Nazi Hunter (27 page)

Producing a 278-page unpublished manuscript dissecting Wiesenthal’s two memoirs and dismissing many of his claims – including ever having written to Nahum
Goldmann about Eichmann – as ‘a legend woven after the capture of Eichmann, so that Wiesenthal could take credit for a significant role in the tracing of Eichmann, and hence for his
capture’, Harel told Schachter: ‘All of the information supplied by Wiesenthal before and in anticipation of the operation was utterly worthless, and sometimes even misleading and of
negative value.’ Harel said that one of Wiesenthal’s many pronouncements that Dr Mengele was in Argentina may have interfered with Mengele’s capture and jeopardized the Eichmann
operation.

The World Jewish Congress – still embroiled in its feud with Wiesenthal from his Nahum Goldmann days to the Kurt Waldheim presidency – first denied the existence of any
Wiesenthal-Goldmann correspondence; then retracted when Wiesenthal sent the WJC a copy of his four-page letter of 30 March 1954 to Goldmann, but then retracted its retraction by saying it had no
proof the letter was ever sent or had even existed at that time, for it had not been found in the late Dr Goldmann’s archives. Wiesenthal countered with Rabbi Kalmanowitz’s reply of 21
May 1954, thereby proving that his letter had indeed reached the WJC in New York.

It would be pointless to cite and refute each argument of Harel’s; besides, this job is done in an admirably documented, if rabidly pro-Wiesenthal, 1992 book called
Documents against
Words: Simon Wiesenthal’s Conflict with the World Jewish Congress,
issued in Holland but written in English and compiled by Richard A. Stein, president of the Foundation for the Fight
against Anti-Semitism (STIBA) in Rotterdam. The spectacle of old men – Friedman, Harel, Wiesenthal – squabbling over scraps of glory well earned years ago is more tarnishing than
edifying; if it does none of them any credit, though, it takes the least away from Wiesenthal.

Simon suspects that Harel’s vendetta stems from his business, financial, and personal difficulties in the dozen years between his being ousted in 1963 as head of Israel’s secret
services in a dispute with Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and publication of his memoir in 1975. Most of all, Harel must have chafed at the veil of secrecy he was pledged to wear even after leaving
Mossad.

Simon remembers how tight it was in the sixties: ‘In those days, the Israeli government was pretending they had nothing to do with
the kidnap – that Eichmann
just showed up on Israel’s soil and was brought before justice. Since what they had done was counter to international law, they just denied everything – including my role.

‘Around then, Yad Vashem asked me to give a talk there about my role in tracking down Eichmann. But first, the director of Yad Vashem warned me not to mention, under any circumstances,
that my dealings had been with the Israeli Embassy and Israeli intelligence. So I just told about these “Jewish friends of mine” who helped get Eichmann’s picture and compared the
photos of his brothers. So what happens? Harel feels slighted because he hears I don’t mention him and, when he publishes his memoirs in the 1970s, he makes no mention of me or my work. For
him, I don’t exist, and later I hear Harel is saying I have nothing to do with his great accomplishment. And this is what they call Intelligence?!’

When they came for the Jews, I was not a Jew, so I did not protest. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not belong to the trade union. When they came for the
Catholics, I was not a Catholic. When they came for me, there was no one left to protest.

– Martin Niemöller,

Protestant pastor imprisoned by Hitler from 1937 to 1945

17

Genocidists, killers, and ‘desk murderers’ are the human beasts that Simon Wiesenthal hunts, but another species of war criminal is not yet fair game: the
‘desk undertaker’ who shuts a door or closes a drawer on human lives, thereby committing crimes of omission which can cause calamity. Assassins of the spirit and muggers of the soul,
the ‘desk undertakers’ were in command at Evian-les-Bains in 1938, when thirty-one nations of the world turned their backs on Jewish immigration and only one tiny Caribbean nation, the
Dominican Republic, committed itself to accepting more than a mere handful of refugees . . . in Havana harbour in 1939, when a change in Cuban visa requirements left 930 Jewish refugees from
Germany stranded aboard the luxury liner
St Louis,
which subsequently was not allowed to land in Panama, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, the United States, or Canada and had to return to
Europe, where most of its passengers perished . . . in Ottawa, where immigration director Frederick Blair required written proof from children whose parents had perished in Hitler’s ovens
that they were orphans before they could be rescued by Canada . . . and in the US State Department, where bureaucrats concealed the truth about the exterminations of the Final Solution for fear
that public compassion would burst open the floodgates of immigration. As it was, only 21,000 refugees were allowed to enter the US during the war with Germany: barely a tenth of the quota in
normal times. With the end of the war, the ‘desk undertakers’ did not relinquish their grip on power; on the contrary, nowhere was it asserted more lastingly than in the case of Raoul
Wallenberg.

‘The Second World War had no heroes,’ Simon Wiesenthal says bluntly. It is the kind of overstatement with which Wiesenthal so often snares the world’s
attention’ even at the risk of alienating widows and patriots, but he persists: ‘The heroes from yesterday’ –
and here he means previous wars, for
World War II is still
today
to him – ‘were people with courage in combat. The Second World War was a technical fight with no space for personal bravery, but Raoul Wallenberg is
one of its rare exceptions.’

Raoul Gustav Wallenberg Jnr – who would save 100,000 Hungarian Jews from the jaws of extermination, only to vanish into the Soviet gulag himself – was born on 4 August 1912, at his
maternal grandparents’ summer home. He never met his father, Raoul Snr, a naval officer who died of cancer at twenty-three in May 1912, three months before his son was born. But he bore the
illustrious name of a long line of Lutheran bankers and industrialists as well as diplomats; advisers to Crown and Cabinets; grey eminences whose family motto, ‘
Esse, non
Videri’
, meant ‘
To be, not to be seen
’. Through their Enskilda Bank (founded in 1856), the Wallenberg dynasty had a finger in or a grip on every major Swedish
industry: steel, iron ore, ball bearings, blast furnaces, timber and then whole forests for pulp and paper, tobacco, electronics, communications, railroads, ferries, the East Asiatic Steamship
line, Saab and Volvo autos, and the airline that is now SAS (Scandinavian Airlines System).

Though his mother, Maj, was the daughter of a prominent neurologist, she was hardly a Wallenberg for having been married to one for less than a year – and she shed the name when Raoul was
still little by marrying Fredrik von Dardel, a Health Department official. Thus, Raoul was never in the mainstream of power which swept his cousins, Jacob and Marcus, to the pinnacle of the
Wallenberg empire. Not quite the black sheep of the family, but a bit of a stray lamb, the little boy with curly locks, full lips, and intense, questioning eyes grew up fearless. Once, in a
thunderstorm which had his friends hiding beneath their beds, he ran outside shouting, ‘Let’s see God’s fireworks!’ Hating hunting, he liberated the hounds from their kennel
the night before a big foxhunt. A solitary hiker, he shunned competitive sports to such an extent that his classmates christened him ‘The Only Child’.

He had a passion for planes and trains and boats. He knew all the types of World War I battleships by heart, but a naval career was ruled out when he drew green horses grazing on red grass and
it was discovered that he was colour-blind. Curious how everything was put together, he would visit construction sites and converse with bricklayers. And he liked to draw on any surface he could
find. Architecture loomed as a likely outlet for his interests and, after an obligatory year in the Swedish Army upon graduation from high school, he set off for the United
States in 1931 to attend the University of Michigan’s College of Architecture and Design in Ann Arbor.

His professors and classmates remembered him as a charming, conscientious student who lived in the architecture fraternity for a while and then boarded off-campus. The late Dr Jean Paul Slusser
described Raoul as ‘one of the best and brightest in thirty years’ experience as a professor of drawing and painting’ – despite his colour-blindness. To his freshman
humanities courses, he brought some of the worldly wisdom he had acquired in his travels, writing:

Another part of his American education was his discovery of hitchhiking. He thumbed his way to the 1932 summer Olympics in Los Angeles and, the following summer, to the Chicago
World’s Fair, as well as periodically to his mother’s sister in Greenwich, Connecticut. ‘Bus and train trips are predictable,’ he wrote to his grandfather, ‘but
hitchhiking offers the thrill of the unknown.’ Besides, it was cheap: ‘I went three hundred miles on fifty cents.’ The real prize of hitchhiking, however, was ‘the great
practice it offers in the art of diplomacy and negotiating. You have to be on your guard. And it brings you into intimate contact with so many different kinds of people.’

At the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, he worked in the Swedish Pavilion, where, for three dollars a day, he washed windows, sold souvenirs, arranged displays of glass and porcelain, manned
the cash register, and moved heavy equipment. His greatest contribution to his native land that sweltering summer, however, was teaching the pavilion’s manager a cheap visual trick any
architect knows: by mounting spotlights on a nearby skyscraper, they could illuminate the otherwise drab Swedish Pavilion and bathe it in an aura of distinction it didn’t really have.

During his student years in Ann Arbor, Raoul Wallenberg acquired the only girlfriend he is known to have had: Bernice
Ringman, an instructor at nearby Michigan State
Normal College (now Eastern Michigan University) in Ypsilanti. A physical therapist in a pioneering programme of special education for handicapped children, she laughed with him at Laurel and Hardy
and Marx Brothers films, went into Detroit with him to watch Fred Astaire tapping on tour, and danced with Raoul at college proms. He often called for her in the late afternoon and helped her with
her patients. When she had to bring them from hospital to homes, he would carry those who couldn’t walk. Bernice, in turn, taught him to drive. In 1934, he bought a jalopy and, instead of
hitchhiking, drove to Mexico. To pay his way, he sketched farmhouses and landscapes and then sold his drawings to the locals for cash or lodging.

Bernice Ringman never married. In her eighties, she was living in Los Angeles and sometimes came over to the Simon Wiesenthal Centre to talk to school groups about Raoul Wallenberg and his
bravery. Once, though, she recounted his aspirations and insecurities: ‘He always wanted to do something outstanding in some way in some field. He was always planning something. As far as he
was concerned, it was never Sunday; there was always something to do next.’

With his curly brown hair already receding and a prominent nose that was often described as aristocratic, Raoul Wallenberg was still a much-sought-after bachelor when he returned to Stockholm in
1935 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in architecture from the University of Michigan, after completing the four-and-a-half-year course in three and a half. Out of a class of 1100 Students, he won
its only medal from the American Institute of Architects. On the boat home, he prepared his entry for a major Swedish architectural competition to rehabilitate the waterfront near the Royal Palace.
Raoul’s design – which included a museum, an outdoor swimming-pool, and a public park along the embankment – won second prize: an astonishing feat for a newcomer up against all of
Sweden’s best-known architects. But, in a cautious country still reeling from the Depression and girding to stay out of the Second World War, not even first-prize winners were being built; as
fulfilled after the war, the project bears closer resemblance to Raoul’s runner-up than to the winning design.