Nazi Hunter (3 page)

Wiesenthal agreed, but brought in the Austrian police, too. They infiltrated two meetings and took pictures. The ‘heroes’, it turned out, were playing the Legionnaire for a fool,
too. Not only did they decline to give him an advance, but the eavesdropping ascertained they had no intention of paying him when the job was done, either. Nevertheless, Wiesenthal took them to
court to put their plot on the public record. Both Robert and the native businessman fled Austria, as did the three Germans, who had been using false names.

‘The “heroes” are tired,’ Wiesenthal concluded. ‘I know it when they need outside help like a French Foreign Legionnaire to do their dirty work for them. But do you
know something else? I am tired, too. I cannot teach my work to other people. There is nobody to succeed me, nobody left who is much younger, who would have my experience or could find out all that
I carry in my head. But I will never retire . . . If I ever close my Centre here, I will have nothing to do but wait for my death. Besides, there are others waiting, too. For if I closed my office,
it would be a Nazi holiday and a Jewish defeat – a defeat for humanity, a defeat for justice, too. And, believe me, the “heroes” will celebrate it as a victory – and they
will begin again that much sooner.’

He denied he was ‘some kind of modern Don Quixote or Jewish James Bond. Yes, my work is an adventure, but there are no romantics about it. You could make thriller after thriller out of my
files, but I am not like James Bond because the results are not immediate; they can come in years, they may take generations. And Don Quixote I am not. Yes, many times I am fighting against
imagination or a world that doesn’t understand, but my fight is not without results.’

On his way out, he confided: ‘I will tell you a secret. For a man who was in a ghetto and in concentration camps and lost all his blood relatives, my biggest personal satisfaction is not
in having a Nazi arrested. It comes when two Nazis have a quarrel and one threatens the other with “I will go to Simon Wiesenthal about you.” And he does! They are my best
informers.’

At subsequent meetings, I was treated to a display of intellectual fireworks by a collector of circumstantial evidence on why, for example, Christopher
Columbus’s crew had to be on board the
Pinta
, the
Nina
, and the
Santa Maria
a day ahead of schedule and why Hitler hated the Jews. On the latter, Wiesenthal had
this to say:

‘I am sure Hitler had syphilis. His paranoia in the last days of the war was typical of a man with syphilis. I have the feeling – though I have no real evidence for it yet –
that he contracted this syphilis in the time he was in Vienna before the war. I have been reading all these people like Joachim Fest and others who write books about Hitler that are supposed to
tell you all, but in thousands of pages I see not one single word about the sickness of Hitler.’

Actually, the 1960 revised edition of Alan Bullock’s
Hitler
:
A Study in Tyranny
did allude to his catching a venereal disease from a prostitute, but Wiesenthal first
heard the theory propounded in the mid-sixties in Munich by a City Councilman named Fackler, who said he’d heard it from Ernst Hanfstaengel, a Harvard-educated local Nazi to whose country
home Hitler fled after his abortive Beer Hall
Putsch
in 1923. According to Hanfstaengel, his good friend Hitler told him that, as a lance-corporal fighting in Flanders’ fields in the
First World War, he’d nearly been court-martialled for ‘self-mutilation’ when syphilis was diagnosed, but had escaped trial by proving he already had the condition before entering
the Bavarian Army and therefore hadn’t done anything new in the war to jeopardize his military service.

In Albert Speer’s later years, Hitler’s master builder and diarist of Nazi times had struck up what could not be called a friendship, but a research relationship with
Wiesenthal.
³
So Simon didn’t hesitate to try out his theory on Speer, whose reply came from Heidelberg
in an elegant
envelope with an ‘A.S.’ monogram and no return address:

This intrigued Wiesenthal, who told me: ‘I am working on it in my spare time. If I can find a solution in another five or ten years, I would be very happy because this
would give the whole story of Hitler and the Jews a different picture.’

‘But where do the Jews enter that picture?’ I asked him.

‘Ah!’ said Simon, slapping his knee. ‘I haven’t told you something else. A few years ago, I have a talk with a man who went to school with Hitler. I ask him what Hitler
was like in school and he says, “Normal. But maybe this hatred began after he got this infection from a Jewish whore.” . . . So I am looking now for names and details. I am just in the
first stages, but I am telling you that if I can find out with evidence that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was the aftermath of an infection from a Jewish prostitute, then all the Nazi racial
theories sink a layer lower in the sewer. All the Nazis were anti-Semites, but hardly any of them had any personal experience with Jews. If Hitler did, this gives an answer to why he hated Jews the
way he did.’

When I met him, Wiesenthal’s research had brought him in contact with an expatriate physician, Edmund Ronald, then living in Portugal. In the early 1950s, while working in a Seattle
hospital, Dr Ronald had met a young Austrian doctor from Graz who said his late father, also a doctor, had treated Hitler for syphilis long ago. After Austria had been annexed by Germany in 1938,
Gestapo agents had confiscated all of his father’s files on that particular patient, but the father had informed his son that Hitler told him he’d caught the disease from a Jewish
prostitute before World War I. Though Dr Ronald gave Wiesenthal the name of his source, the young doctor from Graz later settled in the US and has not proved traceable.

In 1977, there was a medical debate over whether Hitler was sterile or impotent and Dr Ronald wrote from Bordighera, Italy, to the
International Herald Tribune
that

Dr Ronald, who subsequently died, went on to note that Hitler’s love affair with his Viennese niece, Angela ‘Geli’ Raubal, ended with her unexplained suicide
in 1931 at the age of twenty-three. Wiesenthal suspects she killed herself after her uncle infected her with syphilis.

Wiesenthal’s work on Christopher Columbus had been more concentrated and productive. ‘In my research on anti-Semitism throughout history,’ he explained,
‘when I concentrated on the Spanish Inquisition, I discovered an amazing coincidence. The two most important events of 1492 – both of which determined the entire future of Spanish
history and much of world history – were the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and the discovery of America. All Jews had to be off Spanish soil by midnight of August second.

‘Now Columbus didn’t sail for “India”, as they called all of Asia in those days, until August third, as scheduled. But his sailors had orders to report on the night of
the second. This was not customary: a sailor’s last night in port was sacred to him and was usually spent with his family or girlfriend before he came on board next day. I asked myself
why.

‘The tides weren’t right for an earlier departure. And why did Columbus personally supervise the roll-call? So I began to look at the roll he called. One tenth of his crew was Jews;
some of them, I learned later, may have been rabbis. But, even though nine-tenths of the crew wasn’t Jewish, there was no priest aboard. Very unusual at sea!

‘Then I am looking into the financing of his voyage. This business of Queen Isabella hocking her jewels to pay for it is all legend. With the help of
Marrano
ministers of hers,
the mission was entirely financed by Jewish money.’ A
Marrano
(from the Spanish word for ‘pig’ or ‘damned’) was a Jew who, in Wiesenthal’s words,
‘outwardly
pretended to be a Christian, but secretly remained a Jew’, while a
Converso
was ‘a convert who broke off all relations with Jews and
assimilated’. Both were suspect. It had been the discovery of
Marranos
partaking of a Passover seder in 1478 that led to the creation of the Spanish Inquisition, which used the rack,
the pyre, the wheel, branding-irons and blinding-rods as well as bizarre pure-blood laws (direct ancestors of Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws of racial purity) to get to the very bottom of a
victim’s religious beliefs.

‘I began to ask myself,’ Simon went on, ‘why the Jews financed Columbus when all others had refused for years. Who was he and what did the Jews want from him?’

Cristoforo Colombo (1451–1506), an Italian mariner known to Spaniards as Christóbal Colón, came from a family of ‘Spanish Jews settled in Genoa’, according to his
contemporary biographer, Salvadore de Madariaga, who believes the Colóns converted to Christianity during Spanish persecutions in the fourteenth century. Around 1479, Columbus married a
Portuguese noblewoman of
Marrano
descent. After some preliminary study, Wiesenthal went to Spain to examine materials preserved in the Biblioteca Columbina (Columbus Library) in Seville.
In the archives, Simon found a dozen intimate letters from Columbus to his son, Diego. All of them bore not just the obligatory cross at the top, but also a strange boat-like symbol in the upper
left-hand corner.

With the help of an American Jewish scholar named Maurice David, Wiesenthal deciphered it as two Hebrew characters,
beth
and
hei
, standing for
baruch hashem
, meaning
Praised be the Lord
. It was, Wiesenthal thinks, Columbus’s way of reminding his son: ‘Do not forget where you come from. The cross is a tribute to the religion you now follow,
but within the circle of your family give the sign
beth hei, so
that they remember their origins.’ In one of the letters, Wiesenthal adds, he discussed with Diego the possibility of
marriage to a
Marrano
.

‘I spent a lot of time in Seville,’ Wiesenthal went on. ‘I had in my hands all his writings that have survived – not just letters, but books he had read, with his
jottings in the margins, and books he valued enough to have copied for himself at his own expense: usually by hand, because this was very soon after Gutenberg.
⁴
Now why
would you imagine that a Christian sailor five hundred years ago would make a copy of a work by Rabbi Samuel Jehudi urging Jews to accept
conversion, even forced baptism? There were just too many coincidences.

‘In all, I find two hundred and fifty references by Columbus to Jews. He knew the Jewish calendar, the Jewish prophets, and his diary showed a deep knowledge of Jewish history. The beliefs
of Columbus were a mixture of Christianity and Judaism. In a book of history by Pope Pius the Second, he makes a marginal note that the year 1481’s Jewish equivalent was 5241. He writes that
Adam lived to be one hundred fifty years old and, when he tells how the Second Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed in the year Seventy by the Romans, he calls it
Casa secunda
, the Second
House. Only Jews use that phrase; in no non-Jewish publication have I ever met this idiom, Second House.

‘But the most important marginal note I find is the one that tells me Columbus knows the diary of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, who travelled in the east three centuries before him and came to
the conclusion that the ten lost tribes of Israel were in “India”. I have this book in my own library. So now I go back to the register of the crew and look a little closer. Not only
are there a number of Jewish names, but later I learn that several in Columbus’s crew spoke Hebrew and a couple of them may have been rabbis. And who was the interpreter on board? Luis de
Torres, who had been interpreter for the Governor of Murcia, which had a large Jewish population. It took me two weeks to confirm that Luis de Torres had been the governor’s interpreter of
Hebrew. Now the only possible explanation of this is that Columbus expected to reach countries in which Jews lived and governed.’

From research on Columbus that began around 1965, Wiesenthal was convinced ‘that the Jews, concerned about their deteriorating situation in Spain,
⁵
were looking for a homeland, a place to flee to, where they would find a protector. And so, in the belief that the ten lost tribes had found refuge in “India”, they
financed the expedition of Columbus: a man they could trust.’ Simon says
Columbus was surely a
Converso
and quite likely a
Marrano
: ‘I am
convinced he was following the Law of Moses. But I’m not saying to the bitter end that I’m sure he’s Jewish. I make the matter open.’

Still, when Simon wrote a book-length manuscript that became
Sails of Hope
:
the Secret Mission of Christopher Columbus
, he hesitated to offer it to publishers because ‘I
feel when I give out that Columbus had a Hebrew interpreter, people will think I am absolutely crazy or else some Jewish fanatic. So I cannot publish the book. But then I have an idea. I was
invited to lecture in Lisbon, so I am going to the Royal Library there and looking on the documents of Vasco da Gama, who was also looking for a way to India and really found it.
⁶
He had also an interpreter for the Hebrew language. When I saw this, now I should publish.’