Nazi Hunter (94 page)

1
. Former US Secretary of State and co-winner for 1973 with his North Vietnamese negotiating partner, Le Duc Tho, who refused the prize
because they had not negotiated true peace.

2
. Co-winner for 1976 with Mairead Corrigan for their peace efforts in Northern Ireland.

3
. Speer (1905–81), Hitler’s wartime Minister for Armaments and War Production, was considered Nazism’s second powerful
official and the only top Nazi leader at the Nuremberg trial in 1945–6 to shoulder responsibility for war crimes, for which he served nineteen years’ imprisonment in Spandau fortress in
West Berlin. An unsuccessful architect until he started winning commissions to co-design Nazi Party headquarters in major cities in the late 1920s, Speer became Hitler’s chief architect at
the age of twenty-eight soon after the Nazis came to power in 1933.

4
. Johann Gutenberg (1397–1468), a German printer, invented movable type in the late 1430s.

5
. With the expulsion of 1492, some 100,000
Marranos
settled in Portugal and thousands of others in Italy and North Africa. Spain
never recovered from this loss of heart, mind, and money.

6
. Vasco da Gama (1469–1524), sailed around the Cape of Good Hope on his ephocal voyage of 1497–9 for King Manuel I of
Portugal.

7
.
Tsuris
: Yiddish for
troubles
.

8
.
Moldau
in German is now
Vltava
in Czech.

9
.
Golem
: A legendary robot said to have been invented by Judah Löwe, a real rabbi in seventeenth-century Prague, to protect
the Jews from anti-Semitic plots. Widely known from the 1916 German novel by Gustav Meyrink and the 1920 Yiddish play by H. Leivick.

10
.
Matzoh
: The unleavened bread eaten in the thirteenth century BC by Jews fleeing from Egypt without waiting for the dough to
rise.
Hamantashen
: A triangular poppyseed pastry prepared for the joyous religious holiday celebrating the deliverance of the Jews from their Persian oppressor, Haman, as chronicled in The
Book of Esther.

11
. Promulgated in 1935, the Nuremberg Laws divided the population into two classes:
Reich citizens
‘of German or related
blood’ with fiill civic rights, and
State subjects
, whose rights were curtailed. One of these regulations, the Law for Protection of German Blood and Honour, specified in its first
article: ‘Marriages between Jews and citizens of German or related blood are forbidden. Marriages contracted in contravention of this law are invalid, even if contracted abroad . . .’
The second article prohibited ‘extramarital relations between Jews and citizens of German or related blood.’ In the SS, sexual relations with Jewish prisoners were punishable by
beheading. ‘An SS member’s sexual organ,’ said SS chief Heinrich Himmler, ‘being the portion of his anatomy with which he makes possible the perpetuation of the Aryan race,
must never be befouled through coitus with Jewesses or women of other subhuman races.’ Other Nuremberg Laws established elaborate provisions for ‘scientifically’ determining
percentages of Jewish blood in one’s pedigree.

12
. In Janowskà’s Death Brigade of Jewish prisoners who buried and burned the bodies, corpses were called
‘figures’. The same abstraction was used by Franz Stangl when he commanded Sobibor and Treblinka.

13
. Though the Russians claimed the men had been executed by the Germans, the obvious truth of the Katyn massacre was only later
acknowledged by the governments of Russia and Poland. In the rift between Stalin and the Polish government-in-exile, General Anders evacuated his army to the West. Its veterans and former
A
K.
partisans were branded as ‘traitors’ by Poland’s postwar communist regimes.

14
. The Polish city of Tarnopol is now Ternopol in Ukraine. It is about sixty miles from Lvov.

15
. Convicted of corruption in 1944 by an SS court, Karl Koch was executed by Nazi justice. For his wife’s war crimes, postwar
justice handed Ilse Koch a life sentence, which was commuted to four years and she was released. Re-arrested in 1949 after press and public protests, she was tried for murder and again given life
imprisonment. She committed suicide in a Bavarian prison in 1967.

16
. On the rare occasions when women were imprisoned in Mauthausen, a 1943 decree specified that ‘corporal punishment for Russian
women is to be performed by Polish women, and for Polish and Ukrainian women by Russian women’ — tribal enemies who would, presumably, show each other no mercy.

17
. Ziereis was shot by two American soldiers in late May 1945. Wiesenthal later published his death-bed confession.

18
. West German reparations to Jews exceeded $37 billion and were crucial to the early survival of Israel. Austria, pleading that it was
the ‘first victim’ of the Nazis itself, and the former East Germany, contending that its communist regime had severed all ties with the Nazi past, paid no more than token reparations.
In 1988, the Austrian Parliament voted to offer Austrian victims one-time payments ranging from $208 to $416 per person.

19
. Oradour-sur-Glane: a village in central France where all but ten of its 652 inhabitants were massacred by the SS
Das Reich
Division on 10 June 1944.

20
. Marzabotto: a town in northern Italy where nearly 2000 civilians were massacred in September 1944 by SS troops under the command of an
Austrian major, Walter Reder.

21
. VE Day, when World War II ended in Europe.

22
. At his trial in Jerusalem nearly thirty years later, when Eichmann’s defence attorney sought his extradition to West Germany,
where he stood a stronger chance of survival, Bonn refused to co-operate, claiming that Eichmann was not a German national.

23
. This slave-labour organization was named for Hitler’s Minister for Armaments and Munitions, SS General Fritz Todt
(1891–1942), who created Germany’s high-speed
Autobahn
network. Upon Todt’s death, he was succeeded by Albert Speer.

24
. Unlike most of Eichmann’s official Jewish collaborators, Löwenherz survived the war in Vienna and lived long enough to tell
his tale. Emigrating to England and then the US after the war, Löwenherz died shortly after Eichmann’s capture. But he left behind some valuable reports, written during and shortly after
the war, which were used as vital evidence by Israeli prosecutors in Eichmann’s trial.

25
. Elli, Valli, and his beloved Ottla, the three younger sisters of Franz Kafka (1883—1924), all perished in Nazi death camps, as
did two other women in his life: Milena Jesenská-Pollak, to whom he wrote his
Letters to Milena
, and Grete Bloch, who in 1915 gave birth to a son who was presumed by some
biographers to be Kafka’s only child; the boy died at the age of seven and Kafka never knew of his existence.

26
. Bühler was tried in Warsaw and executed in Cracow in 1948.

27
.
DEGUSSA
is an acronym for Deutsche Gold wnd Silber Scheidenanstalt for the extraction of precious metals.

28
. Egyptian General Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–70) led the army coup that deposed King Farouk in 1952 and seized power as Premier in
1954. In 1956, he was elected the first President of the Republic of Egypt and fought wars against Israel in 1956, 1967, and 1969.

29
. Menachem Begin, founder of the Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization), a militant Zionist underground group that fought the
British in Palestine, became the Likud party’s Prime Minister of Israel from 1977 to 1983.

30
. There is no record of such an offer, though Eichmann’s deputy in Bratislava, Dieter Wisliceny, is known to have taken 50,000
dollars in 1942 from the Jewish Relief Committee there for delaying deportations.

31
. Her husband was indeed hanged after the war.

32
. General Jüttner, who was also the long-time Chief of the SS Operational Main Office, became director of a sanatorium in the
German spa of Bad Tölz after the war.

33
. Dannecker committed suicide in American custody in Bad Tölz on 10 December 1945.

34
. Formerly Nizhni Novgorod and renamed after the writer Maxim Gorki (1868–1936) who was born there, Gorki was where the dissident
physicist Andrei D. Sakharov was banished under house arrest in the 1980s. From his internal exile in Gorki in early 1981, Sakharov wrote to the Wallenberg Committee in Stockholm that ‘for
about ten years now, I have known about the tragic fate of Raoul Wallenberg. I consider him to be one of those people of the twentieth century to whom all mankind is greatly indebted and ought to
be proud of . . . The refusal of the Soviet authorities to release Wallenberg’s files would testify to the fact that they have something to hide.’

35
. The plaintiff was Friedrich Peter, leader of Austria’s third-ranking Freedom Party. Back in 1975, Wiesenthal had unmasked Peter
as a corporal who had received a ‘battlefield commission’ as a lieutenant for his ‘valour’ in the ‘1941–2 winter campaign’ of the First SS Infantry
Brigade: an extermination unit which massacred 13,497 civilians in the Ukraine during that winter.

36
. In 1964, both universities revoked Mengele’s degrees ‘because of the crimes he committed as a doctor in the concentration
camp at Auschwitz.’