Nazi Hunter (79 page)

Sometimes there were pickets carrying signs saying ‘
WALDHEIM WAR CRIMINAL
’ and ‘
MEMORY GAP FOR PRESIDENT
!’ Beate Klarsfeld
came from Paris to try to disrupt Waldheim speeches in Linz and Vienna. Capitalizing on Chancellor Sinowatz’s quip that ‘Waldheim wasn’t a Nazi; only his horse was’,
hecklers hoisted a four-foot-high papier mâché horse’s head with the motto: ‘
A HORSE THE WORLD CAN TRUST
’. When the Waldheim camp came up with
a new slogan,
‘
SLANDER MUST NOT PAY
!’, demonstrators showed up carrying such placards, but with the first word crossed out and replaced by
either ‘
CRIME
. . .’ or ‘
ANTI-SEMITISM
. . .’ At a rally in Vienna, hoodlums in loden and lederhosen beat up the protesters
while the police looked on.

The national chairman of the People’s Party, Alois Mock accused the World Jewish Congress of ‘despicable infamy’ and ‘improper intervention in Austrian affairs’.
When leaflets headed ‘
AUSCHWITZ, TREBLINKA, MAJDANEK
–
NOW IT’S THE TURN OF VIENNA
’ arrived in the mailboxes of prominent
Jews, Mock denounced the hate-sheets as forgeries. The question, ‘forgeries of what?’ went unanswered. A Jewish art shop shut its door and adorned it with a sign, ‘
CLOSED DUE TO THREATS
’. Simon Wiesenthal said, ‘I know of several cases of taxi-drivers refusing to take Jewish passengers’, and
Der Spiegel
reported:

When three drunken youths tried to beat up Rabbi Jacob Biederman, he managed to flee, but shrugged off the attack as ‘nothing special’.

Armed with overkill, People’s Party general secretary Graff consistently took the low road and not only criticized Austria’s Jewish community for not distancing itself from the
‘dishonorable fellows’ of the WJC, but warned against ‘provoking feelings we all don’t want to have.’ When journalists asked Graff whether he wasn’t provoking
the very emotions he professed to deplore, he snapped back: ‘You’re only putting us down because we have the courage to stand up to a few Jews!’

From Mallorca, Bruno Kreisky talked on the telephone to
Time’s
Vienna correspondent, Traudl Lessing, and, though no admirer of Waldheim, spoke up for him against the WJC.
‘An extraordinary infamy!’ the seventy-five-year-old Jewish ex-Chancellor growled. But he warned Mrs Lessing not to blame Jewish circles only. ‘The Americans in general have an
old score to settle with Waldheim. They never accepted the fact that he had to do the bidding of the majority at the UN.’ Israel, Kreisky added, had always distrusted Waldheim because of the
UN’s Middle East policy. As for the reaction in Austria, Kreisky predicted: ‘People will simply say, “we
won’t allow the Jews abroad to order us about
and tell us who should be our President.’” Though the latest polls showed Waldheim forging steadily ahead of Steyrer, Kreisky added a compassionate afterthought for his former Foreign
Ministry colleague: ‘I don’t quite understand why Waldheim had to get himself into this mess.’

For once, Simon Wiesenthal and Bruno Kreisky were in agreement – about the 4 May 1986 Austrian election. ‘Waldheim will win with the help of the World Jewish
Congress,’ Simon told me when we met on 9 April 1986, at the Hotel Doral Park Avenue in New York for breakfast. ‘I know how people feel. I am an Austrian, too. Foreigners don’t
have the right to decide who will be our President.’

Simon told me that, after Herzstein had unearthed the Yugoslav
Odluka
accusing Lieutenant Waldheim of murder, candidate Waldheim had phoned again and they had talked more than thirty
minutes: ‘He wanted to say he didn’t know what had happened to those three villages in Yugoslavia in 1944 until the documents were released in 1986. I said I would wait for more
documents. And he asked me again to please believe him that he hadn’t known about the deportations from Saloniki. How could he not have known?’ But Wiesenthal told Waldheim: ‘When
this is only a matter of whether I believe you or not, then is this an Austrian affair between you as a candidate and me as a voter. But, if it is a matter of war crimes, then it is
everybody’s affair – the Yugoslavs’, the Americans’, the world’s – because people from other countries were the victims.’

Now Wiesenthal told me at his breakfast table: ‘In the moment I saw that there are accusations about Yugoslavs, I immediately become engaged. The same day, I drafted a two-hundred-word
telegram to the Prime Minister of Yugoslavia [then Milka Planinc]. She happened to be in Vienna at the time. And I ask her to say why they have done nothing when there are such terrible
accusations. What I say in the cable is that what I am doing is not for and not against Waldheim. As a citizen of Austria, I wish to know the truth. But the next day after she gets my cable, she is
saying Yugoslavia is not mixing in Austrian elections. So I tell Waldheim: “You have to tell the Yugoslavs to let the world see everything. It’s in your best interest.’”
Wiesenthal’s guess was: ‘If the Yugoslavs dropped the case, the only conclusion is that they had nothing.’ He had no use for the possibility of blackmail: ‘If they are using
him for blackmail,
then his dossier would never remain in the archive so a journalist in Yugoslavia could come and look at it.’

With a sigh, Simon said he wasn’t looking forward to contending with the present state of ‘Waldheim hysteria’ in the US: ‘That a man with my reputation has not the
possibility to talk with people in a logical way about Waldheim says more about the hysteria than about Waldheim. Immediately, they say: “Ah, you protect Waldheim!” And I say: I wish to
know the truth. Do what you wish, I will not change my attitude since forty years. I never accuse somebody without evidence and I never play the prosecutor and the judge for the same person. My
line was always: the documents must be hard, but my language moderate – because, when both are hard, my judges will think, “This is a hater.” And you know that I am
not.’

There was a quaver in his voice and, to dispel emotion, he glanced at his breakfast-table
New York Times
and said a little more calmly:

‘Look, for me, before I was ever coming to this country, was American press and American media the eminence of fairness. But I don’t see this fairness now! There are big headlines,
but in the article is not the contents that makes the headline true.’

He blamed the hysteria on World Jewish Congress demagoguery and said: ‘If I had worked the way they do, I would be finished two years after I start. So this press conference will not be
easy. I do not look forward.’

Later, at Simon’s forty-minute meeting with Javier Perez de Cuellar, Waldheim’s successor at the UN – for which Rabbi Hier of the Wiesenthal Centre
⁸²
had flown in from Los Angeles – Perez de Cuellar began by expressing his personal admiration for Simon’s forty years’ work on behalf of justice.

‘First we were talking about the troubles of Kurt Waldheim,’ Simon reported, ‘and the Secretary General told me that they were releasing to Israel and Austria – and now
the United States has
asked and will get it, too – the documents in possession of the United Nations that date from end of 1947 to beginning of 1948. I told the
Secretary General that this was only a part of the file on Kurt Waldheim and the most important files are still in Belgrade.’

Perez de Cuellar agreed to intervene in the matter – to begin with, by calling the Yugoslav ambassador. (He did, but Yugoslavia’s ruling Presidium declined ‘to interfere in the
internal affairs of our neighbours.’) ‘I told Perez de Cuellar that this has not only to do with Austria and Yugoslavia,’ Simon informed me later, ‘“You must do
something for the United Nations. Was a criminal for ten years the head of the UN?’”

Then Wiesenthal and Hier raised the other issue – which Simon introduced by telling Perez de Cuellar: ‘It looks to me like in a thriller: 40,000 dead bodies in a cellar. These are
the documents that were started collected in 1943 in London – first through the governments-in-exile of the occupied countries of Europe and then from the Jewish Agency, which took the
testimony of people who escaped from those countries; and also from the French resistance, Dutch resistance, and other resistances; from Sweden, Hungary: documents, names, and descriptions of
crimes. In 1948, the United Nations War Crimes Commission was closed and the papers were put away, even though they had a big historic value. Now, almost forty years later, they cannot remain in an
archive in a cellar.’
⁸³

Perez de Cuellar asked Wiesenthal to draw up a memo outlining how and to whom, other than governments, the UNWCC files might be made available. The very next day, at Perez de Cuellar’s
request, the Waldheim files were opened to the US, Austrian, and Israeli governments; Israel was also granted access to the files of Alois Brunner, the Austrian SS aide to Eichmann who was still
living in Syria, and Hermann Klenner, an East German diplomat and former Nazi Party member who was serving as vice president of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva. Months later,
the archive was opened to scholars, historians, and researchers.

At his press conference, however, Wiesenthal found the New York journalists much less interested in hearing about Perez de Cuellar than about his predecessor. ‘Have
you come to any conclusions about Waldheim?’ Simon was asked.

‘How could I?’ he replied. ‘Look, when I receive a dossier, I don’t read it like a crime novel. I look at the first and last page to see the accusation and the conclusion
– and then I go back to the beginning and read it all the way through, trying to see if one leads logically to the other . . . From this [UNWCC] document here, without the full Yugoslav
documentation, what we have is an accusation from 1948 and nothing more.’

‘As an Austrian citizen, how do you view the latest rise in Waldheim’s popularity?’

Wiesenthal paused for a moment and then replied: ‘You know, sixty-five per cent of the Austrian population are born after the war or were small children. And they feel very uncomfort[able]
when are coming voices from abroad that give them advices whom they should elect. They feel adult enough to choose. . .’

Asked if the World Jewish Congress was premature, Wiesenthal said yes in the light of evidence thus far. Was there evidence? ‘I don’t know.’ Then he pointed out: ‘By
1948, the Yugoslavs knew he was already a small secretary in the Austrian Foreign Ministry. And they were going after everybody they could. In 1949, the Yugoslavs claimed for a number of people in
Germany and Austria and other places and they started looking for Artukovic, who has just been extradited from California. But why did they not claim for Waldheim? The answer to this can only be
given in Yugoslavia.’

After more than an hour of fielding rapid-fire questions in English, Wiesenthal was tiring and the queries were repeating themselves. When the press conference was over, I congratulated Simon
and said goodbye. ‘They weren’t as hostile as I expected,’ he remarked. ‘Nobody even accused me of coming to protect him.’

But the next day’s
New York Daily News
headline was: ‘
NAZI HUNTER SAYS
: “
HANDS OFF KURT
!’”

38

At Simon Wiesenthal’s request, the respected, sometimes revered, incumbent President of Austria, Rudolf Kirchschläger – who could truly call himself ‘the
man Austria trusts’ – had agreed to review all the evidence for and against Waldheim and to issue some sort of preliminary evaluation before the election. On 22 April 1986, with the
voting for his successor a dozen days away, Kirchschläger went on national television to deliver his conclusions after closeting himself for ten days with three sets of papers: the UN War
Crimes Commission files on Kurt Waldheim; a five-hundred-page ‘preliminary set’ of ‘war documents transmitted to me by the World Jewish Congress, mainly from US war
archives’, and a defence prepared by Waldheim’s son Gerhard.