau, a fifty-seven-year-old self-styled ‘child of the ’68 Revolution, though I could be their mother’, and ‘Germanic’ nominee Otto Scrinzi, sixty-eight, a psychiatrist and former SA officer favouring restoration of the death penalty and opposing all things Jewish – one couldn’t help wishing that Kirchschläger, whose own ‘fulfilment of duty’ at the end of the war cost some 1200 Austrian teenagers their fives, could stay on for a third term.

  Simon Wiesenthal had no fault to find with Kirchschläger’s analysis, ‘except if he thinks the World Jewish Congress has quieted down, he will surely find out other.’

  Sure enough, the WJC had been quick to rejoin that ‘Dr Kirchschläger’s conclusion was that he could neither convict nor acquit Waldheim.’ Meanwhile, in an open letter to US Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Attorney General Edwin Meese III, the WJC’s president, Seagram liquor heir Edgar M. Bronfman, denounced Waldheim as ‘a man who is a proven liar . . . who participated in the most cruel behaviour of the National Socialists, and who is not only unrepentant of his past activities, but still has the nerve to stand before the world as one who simply obeyed orders and runs for the Presidency of Austria.’ Waldheim said he would sue.

  ‘Waldheim’s deceit knows no bounds,’ said the World Jewish Congress in late April. The WJC was seeking to have Waldheim placed on the US Immigration and Naturalization Service’s ‘Watch List’; based on a 1978 federal statute known as the ‘Holtzman Amendment’, it bars entry of aliens who ‘ordered, incited, assisted, or otherwise participated in the persecution of any person because of race, religion, national origin, or political opinion.’ By the end of April 1986, Neal Sher, who had succeeded Allan Ryan as director of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, was reported to have said that if someone less prominent than Waldheim had been involved, ‘a determination of excludability would be clearly and routinely made’ on the basis of evidence already at hand. The OSI recommended to Attorney General Meese that Waldheim be barred from entering the country. Meese put it under consideration – which took a year.

  Of the whole commotion in the States, Wiesenthal said with a sigh: ‘This is so typically American. A great big cloud rises, but nothing comes of it. These World Jewish Congress people are young fellows who have never learned to read German military documents. A lot of people who read German don’t know how to read a German military document. I myself needed a few years to become acquainted with the language: to know that when somebody signed a report on the left side, it was only for the accuracy. In all the [Waldheim] documents I have seen so far, they are signed by him on the left side. There are no conclusions by him what should be done.

  ‘These boys from the WJC, they do not differentiate between an intelligence officer and a reconnaissance man. And it’s nonsense to believe that the Yugoslavs by now don’t know everything that happened in the Balkans. They’ve utilized or archived or published the war diaries of every German unit that was ever there.’

  After what Rabbi Abraham Cooper called a ‘bum rap in the Daily News headline, which registered on lots of American Jews who don’t even read the News, but saw it on the stands’, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre began to argue with Simon Wiesenthal about ‘how his statements were being posited in the US and Canada. So we’re shreyen [Yiddish for screaming] from the Pacific Coast all the way across America, all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, and halfway across Europe to try to tell him the harm he’s doing himself over here and how frustrating this was to us.’

  At the other end of the satellite connection, Simon simply explained the overheated political climate in Austria and the hyperbole heard there.

  ‘Quite frankly, Simon, our main concern is that Gerhard Waldheim is over here and he and his father’s Austro-American supporters are trying to cash in on your back,’ Cooper told him – and he stopped Simon in his tracks when he told him Neal Sher of the OSI had called Waldheim ‘legally excludable’ from the US. After Cooper had explained this part of t
he Holtzman Amendment to Simon, he says Simon told him: ‘Look, I have full confidence in Neal Sher, so if you are telling me that under US law an alien has no rights and is guilty until proven innocent, then you do whatever you want to do in America. I am not going to address the American issue. I am just going to say what I have to say here in Austria.’

  Rabbis Cooper and Hier took this as a cue to launch a postcard campaign similar to a successful one they had used in 1979 to stave off expiration of the German statute of limitations on war crimes. On the front of the 1986 model, all in black and white: the newly unearthed and already world-famous photo of Lieutenant Waldheim standing between two generals at Podgorica in 1943; a portrait of Secretary General Waldheim at his UN desk, and the headline ‘AMERICA SAYS NO TO WALDHEIM!’ On the back: a pre-printed message – pre-addressed to Ronald Reagan in the White House with four lines at the bottom for the sender’s full name and address. The text:

  Dear Mr President:

  In 1947 Kurt Waldheim was charged with ‘murder and slaughter’ by Yugoslavia. Those charges were accepted by the UN Crimes Commission, of which the United States was a member.

  As an ‘alien’ Mr Waldheim does not have the right to be allowed entry into the US unless he can exonerate himself of the war crimes charges.

  Because of the uniqueness and magnitude of Nazi crimes, we urge your administration to enforce the letter of the law and bar Mr Waldheim from our shores.

  ‘We gave out a million postcards,’ Rabbi Hier told me that summer, ‘and the White House admits to receiving 100,000, which they say is an astronomical sum on any given issue.

  Simon had said nothing to me about the postcard campaign, but had made an ‘I-don’t-want-to-hear-about-it’ grimace when I’d mentioned it, so I asked Rabbi Hier whether he’d cleared it with him first.