The Nazi Hunters (43 page)

Their clash was also a product of the broader tensions between American and European Jews. In private and in public, Wiesenthal regularly complained about what he saw as the propensity of the WJC and other U.S.-based Jewish organizations to “
think they can speak in the name of all Jews.” The Americans, he argued, all too often dismiss the concerns of European Jews as insignificant, not understanding how different their situation is from theirs. He attributed the often combative
mode of American Jewish activists to “
the fact that many American Jews have something akin to a sense of guilt in their subconscious anyway, for not having done enough for the persecuted Jews of Europe during the war.” The Waldheim case, he added, “offered them an opportunity to take a demonstrative stance.”

Such tensions were at times even visible in the relationship between Wiesenthal and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Founded in Los Angeles in 1977, it is an independent organization that compensated him for the use of his name, which was critical to its fundraising efforts. Wiesenthal and the center often worked together, but they also had their differences. Rabbi Marvin Hier, the center’s founder and dean, recalled more than one phone conversation when Wiesenthal shouted at him: “
How can you do that?”

During the Waldheim crisis, Hier was much more publicly critical of the Austrian presidential candidate than Wiesenthal was. It was no accident that, during the fight between Wiesenthal and the WJC, Singer fired off a blunt message to Hier: “
TELL WIESENTHAL TO SHUT UP; ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.” Hier did argue with Wiesenthal—up to a point. He recalled telling him: “Simon, if we can’t lock him up, we should do something to him. He should be embarrassed, he shouldn’t be allowed again on a plane.” His center came out in support of the decision to put Waldheim on the U.S. Watch List, which Wiesenthal opposed—all of which prompted some real strains in their relationship.

But Hier also pointed out that Wiesenthal was proven right that there was no evidence to pin any specific war crimes on Waldheim. And contrary to Singer’s exhortations, he was not about to try to dictate to Wiesenthal, who would not listen anyway, or risk a full break with him. He stressed that Wiesenthal was proud of the center, and the center was proud to be affiliated with a man who had dedicated his life to bringing Nazi criminals to justice. “He was the iconic figure,” Hier maintained. The Waldheim affair did not change his view on that score.

• • •

One of the ironies of Rosenbaum’s and the WJC’s insistence that Wiesenthal was an apologist for the new Austrian president was that the Nazi
hunter had a long track record of exposing the role of Austrians in the Third Reich.
He frequently asserted that Austrians, while constituting less than 10 percent of the population of Nazi Germany, were responsible for about 50 percent of its war crimes; about three-quarters of the commanders of death camps were Austrian, he added.

Most famously, Wiesenthal had repeatedly clashed with Bruno Kreisky, the Socialist leader who served as chancellor from 1970 to 1983, over his lax attitude toward former Nazis. They also disagreed violently about Israel and the Middle East.

Although Kreisky was from a secular Austrian Jewish family, he took on the mantle of a champion of Third World causes, including harsh denunciations of Israel on a regular basis. Kreisky also dismissed the whole idea of the existence of a “Jewish people.” As Wiesenthal acidly noted, Kreisky considered himself especially superior to Eastern European Jews like himself. “
He does not wish to have anything in common with us,” he declared. “It is bad enough for him to be connected with the Jewish people at all—but to be connected with us is intolerable.” He speculated that growing up in anti-Semitic Austria, Kreisky chose to try “to prove to those around him that he is not really different from them. . . . A Jew [in Austria] striving for total assimilation must adopt that anti-Jewish attitude.”

The biggest clash between Wiesenthal and Kreisky was triggered by the Socialist chancellor’s political appointments and alliances. When Kreisky took office in 1970, Wiesenthal denounced him for including four former Nazis as ministers in his government. Later, he also berated him for his ties to Friedrich Peter, the head of the Liberal Party, which was notorious for attracting former Nazis. When Kreisky was leaning toward elevating Peter to the post of vice chancellor, Wiesenthal broke the story that the Liberal leader had served in an SS Einsatzgruppen unit that massacred Jews. Forced to admit that he was part of that unit, Peter denied he had participated in the killings.

Kreisky furiously called Wiesenthal a “
Jewish fascist” and a “mafioso,” adding that he was “
a reactionary and they do exist among Jews, just as there are among us Jews [who are] murderers and whores.” In an
eerie echo of Wiesenthal’s attacks on the WJC a decade later, Kreisky charged that the Nazi hunter was making a living by “telling the world that Austria is anti-Semitic.” He also reportedly threatened to close down Wiesenthal’s Documentation Center in Vienna. As a final touch, the chancellor resurrected the allegations circulated by the Polish communist government that Wiesenthal had collaborated with the Nazis.
Later, he would have to back off that charge in order to get Wiesenthal to drop a libel suit against him.

There was no doubt that Wiesenthal’s profound hatred of Kreisky and the Socialists prompted him to favor the People’s Party, although he always denied that he was in its camp. But Rosenbaum and others, like Beate Klarsfeld, considered him a staunch supporter. When the Waldheim controversy broke, it wasn’t just Beate who sided with the WJC in its attacks on the candidate. As Wiesenthal noted, “
on French television Serge Klarsfeld had a real go at me.”

But even among those who believed that the WJC was right in marshaling the evidence against Waldheim, there was skepticism about Rosenbaum’s charge that Wiesenthal had something to cover up about his role in 1979 when the Israelis asked him to check the U.N. secretary-general’s wartime history. Herzstein, the historian the WJC commissioned to conduct his own inquiry into Waldheim’s past, noted that the U.S.-controlled Berlin Document Center provided Wiesenthal’s contact with a report that indicated Waldheim was never listed as a member of the SS or the Nazi Party. “
After carefully studying the reports, Wiesenthal accurately informed the Israelis that there was nothing incriminating in Waldheim’s BDC record,” he wrote.

Herzstein added that “what Wiesenthal could not know” was that Waldheim had been a member of the SA Cavalry Corps and the Nazi student group. The reason was that those organizations were not included in the checklist of Nazi-related organizations on the Berlin Document Center’s report form. Those records were not stored there, as those who had dug into Waldheim’s past seven years later discovered. They, too, had struck out at the Berlin Document Center.

Peter Black, who was a historian at OSI at the time and is now the
senior historian of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, praised Rosenbaum’s “
very credible job” in investigating Waldheim. But he, too, rejected the notion that Wiesenthal attempted a cover-up. “I don’t see him in a conspiracy,” he said. “I think Wiesenthal’s motives were not evil.” Black added that Wiesenthal may not have looked “too carefully” at Waldheim’s record and “he just thought that Waldheim was like any other number of military officers who were there and sort of stayed out of it.” Pointing out that it was only in the late 1980s and 1990s that scholars began examining in more detail “how deeply mired the Wehrmacht was in Nazi crimes” in occupied lands like Greece, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union, Black argued that Wiesenthal initially had no reason to view Waldheim’s military service as a red flag.

But Rosenbaum has never retreated from his impassioned attacks on Wiesenthal and
his
record. The wounds that were inflicted by the WJC-Wiesenthal firefight during the Waldheim affair have still not healed. In the end, the entire Waldheim affair was as much a battle among the Nazi hunters as it was between them and those who had served the Third Reich.

“
At this way station, the innocent people wait, and then when their savager comes, they get to exact a little portion of revenge. God says revenge is good for the soul.”

“Babe” Levy, the hero of William Goldman’s 1974 bestselling novel
Marathon Man,
talking to the fictional Auschwitz SS dentist Christian Szell right before he kills him

I
f you believed everything you read, Nazi hunters exacted much more than a little portion of revenge. In 2007, for example, Danny Baz, a retired Israeli Air Force colonel, published a purported memoir in French called
Ni oubli ni pardon: Au cœur de la traque du dernier Nazi
(Not Forgiven, Not Forgotten: On the Trail of the Last Nazi); it was followed by the English version called
The Secret Executioners: The Amazing True Story of the Death Squad That Tracked Down and Killed Nazi War Criminals
.

At the time, there was still an ongoing search for Aribert Heim, who was one of the most prominent fugitive Nazis after the war.
The Austrian-born doctor had served in Mauthausen, fully earning his nickname “Dr. Death.” He killed Jews by injecting gasoline and other poisonous substances into their hearts; he also carried out particularly sadistic medical experiments, including cutting open healthy prisoners
and removing their organs, leaving them to die on the operating table. As a result, he was sought by everyone from the German government to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which had put him at the top of its most wanted list. But Baz made a startling claim: they had been chasing a ghost for a quarter of a century.

According to Baz’s account, he had been part of a secret all-Jewish death squad that executed Heim in 1982. Dubbed “the Owl,” the group was started by wealthy Holocaust survivors and made up of highly trained former U.S. and Israeli members of a variety of security services. “
The names of my companions in arms have been disguised, in order not to break the confidentiality of our organization, which benefitted from a limitless budget, worthy of the largest secret services,” he wrote. “This book recounts facts that are rigorously true.”

From there, he spun a dramatic tale. The Owl was responsible for capturing and killing dozens of Nazi war criminals, Baz claimed, but their biggest challenge was to find Heim and capture him alive. After that, he would be made to face a tribunal of Holocaust survivors before he would be executed. “
We want the rats to face their victims before they die,” one longtime member of the Owl explained to Baz. It turned out that Heim was hiding in the United States, not anywhere more exotic as was frequently reported, and the avengers tracked him in upstate New York, then to Canada, kidnapping him from a hospital in Montreal; finally, they delivered him to other members of the Owl in California, who conducted the tribunal and carried out the execution.

And this was far from the only story about a prominent Nazi war criminal who supposedly was killed in complete secrecy. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s powerful personal secretary and the head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, had disappeared from Hitler’s Berlin bunker after the Führer committed suicide. The International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg sentenced twelve top Nazis to death; Bormann was the only one who was sentenced in absentia. His apparent vanishing act triggered contradictory reports about whether he had survived. There were claims that he had either been killed or ended his life by biting into a cyanide capsule shortly after he emerged from the bunker. As in Heim’s case, there were
also numerous reported sightings of Bormann in northern Italy, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, among other locations. But in 1970, the sensationalist
News of the World
serialized an account by Ronald Gray, a former British Army intelligence agent, which was subsequently published as a book with the title
I Killed Martin Bormann!

“
Bormann is dead, his body riddled by a burst from a Sten gun,” he wrote. “And it was my finger that pulled the trigger.” Gray described how he was stationed in northern Germany after the war, close to the Danish border. When he was approached by a mysterious German contact to smuggle someone across the border for 50,000 kroner (then $8,400) in March 1946, he agreed, figuring that he would unmask part of the network that was providing safe passage to Nazi war criminals out of the country. Once he was in his military van, he realized that his passenger was Bormann. It was late evening, but there was enough moonlight to confirm the identification when he got him to his destination on the Danish side of the border and they came to a stop opposite two men waiting for them. Suddenly, Bormann started running to his greeting party—and Gray immediately realized he had been set up for an ambush. He opened fire and watched Bormann go down. The two men who had been waiting let loose with a volley of shots in his direction.

Gray dropped to the ground, pretending to be dead. From that position, he caught sight of the men as they dragged Bormann’s lifeless body away. Shadowing them, he watched them take the body out on a fjord in a small rowboat; about forty yards offshore they dropped it into the water. “
From the size of the splash, I guessed that Bormann’s two compatriots had weighted his body with something, perhaps chains,” he wrote. “It struck me that the boat—and the chains—might have been meant for me.”

Gray’s account did not put an end to other versions of the Bormann story. In 1974, the military historian and bestselling author Ladislas Farago published
Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich.
He claimed to have tracked down Bormann to a hospital in southwestern Bolivia after dispensing numerous bribes to various contacts and guards on the Peruvian-Bolivian border. All of this effort resulted in a brief sighting of the man, he insisted. “
When I was taken into his room for what we
agreed would be a five-minute visit . . . I saw a little old man in a big bed with freshly laundered sheets, his head propped up by three big downy pillows, looking at me with vacant eyes, mumbling words to himself,” he wrote. Bormann’s only purported words to his visitor: “Dammit, don’t you see I’m an old man? So why don’t you let me die in peace?”