The Nazi Hunters (48 page)

OSI was merged with the Justice Department’s Domestic Security Section to create a new unit called the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section in 2010, but Rosenbaum and his team continued to press ahead on the remaining Nazi cases. Those efforts, Holtzman noted, “create a historical record and show that the United States is not going to become a sanctuary for mass murderers.” They also should serve as “a signal for future generations,” educating them about genocide and how to handle such cases. In the most optimistic scenario, they might also have a deterrent effect—although she conceded that the record of genocide in countries like Cambodia and Rwanda indicates failure on that score.

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“
There is a natural tension between law enforcement and government officials and people like us who have no mandate whatsoever,” Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, explained during an interview in Jerusalem. “Our mandate is based on the support of the public. It’s not from the ballot box; it’s more in the checkbooks [of donors].”

Born in 1948, Zuroff was raised in Brooklyn before moving to Israel in 1970. From 1980 to 1986, he worked as a researcher for OSI there. He founded the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in 1986, and in recent years he has been frequently described as the last Nazi hunter—
a designation he happily accepts. He never worked for Wiesenthal, who always operated independently, although outsiders often assume that those ties existed. Zuroff described the work of a Nazi hunter as “one-third detective, one-third historian, one-third lobbyist.” He added that Nazi hunters don’t prosecute anyone, but help make prosecutions possible.

As controversial as Wiesenthal could be, Zuroff is even more so—often accused of stirring up publicity merely for publicity’s sake, and antagonizing not just opponents but also putative allies in the process. In the Baltic states, which he frequently attacks for covering up their wartime record of collaboration with the Nazis and rewriting history to downplay the Holocaust, some local Jewish leaders have been alarmed by his tactics. “These communities are very vulnerable,” he conceded. “They don’t have the resources and courage to fight these battles alone.” His efforts, he argued, are meant to give them that support. But like Vienna’s Jewish community during the Waldheim affair, the Baltic Jews often felt that such actions were rekindling deep-seated local anti-Semitism.

Zuroff also made highly publicized journeys to look for Nazi war criminals—most notably, for the Mauthausen doctor Aribert Heim. As late as the summer of 2008, he traveled to Chile and Argentina “
tracking Aribert Heim,” as he put it. When the story broke soon afterward that Heim had died in Cairo in 1992, he confessed that it was “shocking information”—and, at first, maintained that the case was still open pending adequate proof of that fact.

More recently, Zuroff has mounted a new campaign under the rubric “Operation Last Chance.” In 2013, he arranged for posters to go up in major German cities that featured a photo of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp and giant lettering proclaiming “Late, but not too late.” They appealed for people to provide information on anyone who might have participated in Nazi crimes and was still alive.
Zuroff said that the posters generated a flood of tips that included 111 names. Of those, he reported, he passed along four to German prosecutors, who looked into two of them. One concerned a Dachau guard, who it turned out had developed Alzheimer’s; the other, a person who not only collected Nazi memorabilia but also guns and ammunition, had already died.

It’s not just the questionable results of the campaign that generated skepticism about its value. “
It’s true that there are former Nazis who have been able to live peaceful lives at a time when the survivors have led tormented lives,” noted Deidre Berger, the director of the Berlin office of the American Jewish Committee. “The injustice is striking and infuriating. The problem is that when a society feels that it is targeted, as a campaign like this tends to do, there is a counter-reaction in many quarters.” At the same time, though, she believes that it makes sense to pursue the final cases that can be brought to court. “Whatever happens in terms of sentencing is less important than the few remaining survivors having a feeling of moral justice, of finally being able to testify,” she said.

But even some Nazi hunters argued against targeting the last aging concentration camp guards. Serge Klarsfeld called the post-Demjanuk notion that someone can be guilty simply by virtue of his or her position “
quite Soviet.” He and Beate are skeptical not just of Zuroff’s campaign but also of the recent push by the German investigators. The Ludwigsburg officials “want to keep their offices,” he said, suggesting this was a gambit to extend their mandate.

Even as the number of Nazi cases has dwindled, the infighting among the Nazi hunters has not. OSI’s Rosenbaum, for instance, has continued to nurse his grievances against Wiesenthal, his nemesis from the Waldheim affair, and other freelancers who he is convinced hyped their own roles. Although he does not speak publicly about Zuroff, he undoubtedly places him in that category. “
It seems that, in connection with the postwar fate of Nazi war criminals, the world is prepared to accept only that these perpetrators have been tracked down by self-styled ‘Nazi-hunters’ and that U.S. intelligence acted principally to obstruct efforts to pursue justice,” he told a symposium about the Eichmann case at the Loyola Law School of Los Angeles in 2011. “As it happens, both premises are patently false.”

Zuroff shrugs off all such criticism. “I’ve never met a single Nazi hunter who is willing to say a good word about another Nazi hunter,” he said. “It’s jealousy, it’s competition, it’s all these things.” He claimed to be “not that sort of person” who makes such disputes personal, but then
complained about the Klarsfelds. “They made a nasty comment about me as if I hunt Nazis from my living room,” he recalled. He added: “I think what the Klarsfelds did in the cases with France is terrific—no question. They did wonderful things in terms of documentation. But they stopped Nazi hunting.”

In Ludwigsburg, the office for investigating Nazi crimes opened an archive in 2000, and that part of the operation is expected to expand as the number of people who can be investigated continues to dwindle. Already, it is attracting regular visitors, particularly school groups, as part of their education about the Third Reich and the Holocaust. But no one is likely to announce an end to Ludwigsburg’s active operations anytime soon. “
We still have material to look at and we still have people who can be indicted,” said Deputy Director Thomas Will.

Zuroff is even more emphatic about his intentions. “You will never have a press conference in which I will say we’re throwing in the towel, that’s enough, I’ve had it, I’m going to Tahiti to sit under a coconut tree,” he said. “They [the Nazi criminals] may be all dead, but I’m not going to announce it.”

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“
We are not placing people on trial as a symbolic gesture, or to serve some larger purpose of conscience,” Allan Ryan, the head of the OSI in the early 1980s, wrote. “We are putting them on trial because they broke the law. That is the only reason people should be put on trial.” As someone who headed OSI in its early days, Ryan felt obliged to say that. But he was wrong, at least on the second part: the Nazi hunters were pursuing “some larger purpose of conscience.” They targeted those who, whatever the laws of the time were, violated basic concepts of humanity and civilized behavior.

The small band of men and women who were known as Nazi hunters also understood that they could not hope to make all those who violated those concepts pay for what they had done. As Fritz Bauer, Hesse’s attorney general who orchestrated Germany’s Auschwitz trial in the 1960s, pointed out, the defendants were “really only the chosen scapegoats.” The
idea was to punish some of those who had committed monstrous crimes, but also to educate a society about what had happened, even while countless others who were at least as guilty remained free.

The process of education was not an easy one, but no country has done more to acknowledge the horrors it unleashed than Germany has. In no small part, this was the result of the activities of Bauer and other Nazi hunters, including Poland’s Jan Sehn, who was in charge of the first Auschwitz trial shortly after the war. They were the ones pushing for some measure of reckoning with the past.

The son of a senior diplomat of the Third Reich, Richard von Weizsäcker served in the German army that invaded Poland in 1939, burying his brother, who was killed fighting alongside him. Yet when he rose to the presidency of West Germany and then of a reunified Germany, he constantly reminded his countrymen about how much it had to atone for. “
Hardly any country has in its history always remained free from blame for war or violence,” he declared in his famous speech to parliament in 1985 on the fortieth anniversary of Germany’s surrender at the end of World War II. “The genocide of the Jews, however, is unparalleled in history.”

Weizsäcker also made a point of telling his countrymen about his feelings when he learned the war had ended. “
This was a day of liberation,” he said. In an interview after leaving office, he readily acknowledged to me that many of his countrymen did not feel that way at the time, especially given the widespread suffering of the period. “But there is no longer any serious debate: this date was one of liberation,” he insisted. This is far from the normal language used by defeated powers. It is language that Bauer would certainly have approved of—if he had lived long enough to hear it.

Some Germans have bristled at the constant reminders of the horrors their country inflicted on others. Martin Walser, the famed writer whose novels and essays have explored the ways that Germans have rebuilt their lives after the Third Reich, has often stirred controversy by questioning what he called “
a ritualized way of speaking about the German past”—implicitly questioning the kind of language that Weizsäcker and other
senior public figures used. Specifically, he warned that Auschwitz should not be exploited for political purposes. “My experience has been that Auschwitz is often used as an argument to cut someone else off,” he told me during the uproar over one of his speeches. “If I use Auschwitz as an argument, there’s nothing left for them to say.”

When I asked Walser whether he was suggesting that there was enough of talk about the Holocaust, he replied: “This chapter can never be closed; it’d be crazy to think so. But you cannot prescribe how Germans should deal with this country’s shame.” In other words, the underlying shame was not in dispute.

Each successive trial anywhere—whether in Nuremberg, Kraków, Jerusalem, Lyon, or Munich—helped shape the understanding of that shame. Even many of the hunts that failed contributed to that understanding, too, since they reminded the public why people like Mengele had to remain in hiding until the end of their lives.

Similarly, each of the Klarsfelds’ efforts to expose and bring to trial those Germans who were responsible for crimes such as the deportation of Jews from occupied France offered opportunities to set the historical record straight, including the myth that “
only the Germans” had persecuted the Jews, as Serge put it. Klarsfeld gathered much of the documentation that made it possible to convict the former Vichy regime police official Maurice Papon in 1998 for deporting Jews from southwestern France to the death camps.
The Klarsfelds’ son Arno, who was named after his grandfather who died in Auschwitz, was one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs in the case.

Serge Klarsfeld’s meticulous documentation of the wartime record has served as a resource for any number of efforts to get France to face up to the history that it had tried to largely ignore in the immediate postwar era.
Kurt Werner Schaechter, an Austrian-born French Jew, combed through many of Klarsfeld’s findings for a lawsuit he filed against France’s SNCF, the national railroad company, for sending his parents to their deaths. A Paris court ruled against him in 2003, but since then SNCF has taken steps to acknowledge its recent history.

In 2010, the company expressed “profound sorrow and regret” for
its wartime role, and in December 2014 France and the United States announced a $60 million compensation package for French Holocaust victims who were sent to their deaths on SNCF trains, with the French government footing the bill.
At the same time, a Paris exhibition entitled “Collaboration: 1940–1945” featured a 1942 telegram from Vichy police chief René Bousquet urging local officials working for the collaborationist regime “to take personal control of the measures taken with regard to the foreign Jews.” Those measures, of course, were the dispatching of Jews to the deportation camps, from where they were sent to death camps.

Despite the fact that so many Nazi criminals never were held accountable for their crimes, I found the Klarsfelds to be in a reflective mood now that most of their intense, often risky personal battles are over. “
I am satisfied completely with history and justice,” Serge said. “Justice, in its essence, is not effective: it cannot resuscitate people who were killed. So it’s always symbolic. We believe justice was done for the first time in the history of humanity.”

In Germany, Beate is still a highly controversial figure. In 2012,
Die Linke
(The Left) nominated her for the post of president. Since this was a parliamentary vote and all the other major parties were backing Joachim Gauck, the former East German dissident Lutheran pastor, she was overwhelmingly defeated. But the fact that she was the opposition candidate at all, Serge pointed out, was significant. “That means that German society improved quite a lot; we were part of that improvement,” he said. “When Beate slapped [Chancellor] Kiesinger, I told her: ‘When you will be old you will have the gratitude of the German people.’ ”

Even if many Germans still disapproved of her earlier confrontational tactics, there was already something highly symbolic when the current chancellor, Angela Merkel, shook Beate’s hand as parliament convened for the vote.
And on July 20, 2015, Susanne Wasum-Rainer, Germany’s ambassador to France, presented both Beate and Serge the Medal of Merit, her country’s highest honor, expressing her thanks to them for “rehabilitating the image of Germany.” For Beate, who had once slapped a West German chancellor, it was hard to imagine a more poignant moment.