by Alan Levy
Such mentalities, which made no effort to learn German and relied on native interpreters, usually female, often fell prey to what Wiesenthal calls ‘the Nazis’ best secret weapon: The Fräulein Factor. Any young American was naturally more interested in a pretty, obliging girl than in one of “those SS men” everybody wanted to forget like a bad dream.’
When Wiesenthal arrested an SS man in Upper Austria, the prisoner’s comely seventeen-year-old daughter, dressed in her lowest-cut dirndl, appeared in the office to ask the captain-in-charge for permission to bring her father food. The captain filled out a form while admiring hers – and made a date. Three days later, Wiesenthal learned that the SS man had been freed on ‘captain’s orders’.
Simon stormed into the captain’s office and asked him why. The captain told him to ‘shut up!’
‘Ah, so,’ said Wiesenthal. ‘This is also an answer. You don’t have to tell me another thing, Captain.’
His rage seemingly under control, Wiesenthal left the office in Linz and drove directly to US Army of Occupation headquarters in Salzburg, eighty miles away. There, talking to the captain’s superiors, he began to sob as he told them: ‘Please call the captain and tell him that the next Nazi I find, I will kill – but the responsibility for the killing will be the captain’s. He will make me into a murderer.’
Simon created such a commotion that the captain was quickly transferred to Heidelberg. His parting words to Wiesenthal were: ‘You’re a son of a bitch.’ To which Wiesenthal’s response was: ‘This is nothing. In my opinion, you are a Nazi.’
It got so, says Wiesenthal, that ‘if I would arrest a criminal during the afternoon, the next morning he would be free because one of my bosses slept with his wife or daughter.’
Even greater disillusionment came when one of the few superior officers he respected, a Harvard professor, said to him one day: ‘Simon, you must emigrate to the United States. People like you can make great careers back home. You work hard, you’re intelligent, enthusiastic, idealistic. You will become a big shot in the US because you’re Jewish, too. Listen, Simon, in America, the red and green lights regulate traffic and everything else is run by the Jews.’
The man meant it as a joke, but Wiesenthal looked right through him coldly and said: ‘From tomorrow, you must find a replacement for me. This is the last day I am working for you.’
His chief apologized, but Wiesenthal resented his remark as ‘a slap in the face – that an officer in the US Army which liberated me can talk like a Nazi. So the birth of the Jewish Documentation Centre came from a bad joke. That night, I rounded up thirty survivors – desperados like me, people without a future and with a very bad past and no money, and I said: “I am no longer working for the Americans. Life is too simple to them. They think that in America they have cowboys and Indians and in Europe we have Nazis and Jews. I feel it is our duty to do this job with our own hands.” And so we built the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre in Linz without money, without any detective background, and without any official auspices because we all felt we had – we have! – the right of the victim.’
Simon Wiesenthal thinks that the biggest postwar mistake of the Jews was that they settled for material rather than moral restitution.
For a long time, Wiesenthal himself refused to accept restitution money that was legally his from the West German government, which agreed in the 1950s to indemnify Jews for their homes, business, property, and health18 – all or some of which Wiesenthal had lost to the Nazis. It took him almost eight years to swallow the idea of taking money from Germans. When he did, he ploughed more than half of it into his Documentation Centre.
Though he didn’t open the centre at Goethestrasse 63 in Linz until 1947, his initial costs were minimal. The rent was paid by a $50-a-month voluntary contribution from a former Polish Member of Parliament, Dr Aaron Silberschein, who had become an industrialist in Geneva. Most of Simon’s ‘desperados’ were still living in Displaced Persons (DP) camps, where their food and shelter needs were met and witnesses were always at hand. ‘Desperados’ became ‘correspondents’ of the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre and, in each camp, they were provided with typewriter and paper on which to record depositions.
Wiesenthal’s greatest resource was the body of lists he’d compiled during his year with the Americans. Every former concentration camp inmate he or his network of correspondents met in the DP camps around Germany and Austria was interviewed about brutality, torture, and killings which he or she had witnessed or experienced; no hearsay evidence was accepted, and exact names and dates were more important than gory details. Wiesenthal kept one card-file by geographic place; before 1946 was out, he had more than a thousand locations listed in alphabetical order. A second card-file listed criminals by name; whenever he obtained photos of them, he circulated them in the DP camps, for many were known only by title or nickname (‘Angel of Death’, etc.). A third file listed thousands of witnesses, most of whom had already given affidavits.
Virtually all of his correspondents being DPs awaiting emigration to other parts of the world, the turnover was high, but they kept in touch and word soon spread across America, Australia, and Palestine, as well as the continent of Europe, that, back in Linz, a man named Wiesenthal was compiling evidence against Nazi criminals. Hundreds of unsolicited depositions poured in and were followed up. Wiesenthal established relations and exchanged information with the Allied Historical Commission in Munich, the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine in Paris, and Jewish community associations in Prague, Bratislava, Budapest, Italy, and Greece.
As word of his work spread, mail addressed to just ‘Wiesenthal, Austria’ began to reach him in Linz – and almost every envelope contained a matter of life and death. In March 1947, he shared an experience which sealed his destiny:
‘Three rabbis were coming to me in Linz to report that in a casde near Villach in Carinthia was a whole library of Jewish religious books. Hitler had planned to make many museums and libraries of an extinct race – the relics of a people he had extinguished – and this must have been meant to be part of it. For this purpose, they took away Jewish books instead of burning them; for this purpose, Mengele and many other camp doctors had instructions to send “special Jewish types” to the University of Strasbourg, where they were killed with injections and either embalmed like mummies or cooked until they were skeletons to be presented in hundreds of years as “typical Jews from the twentieth century”.
‘There was nothing to be done about the people “preserved” this way except to give them decent burials. But the relationship of a religious Jew to a religious book is like a human relation, so there was desperation in these rabbis’ eyes when they pleaded with me to “please help us save these books”.
‘I rode with them through the mountains in heavy snow to Villach, where we spent the night. In the morning, we went to the castle and I spoke to the manager, who opened it up to us. From cellar to attic was nothing but books: bibles, prayer books, Talmuds, bookmarks, silver page-markers, and labels of the owners. This one was from Vilna, that one from Paris, Cracow, Prague . . .
‘To these three rabbis, it was like they had liberated a concentration camp. The youngest of them was from Carpathorussia; he had lost his entire family in Treblinka. He would pick up a book from the piles, look at it, kiss it very gently, and then put it back exactly where he’d found it. After he’d done this any number of times, he picked up another book, started to read it – and feinted!
‘One of us had some schnapps and when we brought him around, he took a sip and began to cry. “It’s my own prayer book,” he explained. Then he opened the covers and handed it to me. “Here is a message from my sister.” On the first page was a woman’s handwriting in the Yiddish language:
Whoever will find this prayer book, give it to my beloved brother, Rabbi Joshua Zeitman. The murderers are in our village. They are in the next home . . . Please don’t forget us! And don’t forget our murderers! They . . .
‘The writing trailed off there. Her brother was quiet now and spoke almost calmly. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I would like to keep the book.” I closed the book and gave it to him. But I still see it before me – and hear it: that book with the strong covers that I snapped shut. Because this was not only a message of a sister to a brother or of a Jewish woman to a rabbi. This was a message to me: from the millions who died to us the survivors. It could have been written by a Czech woman in Lidice, from a Frenchwoman in Oradour,19 from an Italian woman in Marzabotto.20 For me, this letter was the last will and testament of eleven million dead and, in the car on the way back to Linz, I decided to carry out its bequest.
‘Long after I stepped out of that car, this is what drives me – and always will.’
10
Wiesenthal’s law
The end of the war did not mean the end of violence against Simon Wiesenthal. Within days of his ultimate liberation by the Americans, he had been beaten up in Mauthausen by a future Polish Vice-Minister of Culture. A little more than a year later, in a Displaced Persons camp near Linz, he had been attacked by a knife-wielding ex-Gestapo agent named David Zimet – a Jew!
Zimet had been a ghetto policeman in the southern Polish city of Tarnów and, says Wiesenthal, ‘the right hand of a very known Gestapo sadist with the name of Grunov. Later, Zimet was sent to Mauthausen to work in the crematory. His family stayed in Tarnów. When the Russians came near Tarnów on their way to fight for Cracow, the Germans started more deportations of the few hundred Jews that were left from twenty thousand before the war, most of whom died in Belzec in 1942. Since there were no more trains, they sent them in trucks. In one truck of Jewish women were the wife and the daughter of Zimet. And the hatred against him was so great that the Jewish women in that truck taking them all to die killed his wife and his daughter then and there.’
By 1946, Zimet was a DP in Austria and was recognized by several survivors from Tarnów. Wiesenthal was still collecting testimony about him in the DP camp when Zimet learned that Simon was, as he puts it, ‘occupied with his case, so at seven o’clock in the morning he is coming to my office there with a knife. He was a big, strapping healthy man back in ’46 while we were all still so thin. He had lived good in the ghetto and, in the crematorium at Mauthausen, they were all given double food . . . No, I didn’t know him in Mauthausen. I see him for the first time when he bursts in and attacks me. I pick up the inkwell from my desk and throw it at his face to protect myself and I shout so loud that people come running to help me and he is arrested. Zimet was four weeks in jail for this. But then, because he had worked in the crematory, they need him for the Mauthausen trial and bring him to Germany as a witness. From Germany, he emigrates to Canada.’
Years later, Wiesenthal was looking over a confidential list of cases being investigated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police when he read:
ZIMET, David: A policeman in ghetto in Tarnów. Witnesses have attested to his brutality.
‘Zimet!’ Wiesenthal exclaimed. ‘This is my old case!’ He informed the Canadian authorities of his evidence against Zimet, but they proved unwilling to prosecute a Jew for Nazi crimes. The Canadian Jewish Committee intervened and Zimet agreed to submit to a council of arbitration established by the committee.
‘Nothing ever came of it,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘because the Jewish community was reluctant to publicize the case since Zimet was himself Jewish. This is so terrible! Through this false attitude that we must ignore Jewish helpers of the Nazis, we are losing credibility when we say we are acting against all people that commit crimes. If everybody could see that we are not looking only for Germans and Ukrainians, but even for our own Jewish criminals, then we would have much less opposition.’
‘I first saw Jewish collaborators in the ghetto of Lwów,’ Simon Wiesenthal says in his memoirs, ‘and later I saw them in various concentration camps. There were some shocking cases, and when I talked about the problem after the war, many Jews were perturbed. Perhaps they had expected the Jews to be immune from corruption. Like all races, we have had our saints and our sinners, our cowards and our heroes.’
Reinhard Heydrich, who engineered the Final Solution, believed that the secret of manipulation lay in involvement and collaboration. With the appointment of Jewish councils of elders, even rabbis, to enforce Gestapo edicts, Heydrich’s hatchet-man Adolf Eichmann could compel each Jewish community to co-operate in its own destruction.
Wiesenthal acknowledges that ‘the hardest duty’ of the Jewish Councils the Germans organized in every ghetto and concentration camp was ‘deciding which names should be put on “transport lists” for the death camps. The Nazis had established certain criteria for inclusion (health, age, and so on), but . . . they often left the final selection to the Jews themselves.’ When Jew listed Jew for extinction, the Germans could claim that the Jews had wiped themselves out.
He also concedes that there were heroes and martyrs among the councilmen, starting with the Zionist physician, Dr Elchanan Elkes, who became mayor of the ghetto of some 60,000 Jews in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas (Kovno in the former Soviet Union). Not only did Elkes resist and impede his German overlords in every way he could, and assist many of his constituents to escape, but, in 1944, when the ghetto was liquidated and its last survivors deported to Dachau, he declined an offer from the Jewish underground to smuggle him to safety. Instead, Elkes elected to accompany his constituents (and patients) to Dachau, where he died on 17 October 1944 and is honoured with a granite memorial. Even Elkes, however, had to issue limited quantities of work permits and, while he tried to give them to heads of large families, thereby sparing a maximum number from deportation, he was dooming many of those he reluctantly rejected.
‘A man who had the power to save also had the power to condemn,’ Wiesenthal points out. ‘The SS and the Gestapo were not welfare organizations. They wanted a list of so many people to put on the train next Tuesday – and not one person less. There was no room for bargaining. The people were to be there at twelve-thirty next Tuesday, not twelve-forty. So I am very sceptical about people who say: “This man, he saved my life.” Who could save lives? Only a functionary.’
Once, a character witness asked Wiesenthal to go easy on such a functionary because ‘he crossed my name off the transport list.’
‘And whose name did he put on it instead of yours?’ Wiesenthal asked. The man could not, did not answer.
Of Elkes and a few others, Wiesenthal says: ‘Naturally, of those people they saved, many of them survived. They can bear witness. But we lost six million other witnesses who might have something else to say.’ He adds that some Jewish Council members ‘did the only thing they could, under the circumstances, by following Nazi regulations to the letter. Others were corrupted. They accepted favours, juggled names, hoping against hope that they might save their own skins. Other Jews collaborated with the Nazis or bartered others’ lives for their own. Some Jews were concentration camp trusties. Sometimes they helped their fellow inmates; sometimes they didn’t.
‘After the war, I not only arrested Jews who were Nazi collaborators, but, from the committees running the Displaced Persons camps and the former concentration camps, I expelled people who could not bring evidence about their activities during the Nazi time. I made a rule that was approved by the American military government authorities and became known in the camps as Lex Wiesenthal: Latin for Wiesenthal’s Law. It was very simple: Whoever had a function of authority in the Nazi period could not have a function in postwar Jewish life. I wasn’t saying such a man was a criminal. I wasn’t even looking into whether he was good or bad. But I needed to protect our Jewish society from more bad surprises.’
‘Don’t push it, Simon,’ a friend he describes as an ‘official Jew’ pleaded with him. ‘What you are doing will only diminish the guilt of the Nazis.’
‘No,’ said Simon, ‘this is an extension of the guilt of the Nazis. When they brought pressure on Jews to work against other J
ews, then they were guilty of corrupting hundreds of Jews as well as murdering millions of us.’
Wiesenthal noted that ‘in many cases, such people after the war found jobs with Jewish organizations. Maybe they were trying to atone; maybe they thought this was the best place to hide. Once, I was going special to Paris to see the director for Europe of the Joint Distribution Committee, because working for him was a man – a Jew! – who had been in a concentration camp the head of the transports to the death camps.’
According to Wiesenthal, the JDC director, an American, responded, ‘So what? This was a time when everyone had to serve.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Wiesenthal told him. ‘Your employee had in his hand power to send people to extermination or take them out. I don’t know how he handled it. But suppose somebody will come to you and say, “My father was sick and he put him on transport” or “My father was well enough to work, but he put him on transport”, what will you say? The accuser may not have any witnesses. Your man may or may not have witnesses. But you will have a bad conscience. And, if you don’t, I will make you such publicity that you will fire him.’