Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  Criticism from Israel hurts Simon. In practically the same breath, Tuviah Friedman claimed that Eichmann’s first words to his captors were ‘Which one of you is Friedman?’ and complained that ‘They always talk about Wiesenthal, never about me.’ And Isser Harel, leader of the Eichmann abduction, not only made Wiesenthal a non-person in his 1975 memoir, The House on Garibaldi Street (even though Simon had supplied Harel’s publisher with an important postwar, pre-capture photo of Eichmann, available nowhere else, to illustrate it), but, when questioned about the omission by a Dutch interviewer, said of Simon that ‘his information didn’t lead to Eichmann’s tracks.’

  Wiesenthal’s response back in 1975 was to term Harel’s words ‘an assault on the credibility of my Documentation Centre. Harel is trying to get even more honour than he has coming, although I’m not trying to belittle his accomplishments of arresting and kidnapping Eichmann. Look, the capture of Eichmann was a mosaic, a picture puzzle, and in it I had my place. Harel is trying to deny me this and I protest this.’

  Over the years, Harel kept bad-mouthing Wiesenthal. He was cited in a footnote to a 1986 book, Mengele: the Complete Story, as telling co-authors Gerald L. Posner and John Ware that neither Friedman nor Wiesenthal played any role in finding Eichmann. On a 1989 trip to the US, Harel found that ‘everywhere I visited, people would say, “Where is Wiesenthal in the [Eichmann] operation?” because he was telling everybody he was behind all this. I was obliged to tell them it’s not true.’ Finally, in May 1991, when Harel went to New York to be honoured by the World Jewish Congress, he gave an interview to the Jerusalem Post’s correspondent there, Jonathan Schachter, which the newspaper headlined: WIESENTHAL HAD “NO ROLE” IN EICHMANN KIDNAPPING’.

  Producing a 278-page unpublished manuscript dissecting Wiesenthal’s two memoirs and dismissing many of his claims – including ever having written to Nahum Goldmann about Eichmann – as ‘a legend woven after the capture of Eichmann, so that Wiesenthal could take credit for a significant role in the tracing of Eichmann, and hence for his capture’, Harel told Schachter: ‘All of the information supplied by Wiesenthal before and in anticipation of the operation was utterly worthless, and sometimes even misleading and of negative value.’ Harel said that one of Wiesenthal’s many pronouncements that Dr Mengele was in Argentina may have interfered with Mengele’s capture and jeopardized the Eichmann operation.

  The World Jewish Congress – still embroiled in its feud with Wiesenthal from his Nahum Goldmann days to the Kurt Waldheim presidency – first denied the existence of any Wiesenthal-Goldmann correspondence; then retracted when Wiesenthal sent the WJC a copy of his four-page letter of 30 March 1954 to Goldmann, but then retracted its retraction by saying it had no proof the letter was ever sent or had even existed at that time, for it had not been found in the late Dr Goldmann’s archives. Wiesenthal countered with Rabbi Kalmanowitz’s reply of 21 May 1954, thereby proving that his letter had indeed reached the WJC in New York.

  It would be pointless to cite and refute each argument of Harel’s; besides, this job is done in an admirably documented, if rabidly pro-Wiesenthal, 1992 book called Documents against Words: Simon Wiesenthal’s Conflict with the World Jewish Congress, issued in Holland but written in English and compiled by Richard A. Stein, president of the Foundation for the Fight against Anti-Semitism (STIBA) in Rotterdam. The spectacle of old men – Friedman, Harel, Wiesenthal – squabbling over scraps of glory well earned years ago is more tarnishing than edifying; if it does none of them any credit, though, it takes the least away from Wiesenthal.

  Simon suspects that Harel’s vendetta stems from his business, financial, and personal difficulties in the dozen years between his being ousted in 1963 as head of Israel’s secret services in a dispute with Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and publication of his memoir in 1975. Most of all, Harel must have chafed at the veil of secrecy he was pledged to wear even after leaving Mossad.

  Simon remembers how tight it was in the sixties: ‘In those days, the Israeli government was pretending they had nothing to do with the kidnap – that Eichmann just showed up on Israel’s soil and was brought before justice. Since what they had done was counter to international law, they just denied everything – including my role.

  ‘Around then, Yad Vashem asked me to give a talk there about my role in tracking down Eichmann. But first, the director of Yad Vashem warned me not to mention, under any circumstances, that my dealings had been with the Israeli Embassy and Israeli intelligence. So I just told about these “Jewish friends of mine” who helped get Eichmann’s picture and compared the photos of his brothers. So what happens? Harel feels slighted because he hears I don’t mention him and, when he publishes his memoirs in the 1970s, he makes no mention of me or my work. For him, I don’t exist, and later I hear Harel is saying I have nothing to do with his great accomplishment. And this is what they call Intelligence?!’

  PART III

  Raoul Wallenberg

  When they came for the Jews, I was not a Jew, so I did not protest. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not belong to the trade union. When they came for the Catholics, I was not a Catholic. When they came for me, there was no one left to protest.

  – Martin Niemöller,

  Protestant pastor imprisoned by Hitler from 1937 to 1945

  17

  Wallenberg the searcher

  Genocidists, killers, and ‘desk murderers’ are the human beasts that Simon Wiesenthal hunts, but another species of war criminal is not yet fair game: the ‘desk undertaker’ who shuts a door or closes a drawer on human lives, thereby committing crimes of omission which can cause calamity. Assassins of the spirit and muggers of the soul, the ‘desk undertakers’ were in command at Evian-les-Bains in 1938, when thirty-one nations of the world turned their backs on Jewish immigration and only one tiny Caribbean nation, the Dominican Republic, committed itself to accepting more than a mere handful of refugees . . . in Havana harbour in 1939, when a change in Cuban visa requirements left 930 Jewish refugees from Germany stranded aboard the luxury liner St Louis, which subsequently was not allowed to land in Panama, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, the United States, or Canada and had to return to Europe, where most of its passengers perished . . . in Ottawa, where immigration director Frederick Blair required written proof from children whose parents had perished in Hitler’s ovens that they were orphans before they could be rescued by Canada . . . and in the US State Department, where bureaucrats concealed the truth about the exterminations of the Final Solution for fear that public compassion would burst open the floodgates of immigration. As it was, only 21,000 refugees were allowed to enter the US during the war with Germany: barely a tenth of the quota in normal times. With the end of the war, the ‘desk undertakers’ did not relinquish their grip on power; on the contrary, nowhere was it asserted more lastingly than in the case of Raoul Wallenberg.

  ‘The Second World War had no heroes,’ Simon Wiesenthal says bluntly. It is the kind of overstatement with which Wiesenthal so often snares the world’s attention’ even at the risk of alienating widows and patriots, but he persists: ‘The heroes from yesterday’ – and here he means previous wars, for World War II is still today to him – ‘were people with courage in combat. The Second World War was a technical fight with no space for personal bravery, but Raoul Wallenberg is one of its rare exceptions.’

  Raoul Gustav Wallenberg Jnr – who would save 100,000 Hungarian Jews from the jaws of extermination, only to vanish into the Soviet gulag himself – was born on 4 August 1912, at his maternal grandparents’ summer home. He never met his father, Raoul Snr, a naval officer who died of cancer at twenty-three in May 1912, three months before his son was born. But he bore the illustrious name of a long line of Lutheran bankers and industrialists as well as diplomats; advisers to Crown and Cabinets; grey eminences whose family motto, ‘Esse, non Videri’, meant ‘To be, not to be seen’. Through their Enskilda Bank (founded in 1856), the Wallenberg dynasty had a finger in or a grip on every ma
jor Swedish industry: steel, iron ore, ball bearings, blast furnaces, timber and then whole forests for pulp and paper, tobacco, electronics, communications, railroads, ferries, the East Asiatic Steamship line, Saab and Volvo autos, and the airline that is now SAS (Scandinavian Airlines System).

  Though his mother, Maj, was the daughter of a prominent neurologist, she was hardly a Wallenberg for having been married to one for less than a year – and she shed the name when Raoul was still little by marrying Fredrik von Dardel, a Health Department official. Thus, Raoul was never in the mainstream of power which swept his cousins, Jacob and Marcus, to the pinnacle of the Wallenberg empire. Not quite the black sheep of the family, but a bit of a stray lamb, the little boy with curly locks, full lips, and intense, questioning eyes grew up fearless. Once, in a thunderstorm which had his friends hiding beneath their beds, he ran outside shouting, ‘Let’s see God’s fireworks!’ Hating hunting, he liberated the hounds from their kennel the night before a big foxhunt. A solitary hiker, he shunned competitive sports to such an extent that his classmates christened him ‘The Only Child’.

  He had a passion for planes and trains and boats. He knew all the types of World War I battleships by heart, but a naval career was ruled out when he drew green horses grazing on red grass and it was discovered that he was colour-blind. Curious how everything was put together, he would visit construction sites and converse with bricklayers. And he liked to draw on any surface he could find. Architecture loomed as a likely outlet for his interests and, after an obligatory year in the Swedish Army upon graduation from high school, he set off for the United States in 1931 to attend the University of Michigan’s College of Architecture and Design in Ann Arbor.

  His professors and classmates remembered him as a charming, conscientious student who lived in the architecture fraternity for a while and then boarded off-campus. The late Dr Jean Paul Slusser described Raoul as ‘one of the best and brightest in thirty years’ experience as a professor of drawing and painting’ – despite his colour-blindness. To his freshman humanities courses, he brought some of the worldly wisdom he had acquired in his travels, writing:

  The open-mindedness of humanity, even in our generation, is a myth. Maybe the individual is open-minded on one question, but on this question he generally belongs to the minority. In most other things, he generally is extremely reactionary.

  Another part of his American education was his discovery of hitchhiking. He thumbed his way to the 1932 summer Olympics in Los Angeles and, the following summer, to the Chicago World’s Fair, as well as periodically to his mother’s sister in Greenwich, Connecticut. ‘Bus and train trips are predictable,’ he wrote to his grandfather, ‘but hitchhiking offers the thrill of the unknown.’ Besides, it was cheap: ‘I went three hundred miles on fifty cents.’ The real prize of hitchhiking, however, was ‘the great practice it offers in the art of diplomacy and negotiating. You have to be on your guard. And it brings you into intimate contact with so many different kinds of people.’

  At the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, he worked in the Swedish Pavilion, where, for three dollars a day, he washed windows, sold souvenirs, arranged displays of glass and porcelain, manned the cash register, and moved heavy equipment. His greatest contribution to his native land that sweltering summer, however, was teaching the pavilion’s manager a cheap visual trick any architect knows: by mounting spotlights on a nearby skyscraper, they could illuminate the otherwise drab Swedish Pavilion and bathe it in an aura of distinction it didn’t really have.

  During his student years in Ann Arbor, Raoul Wallenberg acquired the only girlfriend he is known to have had: Bernice Ringman, an instructor at nearby Michigan State Normal College (now Eastern Michigan University) in Ypsilanti. A physical therapist in a pioneering programme of special education for handicapped children, she laughed with him at Laurel and Hardy and Marx Brothers films, went into Detroit with him to watch Fred Astaire tapping on tour, and danced with Raoul at college proms. He often called for her in the late afternoon and helped her with her patients. When she had to bring them from hospital to homes, he would carry those who couldn’t walk. Bernice, in turn, taught him to drive. In 1934, he bought a jalopy and, instead of hitchhiking, drove to Mexico. To pay his way, he sketched farmhouses and landscapes and then sold his drawings to the locals for cash or lodging.

  Bernice Ringman never married. In her eighties, she was living in Los Angeles and sometimes came over to the Simon Wiesenthal Centre to talk to school groups about Raoul Wallenberg and his bravery. Once, though, she recounted his aspirations and insecurities: ‘He always wanted to do something outstanding in some way in some field. He was always planning something. As far as he was concerned, it was never Sunday; there was always something to do next.’

  With his curly brown hair already receding and a prominent nose that was often described as aristocratic, Raoul Wallenberg was still a much-sought-after bachelor when he returned to Stockholm in 1935 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in architecture from the University of Michigan, after completing the four-and-a-half-year course in three and a half. Out of a class of 1100 Students, he won its only medal from the American Institute of Architects. On the boat home, he prepared his entry for a major Swedish architectural competition to rehabilitate the waterfront near the Royal Palace. Raoul’s design – which included a museum, an outdoor swimming-pool, and a public park along the embankment – won second prize: an astonishing feat for a newcomer up against all of Sweden’s best-known architects. But, in a cautious country still reeling from the Depression and girding to stay out of the Second World War, not even first-prize winners were being built; as fulfilled after the war, the project bears closer resemblance to Raoul’s runner-up than to the winning design.

  Another obstacle to instant success in his homeland was that his American diploma didn’t entitle Raoul to practise architecture in Sweden and nothing he saw on the horizon encouraged him to study for his licence there. Instead, he was persuaded by his grandfather to acquire some commercial experience as a trainee with a trading company in South Africa for six months, and then to apprentice with a bank in Palestine. To a friend, Gustaf Wallenberg wrote of his grandson:

  Most of all, I want to make a man of him by giving him a chance to see the world and, through mixing with foreigners, to acquire what most Swedes lack: an international outlook.

  Based in Cape Town, Raoul travelled the length and breadth of an uneasy, but seemingly placid, British dominion to sell chemicals, timber, and building materials for the Swedish-South Africa Export-Import Company. His employer wrote to his grandfather: ‘I have found him a splendid organizer and negotiator. He has seemingly boundless energy and vitality as well as great imaginative powers: an original mind.’ Another partner wrote that Raoul had the ‘remarkable gift of quickly and thoroughly acquainting himself with whatever he sets his mind to.’ Sharpening these skills with international experience was preparing Raoul Wallenberg for a mission which not even his great imagination and original mind could have envisioned in 1936.

  From South Africa in 1936, Raoul moved on to Palestine, which England had conquered in World War I and, under League of Nations mandate, ruled imperiously as if it were an unruly British colony. His clerking for the Holland Bank branch in Haifa went unpaid, for no Swede could obtain a visa to work in a Dutch bank under the tight British population control.

  In the bustling port of Haifa, he encountered the first flood of Jewish refugees from Germany to Palestine. Stripped of their proud past, their wealth and position in society, brutalized and terrorized by storm troopers who sang of ‘When Jewish blood spurts from the knife’ at every parade, degraded and deprived of German citizenship by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, they were the lucky ones who escaped early. Struggling for survival and a fresh start, these bedraggled burghers of Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, and Hamburg touched a chord in a displaced architect in search of himself.

  Palestine – which then included what are now Israel and Jordan – had been pledged as a Je
wish homeland by Britain’s Balfour Declaration of 1917. It should have been the one place in the world where Jews fleeing Hitler could find a haven in the early days of the Third Reich, but now the territory’s Arab natives worried that the Jewish influx would drive them out. Fuelled by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el Husseini, a rabid Jew-hater and Nazi sympathizer, and a young nationalist named Fawzi al-Qawukji, who openly imitated Hitler, the combustion point came on 19 April 1936, when Palestinian Arabs set fire to Jewish villages and ambushed hundreds of Jewish settlers.

  From the outset of their Palestinian mandate, British policy had been to divide and rule. It was the same tactic they took in India, playing Hindus against Moslems, and the one the Habsburgs had used with the peoples of Galicia and the Balkans. In an effort to keep the balance of power and control the Suez Canal, their lifeline to India and their Asian colonies, the British insisted after the 1936 riots that Palestine could not absorb large numbers of immigrants. Now the desk undertakers took control. Entry requirements were tightened: a prelude to 1939’s shameful ‘White Paper’ limiting Jewish immigration to 1500 a month for the next five years – while the Holocaust raged hottest! – and shutting it off entirely from 1944 on ‘unless the Arabs of Palestine are prepared to acquiesce in it.’