Nazi Hunter (82 page)

Toward the end of October 1986, a Catholic university students’ association took a stab at reconciliation with ‘A Jewish Week’ of readings, concerts, and lectures. On Thursday,
Simon Wiesenthal shared the podium on anti-Semitism with Dr Erika Weinzierl, a non-Jewish historian who was Austria’s leading analyst of the workings of bigotry. Wiesenthal went first. As his
speech began, the organizers took a call from the President’s office. Would there be three seats available in the audience if President Waldheim came right over? The organizers said yes and
gave up their front-row seats. At a pause for questions, they announced that President Waldheim himself was on his way over. The capacity audience gasped. Wiesenthal gulped. Then he stood up and
said: ‘You will understand why I have to excuse myself.’

Not everybody did, but I could understand how, particularly with a couple of photographers present, Wiesenthal – his Stateside standing and lecture bookings at stake – could not
afford to be seen in a situation involving hobnobbing with the controversial President. As Simon collected his coat in the vestibule, Waldheim and an aide
and a bodyguard
appeared. Waldheim gave Wiesenthal a warm ‘Good evening, Mr Engineer!’ Wiesenthal gave Waldheim a frostier ‘Good evening, Mr President.’ Glancing around to see that the
photographers were still in the auditorium, Simon shook Waldheim’s hand and left. Later, he would say: ‘You cannot bring the President of the country in through the back
door.’

The President of Austria took his front-row seat and listened attentively to Dr Weinzierl, but did not ask any questions. The audience behaved politely.

When the leaders of Democrats Abroad convened in Vienna in late 1986 to lay plans for the US presidential election two years later, I helped arrange a private briefing by Simon Wiesenthal over
cocktails on a Saturday night at a home within walking distance of his – and he let me tape the conversation. Simon blamed the whole Waldheim affair, including his election, on middle level
‘members of the Socialist Party in Vienna and the World Jewish Congress.’ He did not condemn Waldheim for his memberships in the Nazi student union and SA riding club. ‘Believe
me,’ said Simon, ‘eighty per cent of students in those times had to be members of such organizations; they had no choice. And, if Waldheim had been a wise man, he could have said so
and, by giving the right answer, win immediately. But his tactic was always evasion and no truth – and then the truth, when it was too late.’

He condemned Singer and Steinberg of the World Jewish Congress, but acknowledged the effect of their tactics: ‘These two young boys: they knew the psychology of American Jews better than I
do. In their subconscious, American Jews feel guilty. They haven’t done enough against the Nazis in the war to help their fellow Jews in Europe. Now they have the golden chance to do all
against Waldheim – verbally! On my lecture tours, they ask me: “What is the difference between Eichmann and Waldheim?” “Why is Waldheim not arrested?” “Why
don’t they hang him?” And when I say, “First give me evidence and then let us see”, they say, “Why you protect him?” Nobody wish to know the truth!

‘I have always had letters to the editor against me. Usually, they come from neo-Nazis. But now, to see them signed by Jews in Jewish newspapers: this is something new to me.’

Wiesenthal told the amateur politicians – American Democrats living in a dozen European countries and Israel – what he’d told
Singer and Steinberg when
they visited him on his most recent lecture tour of the States. According to Wiesenthal, the ‘two young boys’ said to him: ‘We cannot finish the matter of Waldheim without your
moral support. We need your moral position in the world.’ And Simon had replied:

‘Well, let me tell you how to get it. You bring your evidence to me
before
you hold a press conference. And if your documents show me that the man was involved in war crimes, then
I as an Austrian citizen will ask him to resign. People will believe me. But when you will come out and ask him to resign, it will be the same as it was in the presidential election. Out of the two
and a half million votes he got, a few hundred thousand people voted for Waldheim who never would have voted for him without this interference from abroad. They say to me, “Do the Americans
think we are a banana republic? that we cannot alone decide whom to elect?” And these quarter of a million people weren’t voting for Waldheim so much as they were voting against the
World Jewish Congress.’

Now Simon told the wide-eyed Democrats: ‘To understand the Austrian position, I say: look, you had a problem with a president, Nixon. What would it have been like if the accusations
against him had come not from the States, but only from abroad? Nixon would never have had to resign. So why should Singer and Steinberg imagine Waldheim should resign because they attacked him
from abroad?’

Simon suggested that he, as an Austrian citizen, might call for Waldheim’s resignation if the commission of military historians condemned him: ‘They will read all the documents and
they will make a conclusion. This is so easy when military historians talk; whether they are American or German or Greek, in half an hour, they have a common language of how these documents must be
read. This commission must be created not for or against Waldheim, but only for the truth.’

Though Wiesenthal had high hopes for the historians’ commission, others, including me, felt that any group empanelled by the Austrian government would have a built-in predisposition toward
whitewash. This impression was heightened in 1987 when a part-time researcher at Wiesenthal’s Jewish Documentation Centre, Silvana Konieczny-Origlia, copied a personal letter from one of the
commission members, Gerald Fleming of Great Britain, to Wiesenthal
enclosing evidence she said incriminated Waldheim. After she published letter and documents in the Italian
magazine
Epoca
, it turned out that the documents – found by Fleming in Washington’s National Archives and suggesting a link between Waldheim’s intelligence unit and the
killing of British prisoners of war in 1944 – had been analysed earlier, not only in Germany’s
Der Spiegel
, but by the British Foreign Office, which found no evidence of
‘any criminal activity’ by Lieutenant Waldheim against British prisoners. Certifying the veracity of the documents, Wiesenthal pointed out that they contained only information that was
already known. He added that Mrs Konieczny-Origlia ‘disappeared about five days before and we have not heard from her since. I was very surprised to hear about this report.’ She was no
longer in his employ. Later, he would remark that this showed ‘how the Waldheim case could induce a seemingly sensible, seemingly decent person to commit an incomprehensible action . . .
believing that she could thereby prove Waldheim to be a war criminal who was being protected by me.’

Potentially more harmful to the historical commission was Fleming’s covering letter, in which he wrote in German:

Even though the letter was written before Fleming’s appointment to the commission, some damage was done. An Italian journalist wrote that Simon had concealed the papers
to help Waldheim. A week later,
Epoca
published an attack on Simon by the WJC’s Elan Steinberg. And Serge Klarsfeld went on French TV to denounce Simon’s role as a passive
recipient of vital data.

The next attack on Simon Wiesenthal came from a more familiar direction. On the morning of 6 January 1988 – the Austrian holiday of Epiphany – Austrian Television transmitted
nationwide a two-hour interview with Wiesenthal live from the stage of the Theater in der Josefstadt. A few minutes into the telecast, when Simon was explaining that he saw himself more as a
‘researcher’ than a ‘Nazi-hunter’, a voice from the third balcony shouted ‘Murderer!’ and another called out ‘You are a liar!’ as a shower of
neo-Nazi hate-leaflets fluttered down upon the rococo auditorium. After a brief scuffle, three rightist hoodlums were apprehended by
the police, but much more heartening was
the immediate response when the interviewer, Franz Ferdinand Wolf, exhorted the capacity audience: ‘
This
is Austria 1988. I believe
that
was “The Other Austria”.
Shall we show it with applause?’ – and all 850 Austrians on hand rose as one to give Wiesenthal a prolonged standing ovation.

Later, Simon told me: ‘Letters to the editor in America are saying I am senile, but what I lose in America, I win in Austria.’ He meant respect and respectability as he went from a
non-person or worse in Kreisky’s Austria to recognition as a symbol of justice and integrity in the Waldheim era. Indeed, nothing did Wiesenthal’s heart more good than hearing a
Socialist chancellor, Vranitzky, praise him publicly as ‘Austria’s incorruptible conscience, too long ignored or unacknowledged in our country.’

1988 was predestined to be a traumatic year for Austria with the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss in March preceded by delivery of the historians’ commission report in February. As
rumours flew that the panel would not be as kind to Waldheim as anticipated, pressure for his resignation mounted to a new frenzy. Though the
Jerusalem Post
claimed that People’s
Party leader Alois Mock had written to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that President Waldheim would soon resign pleading ill health, the President himself, at the outset of his seventieth
year, looked fitter than ever and seemed to thrive on controversy.

While the historians’ 202-page report said that ‘the question of Waldheim’s guilty conduct in the war is not finally answered’, it also concluded that ‘he
repeatedly assisted in connection with illegal actions and thereby facilitated their execution. He tried to let his military past slip into oblivion and, as soon as that was no longer possible, to
portray it as harmless.’ Though Waldheim termed the failure to attach ‘personal guilt’ to him a vindication, the Israeli member of the commission, Jehuda Wallach, said that not
only had Waldheim twisted the panel’s words, but that he believed there was enough evidence to prosecute the President of Austria.

At this point, Simon Wiesenthal beat the retreat that had begun when he’d left the Catholic students’ seminar in haste upon hearing that Waldheim was coming. With his lecture
bookings and his standing with world Jewry eroding from the principled position he had taken for two years, he now leaped to loftier moral ground by calling for Waldheim’s resignation because
a president must be an
ethical role-model for a society. In various interviews, Wiesenthal said he hoped the President would take advantage of the report’s ambiguity
‘to make the decision to go without losing face, but in Austria’s interest.’ Terming the current situation a ‘catastrophe’, he said ‘the way out lies with the
President. Austria cannot live alone in the world. Sooner or later, the people will hold Dr Waldheim responsible for their isolation . . . The President must symbolize truth and not come in
conflict with it.’

The Waldheim affair made Simon Wiesenthal and Bruno Kreisky into strange bedfellows. Kreisky, too, now called for the President to resign. Kreisky’s initial defence of his former colleague
against WJC ‘infamy’ and American ‘score-settling’ had turned to disenchantment with ‘a candidate who will create a divided nation . . . It is not good for Austria to
have a liar at the top of the State. It is not good for a people to have a President who is on the Watch List.’

The most startling response to the historians’ report came from Karl Gruber, the Tyrolean resistance hero who, as Austrian Foreign Minister, gave Waldheim his first diplomatic job. Nearing
eighty, Gruber gave an interview to Italian television and his words were re-broadcast on Austrian radio: ‘The commission, they were not his friends. They were practically all his enemies.
The German is a Socialist. The others are of Jewish descent.’

Gruber was promptly repudiated by everybody from Waldheim to Wiesenthal, from Chancellor Vranitzky to Gruber’s own People’s Party – and by the truth. The German panellist,
Manfred Messerschmidt of the Research Institute for Military History in Freiburg, said he had never joined any political party and considered himself a liberal, not a socialist. Two commission
members – Israel’s Wallach and Britain’s Fleming – were indeed Jewish, but the other three (including US Brigadier-General James Lawton Collins Jnr) were not. Gruber’s
words proved only one truth: the vocabulary of anti-Semitism was so pervasive in Austria that even a confirmed anti-fascist fighter spoke its language.

It was almost anticlimactic when Kurt Waldheim went on Austrian television to tell the nation (and the world) that he had ruled out resigning: ‘It is a fundamental principle of our
democracy that an election result cannot be subsequently corrected. A head of state must not retreat in the face of slanders, hateful demonstrations, and wholesale condemnations.’

As if to prove Waldheim’s point, President Bronfman of the World Jewish Congress surfaced in the next day’s
New York Times
with this condemnation:

On another occasion, Bronfman called upon the world to oppose Austria’s application to enter the European Union: collective punishment for one man’s unproven
guilt.

Simon Wiesenthal took another tack. ‘When the historians said Waldheim can’t be tried,’ he told me, ‘I had hoped he would take this as a way to leave with dignity. When
he didn’t, I asked him to resign. But I spoke only as a citizen of Austria.’

While Waldheim’s on-going sauna of cold snubs and hot exposures only seemed to invigorate him, he also appeared to have learned a certain humility that was almost becoming. In his TV
response to the historians, he had acknowledged it was a mistake to say two years earlier that he was only doing his duty as a German soldier and now he paid his respects to ‘the heroes and
martyrs of that time’. He was not one of them, he admitted: ‘We others in my generation were submerged in the machinery of war, in fear and the effort to survive.’ But, he added,
he had a ‘clear conscience’.