Nazi Hunter (68 page)

‘
WIESENTHAL DISCREDITS AUSTRIA ABOARD
’, the nation’s bestselling daily, the tabloid
Kronen-Zeitung
, howled in a front-page headline. A Freedom
Party weekly ‘exposed’ the regimental war diary as ‘a forgery’ planted by the Czechoslovak secret police. One of the few editors who did speak up – Peter Michael
Lingens of
profil
, who used to be Simon’s secretary and who wrote that Kreisky’s slurs were ‘undignified and immoral’ as well as ‘monstrous’ – was
sued by Kreisky, who won at every level of the Austrian courts. Fined a sum equivalent to almost 4000 dollars, Lingens – in a move that would not have occurred to many Austrian lawyers
– took his case to one of Kreisky’s pet institutions: the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. In 1986, more than ten years after the case was initiated, Lingens won in
Strasbourg. The European Court, after studying the statements of both sides, said that Lingens had the right of free expression of opinion to call Kreisky’s utterances ‘monstrous,
immoral, and undignified’. The government of Austria was told to vacate the fine and pay Lingens’ court costs of some $23,000.

‘Do you know how Kreisky “justified” calling me a
mafioso
?’ Simon asked me rhetorically in early 1989. ‘In Lingens’ case, he explained that the
abduction of Adolf Eichmann had been conducted like a Mafia operation. Then, in the same presentation, he says, “Wiesenthal had nothing to do with the abduction of Eichmann.” Look, his
calling me a
mafioso
didn’t bother me as much as other people. Three waiters make a strike: their customers call it a Mafia. But, for a Jew to call another Jew a collaborator is to
call him a murderer.’

Friedrich Peter sued Wiesenthal as well as
profil
and the
Kurier
for slander. At sporadic court sessions over the next seven years, Wiesenthal produced documents indicating
that Peter’s SS Brigade killed close to 400,000 people during his twenty months in its service, and showing that another 167 members of the unit were living in Austria. In 1976, Kreisky took
former SS Lieutenant Peter with him on a State visit to Czechoslovakia which included a stop in the Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp, where many of the
Jewish
Chancellor’s relatives perished or passed en route to extermination; Peter stood stony-faced through the short ceremony. In 1977, President Kirchschläger decorated Peter with
Austria’s highest gold medal for service and, a year later, Peter retired as head of the Freedom Party, though retaining his positions as Member of Parliament and party speaker there. In
1983’s re-election campaign, Kreisky announced he wouldn’t govern in coalition and, when the Socialists failed to achieve an absolute majority, he stepped aside after thirteen years as
Chancellor to let his Socialist deputy, Fred Sinowatz, form a government with the Freedom Party’s more respectable new chief, Norbert Steger (born 1944), as Vice Chancellor. Around the time
his party achieved a share of power (which lasted until 1986), Peter had his lawyer write to Wiesenthal’s lawyer saying that the suit was being dropped because Peter had lost interest in
pursuing it.

Simon Wiesenthal tried to sue Bruno Kreisky, but the Chancellor’s parliamentary immunity protected him, no matter where and what he spoke. Parliamentary immunity is stronger in Austria
than even diplomatic immunity; a drunk-driving deputy who shows his status to a policeman will be waved forward to weave onward – the assumption being that he is going about his government
business. Though Kreisky said he would gladly waive his immunity for the ‘big trial’ against Wiesenthal, he never did and it never materialized. Meanwhile, Kreisky said he would order a
special parliamentary commission to investigate not Peter, but Wiesenthal. Information later surfaced that, three days after Wiesenthal’s disclosures, the Austrian federal police shadowed and
eavesdropped on him in the transit buffet of Vienna’s Schwechat Airport as he greeted two friends he encountered while waiting for a flight to Frankfurt:

The unlikely truce-maker in this uncivil war between Austria’s two best-known Jews was Simon’s ailing wife Cyla. After nearly two months of
not picking up a newspaper, never turning on TV, seldom leaving the house since being heckled while shopping, and declining to see her friends because she knew what they had on their minds, she
told Simon she wanted to lead the normal life of a woman nearing seventy: to sit in a coffee-house, stroll in the park, go to the theatre. She asked him to settle the case. Simon argued that they
hadn’t survived Janowskà and Mauthausen only to capitulate to Kreisky.

‘But we were young then,’ Cyla pointed out. ‘And it doesn’t matter what people think, so long as we can finally enjoy a little peace in our old age.’

The president of B’nai B’rith
⁷⁴
in Vienna, a mutual friend of both men, negotiated an uneasy peace between them. Wiesenthal
abandoned his efforts to force Kreisky into court while the Chancellor dropped the idea of an investigatory commission and told Parliament grumblingly: ‘Incidentally, I want to make it clear
that I have never identified Wiesenthal as a Nazi collaborator.’

In 1982, when Israel invaded southern Lebanon, Kreisky declared in an interview: ‘Israel’s standing is bare of any ethics. Its leadership has shown its true face.
The warfare in Lebanon has actually cost Israel the support it secured and received during the past few decades. The insanity of its rulers, who are only relying on their arms, is causing fear in
the world at large. With this Israel I don’t want to have anything to do any more. Never again!’

In a 1986 interview with me, ex-Chancellor Kreisky elaborated succinctly on why ‘this Israel is not my Israel: it has, in my view, a semi-fascist ideology, a policy of force, a regime of
apartheid, and it uses the support of the masses for its own ends. I have no sympathy for any of this.’

This viewpoint, of course, did nothing to endear Kreisky to Simon Wiesenthal, but it did endear him to Austrians who said, as one heard all too often: ‘We’d have nothing against the
Jews if they
were all like Kreisky.’ Or, as Simon Wiesenthal put it succinctly: ‘Every anti-Semite had to have a Jew he likes.’

Dr Daim, the Viennese depth psychologist, has examined why Kreisky was particularly well liked by many Austrian Nazis: ‘For them, it was a sort of redemption to elect a Jew. And for that
very reason, the Nazis were already lucky to have Kreisky, for he alone was in a position to make them socially acceptable again. A Jewish Chancellor could put an end to a past with which they
didn’t want to have anything more to do’ – if Wiesenthal hadn’t risen to protest Kreisky’s gift of absolution. To make matters worse, Daim adds, ‘Kreisky, in the
way he attacked Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, enabled these people to start thinking of Jews as war criminals.’

Notorious in Austria for his controversial ‘psychograms’ of Kreisky, Daim actually ‘interviewed’ his subject at the height of the furore over Wiesenthal’s 1975
exposure of Peter. ‘It was hardly an interview,’ Daim recalls. ‘My topic was his attitude toward the Nazis and he spoke for more than an hour without my even having a chance to
interrupt and ask a question. But when our time together was nearly up, I managed to thank him for talking about the Nazis and then I asked him: “Mr Chancellor, now what is your relationship
to the Jews?’ And he replied very sharply: “That has nothing to do with it.” But I said, almost as sharply: “Mr Chancellor, it has a direct bearing. One cannot speak about
the Nazis without speaking about the Jews.” So then he talked in generalities about “these highly intelligent people” and so on.’

‘Kreisky is a modern King Midas,’ said a People’s Party politician. ‘When he takes a Nazi in his hand, suddenly he’s no longer a Nazi.’

Every now and then, Kreisky repeated one or another of his allegations and insinuations against Wiesenthal – and, each time Simon found out about it, he went through the motions of trying
to sue. By November 1986, he could tell me: ‘I’ve sued him five times, but each time Parliament won’t lift his immunity.’ To avoid making it six, I didn’t bother to
mention my visit to Kreisky’s home on Friday, 24 January of that year: two days after the ex-Chancellor’s seventy-fifth birthday.

His 250-year-old rented villa with a discreet modern swimming-pool in the back was already under wraps for winter hibernation. Its tenant would soon be flying off to Mallorca, where he
maintained an island home.

The Viennese villa hadn’t changed much, but Kreisky had. Upon leaving the Ballhausplatz, he’d let what was left of his reddish greying hair grow long to form a
fringe which met a foxy-looking beard he’d grown while hospitalized for a kidney transplant. His
eternal-Lumpenproletariat
look had yielded to a rakish demeanour which, to me,
conjured up a bizarre image of Ezra Pound as an elder Jewish wise man.

When we talked about Wiesenthal, he confided that ‘my information on him is very, very bad, but I don’t want to have a trial with former Nazis as witnesses he will accuse, because
the people who know all about him
are
that. There is one in Germany who commanded a camp. He knows a lot about Wiesenthal, but he keeps silent because he also knows what Wiesenthal will
use against him if he comes to court.’

In an interview in
profil
later that year, Kreisky re-affirmed his accusations and Wiesenthal took him to court once again. The case was still pending in the fall of 1988, when Kreisky
pleaded that he couldn’t come to court in Vienna because he was promoting the second volume of his memoirs at the Frankfurt Book Fair. As it turned out, Wiesenthal was presenting the second
volume of
his
memoirs in Frankfurt, too.

‘Look,’ Wiesenthal protested, ‘I also was in Frankfurt, but I could be in Vienna, too, for the trial.’ But the case was postponed until January 1989. ‘What happened
next?’ Wiesenthal reported rhetorically. ‘He was twice, without apology, not coming to the trial. The judge spoke to the lawyers and said if Kreisky does not appear, he will give to me
the verdict. So then his lawyer is bringing certification from his doctor that he is sick and cannot come from Mallorca. But two days later he is in Vienna presenting his book. When he does come to
court, the judge suggests maybe he should apologize to me and get it over with. And what does he tell the judge? “Shortly before my death, I will apologize for this.”

‘The man hates me, but I am not a hater,’ insisted Simon, two years Kreisky’s senior, but in much better health. ‘Still, for this apology, I will wait around.’ He
was still waiting when Bruno Kreisky died of heart failure in Vienna on 29 July 1990, at the age of seventy-nine.

34

Throughout the 1970s and most of the 1980s, Simon Wiesenthal wrestled with Jewish self-hate in the person of Bruno Kreisky, his most formidable and dangerous postwar enemy. In
the second half of the eighties and well into the nineties, having outlasted Kreisky, his most formidable challenge was Jewish overkill. It took the form of the American Jewish Congress in New York
and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies in Los Angeles. And it took the face of Kurt Waldheim, about whom Wiesenthal personally made a principled stand which cost him Stateside
lecture bookings, a rift with his own Wiesenthal Centre, and maybe even the Nobel Peace Prize. But, thanks to adept manoeuvring on his part as he turned eighty, he won respect, and even reverence,
from his fellow Austrians.

As a diplomat and politician for most of his life, and as Secretary General of the United Nations for a decade, Kurt Waldheim was all things to all people. After all the twists and turns that
took him in 1986 to both the Presidency of Austria and the summit of opprobrium, there are, according to Simon Wiesenthal, two things Waldheim never was: a Nazi or a war criminal.