Nazi Hunter (67 page)

Call this ‘Jewish self-hate’, as Wiesenthal does, or make light of it, as Arthur Schnitzler did (‘Anti-Semitism became popular in Vienna only when the Jews themselves took it
up’), but the same tensions exist between Berlin Jews and other German and Austrian
Jews and, in Israel, between Oriental and European Jews. Or, as Dr Wilfried Daim, a
Viennese analyst who wrote
Depth Psychology and Salvation
, put it to me bluntly: ‘To a German-speaking Jew like Kreisky, a Polish-and-Yiddish-speaking Jew like Wiesenthal coming out
of the East to haunt him is as much a rebuke as if he had a Southern “darky” for a cousin.’

‘For me,’ said Kreisky in 1986, ‘this whole “Wiesenthal Complex” . . . isn’t worth another word. I happen not to like the man and that is my right. Just
because we share the same religion, it doesn’t mean that we have to love each other. Do all Catholics?’

Kreisky could easily infuriate Wiesenthal, whose only child lives with her family in Israel and whose granddaughter and grandsons have all served in the Israeli Army, just by disparaging
Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, as ‘that Polish lawyer’ and ‘the son of a little Polish tailor’. Or by complaining that ‘Israel is run by
Russian and Polish Jews.’ Or by proclaiming: ‘I have no Jewish fellow citizens; I know only Austrian countrymen.’

Said Wiesenthal: ‘One of Kreisky’s favourite themes is that the Jews are not a people. He says this is scientific truth and one day he’s going to write a book about it. He
belabours journalists with endless sermons on this subject and most of them are too polite to interrupt or challenge him.’

One Israeli editor did, however. Menachem Oberbaum of
Al Ahram
asked Kreisky in 1975 how, as a statesman and diplomat, he could criticize Israel, the Jewish people, Begin, and
Wiesenthal in such strong terms.

Kreisky’s reply was nothing if not vehement: ‘Tell me once and for all, Mr Editor, do you come to me wanting information from the Chancellor of the Republic or are you here to
interrogate me? When you want to make an interrogation of me, then I’ll cancel everything [on the schedule]. The Jews publish so much that is terrible about me that I won’t allow this
[to happen]. Would you have the nerve to question the French Prime Minister in such a way? This is such impudence that I would gladly throw you out. Why must I really stand for your Questions and
Answers? . . . Now I’ve had enough. I’m not here to answer like a defendant to the Jewish – the Israeli media.’ He concluded his tirade with one of his most memorable
utterances: ‘The Jews are not a people, and if they are, they are a lousy people.’

Calming down to the melting-point, Kreisky answered the rest of Oberbaum’s question quite candidly: ‘When I hear the name Begin or Wiesenthal, I simply lose
control of myself.’

To Wiesenthal, it was quite clear that he and Begin were ‘for Kreisky the same “Jews from the east” that we are to many Viennese and he will have nothing to do with
us.’

In the autumn of 1975, when Bruno Kreisky stood for re-election, he struck a bargain with Friedrich Peter, head of the small right-wing Freedom Party: if Kreisky’s
Socialists failed to win a majority in Parliament, his Reds would govern in a coalition with Peter’s Blues. Peter would be appointed Vice Chancellor and his party would be given the Foreign
Ministry, too. Since the Freedom Party was riddled with Nazis, this alarmed many – but not Simon Wiesenthal. ‘Just wait,’ he reassured friends. ‘First, we must have the
election and then we will see the results – but I can guarantee there will be no such coalition.’

Simon gave this assurance because, upon returning from his summer vacation early that September, he had found a new acquisition crowning the clutter on his desk. It was a 1942 roster of the
First SS Infantry Brigade, which Wiesenthal calls ‘one of the most notorious extermination units of the war.’ In ‘special actions’ against civilians in the Ukraine in
1941–2, it had massacred 13,497 men, women, and children, whose corpses were classified as ‘Jews, gypsies, partisans, bandits, and suspected enemies.’ From near the middle of the
list, one name jumped out at him: SS Lieutenant Friedrich Peter, an Austrian born 13 July 1921.

When that date matched Peter’s campaign biographies, Simon made further inquiries and quickly confirmed that this was the same Friedrich Peter who had never denied an SS past, but had
hinted he was ‘only a lieutenant’ in the
Waffen
SS. It did not take Wiesenthal long to establish that Peter had been a corporal in the brigade’s Fifth Company on
Thursday, 4 September 1941, when, according to a regimental logbook which had, ironically, been issued by a Socialist publishing house in Vienna as a warning against resurgent Nazism:

‘The massacre,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘took place just outside the town. The Jews had to dig deep trenches and then climb in, so they could be shot in their grave
and buried efficiently.’ Not all the victims, however, were shot, but those that weren’t were buried alive when the next group of victims had to cover the grave over with sand before
digging their own.

For his work in the brigade’s ‘winter campaign 1941–42’, Friedrich Peter earned an Iron Cross and a battlefield commission. More than three decades later, Simon
Wiesenthal recognized that ‘I had a stick of dynamite in my hand. If I made it public during the campaign, Kreisky and Peter and everybody else would accuse me of meddling in politics.’
Anticipating that the volatile Austrian vote might react in favour of Peter or Kreisky as a backlash against the interfering Jew, Wiesenthal decided to maintain silence until after the election,
but to show his good faith by delivering Peter’s dossier beforehand to the apolitical President of Austria: Dr Rudolf Kirchschläger (predecessor to Kurt Waldheim).

A lanky, pious man who spoke with a quaver that often sounded as if he were about to cry, Kirchschläger wept real tears when Wiesenthal presented him with the Peter papers on Monday, 29
September 1975, a week before the election. ‘The President read a few pages and began to shudder and then burst into tears,’ Wiesenthal recalls. ‘Then he thanked me for not going
public with it before the election, so the people would vote on the issues and not on one man’s past. He made me feel like a patriot.’ Simon said he would make Peter’s past public
after the election out of fear that he might come to high office then or at a later time. The President, with Simon’s permission, sent photocopies of the dossier to Peter and Kreisky. He also
indicated to Wiesenthal that he might reject any naming of Peter as Vice Chancellor: calling elections and accepting governments are among the few real powers of the largely ceremonial Austrian
Presidency.

In that critical week before the election, Simon says that Peter was very uneasy and offered to bow out of the bargain, but Kreisky told him anything Wiesenthal said could be disregarded. The
deal was still on.

Sunday, 5 October’s election results nullified all arrangements. The Reds won ninety-three of the 183 seats in Parliament; the
Blacks eighty; and Peter’s Blues
ten. Kreisky could govern with a clear majority and no partners.

On 9 October, Wiesenthal gave a press conference in the Hotel de France on the Ringstrasse and handed journalists his documentation of Peter’s war record. From his party headquarters,
Peter told reporters that he had not participated in his unit’s dirty work, had known nothing of atrocities, had heard nothing from his comrades-in-arms, and must have been on home leave when
the Leltschitky massacre occurred. Wiesenthal was quick to retort that no leaves were granted by the First SS Infantry Division while it was in ‘combat’ against civilians during the
1941–2 ‘special actions’ and that Peter’s Fifth Company was in the centre of virtually every daily extermination during that time. That night, on Austrian television, Peter
declared: ‘I have never taken part in such an operation, but have only fulfilled my duty as a soldier.’

(Peter’s plea of
Pflichterfüllung
, ‘fulfilment of duty’, may have fallen more sympathetically on President Kirchschläger’s ear than Wiesenthal
surmised. For, as a captain in the German Army in 1945, Kirchschläger had fulfilled his duty without question by leading 1200 teenagers, the last of Hitler’s reserves in Austria, to
certain doom from Soviet tanks at the gates of Vienna on the eve of the city’s surrender. Badly equipped and without enough weapons to go around, some 200 youths died and another 800 were
wounded, as was Captain Kirchschläger. Nowhere did this infamous ‘Charge of the Lightly-Armed Brigade’ appear in his official biography.)

After Wiesenthal’s revelation and Peter’s denial in 1975, the response from Chancellor Kreisky – at a press conference with foreign journalists – was massive
overkill:

‘Look, to close out this whole long chapter, I must say that all this is for me a baroque affair that has materialized only through the efforts of Mr Wiesenthal, whom I know just from
secret reports – and they are very negative, positively evil.’

Asked what he was talking about, Kreisky rambled on: ‘I can assure you that Mr Wiesenthal maintained a different relationship to the Gestapo from mine – provably! More I cannot say
now, but the rest I will say in court . . . I hope it will be a big trial, for, let me tell you, a man like him has no right after all that to play the role of a moral authority. Furthermore, I
state that he has no right to earn
his living from persecuting other human beings . . . He has no right to meddle in Austrian politics. The man must go!’

As Kreisky went on to call Wiesenthal a spy and a
mafioso
bent on bringing everybody to court, a reporter from United Press International broke in to ask incredulously: ‘Are you
saying that Wiesenthal was a Gestapo agent?’

‘I maintain,’ said Kreisky, ‘that, in that time, Mr Wiesenthal lived in an area under the Nazi sphere of influence without being persecuted.’

This was reverse character assassination worthy of the Hitler era. Perhaps not as ominous because the consequences weren’t immediate, but, even in a democracy – particularly in a
democracy! – such a public denunciation by the head of government, calling for Simon’s disappearance, was an open invitation to any crazy or Nazi to take a pot-shot at Wiesenthal and
even for the police to look the other way. Vienna is an orderly city with an abundance of social services, but it has its share of people who walk down the street backwards shouting to themselves.
In late 1975 and well into 1976, it seemed to me that most of them were proclaiming that ‘the Jew, Simon Wiesenthal, must go!’

What made this even more terrifying, says Wiesenthal, was that ‘in the time of Kreisky, Austria was not a democracy because he so dominated it. Even the Jews here, some of them were so
angry at me for making trouble and most of them were worried this would lead to big anti-Semitism.’

Though outraged, Simon Wiesenthal was a little less surprised than many by the nature of the attack on him. Five years earlier, when he was criticizing Kreisky for naming four Nazis to his
Cabinet and Kreisky was calling him a ‘Jewish fascist’, he had learned of feverish inquiries in international Socialist circles for any leads connecting him to a pre-war
Jewish-fascistic youth group in Poland. This research unearthed a Polish Jewish youth group called
Betar
, whose members wore greyish brown blouses and blue trousers.
‘Unfortunately,’ said one Swiss report, ‘Wiesenthal did not belong to it; besides, it was not at all fascistic.’
⁷¹

Not even this, however, had prepared Wiesenthal for the onslaught of public insults from Kreisky, who disparaged him as ‘Simon Wiesenthal, so-called Engineer’,
and still questioned his right to Austrian citizenship: ‘One must at last close the door on these things. Some day there must be an end to this – then how is it that Wiesenthal is
allowed to live here anyway?’ Most reprehensible to Simon were the accusations and allegations, slurs and insinuations against him without a shred of documentation: the antithesis of the way
he worked.

On Austrian television, the Chancellor told millions that Wiesenthal’s methods were ‘deplorable’ and the attack on Peter was, in reality, aimed at Kreisky himself. He had known
Peter for years. He believed this stalwart democrat’s assurances that he had been involved in no criminality at all – and Peter’s word was enough for him. Not for Wiesenthal,
however. ‘The fact that Friedrich Peter had, until now, never acknowledged his service in the First SS Infantry Brigade,’ said Simon, ‘didn’t seem to disturb the Chancellor
at all.’

Wiesenthal says that the next six weeks were ‘the worst time I had experienced since the war. I was a leper in my new homeland and only the thought that I hadn’t survived Hitler just
to escape from Austria kept me from emigrating. What I was up against was Kreisky at the peak of his popularity with a hypnotic, downright magical hold on the people. They saw him as father,
emperor, and god in one. Self-critical Austrian intellectuals hung on his lips for every single word; they called him the “Sun King”. The journalists of the country, with a few
exceptions, ate out of his hand. And, whenever others attacked me, he cheered them on. I had the public image of an insatiable avenger who, every morning, got up and ate some poor innocent little
Nazi Party member for breakfast.’ (When asked point-blank whether he did indeed devour a neo-Nazi a day, Simon once replied: ‘No, I don’t eat pork.’)
⁷²

Around that time, a polling institute in Linz reported the results of its national public opinion survey of Austrian reactions to the Kreisky-vs-Wiesenthal controversy: fifty-nine per cent
supported Kreisky; twenty-nine per cent were neutral; thirteen per cent had
no opinion; and only three per cent supported Simon. Among younger interviewees (ages sixteen to
twenty-nine), six per cent were for Wiesenthal, but among the over-fifties, his support was so negligible that the computer couldn’t even register one per cent.