Nazi Hunter (15 page)

Undaunted, Weisberg made his way to Cracow and posted a notice on the bulletin board of the Jewish Committee there: ‘Would Cyla Wiesenthal please get in touch with Dr Felix Weisberg, who
will take her to her husband in Linz?’

Since a good many people wanted to get out of Poland by then, three women showed up claiming to be Mrs Simon Wiesenthal. ‘Poor Felix Weisberg!’ says Wiesenthal. ‘He had a
bigger problem than the judgement of Paris. He didn’t know my wife. I hadn’t given him any physical description of her. Very easy could he have brought back the wrong Mrs
Wiesenthal.’

The woman who told the straightest story was the one Weisberg liked the best, so he bought false travel papers for her on the black market and brought her safely to Linz. There he made her wait
outside while he explained all his difficulties at great length and with profuse apologies to Simon, concluding: ‘I lost my wife in the war. If this one isn’t yours, I’ll marry
her myself.’

But when Cyla Müller Wiesenthal stepped into the room, Felix Weisberg slipped away, still unmarried and virtually unnoticed.

9

Both nearing forty, Cyla and Simon Wiesenthal wasted no time making up for the lost years. Their only child, Pauline Rosa, was born in Linz on 5 September 1946, barely a year
after their sudden and suspenseful reunion among the living. ‘Nobody has ever wanted a baby as much as we did,’ Simon says succinctly.

In the postwar summer of 1946, on a picnic in the rolling hills of Upper Austria, Simon spotted a bush and, behind it, a sunflower. As he drew closer, he saw other sunflowers and now, after more
than a year of liberation, he thought back to 1942 in Lemberg: first of the military cemetery, and then of the dying SS man to whom he had denied absolution four years earlier. Surely there was a
sunflower growing on his grave and a cross with his name on it. Though Wiesenthal tried to think of the unmarked, unknown last resting places of his eighty-nine relatives who had perished in the
Holocaust, he could think only of that young man who had pleaded on his death-bed for a word of forgiveness: an episode he remembered so vividly that he could still see the Stuttgart address on a
bag of the SS man’s personal effects which the nurse was sending to his mother the next day, while telling Simon the young man had died.

With the sight of sunflowers, all of Simon’s questions came back in a rush of doubts. ‘Have I anything to reproach myself for?’ he wondered. He would be travelling to Munich on
business two weeks later, and decided to venture 150 miles farther – to Stuttgart – and visit the SS man’s mother. ‘It was not curiosity that inspired me,’ he
explains, ‘but a vague feeling of duty . . . And maybe the hope of exorcizing forever one of the worst experiences of my life.’

Badly bombed, Stuttgart still lay in ruins when Wiesenthal found the indelible address in a particularly devastated district. The fragile
woman who received him had been
twice bereaved, having lost her husband as well as her only child in the war. Of the latter, she had been told only the official truth: that her son had been wounded in battle on the Russian front
and died in a military hospital in Lemberg. Showing her visitor the same bundle he’d seen the hospital nurse wrap, she asked how he had come to know her son.

Improvising
, as he calls white-lying, Simon told her he’d been working on the railroad in the Eastern Yards of Lemberg when he was handed a note from a hospital train with her
address and a message to send a son’s greetings to the mother of one of the wounded. ‘So you never actually saw him?’ she said.

‘No. He was probably so badly wounded he couldn’t come to the window,’ Wiesenthal
improvised
.

Recognizing that he was a Jew, the woman assured him that ‘in this district we always lived with Jews in a very peaceful fashion. We are not responsible for their fate.’ When
Wiesenthal started to argue this with her, she deflected him blandly, but in all sincerity, with ‘I can’t really believe the stories they tell. I can’t believe what they say
happened to the Jews’, and struck him speechless when she said: ‘So many dreadful things happened, but one thing is certain: my son never did any wrong. He was always a decent young
man.’

Realizing that this exchange of half-truths had brought him not a single step closer to solving his own dilemma, Wiesenthal left ‘without diminishing in any way the woman’s last
surviving consolation: faith in the goodness of her son.’ In her circumstances, he adds, to take that from her might also have been a crime.

Tuviah Friedman – a Polish refugee who started
his
Eichmann hunt in Vienna around the same time as Simon in Linz, and later, in Israel, headed the Haifa
Institute for the Documentation of Nazi War Crimes – remembers the 1946-model Wiesenthal with whom he used to compare notes as ‘an embittered, ruthless, vengeful pursuer of Nazi
criminals. I understood him perfectly.’

A few months later, Wiesenthal took into criminal custody a minor SS torturer who was in an American prisoner of war camp. When the military police searched him while Wiesenthal watched,
‘they found this picture on him’, Simon told a visitor years later, producing a photo of a naked Jew suspended from a meat hook by
his penis, with arms and legs
dangling. ‘When I saw that this was what he carried around as a memento, I leaped at him with a roar. I lost all control of myself. It’s the only time I ever wanted to kill a man and I
almost did. Two American GIs had to pull me off him.’

By then, the American soldiers who had liberated the concentration camps and shared some of Simon’s outrage had been rotated home and replaced by newcomers from the US or the Far Eastern
front. Wiesenthal had trouble communicating the urgency of his or their own mission to his new American superiors: ‘They thought those of us who were intent on seeing justice done were
eye-for-an-eye avengers and alarmists who would always see the world through a barbed-wire screen.’ The Cold War had not yet heated up, but, even before seeing Red, these new Americans abroad
saw postwar Europe through the red-white-and-blue standards of their own democratic experience. Wiesenthal was shocked when a captain whose job was to educate Germans explained to him:
‘There’ll always be people with different viewpoints. At home we have Democrats and Republicans. Here you have Nazis and anti-Nazis. That’s what makes the world go round. Try not
to worry too much about it.’

Such mentalities, which made no effort to learn German and relied on native interpreters, usually female, often fell prey to what Wiesenthal calls ‘the Nazis’ best secret weapon: The
Fräulein
Factor. Any young American was naturally more interested in a pretty, obliging girl than in one of “those SS men” everybody wanted to forget like a bad
dream.’

When Wiesenthal arrested an SS man in Upper Austria, the prisoner’s comely seventeen-year-old daughter, dressed in her lowest-cut dirndl, appeared in the office to ask the
captain-in-charge for permission to bring her father food. The captain filled out a form while admiring hers – and made a date. Three days later, Wiesenthal learned that the SS man had been
freed on ‘captain’s orders’.

Simon stormed into the captain’s office and asked him why. The captain told him to ‘shut up!’

‘Ah, so,’ said Wiesenthal. ‘This is also an answer. You don’t have to tell me another thing, Captain.’

His rage seemingly under control, Wiesenthal left the office in Linz and drove directly to US Army of Occupation headquarters in Salzburg, eighty miles away. There, talking to the
captain’s superiors,
he began to sob as he told them: ‘Please call the captain and tell him that the next Nazi I find, I will kill – but the responsibility
for the killing will be the captain’s. He will make me into a murderer.’

Simon created such a commotion that the captain was quickly transferred to Heidelberg. His parting words to Wiesenthal were: ‘You’re a son of a bitch.’ To which
Wiesenthal’s response was: ‘This is nothing. In my opinion, you are a Nazi.’

It got so, says Wiesenthal, that ‘if I would arrest a criminal during the afternoon, the next morning he would be free because one of my bosses slept with his wife or daughter.’

Even greater disillusionment came when one of the few superior officers he respected, a Harvard professor, said to him one day: ‘Simon, you must emigrate to the United States. People like
you can make great careers back home. You work hard, you’re intelligent, enthusiastic, idealistic. You will become a big shot in the US because you’re Jewish, too. Listen, Simon, in
America, the red and green lights regulate traffic and everything else is run by the Jews.’

The man meant it as a joke, but Wiesenthal looked right through him coldly and said: ‘From tomorrow, you must find a replacement for me. This is the last day I am working for
you.’

His chief apologized, but Wiesenthal resented his remark as ‘a slap in the face – that an officer in the US Army which liberated me can talk like a Nazi. So the birth of the Jewish
Documentation Centre came from a bad joke. That night, I rounded up thirty survivors – desperados like me, people without a future and with a very bad past and no money, and I said: “I
am no longer working for the Americans. Life is too simple to them. They think that in America they have cowboys and Indians and in Europe we have Nazis and Jews. I feel it is our duty to do this
job with our own hands.” And so we built the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre in Linz without money, without any detective background, and without any official auspices because we all
felt we had – we have! – the right of the victim.’

Simon Wiesenthal thinks that the biggest postwar mistake of the Jews was that they settled for material rather than moral restitution.

For a long time, Wiesenthal himself refused to accept restitution money that was legally his from the West German government, which agreed in the 1950s to indemnify Jews for their homes,
business, property, and health
¹⁸
– all or some of which Wiesenthal had lost to the Nazis. It took him almost eight
years to swallow the idea of taking money from Germans. When he did, he ploughed more than half of it into his Documentation Centre.

Though he didn’t open the centre at Goethestrasse 63 in Linz until 1947, his initial costs were minimal. The rent was paid by a $50-a-month voluntary contribution from a former Polish
Member of Parliament, Dr Aaron Silberschein, who had become an industrialist in Geneva. Most of Simon’s ‘desperados’ were still living in Displaced Persons (DP) camps, where their
food and shelter needs were met and witnesses were always at hand. ‘Desperados’ became ‘correspondents’ of the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre and, in each camp, they
were provided with typewriter and paper on which to record depositions.

Wiesenthal’s greatest resource was the body of lists he’d compiled during his year with the Americans. Every former concentration camp inmate he or his network of correspondents met
in the DP camps around Germany and Austria was interviewed about brutality, torture, and killings which he or she had witnessed or experienced; no hearsay evidence was accepted, and exact names and
dates were more important than gory details. Wiesenthal kept one card-file by geographic place; before 1946 was out, he had more than a thousand locations listed in alphabetical order. A second
card-file listed criminals by name; whenever he obtained photos of them, he circulated them in the DP camps, for many were known only by title or nickname (‘Angel of Death’, etc.). A
third file listed thousands of witnesses, most of whom had already given affidavits.

Virtually all of his correspondents being DPs awaiting emigration to other parts of the world, the turnover was high, but they kept in touch and word soon spread across America, Australia, and
Palestine, as well as the continent of Europe, that, back in Linz, a man named Wiesenthal was compiling evidence against Nazi criminals. Hundreds
of unsolicited depositions
poured in and were followed up. Wiesenthal established relations and exchanged information with the Allied Historical Commission in Munich, the
Centre de documentation juive contemporaine
in Paris, and Jewish community associations in Prague, Bratislava, Budapest, Italy, and Greece.