Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  Not everybody did, but I could understand how, particularly with a couple of photographers present, Wiesenthal – his Stateside standing and lecture bookings at stake – could not afford to be seen in a situation involving hobnobbing with the controversial President. As Simon collected his coat in the vestibule, Waldheim and an aide and a bodyguard appeared. Waldheim gave Wiesenthal a warm ‘Good evening, Mr Engineer!’ Wiesenthal gave Waldheim a frostier ‘Good evening, Mr President.’ Glancing around to see that the photographers were still in the auditorium, Simon shook Waldheim’s hand and left. Later, he would say: ‘You cannot bring the President of the country in through the back door.’

  The President of Austria took his front-row seat and listened attentively to Dr Weinzierl, but did not ask any questions. The audience behaved politely.

  When the leaders of Democrats Abroad convened in Vienna in late 1986 to lay plans for the US presidential election two years later, I helped arrange a private briefing by Simon Wiesenthal over cocktails on a Saturday night at a home within walking distance of his – and he let me tape the conversation. Simon blamed the whole Waldheim affair, including his election, on middle level ‘members of the Socialist Party in Vienna and the World Jewish Congress.’ He did not condemn Waldheim for his memberships in the Nazi student union and SA riding club. ‘Believe me,’ said Simon, ‘eighty per cent of students in those times had to be members of such organizations; they had no choice. And, if Waldheim had been a wise man, he could have said so and, by giving the right answer, win immediately. But his tactic was always evasion and no truth – and then the truth, when it was too late.’

  He condemned Singer and Steinberg of the World Jewish Congress, but acknowledged the effect of their tactics: ‘These two young boys: they knew the psychology of American Jews better than I do. In their subconscious, American Jews feel guilty. They haven’t done enough against the Nazis in the war to help their fellow Jews in Europe. Now they have the golden chance to do all against Waldheim – verbally! On my lecture tours, they ask me: “What is the difference between Eichmann and Waldheim?” “Why is Waldheim not arrested?” “Why don’t they hang him?” And when I say, “First give me evidence and then let us see”, they say, “Why you protect him?” Nobody wish to know the truth!

  ‘I have always had letters to the editor against me. Usually, they come from neo-Nazis. But now, to see them signed by Jews in Jewish newspapers: this is something new to me.’

  Wiesenthal told the amateur politicians – American Democrats living in a dozen European countries and Israel – what he’d told Singer and Steinberg when they visited him on his most recent lecture tour of the States. According to Wiesenthal, the ‘two young boys’ said to him: ‘We cannot finish the matter of Waldheim without your moral support. We need your moral position in the world.’ And Simon had replied:

  ‘Well, let me tell you how to get it. You bring your evidence to me before you hold a press conference. And if your documents show me that the man was involved in war crimes, then I as an Austrian citizen will ask him to resign. People will believe me. But when you will come out and ask him to resign, it will be the same as it was in the presidential election. Out of the two and a half million votes he got, a few hundred thousand people voted for Waldheim who never would have voted for him without this interference from abroad. They say to me, “Do the Americans think we are a banana republic? that we cannot alone decide whom to elect?” And these quarter of a million people weren’t voting for Waldheim so much as they were voting against the World Jewish Congress.’

  Now Simon told the wide-eyed Democrats: ‘To understand the Austrian position, I say: look, you had a problem with a president, Nixon. What would it have been like if the accusations against him had come not from the States, but only from abroad? Nixon would never have had to resign. So why should Singer and Steinberg imagine Waldheim should resign because they attacked him from abroad?’

  Simon suggested that he, as an Austrian citizen, might call for Waldheim’s resignation if the commission of military historians condemned him: ‘They will read all the documents and they will make a conclusion. This is so easy when military historians talk; whether they are American or German or Greek, in half an hour, they have a common language of how these documents must be read. This commission must be created not for or against Waldheim, but only for the truth.’

  Though Wiesenthal had high hopes for the historians’ commission, others, including me, felt that any group empanelled by the Austrian government would have a built-in predisposition toward whitewash. This impression was heightened in 1987 when a part-time researcher at Wiesenthal’s Jewish Documentation Centre, Silvana Konieczny-Origlia, copied a personal letter from one of the commission members, Gerald Fleming of Great Britain, to Wiesenthal enclosing evidence she said incriminated Waldheim. After she published letter and documents in the Italian magazine Epoca, it turned out that the documents – found by Fleming in Washington’s National Archives and suggesting a link between Waldheim’s intelligence unit and the killing of British prisoners of war in 1944 – had been analysed earlier, not only in Germany’s Der Spiegel, but by the British Foreign Office, which found no evidence of ‘any criminal activity’ by Lieutenant Waldheim against British prisoners. Certifying the veracity of the documents, Wiesenthal pointed out that they contained only information that was already known. He added that Mrs Konieczny-Origlia ‘disappeared about five days before and we have not heard from her since. I was very surprised to hear about this report.’ She was no longer in his employ. Later, he would remark that this showed ‘how the Waldheim case could induce a seemingly sensible, seemingly decent person to commit an incomprehensible action . . . believing that she could thereby prove Waldheim to be a war criminal who was being protected by me.’

  Potentially more harmful to the historical commission was Fleming’s covering letter, in which he wrote in German:

  Please destroy this letter. The documents are for your private files. They come from Washington. What I am telling you is absolutely confidential and must remain so.

  Even though the letter was written before Fleming’s appointment to the commission, some damage was done. An Italian journalist wrote that Simon had concealed the papers to help Waldheim. A week later, Epoca published an attack on Simon by the WJC’s Elan Steinberg. And Serge Klarsfeld went on French TV to denounce Simon’s role as a passive recipient of vital data.

  The next attack on Simon Wiesenthal came from a more familiar direction. On the morning of 6 January 1988 – the Austrian holiday of Epiphany – Austrian Television transmitted nationwide a two-hour interview with Wiesenthal live from the stage of the Theater in der Josefstadt. A few minutes into the telecast, when Simon was explaining that he saw himself more as a ‘researcher’ than a ‘Nazi-hunter’, a voice from the third balcony shouted ‘Murderer!’ and another called out ‘You are a liar!’ as a shower of neo-Nazi hate-leaflets fluttered down upon the rococo auditorium. After a brief scuffle, three rightist hoodlums were apprehended by the police, but much more heartening was the immediate response when the interviewer, Franz Ferdinand Wolf, exhorted the capacity audience: ‘This is Austria 1988. I believe that was “The Other Austria”. Shall we show it with applause?’ – and all 850 Austrians on hand rose as one to give Wiesenthal a prolonged standing ovation.

  Later, Simon told me: ‘Letters to the editor in America are saying I am senile, but what I lose in America, I win in Austria.’ He meant respect and respectability as he went from a non-person or worse in Kreisky’s Austria to recognition as a symbol of justice and integrity in the Waldheim era. Indeed, nothing did Wiesenthal’s heart more good than hearing a Socialist chancellor, Vranitzky, praise him publicly as ‘Austria’s incorruptible conscience, too long ignored or unacknowledged in our country.’

  1988 was predestined to be a traumatic year for Austria with the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss in March preceded by delivery of the historians’ commission report in February. As rumours flew that the pan
el would not be as kind to Waldheim as anticipated, pressure for his resignation mounted to a new frenzy. Though the Jerusalem Post claimed that People’s Party leader Alois Mock had written to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that President Waldheim would soon resign pleading ill health, the President himself, at the outset of his seventieth year, looked fitter than ever and seemed to thrive on controversy.

  While the historians’ 202-page report said that ‘the question of Waldheim’s guilty conduct in the war is not finally answered’, it also concluded that ‘he repeatedly assisted in connection with illegal actions and thereby facilitated their execution. He tried to let his military past slip into oblivion and, as soon as that was no longer possible, to portray it as harmless.’ Though Waldheim termed the failure to attach ‘personal guilt’ to him a vindication, the Israeli member of the commission, Jehuda Wallach, said that not only had Waldheim twisted the panel’s words, but that he believed there was enough evidence to prosecute the President of Austria.

  At this point, Simon Wiesenthal beat the retreat that had begun when he’d left the Catholic students’ seminar in haste upon hearing that Waldheim was coming. With his lecture bookings and his standing with world Jewry eroding from the principled position he had taken for two years, he now leaped to loftier moral ground by calling for Waldheim’s resignation because a president must be an ethical role-model for a society. In various interviews, Wiesenthal said he hoped the President would take advantage of the report’s ambiguity ‘to make the decision to go without losing face, but in Austria’s interest.’ Terming the current situation a ‘catastrophe’, he said ‘the way out lies with the President. Austria cannot live alone in the world. Sooner or later, the people will hold Dr Waldheim responsible for their isolation . . . The President must symbolize truth and not come in conflict with it.’

  The Waldheim affair made Simon Wiesenthal and Bruno Kreisky into strange bedfellows. Kreisky, too, now called for the President to resign. Kreisky’s initial defence of his former colleague against WJC ‘infamy’ and American ‘score-settling’ had turned to disenchantment with ‘a candidate who will create a divided nation . . . It is not good for Austria to have a liar at the top of the State. It is not good for a people to have a President who is on the Watch List.’

  The most startling response to the historians’ report came from Karl Gruber, the Tyrolean resistance hero who, as Austrian Foreign Minister, gave Waldheim his first diplomatic job. Nearing eighty, Gruber gave an interview to Italian television and his words were re-broadcast on Austrian radio: ‘The commission, they were not his friends. They were practically all his enemies. The German is a Socialist. The others are of Jewish descent.’

  Gruber was promptly repudiated by everybody from Waldheim to Wiesenthal, from Chancellor Vranitzky to Gruber’s own People’s Party – and by the truth. The German panellist, Manfred Messerschmidt of the Research Institute for Military History in Freiburg, said he had never joined any political party and considered himself a liberal, not a socialist. Two commission members – Israel’s Wallach and Britain’s Fleming – were indeed Jewish, but the other three (including US Brigadier-General James Lawton Collins Jnr) were not. Gruber’s words proved only one truth: the vocabulary of anti-Semitism was so pervasive in Austria that even a confirmed anti-fascist fighter spoke its language.

  It was almost anticlimactic when Kurt Waldheim went on Austrian television to tell the nation (and the world) that he had ruled out resigning: ‘It is a fundamental principle of our democracy that an election result cannot be subsequently corrected. A head of state must not retreat in the face of slanders, hateful demonstrations, and wholesale condemnations.’

  As if to prove Waldheim’s point, President Bronfman of the World Jewish Congress surfaced in the next day’s New York Times with this condemnation:

  Mr Waldheim is clearly amoral. He is a man without conscience. He is a liar and an unrepentant man who was part and parcel of the Nazi killing machine.

  On another occasion, Bronfman called upon the world to oppose Austria’s application to enter the European Union: collective punishment for one man’s unproven guilt.

  Simon Wiesenthal took another tack. ‘When the historians said Waldheim can’t be tried,’ he told me, ‘I had hoped he would take this as a way to leave with dignity. When he didn’t, I asked him to resign. But I spoke only as a citizen of Austria.’

  While Waldheim’s on-going sauna of cold snubs and hot exposures only seemed to invigorate him, he also appeared to have learned a certain humility that was almost becoming. In his TV response to the historians, he had acknowledged it was a mistake to say two years earlier that he was only doing his duty as a German soldier and now he paid his respects to ‘the heroes and martyrs of that time’. He was not one of them, he admitted: ‘We others in my generation were submerged in the machinery of war, in fear and the effort to survive.’ But, he added, he had a ‘clear conscience’.

  ‘Maybe so,’ Simon Wiesenthal remarked. ‘The man was neither a Nazi nor a war criminal, a hero or a victim. He was an opportunist like ninety-nine per cent of the others. But should such an average person be president of a country?’

  The fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss fell on the same days of the week in 1988 that they did in 1938. On Friday, 11 March, the day Schuschnigg gave up, there would be a ceremony in the Hofburg, but enough Socialist and Green Members of Parliament threatened to boycott the event or walk out if the President spoke that he agreed to attend as a silent spectator. He was, however, given the opportunity to speak on national television the night before, and there he said that although Austria was the first victim of Hitler, some Austrians were guilty of committing Nazi crimes. ‘Of course, there is no such thing as collective guilt,’ he declared. ‘Nevertheless, I should like to apologize as head of state.’

  In 1988, Kurt Waldheim conjured up a ghost from Simon Wiesenthal’s past: Eichmann-hunter Tuviah Friedman made a much-publicized return to Vienna from Haifa – at the invitation and expense of the offices of the President of Austria, the Austrian Foreign Ministry, and the Austrian Federal Press Service – as the self-proclaimed ‘Conscience of Israel’ come to Austria to pronounce President Kurt Waldheim ‘innocent as a baby’. Friedman made no effort to contact Wiesenthal while being wined and dined by the Waldheims at the presidential villa in the garden district of Hohe Warte and by the Federal Press Service at the Noah’s Ark Kosher Restaurant on the Judengasse in the old ghetto, where a press dinner for nine – Friedman, four officials shepherding him, and four journalists – cost the taxpayers some 400 dollars.

  The last word on this whole fiasco, however, belonged to Simon Wiesenthal, who told the press that Friedman had snubbed him as a rival. ‘We’ve been out of touch for more than thirty years,’ Simon said. ‘After Eichmann was captured, Friedman was once quoted as complaining: “They always talk about Wiesenthal, never about me.” I feel sorry for Tuviah Friedman. He was recruited for something of which he wasn’t intellectually capable . . . [But] nationally and internationally, Waldheim is in a situation where the only person who can help him is himself.’

  The embarrassing resuscitation of Tuviah Friedman was part of a media offensive launched from the Hofburg in 1988. A spate of interviews with Waldheim began to appear in the world’s English-language media. He told James M. Markham of the New York Times that he was slightly reluctant to make any gesture of reconciliation toward Austrian Jews: ‘I have to be a little careful. I want to be sure I will be well received. There will always be people who will say, “Well, why is he coming?’” Then he launched into what Markham called ‘a paean to the Jewish contribution to Austrian civilization’ and recalled Jewish friendships in New York: ‘I attended Jewish weddings. My family doctor in New York was a Jew.’ He vowed to use his ‘whole moral authority to fight anti-Semitism, which is a scourge of humanity. I shall do that out of deep conviction.’

  Receiving Steve Lipman of Jewish Week at the Attersee, he rattled off his Jewish connections �
� the New York physician; a Jewish friend in the US who sends letters of ‘moral support’; an English teacher from his early school years – and told Lipman how he attends Jewish weddings and funerals in Vienna wearing a conspicuous skull-cap. (Lipman did not mention the yarmulkah flap at Yad Vashem.)

  He even granted a polite, if tense, interview to his nemesis, Professor Herzstein, the military historian who had ‘unmasked’ his ‘hidden past’ for the World Jewish Congress. Herzstein said that ‘much of the information he offered was new and highly useful’ to his book Waldheim: the Missing Years.

  Just to analyse Herzstein’s book and another (Waldheim, by French journalists Luc Rosenzweig and Bernard Cohen) for the London Review of Books, Gitta Sereny, the biographer of Franz Stangl, flew to Vienna for an interview with Waldheim. ‘Why do they go on about me? Do you understand the reasons?’ he asked Sereny in the Anschluss anniversary month of March 1988. When she observed that the historians’ commission seemed to think he should have been a hero, he voiced his disappointment: ‘I thought that the commission, who after all I asked for, would understand. Would I really have asked for such learned men to investigate my past if I had done something wrong? Those who think me bad, do they also think me mad? But it is true, of course. I could have resisted, deserted, and I didn’t.’