Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  ALAN LEVY was born in New York City in 1932 and educated at Brown University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. After seven years as a reporter for The Louisville Courier-Journal and another seven years freelancing in New York, he took his family to Prague in 1967 on an assignment to adapt a play for director Miloŝ Forman. Rowboat to Prague, Levy’s eyewitness account of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia (published in England as So Many Heroes), was hailed by Newsweek as ‘the definitive book about a tiny nation’s hope and tragedy, written with an intimacy of detail and emotion that transcends mere journalistic reporting.’ For it, he and his family were expelled and deported in 1971. After nearly two decades in Vienna, Alan Levy returned to Prague in late 1990 and, the following autumn, became the founding editor-in-chief of a pioneering English-language weekly newspaper, The Prague Post. When this book was first published in England in 1993 as The Wiesenthal File, it was on Best of the Year lists for the Good Books Guide and The Observer. Published in America a year later, it earned Levy the 1995 Author of the Year award from the American Society of Journalists & Authors.

  Praise for The Wiesenthal File:

  ‘Wiesenthal has played his part in a disturbing episode of post-war history. He deserves this readable and intelligent book.’

  Norman Stone, The Times

  ‘This biography of famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal is so well written that it often seems like a thriller.’

  Kirkus Reviews

  ‘Levy is ruthless in his determination to make every act of barbarity clear. It is impossible to turn the pages without feeling not just despair but revulsion . . . A valuable addition to the literature of Nazi atrocities.’

  Caroline Moorehead, New Statesman & Society

  ‘There is scarcely a page from first to last when one does not flinch, take a deep breath and consider what it is to belong to the species that could bring such nightmares on the world . . . Alan Levy writes affectingly and simply of great tragic matters.’

  Simon Ward, Literary Review

  ‘This moving account . . . is filled with Wiesenthal’s outspoken comments and impromptu recollections . . . As much suspense and high drama as a thriller.’

  Publishers Weekly

  ‘His approach to Wiesenthal is fair minded and critical.’

  International Herald Tribune

  ‘[This book] should be read, lent, and referred to.’

  Observer

  ‘The Wiesenthal File is more than the sum of its parts. It throws light on themes such as the nature of evil, and is also a portrait of a man the author knows intimately and obviously admires.’

  Emma Klein, The Tablet

  ‘[A] thorough, objective book . . . compellingly detailed.’

  Good Book Guide

  ‘Alan Levy’s biography presents us with the real Wiesenthal, warts and all. It is a candid exploration of a man whose image as an avenger of the Holocaust has, in the popular mind, reached almost biblical proportions.’

  Bernard Josephs, Jewish Chronicle

  ‘Levy recounts the complex events so skilfully that the book does full credit to Simon Wiesenthal . . . one of the most readable fact-bulging Holocaust reports yet . . . [a] dark, disturbing and brutally honest volume.’

  Austria Today

  ‘Despite the book’s sober topic, the author packs in revealing anecdotes and rich detail that capture the ironic humour of Wiesenthal.’

  American Booksellers Association, Bookman’s Weekly

  ‘Alan Levy can write of truly horrendous acts of inhumanity with clarity and restraint.’

  Fergus Pyle, Irish Times

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  3 The Lanchesters

  162 Fulham Palace Road

  London W6 9ER

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK as The Wiesenthal File by

  Constable Publishers 1993

  This revised edition first published in the UK by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2002

  Reprinted 2005, 2006

  Copyright © Alan Levy 1993, 2002

  The right of Alan Levy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication data is available from the British Library

  ISBN 1-84119-607-X

  ISBN 978-1-84119-607-7

  eISBN 978-1-47210-800-5

  Printed and bound in the EU

  10 9 8 7 6 5

  To

  Cyla and Simon Wiesenthal

  and to

  Lisa Keloufi

  born 3 September 1993

  and to

  Mélina Keloufi

  born 26 September 1996

  Contents

  Illustrations

  Prologue: Anti-Semitism without Jews

  PART I: WIESENTHAL’S WARS

  1 Deputy for the dead

  2 The many liberations of Szymon Wiesenthal

  3 Now begins the dying

  4 Simon and the sunflower

  5 When a Jew chooses to die

  6 A Polish odyssey 1944

  7 The last liberation 1945

  8 Mornings in Mauthausen

  9 ‘Don’t forget our murderers!’

  10 Wiesenthal’s law

  PART II: ADOLF EICHMANN

  11 Eichmann the Zionist

  12 Wannsee: the final solution

  13 Eichmann the genocidist

  14 Eichmann the fugitive

  15 The Eichmann abduction

  16 Should Eichmann die?

  PART III: RAOUL WALLENBERG

  17 Wallenberg the searcher

  18 ‘I came to save a nation’

  19 The Wallenberg disappearance

  20 Enter Wiesenthal

  PART IV: JOSEF MENGELE

  21 Mengele the dilettante

  22 The world’s biggest battlefield

  23 Mengele the fugitive

  24 Death of a bionic ‘angel’

  25 Post-mortems

  PART V: FRANZ PAUL STANGL, GUSTAV WAGNER, HERMINE BRAUNSTEINER RYAN

  26 Stangl the weaver

  27 The man in the white jacket

  28 Stangl’s inferno

  29 The secret bearers

  30 The Stangl extradition

  31 Wearing down Wagner

  32 The mare of Majdanek went to Germany

  PART VI: BRUNO KREISKY, KURT WALDHEIM

  33 The Jewish Chancellor

  34 Waldheim the conscience

  35 The man who wasn’t there

  36 The denazification of Lieutenant Waldheim

  37 The man at the top

  38 The prisoner of the Hofburg

  39 Wiesenthal vs Waldheim

  40 A letter from Waldheim to Wiesenthal

  PART VII: EPISODES AND EPILOGUES

  41 Wiesenthal vs Wiesel

  42 A hero at nightfall

  43 ‘I wish not to provoke the Lord’

  Index

  Illustrations

  between pages 180 and 181

  Treblinka camp (Wiener Library)

  Auschwitz inmates (Wiener Library)

  Martin Bormann (Popperfoto)

  Adolf Eichmann (Popperfoto)

  Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem (Popperfoto)

  Raoul Wallenberg (Topham Picture Library)

  Josef Mengele (Associated Pres
s)

  Mengele’s experiment victims (Wiener Library)

  Photographers of Josef Mengele in São Paulo (Associated Press)

  between pages 372 and 373

  Franz Stangl with daughter (Topham Picture Library)

  Bruno Kreisky (Horst Tappe)

  Kurt Waldheim at Yugoslav airstrip (Topham Picture Library)

  Oberleutnant Kurt Waldheim (Popperfoto)

  Kurt Waldheim at the United Nations (Topham Picture Library)

  Dr Israel Singer of the World Jewish Congress (Topham Picture Library)

  Simon Wiesenthal in his office (Horst Tappe)

  Four 1992 photographs of Simon Wiesenthal (Antonin Novy)

  Prologue: Anti-Semitism without Jews

  Bregenz, the capital of Austria’s westernmost province, the Vorarlberg, is less than two hours and seventy-seven miles by train from Zürich, Switzerland, but, to the federal capital in Vienna, it is an all-day trip of almost 500 miles on the crack Bodensee Express. Settling into the dining car with Austria’s weightiest daily, Die Presse, in hand in the early 1970s, a gentleman in his sixties was paired for breakfast with a Vorarlberger in his twenties who boarded in Bludenz almost an hour later, when there were no empty tables left. Discovering that the man opposite him was reading the other side of his paper, the older man was amused and asked, before turning the page, if he was finished. Flustered, the younger man tried to pretend he wasn’t reading the other’s paper, but he accepted when his neighbour said he’d finished the first section and wouldn’t he like to look at it?

  The Vorarlberger punctuated his reading of the news with interpretive comment: ‘Another traffic detour in Innsbruck! Those Jews in City Hall are always messing things up for the rest of us.’ . . . ‘The price of gas is going up! It’s all because of what the Jews have done to the Arabs.’. . . ‘A bomb went off in the South Tyrol! The Italians say German extremists did it, but it’s all the work of the Jews.’

  ‘There are still Jews in the South Tyrol?’, the older man wondered gently.

  ‘You can’t believe what you read in the papers anyway,’ the Vorarlberger replied. ‘They’re all run by Jews!’ Passing through some of the most gorgeous mountain scenery in the world, the older man tried not to focus on the ugliness he was hearing.

  Finally, though, he could bear it no more, so he asked: ‘Do you know any Jews?’

  ‘Of course not!’ the man replied proudly. ‘I am from Bludenz, where there are no Jews.’

  ‘Would you ever sit at a table with one?’

  ‘Certainly not!’

  ‘Well, you’re just as wrong about that as you’ve been about everything else you’ve said today. You just had breakfast with a Jew.’

  The man stood up spluttering ‘Waiter! Waiter! I want to pay.’

  ‘But I haven’t brought you the second coffee you ordered,’ the waiter protested.

  ‘That’s all right. I’ll pay for it,’ the man insisted, thrusting an exorbitant tip at him and exiting in haste.

  Simon Wiesenthal reflected on the encounter all the way home. That night, over dinner, he told his wife Cyla and a couple of friends about it. The next morning, he went to the Austrian National Library and did a little research before writing a feuilleton for the Salzburger Nachrichten.

  ‘There is only one person who has declared himself a Jew in the whole Vorarlberg,’ Wiesenthal reported, ‘out of a quarter-million people. Statistically, that means my breakfast guest had a fifty times better chance of being hit by a car while waiting on the sidewalk in Bludenz than of having anything to do with a Jew. And yet he was a confirmed anti-Semite.’ To me, Wiesenthal added when we met soon thereafter: ‘Even if Hitler had succeeded in exterminating us, we still would have been a menace to the Nazis. They don’t need a living Jew. The phantom of a Jew is already enough.’

  PART 1

  Wiesenthal’s Wars

  Have you ever heard of Simon Wiesenthal? He lives in Vienna. Jewish chap, came from Polish Galida originally. Spent four years in a series of concentration camps, twelve in all. Decided to spend the rest of his days tracking down wanted Nazi criminals. No rough stuff, mind you. He just keeps collating all the information about them he can get; then, when he’s convinced he has found one, usually living under a false name – not always – he informs the police. If they don’t act, he gives a press conference and puts them on the spot. Needless to say, he’s not terribly popular with officialdom in either Germany or Austria. He reckons they are not doing enough to bring known Nazi murderers to book, let alone chase the hidden ones. The former SS hate his guts and have tried to kill him a couple of times; the bureaucrats wish he would leave them alone, and a lot of other people think he’s a great chap and help him where they can.

  – Lord Russell of Liverpool

  in Frederick Forsyth’s novel, The Odessa File (1972)

  1

  Deputy for the dead

  Coming back to the office from an early lunch on a day when he hoped to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Simon Wiesenthal met a mailman who handed him a hate letter addressed simply to ‘Saujude Wiesenthal, Wien’ (‘Jewish Pig Wiesenthal, Vienna’).

  ‘There are nine Wiesenthals in the Vienna phone book,’ Simon protested. ‘How do you always know to send this kind of mail to me?’

  Confronted by this bustling elder – whose smallish, balding head protruding from a surprisingly tall body made him look like a snail in a grey tweed suit – the Viennese mailman weaselled: ‘Well – er – we just send it to S. Wiesenthal.’

  ‘But there are two other S. Wiesenthals in the phone book and I’m not even in the book,’ said Simon Wiesenthal, who keeps himself unlisted.

  The mailman – a cherubic, ageing Hitler Youth – could have avoided misadventure just by saying from the start: ‘It was obviously meant for you.’ After all, hardly a day goes by without the Austrian Post & Telegraph Office finding the addressee of missives aimed at ‘Simon Wiesenthal, Office of Humanity, Vienna’ or ‘Nazi-Hunter Wiesenthal, Europe’. Instead, however, the mailman blustered: ‘I’m sorry. Just give it back to me and we’ll deliver it to one of the other S. Wiesenthals.’

  ‘No,’ said Simon Wiesenthal, holding the letter tantalizingly out of reach. ‘I want it because I have a standing offer from an American collector. I get two hundred dollars for every one of these.’

  That exit line, he could see, hit the mailman where he lived. A few minutes later – telling this tale to a group of friends assembled for the Nobel news on the midday broadcast from Oslo and speaking German, English, Polish, and Yiddish with the rolled rs that spell origins east of Vienna – Wiesenthal’s baritone rose to a high cackle and his bristling moustache began to crinkle benignly, as befits any good story-teller easing pain with laughter. But that day’s damage was so minor – a familiar insult and no Nobel – that Wiesenthal wanted to leave his well-wishers laughing.

  The Nobel Prize he never won, though he was nominated four times by such varied sponsors as Nobel Laureates Henry Kissinger1 and Betty Williams2 as well as a Dutch parliamentary group. Favoured for it throughout the early eighties, Wiesenthal came closest in 1983, when the Norwegian selection committee would have given it to him if the prize had put their first choice, Lech Walesa, at too much risk with Poland’s Communist authorities. When the embattled Polish labour leader (who later became President of his country) won, Wiesenthal rejoiced for him. For a couple of years thereafter, there was talk of Simon sharing the honour with the holocaust novelist and activist Elie Wiesel. Then, in 1986, the Nobel Peace Prize went to Wiesel alone.

  Simon Wiesenthal’s office when I first met him in 1974 was on the Rudolfsplatz an undistinguished inner-city square surrounding an unappetizing playground which never seemed to have any children in it. Rudolfsplatz Number 7 was a drab postwar apartment house in which Wiesenthal had maintained an office for a decade. When I reached the third floor (American fourth floor), I rang the bell beside a white door that said ‘DOKUMENTATIONSZENTRUM’. A recorded voice asked me in Ger
man to speak my name and the purpose of my visit. The entrance’s peephole, I could see, was a closed-circuit camera lens.

  Before I’d finished announcing my name and that I had an appointment, the door swung open and a pretty red-haired secretary named Sonja greeted me and showed me down a narrow hall to a small office where Simon Wiesenthal was waiting with right hand outstretched. At sixty-five, Wiesenthal was already a living legend: fictionalized as ‘Jakov Liebermann’ in Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil and portrayed as himself in The Odessa File. (In their film versions, he was played in the former by Sir Laurence Olivier, who received an ‘Oscar’ nomination, and in the latter by Israeli actor Shmuel Rodonsky, who came out looking more like Simon than Simon himself.) Frederick Forsyth had found Wiesenthal ‘bigger than . . . expected, a burly man over six feet tall, wearing a thick tweed jacket, stooping as if permanently looking for a mislaid piece of paper.’ Levin, who hadn’t yet met Wiesenthal, had nonetheless described him fairly astutely as ‘a considerate bear with something contagious [who] carries the whole damned concentration-camp scene pinned to his coat-tails.’ Sir Ben Kingsley, who would portray Wiesenthal in a made-for-television film of The Murderers Among Us, told me in 2001 that ‘he is a man whose emotions are very close to the surface. Which makes him a great storyteller, a great balladeer. Simon’s song is “Never Forget” and he wanders the world with it.’

  This was the self-styled ‘researcher’ whose discovery of Adolf Eichmann’s hideout had led to the Nazi genocidist’s abduction from Argentina by Israeli agents in 1960 and his hanging in 1962 for the murders of six million men, women, and children . . . the unrelenting pursuer who had Franz Stangl, commandant of the extermination centres in Sobibor and Treblinka, extradited from Brazil, and Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, ‘the mare of Majdanek’ who stomped hundreds of Jews to death, extradited from Queens to spend the rest of their lives in German jails . . . the demonic detective who was always, eternally, one phone call away from apprehending Dr Josef Mengele, the ‘Angel of Auschwitz’. Since 1947, Wiesenthal had brought 1100 important Nazis to trial in different parts of the world and made countless others uncomfortable.