Nazi Hunter (83 page)

‘Maybe so,’ Simon Wiesenthal remarked. ‘The man was neither a Nazi nor a war criminal, a hero or a victim. He was an opportunist like ninety-nine per cent of the others. But
should such an average person be president of a country?’

The fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss fell on the same days of the week in 1988 that they did in 1938. On Friday, 11 March, the day Schuschnigg gave up, there would be a ceremony in the
Hofburg, but enough Socialist and Green Members of Parliament threatened to boycott the event or walk out if the President spoke that he agreed to attend as a silent spectator. He was, however,
given the opportunity to speak on national television the night before, and there he said that although Austria was the first victim of Hitler, some Austrians were guilty of committing Nazi crimes.
‘Of course, there is no such thing as collective guilt,’ he declared. ‘Nevertheless, I should like to apologize as head of state.’

In 1988, Kurt Waldheim conjured up a ghost from Simon Wiesenthal’s past: Eichmann-hunter Tuviah Friedman made a much-publicized return to Vienna
from Haifa – at the invitation and expense of the offices of the President of Austria, the Austrian Foreign Ministry, and the Austrian Federal Press Service – as the self-proclaimed
‘Conscience of Israel’ come to Austria to pronounce President Kurt Waldheim ‘innocent as a baby’. Friedman made no effort to contact Wiesenthal while being wined and dined
by the Waldheims at the presidential villa in the garden district of Hohe Warte and by the Federal Press Service at the Noah’s Ark Kosher Restaurant on the Judengasse in the old ghetto, where
a press dinner for nine – Friedman, four officials shepherding him, and four journalists – cost the taxpayers some 400 dollars.

The last word on this whole fiasco, however, belonged to Simon Wiesenthal, who told the press that Friedman had snubbed him as a rival. ‘We’ve been out of touch for more than thirty
years,’ Simon said. ‘After Eichmann was captured, Friedman was once quoted as complaining: “They always talk about Wiesenthal, never about me.” I feel sorry for Tuviah
Friedman. He was recruited for something of which he wasn’t intellectually capable . . . [But] nationally and internationally, Waldheim is in a situation where the only person who can help
him is himself.’

The embarrassing resuscitation of Tuviah Friedman was part of a media offensive launched from the Hofburg in 1988. A spate of interviews with Waldheim began to appear in the world’s
English-language media. He told James M. Markham of the
New York Times
that he was slightly reluctant to make any gesture of reconciliation toward Austrian Jews: ‘I have to be a
little careful. I want to be sure I will be well received. There will always be people who will say, “Well, why is he coming?’” Then he launched into what Markham called ‘a
paean to the Jewish contribution to Austrian civilization’ and recalled Jewish friendships in New York: ‘I attended Jewish weddings. My family doctor in New York was a Jew.’ He
vowed to use his ‘whole moral authority to fight anti-Semitism, which is a scourge of humanity. I shall do that out of deep conviction.’

Receiving Steve Lipman of
Jewish Week
at the Attersee, he rattled off his Jewish connections – the New York physician; a Jewish friend in the US who sends letters of ‘moral
support’; an English
teacher from his early school years – and told Lipman how he attends Jewish weddings and funerals in Vienna wearing a conspicuous skull-cap.
(Lipman did not mention the
yarmulkah
flap at Yad Vashem.)

He even granted a polite, if tense, interview to his nemesis, Professor Herzstein, the military historian who had ‘unmasked’ his ‘hidden past’ for the World Jewish
Congress. Herzstein said that ‘much of the information he offered was new and highly useful’ to his book
Waldheim: the Missing Years.

Just to analyse Herzstein’s book and another (
Waldheim
, by French journalists Luc Rosenzweig and Bernard Cohen) for the
London Review of Books
, Gitta Sereny, the
biographer of Franz Stangl, flew to Vienna for an interview with Waldheim. ‘Why do they go on about me? Do you understand the reasons?’ he asked Sereny in the Anschluss anniversary
month of March 1988. When she observed that the historians’ commission seemed to think he should have been a hero, he voiced his disappointment: ‘I thought that the commission, who
after all I asked for, would understand. Would I really have asked for such learned men to investigate my past if I had done something wrong? Those who think me bad, do they also think me mad? But
it is true, of course. I could have resisted, deserted, and I didn’t.’

From the moment in 1986 when the first ‘revelations’ about him began making daily headlines and Kurt Waldheim started to squirm like a schoolboy caught
‘cheating’, the ‘character issue’ was invoked on the world stage with the Final Solution as backdrop. And, on this canvas in an epic morality play which traumatized the
Austria he symbolized for so many years and still symbolizes, President Kurt Waldheim – neither Nazi nor war criminal, but once the servant of both – has become as much a landmark of
Holocaust remembrance as Simon Wiesenthal and Elie Wiesel, Adolf Eichmann and Anne Frank, and the bronze statue of a Jew scrubbing the pavement a few blocks from his Chancellery. Somewhere in
time’s no man’s land between moral obtuseness and passive complicity, ‘The Prisoner of the Hofburg’ became today’s ‘Man in the Glass Booth’ – with
every day of his 2192-day presidency a Day of Judgement by the world.

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The 1988 report of the historians’ commission, proposed by Wiesenthal and activated by Waldheim, had given Simon a good opportunity to dismount the high horse of
principle that had already cost him lecture bookings and rapport with the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, but it was too late for the Nobel Peace Prize which eluded him after his near-miss in 1983.

When, after two years of talk of Simon’s sharing the honour with Elie Wiesel, the 1986 prize went to Wiesel alone, the timing was obvious. Simon’s severest postwar test of character
– the politically unfashionable stance of fair play he took early in the Waldheim affair and maintained for two turbulent years – had clearly taken its toll.

Simon saw something more sinister. In 1989, he complained to me that Israel Singer and the World Jewish Congress had torpedoed his last chance at the Nobel Peace Prize three years earlier in the
heat of the Waldheim controversy: ‘A member of the Nobel committee told me that they got “a letter from world Jewry” protesting any plan to give me the prize or have me share it
with Wiesel. He wouldn’t tell me any more than that, but I could guess where it was from. The World Jewish Congress is not world Jewry, but its name sounds like it.’

Singer denies that the WJC sent any such letter and says why he thinks the Nobel went to Wiesel alone: ‘Hunters don’t win peace prizes.’

As an Austrian citizen, Simon had every right to request the President’s resignation, but no real reason to expect it. Still, he
continued to call
for it, even while acknowledging that Austrian interest in his work and his subject were never higher than when Kurt Waldheim ran for President.

Within President Waldheim, once he was installed in the Hofburg, some of the arrogance of office had given way to humility in power. Reviewing my tape of our 10 May 1989 interview with the
president, I picked up on a reference he had made to a ‘very clear letter’ to Wiesenthal – and, the next day, back in the Hofburg once more, I was allowed to see a copy, but not
to quote it. Dated 2 February 1989, on Dr Kurt Waldheim’s personal (not his presidential) letterhead, it was two pages and nine paragraphs long.

Waldheim’s letter began by acknowledging that he’d looked at Wiesenthal’s new 1988 memoir with great interest, particularly because of the chapter about him. Then he thanked
Simon for taking such a clear position against any and all allegations of wrongdoing by Lieutenant Waldheim and praised Wiesenthal’s devotion to justice and his high moral standard –
which was precisely why Waldheim was disturbed by Wiesenthal’s doubts about his credibility, particularly concerning his purported knowledge of the deportation of the Jews of Salonika.

The tragedy was now forty-five years old, Waldheim went on, and allegations that he knew about it were based on assumptions, not proof. The same was true of the report of the historians, who
operated on hypotheses, not facts.

The President acknowledged that once the historians’ report and Wiesenthal’s book had been issued, he could hardly hope for a change in position. Therefore, although it was too late
to influence Simon’s public judgement, he wanted to repeat once again – with the complete conviction of his conscience – that he knew nothing of the deportations.

Recalling a 1986 conversation with Wiesenthal that is cited in the memoir, Waldheim said Simon had suggested he would be more credible if he admitted knowing of the deportations. He had replied
then and reiterated now that he had known nothing then and could not knowingly speak untruth.

Waldheim then reaffirmed that he was absent from Arsakli during the time of deportations and that the framework of his military activities precluded any involvement in the terrible events that
took place.

Although Simon had jumped to political conclusions (that Waldheim should resign) from his doubts about the President’s credibility, Waldheim insisted that, knowing
the real truth, he could not accept Wiesenthal’s statements in this regard.

Finally, Waldheim said that if a personal meeting would clarify matters, he stood ready to get together with Wiesenthal.

It was a remarkable letter for any president to send to a constituent.

Even more remarkably, three months after the letter from his President was sent to him, Wiesenthal had not answered it.

‘Why should I answer him?’ Simon asked me when I called him about it next morning. ‘He is right that I will never change my position. This is what I believe. Him I can’t
believe.’

‘But the President of your country writes to you!’ I remonstrated, at least as shocked as I was years ago when Simon suggested Hitler caught syphilis from a Jewish prostitute.

‘Yes, and already he is showing the letter to you!’

‘Not him; one of his aides,’ I argued. ‘They’re miffed that you didn’t answer.’

‘Look, if I write him a letter, immediately it will be in the press – but with two or three words missing.’

I asked him if he had ever suggested to Waldheim that he should say he knew about the deportations.

‘Sure,’ he said, ‘because nobody can believe other. Listen, I am not going to answer his letter, but the last time I talked to him on the phone, I said to him: “I know
during the war you could do nothing . . . After the war, however, you who have seen so much and known so much could have told us so much. But you say nothing.’”

On 17 October 1989, Simon Wiesenthal had the last word on both Kurt Waldheim and the World Jewish Congress.

The previous afternoon, I’d attended a kosher banquet hosted by Mayor Helmut Zilk in Vienna’s Rathaus (City Hall) for Arthur Hertzberg, a jovial, roly-poly New Jersey rabbi and
professor (of religion at Dartmouth and history at Columbia) who happens to be vice president of the World Jewish Congress. After the feast, in his formal remarks, Hertzberg said:

‘The Waldheim affair is dead, but could possibly be revived if he runs for President again. The less said about it the better – at least for a couple of years.’

Waldheim’s term would expire in 1992. Remembering how Rabbi Hertzberg two years earlier had praised WJC secretary general Israel Singer to me as ‘an acorn I
planted that grew to be an oak’, I asked him: ‘Can we take your current concept as indicative of the thinking within the executive ranks of the World Jewish Congress?’

‘I am vice president of the World Jewish Congress,’ Hertzberg replied succinctly.

‘Would Mr Singer and the others . . . ?’ I persisted.

He cut me off by repeating, ‘I am vice president of the World Jewish Congress’ and adding, ‘I don’t speak lightly, OK?’

‘OK,’ I agreed as Hertzberg went on: ‘But this is on the presumption that the problem is ending, not beginning again . . . I’m not entirely persuaded that the affair as a
whole was brilliantly managed, not at all. It is, however, over – in the sense that it is very clear that the world will be better served if Mr Waldheim’s term in office, when he ceases
to be the Prisoner of the Hofburg, ends after one term, that’s all.’