Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  ‘No,’ he replied, ‘but we told him what we were doing and that this was our point of view on the matter. It’s great that we can sometimes disagree on issues. I don’t consider Simon a defender of Waldheim. I think he is being more cautious than we are on the Waldheim case. He’s operating like a jury and we’re working like a grand jury. Our obligation is just to gather the information and present it to the authorities with a recommendation. At this point in time, I think there’s no reason to give Waldheim the benefit of the doubt. I refuse to do so.’

  ‘So you’re saying that the Wiesenthal Centre is independent even of Wiesenthal?’

  ‘Yes, we are independent. We’re an American organization: totally American. You know, Mr Wiesenthal is not the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre – and, in this case, it’s very clear and it’s a good thing.’

  Rabbi Hier even professed admiration for the World Jewish Congress: ‘They had no other option. People called them to Vienna and said, “Here are documents.” If the WJC had sat on those documents and done nothing about it, the people who gave it to them would have leaked it anyway and they would have said, “Look at these guys! We’ve given them decent documents and they don’t even want to make it public.” So I don’t think any Jewish organization in the world, given those documents, would have behaved differently. They’d have made them public.’

  ‘What if they’d given them to Simon Wiesenthal?’ I asked. ‘Wasn’t he the logical place to bring them?’

  ‘Well, maybe as Socialists, they felt he was too close to Waldheim’s party and also anti-Kreisky,’ Hier answered. ‘I don’t know.’

  Rabbi Cooper added that the feud between Wiesenthal and the WJC had ‘nothing to do with fund-raising, but with all the years Nahum Goldmann and the WJC shut the door in his face and made it easier for former Nazis to be accepted. Then they shafted him on Kreisky and left him standing all alone. No wonder it’s a reflex that he bristles at the mention of the World Jewish Congress. So now, where there’s no smoking gun, why should he go out and raise hell for a guy like Israel Singer? – who, by the way, doesn’t come across as a normal human being to Simon. He just says “this guy is a frustrated yeshiva bucket’” – a Yiddish term for an inexperienced, unrealistic Talmudic student. To me later that year, Wiesenthal would call Singer a ‘young boy building his career on this case. I just had a talk with him in New York. He tried to tell me what is a Nazi. I say to Singer: “When I am meeting my first Nazi, you are not born yet.’”

  As the 4 May election neared, the campaign momentum was moving in Waldheim’s direction. So intense was the anti-WJC backlash (‘The Jews didn’t ask us if we objected to them making Begin their Prime Minister!’) that Socialist candidate Steyrer started pleading for the past to be forgotten as he plodded through 1200 election rallies and spoke to half a million voters in the hope that if no candidate won at least fifty per cent of the ballots cast on 4 May, there would have to be a run-off election in June between the top two vote-getters. But the front runner’s newest poster offered to spare the public as well as himself that further ordeal: ‘WALDHEIM ON MAY 4 WILL SAVE YOU A SECOND ROUND!’

  Austrian elections are held on Sundays, with voting compulsory in some provinces. When the results were tallied that night, Kurt Waldheim had 2,343,227 votes – an impressive figure in a land of seven and a half million people (many of them minors ineligible to vote), but, at 49.6 per cent, 16,000 votes short of a majority. Steyrer had 43.7 per cent. Frau Meissner-Blau polled a surprisingly strong 5.5 per cent, and Dr Scrinzi a hard-core 1.2 per cent. A run-off election between the two Kurts – Steyrer and Waldheim – was set for 8 June 1986.

  ‘True, I have only an outside chance,’ Steyrer admitted, ‘but if those who didn’t vote on 4 May and those who voted for the Environmentalist candidate come into my camp, I have a good chance of winning.’

  Taking no chances, a weary Waldheim resumed his barn-storming, trying to touch all the bases he’d missed in his first 1986 campaign. But it all seemed grubbier as a re-run. By now, Waldheim had a sore throat and his Paul Henreid matinee-idol voice was a chronic croak as he said over and over: ‘I have always been a practising Catholic and I can tell you my religion has helped me a lot. Our generation has suffered so much [but] I shall be able to stand anything that comes now: all the defamation and the rest.’

  As one correspondent noted:

  Villagers approved. They will elect the Christian candidate against the attacks of a foreign world they neither know nor care about.

  Though the Israeli government had remained remarkably cool toward the Waldheim controversy, it suddenly came to a boil when Yitzhak Shamir, then the Foreign Minister, urged Austrians not to vote for Waldheim: ‘The election of such a man to such a position would be a tragedy.’ Once again, Waldheim was being ‘victimized’ by outside interference in Austrian politics and he exploited this fully. At no meeting, no press conference, no TV interview did he fail to mention the WJC or Shamir and his terrorist past.84 ‘The media and the World Jewish Congress can go on hunting me, but I’ll go right on saying that I had no knowledge,’ Waldheim insisted from the outset, often referring to his nemesis as ‘that private institution, the World Jewish Congress.’ He told French journalist Claire Tréan in Le Monde: ‘But the international press is dominated by the World Jewish Congress. It’s well known!’

  Throughout this reprise of the first campaign, Simon Wiesenthal, too, continued to vent his ire on the World Jewish Congress for ‘demonizing’ Waldheim. He told interviewers: ‘I don’t support him. I don’t believe him. I have told that to him directly, and I will not defend him. But I can’t kill a reputation of forty years over an outburst of hysteria in America. I find that to accuse someone of being a war criminal, a murderer, without evidence is not in accordance with Jewish ethics.’ And he pointed out that the World Jewish Congress ‘has made people believe that Waldheim was one of the biggest war criminals’, while to Wiesenthal ‘Waldheim is a false symbol of the Nazis. He is a liar and an opportunist, but he never was a member of the Nazi Party. And there is no evidence that he was an assassin or a leader of the deportation of Jews.’ Simon also blamed the WJC for suggesting that Waldheim was responsible for ‘Austrian and UN policies hostile to Israel and the Jews.’ Most of all, however, he blamed the WJC for making ‘collective threats against all of Austria – and that, too, is not in accord with Jewish ethics.’

  The backlash over Wiesenthal’s attacks on the World Jewish Congress was being felt in the United States, where WJC President Bronfman merely professed puzzlement, but Vice-President Kalman Sultanik proclaimed that spring: ‘Waldheim, who sent Jews to the gas chambers, is being backed and defended by that prominent Jew, Simon Wiesenthal.’ And Barnett Zumoff, president of the Workmen’s Circle organization, said at its national convention in Swan Lake, New York: ‘Wiesenthal’s actions represent a worst example of the type of internecine warfare within the Jewish community that seriously endangers that community and diverts our energies from dealing with the real problems that threaten all Jews.’

  Answering attacks like Zumoff’s and Sultanik’s, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre was kept busy issuing statements clarifying Simon’s position to a distracted, information-battered public. To seize the initiative, Rabbi Hier fanned the flames two days before the election with a press-released ‘Reaction to the Projected Victory of Presidential Candidate Kurt Waldheim in Austria’s June 8 Election’ which began: ‘Kurt Waldheim, a deliberate liar, was accused of “murder and slaughter” by the government of Yugoslavia. He has never disproved these charges; nor has his behaviour reflected that of an innocent man.’ When Waldheim was elected President of Austria with a 53.9 per cent majority that Sunday night, Rabbi Hier was on NBC’s Monday morning news telling the people of Austria that they had been given two chances to reject Waldheim and ‘now we will keep your President busy cutting ribbons for the next six years.’

  It was an easy threat to keep, for the Presidency of Austria can be, to a large extent, a ce
remonial post – and ribbon-cutting is precisely what it’s about (unless there is a parliamentary or cabinet emergency, in which case the President could dissolve a government, reject a cabinet, or call elections). Alone in his cluttered office in Vienna, Simon Wiesenthal went on speaking out not for Waldheim, but for fair play for Waldheim while others made demagogic pronouncements in Simon’s name.

  A poll taken in Vienna in mid-1986 showed that ‘forty-three per cent of a representative sample said Jews were not Austrians – and a staggering seventy-nine per cent thought the Jews had at least been partly responsible for their own fate.’

  Inaugurated on 8 July, President Kurt Waldheim was already known as ‘The Prisoner of the Hofburg’ (the winter palace of the Habsburgs in which the Presidential Chancellery lies) when I returned to Vienna from the US that August.

  From the moment he was elected, the distancing had begun. The Socialist Chancellor, Fred Sinowatz, had resigned right away rather than pay ceremonial homage to Waldheim as head of state. He was followed by his Foreign Minister, Leopold Gratz, Kreisky’s hatchet-man in the 1970 counter-attack on Wiesenthal for uncovering Nazis and an SS and SA man in the cabinet. Gratz could not bring himself to ‘direct the Austrian Foreign Service in the defence of President Waldheim.’ A forty-eight-year-old Viennese banker, Franz Vranitzky, who had been Sinowatz’s finance minister, succeeded him as Chancellor. Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece, and the Netherlands withheld congratulations. Israel recalled its ambassador for consultations and sent a replacement of ambassadorial rank, but without the title of ambassador. The new US envoy, Ronald Lauder, a Jew who put a mezuzah85 on his palatial residence’s door, pleaded a prior commitment and didn’t attend the inauguration. To retaliate, a number of prominent Austrians, including the editor of Die Presse, boycotted Ambassador Lauder’s Fourth of July reception.

  At the inauguration in Parliament, many Socialist MPs wore black ties in protest and, in the park between Parliament and the Presidential Chancellery, a dozen protesters, led by an American rabbi and a Roman Catholic nun, picketed in the striped uniforms of concentration camp inmates. State visitors bypassed Vienna for fear of being photographed shaking Waldheim’s hand and, for similar reasons, high foreign officials met their Austrian counterparts in border cities like Salzburg and Bregenz. American Jewish tourists cancelled their Austrian travel plans en masse.

  The Waldheims had wanted to relax after the tiring election campaigns with a visit to Ireland, but Dublin gave them a polite ‘no thank you’. When former Finnish President Urho Kekkonen died, a ceremonial visit to the funeral by the President of Austria was almost obligatory, but no invitation was forthcoming and Helsinki let it be known that rioting against Waldheim might mar the solemnity of the occasion. Then the Netherlands weighed in with word that an invitation, which had been extended to President Kirchschläger for the opening of a new dam, was not transferable. But the crowning insult came from the King of Belgium, Baudoin, whose father, Leopold III, had abdicated after the war in the wake of accusations that he had fascist sympathies and had collaborated with his German captors. King Baudoin let it be known that he wouldn’t sponsor Belgium’s 1987 Europalia festival honouring Austria if Waldheim was on its organizing committee. The Austrian Foreign Ministry had to pretend that the President would be too busy to participate or attend, even though Waldheim had already sounded out Belgian contacts about cutting the ribbon at the Europalia opening.

  Not until March 1987 would Waldheim receive an acceptable invitation for a State visit – from King Hussein of Jordan, a nation still officially at war with neighbouring Israel. But even Hussein, who takes his winter ski vacations in Austria and owns a mansion on the edge of the Vienna Woods, later quailed at sharing the Presidential loge at the Opera Ball.

  In the wine gardens of Vienna in 1986, the sounds of a summer night invariably reverberated with discussions of Waldheim, Wiesenthal, ‘the Jews’, ‘the American Jews’, and ‘the Jews from New York’. At that autumn’s Freedom Party Congress in Innsbruck, Norbert Steger, the moderate leader serving as Vice Chancellor in the post-Kreisky coalition that had governed Austria since 1983 was overthrown by Jörg Haider, a dashing, pipe-smoking thirty-six-year-old extreme rightist who was hailed as ‘Hitler’s adopted son’ by fans who spoke of him fondly by the diminutive ‘Jörgl’. His wealth came from inherited property (worth nine to twelve million dollars) in Carinthia that had been expropriated from a Jewish family.

  Rather than rule in partnership with Haider, new chancellor Vranitzky dissolved the Red-Blue coalition. After President Waldheim called new elections, Haider made such a strong showing that the Socialists and the People’s Party returned to their postwar Red-Black ‘Grand Coalition’, with Vranitzky at the helm this time, to keep Haider out of power. In 1989, however, after a strong second-place showing in provincial elections, Haider formed a regional Black and Blue coalition with the third-place People’s Party to oust the Socialists in Carinthia and become Governor of the province. In 1990, after a Freedom Party candidate for mayor of a Carinthian village proclaimed that ‘I told Simon Wiesenthal we’re building ovens again, but not for you, Mr Wiesenthal; for you there’s room in Jörgl’s pipe’, Wiesenthal, who had never met the man, sued him under an Austrian law prohibiting acts that spread or glorify Nazism, but Haider, puffing serenely above it all, chose to ‘not even ignore’ Simon’s ‘artificial agitation’.

  Exacerbated by Attorney General Meese’s decision in April 1987 to place Waldheim on the ‘Watch List’ of undesirable aliens excluded from the US and by Pope John Paul II’s sudden invitation to Waldheim to visit the Vatican in mid-1987 as a devout Catholic man of peace (an opportunity Waldheim grasped so fast that it preceded his visit to Jordan), the hatred heated up that summer, when a group of orthodox Jews were cursed at, spat upon, and given the stiff-armed ‘Heil Hitler!’ salute in the streets of Vienna and some Jewish children were beaten up by Gentile children. The official Jewish community – representing less than one Austrian in a thousand – reported receiving an average often poison-pen letters per day. And Carl Hödl, the People’s Party Deputy Mayor of Hitler’s home city of Linz, wrote his hate-mail directly to WJC President Bronfman, comparing the attacks on Waldheim to

  those of your fellow believers, who two thousand years ago had Jesus Christ convicted in a show trial because he did not accommodate the lords of Jerusalem . . . It remained for you, and those like you, to bring such a Talmudic concept into the world.

  Disowned by his party bosses amidst clamour for his removal, Hödl took early retirement at the age of sixty-three.

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  Wiesenthal vs Waldheim

  ‘BACK TO THE FUTURE’ proclaimed posters that had sprouted across Austria within hours of Kurt Waldheim’s election victory in June 1986. Everybody in Austria agreed that the country had to resume its forward march from Western Europe’s poorest land in 1970 to one of its most affluent in the eighties – a transition that coincided with the Kreisky era. But, by the time Waldheim was inaugurated a month later, everybody knew that even without the World Jewish Congress, the world’s conscience would not let Austria and its President bury their past just yet.

  For once, Waldheim had recognized this and, at his first presidential press conference two days after taking office, he had endorsed Simon Wiesenthal’s proposal of an international commission of military historians to examine all relevant documents and evaluate the allegations against him. Speaking in bureaucratese, Waldheim told the press: ‘I have no objection to such an idea because I am sure it would clarify, finally, my statement in this regard. But the technical aspects would have to be clarified before one would take a final position on such matters.’

  ‘If Waldheim had his way,’ one of the foreign correspondents present remarked, ‘he’d kill this story through boredom.’

  Pleased that his historical commission was moving from idea toward reality, Simon Wiesenthal said he didn’t expect it to come up with a ‘smoking gun’; in fact, he was quite sure there wa
sn’t one. And he resumed speaking out on other aspects of the case. ‘Waldheim should have sued a long time ago,’ he told a couple of journalists. ‘The media in the US are powerful, but the courts took care that the trees which make newsprint don’t go all the way up into the sky.’

  Expressing disappointment in Rabbi Hier’s continued pronouncements (e.g., ‘That such a man can still be elected President of Austria is an indictment of the Austrian people’s unwillingness to squarely face up to the past . . . The Austrian people wanted Waldheim; they can have him!’), Simon revealed to me that he had flirted with severing his ties to the Wiesenthal Centre and had even asked Hier to change its name.

  ‘I have so many troubles with our Centre in connection with Waldheim,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Not with any other problems; just this. They are part of the hysteria, day and night. We have 320,000 members and I am getting letters from Jewish judges of the Supreme Courts of the States of New York and Connecticut and from other people of justice – not men off the street! – who could not understand my problem and so they resign their membership in the Centre. To each of these few people I send a letter telling them I will never change the style of my work; I will never accuse people without evidence. A judge should respect that. Later, they apologize and send letters to the Centre wanting to be reinstated as members. For a while, I was so unhappy with the situation that I revoked my name from the Centre. But, on the other hand, Waldheim is temporary and all the other work of the Centre is so important that, like those Supreme Court judges, I give my name back.’

  Toward the end of October 1986, a Catholic university students’ association took a stab at reconciliation with ‘A Jewish Week’ of readings, concerts, and lectures. On Thursday, Simon Wiesenthal shared the podium on anti-Semitism with Dr Erika Weinzierl, a non-Jewish historian who was Austria’s leading analyst of the workings of bigotry. Wiesenthal went first. As his speech began, the organizers took a call from the President’s office. Would there be three seats available in the audience if President Waldheim came right over? The organizers said yes and gave up their front-row seats. At a pause for questions, they announced that President Waldheim himself was on his way over. The capacity audience gasped. Wiesenthal gulped. Then he stood up and said: ‘You will understand why I have to excuse myself.’