Nazi Hunter (2 page)

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

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
r
s 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 Kissinger
¹
and Betty
Williams
²
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 German 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.

‘In the moment when the Germans first came into my city in Galicia,’ he said in heavily accented but always eloquent English, ‘half the population was Jewish: one hundred fifty
thousand Jews. When the Germans were gone, five hundred were alive. Five hundred in a hundred fifty thousand! One out of three hundred! Many times I was thinking that everything in life has a
price, so to stay alive must also have a price. And my price was always that, if I lived, I must be deputy for many people who are not alive.’

We talked that day about his latest ‘clients’, as he calls Nazis he’s brought to justice; until they’re in custody, he labels them, with matching irony, ‘the
heroes’. One of the clients – in Graz, Austria’s second-largest city – was pleading that he did only what everyone
in his unit was doing, but Simon
said: ‘Camaraderie ends when crime begins.’

Then we talked of ‘leftist fascism’ and how the Russians and their Stalinist puppets in Eastern Europe issued decrees with the same wording used by the Nazi occupiers. As Simon put
it: ‘The world is round. If you go right, right, right, you come out on the left.’

We talked of his past and we talked of his unpaid helpers around the world. One, in Australia, was a nun: ‘I don’t ask her background, but I am sure it is maybe Jewish.’

He told of a fifteen-year search for ‘a very little killer’ he had just unearthed as a Buddhist monk in Katmandu: ‘I have heard what that life is like; he is either punished
every day or he repents every day. So I will close his file. To bring such a man before a court can only build him sympathy.’

By the end of a couple of hours together, Simon and I were on a first-name basis – a relationship which, in Austria, can take years, or forever, to ripen. It was late
afternoon and he offered me a ride home in his small car. On our way out, we met an elderly couple who averted their eyes and said nothing when Simon greeted them.

‘They are Jewish,’ he whispered when we were one landing down. ‘I meet them in the elevator and they are looking on me like I am their murderer.’

What had happened, he explained on the ride home, was a ‘blackmail letter’ campaign by ‘the heroes’ addressed to everybody in the building on Rudolfsplatz
except
Wiesenthal. The letter warned his fellow tenants that, ‘when the Documentation Centre is bombed, you and your apartments are likely to perish in the blast, too.’ All the neighbours
– including the Jewish couple, who’d survived the death camps – had signed a petition and started a legal action to evict Wiesenthal as a threat to their security. (They succeeded
a few months later, before die case ever came to court, when Simon moved one block away to the Salztorgasse.)

I invited him to my home for our next meeting. Whether or not he carries six million dead Jews on his coat-tails when he enters a room, there was something of a stage play or a grainy old
black-and-white film about the way Wiesenthal bustles into any scene – as though something momentous is about to happen or be announced. My daughters, then ten and eleven, took his topcoat
and hat. A minute or two later, one of them tiptoed into the living-room and whispered, ‘Daddy, that man has a gun in his pocket.’

I asked Simon and he said, yes, the police had told him, in lieu of a bodyguard he’d declined, to carry the snub-nosed revolver he now showed us and then pocketed in his tweed jacket. (My
daughters always frisked his topcoat on subsequent visits and never again struck heavy metal.) He certainly had good reason to carry his own protection. The neo-Nazi World Union of National
Socialists had recently put a price of $120,000 on his head – dead, not alive. As a fugitive in Bolivia, Klaus Barbie, ‘The Butcher of Lyon’, once inquired into paying for
Wiesenthal’s assassination and, in Brazil, one of Dr Josef Mengele’s hosts offered to ‘put a steel cable to the leg of Simon Wiesenthal and drag his carcass behind my car.’
Later, Simon learned of a Palestine Liberation Organization plot to kidnap and kill him, but the world’s most notorious terrorist at the time – a mysterious Venezuelan named Ilich
Ramirez Sanchez, but called ‘Carlos’ – was said to have vetoed the contract because the target was, after all, anti-fascist. Still later, in 1982, a bomb planted by neo-Nazis
would destroy much of Simon’s modest home in a garden district of Vienna and shatter what was left of his wife’s health. (The following year, when Wiesenthal testified at their trial,
one of the culprits leaped to his feet and tried to throttle him on the witness stand.)

Over vermouth and mineral water, he told how he’d been visited by an Austrian who’d served five years in the French Foreign Legion (fighting in the decisive Vietnamese battle of Dien
Bien Phu in 1954) and another four and a half years in an Austrian prison for rape. On the day he was freed, a man named Robert was waiting at the gate to offer him a job: 100,000 Deutschmarks
(almost $35,000 at the time) to kill Wiesenthal.

The Legionnaire, having been ‘put on ice for four and a half years just for rape’, didn’t want to risk a murder rap, though he wasn’t averse to fraud. So he came to
Wiesenthal and said: ‘I have been offered one hundred thousand marks to kill you. Maybe we can make a deal and split the money.’

‘You mean I die and my widow gets fifty thousand?’ Wiesenthal asked incredulously.

‘You don’t die. You don’t play dead,’ his caller assured him. He would meet with Robert and the four businessmen backing him –
three Germans
and an Austrian – and negotiate an advance. Then Wiesenthal would call a press conference and reveal plot and plotters. He and the Legionnaire would split the advance – and let the
‘heroes’ try to get their money back!