by Alan Levy
From the moment in 1986 when the first ‘revelations’ about him began making daily headlines and Kurt Waldheim started to squirm like a schoolboy caught ‘cheating’, the ‘character issue’ was invoked on the world stage with the Final Solution as backdrop. And, on this canvas in an epic morality play which traumatized the Austria he symbolized for so many years and still symbolizes, President Kurt Waldheim – neither Nazi nor war criminal, but once the servant of both – has become as much a landmark of Holocaust remembrance as Simon Wiesenthal and Elie Wiesel, Adolf Eichmann and Anne Frank, and the bronze statue of a Jew scrubbing the pavement a few blocks from his Chancellery. Somewhere in time’s no man’s land between moral obtuseness and passive complicity, ‘The Prisoner of the Hofburg’ became today’s ‘Man in the Glass Booth’ – with every day of his 2192-day presidency a Day of Judgement by the world.
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A letter from Waldheim to Wiesenthal
The 1988 report of the historians’ commission, proposed by Wiesenthal and activated by Waldheim, had given Simon a good opportunity to dismount the high horse of principle that had already cost him lecture bookings and rapport with the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, but it was too late for the Nobel Peace Prize which eluded him after his near-miss in 1983.
When, after two years of talk of Simon’s sharing the honour with Elie Wiesel, the 1986 prize went to Wiesel alone, the timing was obvious. Simon’s severest postwar test of character – the politically unfashionable stance of fair play he took early in the Waldheim affair and maintained for two turbulent years – had clearly taken its toll.
Simon saw something more sinister. In 1989, he complained to me that Israel Singer and the World Jewish Congress had torpedoed his last chance at the Nobel Peace Prize three years earlier in the heat of the Waldheim controversy: ‘A member of the Nobel committee told me that they got “a letter from world Jewry” protesting any plan to give me the prize or have me share it with Wiesel. He wouldn’t tell me any more than that, but I could guess where it was from. The World Jewish Congress is not world Jewry, but its name sounds like it.’
Singer denies that the WJC sent any such letter and says why he thinks the Nobel went to Wiesel alone: ‘Hunters don’t win peace prizes.’
As an Austrian citizen, Simon had every right to request the President’s resignation, but no real reason to expect it. Still, he continued to call for it, even while acknowledging that Austrian interest in his work and his subject were never higher than when Kurt Waldheim ran for President.
Within President Waldheim, once he was installed in the Hofburg, some of the arrogance of office had given way to humility in power. Reviewing my tape of our 10 May 1989 interview with the president, I picked up on a reference he had made to a ‘very clear letter’ to Wiesenthal – and, the next day, back in the Hofburg once more, I was allowed to see a copy, but not to quote it. Dated 2 February 1989, on Dr Kurt Waldheim’s personal (not his presidential) letterhead, it was two pages and nine paragraphs long.
Waldheim’s letter began by acknowledging that he’d looked at Wiesenthal’s new 1988 memoir with great interest, particularly because of the chapter about him. Then he thanked Simon for taking such a clear position against any and all allegations of wrongdoing by Lieutenant Waldheim and praised Wiesenthal’s devotion to justice and his high moral standard – which was precisely why Waldheim was disturbed by Wiesenthal’s doubts about his credibility, particularly concerning his purported knowledge of the deportation of the Jews of Salonika.
The tragedy was now forty-five years old, Waldheim went on, and allegations that he knew about it were based on assumptions, not proof. The same was true of the report of the historians, who operated on hypotheses, not facts.
The President acknowledged that once the historians’ report and Wiesenthal’s book had been issued, he could hardly hope for a change in position. Therefore, although it was too late to influence Simon’s public judgement, he wanted to repeat once again – with the complete conviction of his conscience – that he knew nothing of the deportations.
Recalling a 1986 conversation with Wiesenthal that is cited in the memoir, Waldheim said Simon had suggested he would be more credible if he admitted knowing of the deportations. He had replied then and reiterated now that he had known nothing then and could not knowingly speak untruth.
Waldheim then reaffirmed that he was absent from Arsakli during the time of deportations and that the framework of his military activities precluded any involvement in the terrible events that took place.
Although Simon had jumped to political conclusions (that Waldheim should resign) from his doubts about the President’s credibility, Waldheim insisted that, knowing the real truth, he could not accept Wiesenthal’s statements in this regard.
Finally, Waldheim said that if a personal meeting would clarify matters, he stood ready to get together with Wiesenthal.
It was a remarkable letter for any president to send to a constituent.
Even more remarkably, three months after the letter from his President was sent to him, Wiesenthal had not answered it.
‘Why should I answer him?’ Simon asked me when I called him about it next morning. ‘He is right that I will never change my position. This is what I believe. Him I can’t believe.’
‘But the President of your country writes to you!’ I remonstrated, at least as shocked as I was years ago when Simon suggested Hitler caught syphilis from a Jewish prostitute.
‘Yes, and already he is showing the letter to you!’
‘Not him; one of his aides,’ I argued. ‘They’re miffed that you didn’t answer.’
‘Look, if I write him a letter, immediately it will be in the press – but with two or three words missing.’
I asked him if he had ever suggested to Waldheim that he should say he knew about the deportations.
‘Sure,’ he said, ‘because nobody can believe other. Listen, I am not going to answer his letter, but the last time I talked to him on the phone, I said to him: “I know during the war you could do nothing . . . After the war, however, you who have seen so much and known so much could have told us so much. But you say nothing.’”
On 17 October 1989, Simon Wiesenthal had the last word on both Kurt Waldheim and the World Jewish Congress.
The previous afternoon, I’d attended a kosher banquet hosted by Mayor Helmut Zilk in Vienna’s Rathaus (City Hall) for Arthur Hertzberg, a jovial, roly-poly New Jersey rabbi and professor (of religion at Dartmouth and history at Columbia) who happens to be vice president of the World Jewish Congress. After the feast, in his formal remarks, Hertzberg said:
‘The Waldheim affair is dead, but could possibly be revived if he runs for President again. The less said about it the better – at least for a couple of years.’
Waldheim’s term would expire in 1992. Remembering how Rabbi Hertzberg two years earlier had praised WJC secretary general Israel Singer to me as ‘an acorn I planted that grew to be an oak’, I asked him: ‘Can we take your current concept as indicative of the thinking within the executive ranks of the World Jewish Congress?’
‘I am vice president of the World Jewish Congress,’ Hertzberg replied succinctly.
‘Would Mr Singer and the others . . . ?’ I persisted.
He cut me off by repeating, ‘I am vice president of the World Jewish Congress’ and adding, ‘I don’t speak lightly, OK?’
‘OK,’ I agreed as Hertzberg went on: ‘But this is on the presumption that the problem is ending, not beginning again . . . I’m not entirely persuaded that the affair as a whole was brilliantly managed, not at all. It is, however, over – in the sense that it is very clear that the world will be better served if Mr Waldheim’s term in office, when he ceases to be the Prisoner of the Hofburg, ends after one term, that’s all.’
‘Are you sounding this as a warning?’ I asked.
‘I’m not saying it as a warning or anything of the sort. I’m saying facts. I would imagine that if Mr Waldheim announced he were running fo
r President again, inevitably the whole thing will revive. The World Jewish Congress would have to revive it, appropriately.’
After formal thanks by Karl Vak, chief of Vienna’s Central Savings Bank, Hertzberg said: ‘May I have one more word, Dr Vak? . . . I am going to speak officially. This is not a personal statement. I am talking with the full concurrence of my colleagues in the World Jewish Congress . . . We’ve said everything we’re going to say in the matter of Waldheim. His future is a matter for the Austrian people to decide. We of the World Jewish Congress trust the good sense of the Austrian people. Or, to put it another way, Waldheim will neither live politically or cease to live politically from campaigning against the World Jewish Congress. That is over. Can I make myself clearer than that? The problem of Waldheim is the problem of Austria. It is no longer the problem of the World Jewish Congress. We have spoken our last word on the subject.’
Chatting with Hertzberg afterwards, I reminded him how he’d hailed Israel Singer as a sprout he’d nurtured. ‘Yes,’ the rabbi responded, ‘but you know “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”86 – and [it applies to] Elan Steinberg more than him.’
Of Waldheim, Hertzberg remarked: ‘This man who didn’t tell the truth about his past has been making some noises about running again . . . We are not going to provide him a target. He’s not going to run against the World Jewish Congress. He’s not going to run against Weltjudentum [world Jewry], thus allowing all the latent xenophobic feelings in this country to well up around supporting him. That game is not going to be played again. We are leaving him to the embarrassment – or to the support – of the Austrians. So he’s not going to have such an easy time of it. The Austrians are embarrassed, but I hear he’s living in a world of unreality. He thinks he’s going to run.’
Later, I called the Austrian President’s office, where his aide, Dr Scheide sounded pleased by the WJC’s provisional withdrawal from the Austrian battlefield but said Waldheim had not yet decided whether to run for re-election and would make no comment on Hertzberg’s words.
The next morning, I rang up Simon Wiesenthal, who remarked that he was ‘glad to hear that a man of Rabbi Hertzberg’s stature shares my opinion of Singer and Steinberg and says that the whole matter was badly run. I myself have suffered from this, so I am happy if it’s over.’
When I asked Simon whether a Waldheim candidacy in 1992 might re-ignite the flames of controversy, he replied:
‘He cannot run alone. No party will nominate him now. For him it is possible only to run around the table.’
In 1991, President Waldheim announced that he would not run for a second term in 1992 at the age of seventy-three.
PART VII
Episodes and Epilogues
All too often in this part of the world, fear of one lie gives birth to another lie, in the foolish hope that by protecting ourselves from the first lie we will be protected from lies in general. But a lie can never protect us from a lie. Those who falsify history do not protect the freedom of a nation but rather constitute a threat to it.
The idea that a person can rewrite his autobiography is one of the traditional self-deceptions of Central Europe. Trying to do that means hurting oneself and one’s fellow countrymen. When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.
– Czech (then Czechoslovak) President Václav Havel at the opening of the Salzburg Festival in Austria after he was introduced by President Kurt Waldheim on 26 July 1990 (translated from the Czech by Káča Poláčková-Henley).
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Wiesenthal vs Wiesel
No Nobel for Simon Wiesenthal makes him no less noble. Rabbi Hier of the Wiesenthal Centre puts it most eloquently:
‘Simon, to his credit, doesn’t have to apologize to anyone for what he’s done with his life. Without Simon Wiesenthal, the subject of the Holocaust would not really receive serious attention anywhere in the world. Let’s also state for the record that, although the popular writers on the Holocaust began writing in the sixties – that’s when Elie Wiesel first started getting published, too – there was still a big period of time between 1945 and the early sixties: a crucial period when there was the greatest pressure to forget. But if there was one person who kept it alive, that was Simon Wiesenthal. So this is all to his credit that nobody can take away from him. Without him, all this that we’re talking about in America, the mere fact that there would be in Washington a President’s Council, a Commission on the Holocaust headed by Elie Wiesel, would have been an impossibility, because the subject would have been forgotten. Simon was a stubborn man who kept it alive through the worst of times.’
When Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, Simon Wiesenthal did not rejoice at this recognition of Holocaust remembrance, for no love has been lost between these two titans of survivorship. Though Wiesel once came to Wiesenthal’s rescue as a fund-raiser when his Viennese bank collapsed in 1974, Simon says that Wiesel later opposed his poaching on his turf when the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies was built in Los Angeles three years later. One bone of contention was Simon’s insistence that the Wiesenthal Centre, despite being a division of Yeshiva University, should take a non-sectarian approach to the Holocaust:
‘I was for over four years in different camps with people from fifteen nations: Jews, Gentiles, gypsies, communists. Through this experience, my view on the Holocaust and the whole problem of Nazism is a lot different from Elie Wiesel, who was only six months in camps and only with Jews. For me was the Holocaust not only a Jewish tragedy, but also a human tragedy. After the war, when I saw that the Jews were talking only about the tragedy of six million Jews, I sent letters to Jewish organizations asking them to talk also about the millions of others who were persecuted with us together – many of them only because they helped Jews. This made me unpopular with Jewish organizations – and, when the Wiesenthal Centre happened, I became a danger to them. Elie Wiesel wrote that what I was doing was “a diminution” of the tragedy. But he and they are the diminishers, for it is they who reduced the whole tragedy to a problem between Nazis and Jews instead of a crime against humanity.
‘I know I am not only the bad conscience of the Nazis. I am also the bad conscience of the Jews. Because what I have taken up as my duty was everybody’s duty.’
Relations between Wiesenthal and Wiesel soured not from their rivalry so much as from their disagreement over recognizing the role of gypsies as victims of Nazi genocide. ‘Half a million gypsies are not the same to the world as six million Jews,’ Simon acknowledges, ‘even though the proportion is at least the same. But gypsies weren’t well-organized people; they moved from place to place and many were illiterate. Besides, there was no Gypsy Documentation Centre – so nobody much cared about them until 1954.’
That was when Wiesenthal, on a research visit to Prague, stumbled on to some 1939 papers left by the Gestapo in the Moravian city of Ostrava. Piecing them together over the years like a jigsaw puzzle, Wiesenthal had established the chain of command in the extermination of the gypsies: with Adolf Eichmann at the top and a Captain Walter Braune, who has never been found, directly in charge of gypsy deportations to Poland which began in the fall of 1939. After more than a decade, Simon presented his findings to the Central Prosecutor’s Office in Ludwigsburg, Germany. Later, he learned that other documents pertaining to the classification of gypsies under the Nuremberg laws of racial purity were in an archive at the University of Tübingen under the care of Professor Sophie Erhard, the same ‘race hygienist’ who had drawn some of them up in 1942. A telegram from Wiesenthal to the German Minister of Justice was all it took to have the records transferred to the Federal Archives in Koblenz.
When four hard-working gypsy families in Darmstadt returned from a three-week vacation to find that their home – where they had lived for four years – had been torn down on the assumption they wouldn’t be coming back, and besides, the authorities claimed, their living conditions posed a health menace, the Central Council of German Gypsies protested to th
e Mayor of Darmstadt that this was a ‘continuation’ of Nazi persecution. The mayor sued the gypsies for slander – and Simon Wiesenthal went to court in Frankfurt to testify ‘on behalf of my fellow sub-humans’ that this was indeed the ‘same genocide, just new pogroms; the tragedy of the gypsies in Germany is by no means over.’ The mayor’s law suit was dismissed, but, says Simon, ‘the gypsies got no restitution. The City can get away with murder.’
In 1979, a US Holocaust Memorial Council was founded to perpetuate awareness of history’s greatest tragedy. Simon Wiesenthal, as an interested observer, was appalled to find that ‘in addition to Jewish representatives, there are Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and others who have seats and voices on the fifty-five-person council – but not the gypsies.’ Hoping to win the gypsies a seat, Wiesenthal wrote a letter of polite protest to the council’s chairman, ‘my “friend” Wiesel’.
Many months later, Simon received a reply from a secretary stating that the selection of council members was in President Ronald Reagan’s hands. On Wiesenthal’s advice, gypsy leaders sent pleas to the White House, but their mail was forwarded to Elie Wiesel, who, says Simon, showed no sympathy.
Simon then wrote to Wiesel suggesting that one of the thirty-odd Jewish council members should vacate his seat and give it to a gypsy. Simon received no reply, but when he published his appeal in his 1985 annual report, he pricked enough Jewish consciences that Wiesel had to react to the criticism. The council held what Wiesenthal calls ‘a kind of memorial hour’ for the gypsies in September 1986, but Simon says that ‘not until Elie Wiesel gave up the chairmanship a few months later were we able to get a gypsy on the council.’ In 1987, Professor Ian F. Hancock, President of the World Romany Congress, was named to a vacant seat.
