SIMON WIESENTHAL, the Nazi hunter of Vienna, has spent nearly 40 years in a highly lauded and seemingly endless effort to bring to justice the murderers of the Holocaust.
His looks, though, hint little of this role. He seems nothing more than a paunchy senior citizen whose greatest mission is finding presents for his three grandchildren. During a recent breakfast interview in New York, he also seemed quaintly out of march with the times.
Outside, New Yorkers were walking to work. Inside, at the ornate Park Avenue hotel where Wiesenthal was staying, visitors could glimpse frilly bras and pastel panties hung out for display during the hotel`s biennial showing by underwearmakers, at least a dozen of them from Germany.
Happiness, gaiety and light. And Wiesenthal was still talking about the two-edged sword that has driven him for half a lifetime: death, the executions of millions of innocents, from the youngest babies to the most enfeebled old grandmothers; and justice, his need to seek court-ordered punishment, however inadequate, for those deaths.
WHY DOESN`T he let it drop now? Wiesenthal says he often is asked. And if the question is not raised by others, he will raise it himself. Wiesenthal is 76, and the Nazis he searches for, even the youngest, are at least in their 60s. An old man chasing other old men, racing with time to bring war criminals to human courts before all of them are called to a higher court.
One of Wiesenthal`s most-wanted Nazis, Walter Rauff, who designed mobile vans that used exhaust fumes to gas thousands of Jews, escaped Wiesenthal`s Jewish Documentation Center staff last May by dying at the age of 77–one day, according to Wiesenthal, before there was to have been a new demand for Rauff`s extradition from Chile. News accounts indicate that Rauff, an old, physically ravaged man, died of a heart attack and long-term lung cancer. Rauff`s victims, who perhaps entered the death vans with little fear because of the red crosses painted on them, died in 15 to 20 minutes.
”Well, that close the file,” Wiesenthal, whose English is convoluted and heavily accented, said without bitterness.
There are still, by his estimate, many thousands of Nazi criminals to be brought to justice, including Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz physician who is called the ”Angel of Death,” now 73 and living, Wiesenthal said, in Paraguay.
STILL, WHY go on? For Wiesenthal, it is a question easily answered because he has been answering it so long.
”So many trials” of the Nazi criminals ”are of a symbolic nature,”
Wiesenthal acknowledged. ”How can you give a sentence to a man who is the murderer of 10,000? Okay, he got life. But he had only his one life. You understand this?
”And people say, `Forty years later, you will never reach all the people that committed crimes. You haven`t enough time. So stop. Say finish.` There are a number of people who say this.
”And in May, 1985, will be 40 years since my liberation (from the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria). And I have not interrupted for one day. Why? Because I am looking on my work from absolutely another point of view: I am looking at it as a warning to the murderers of tomorrow that they will never rest.
”Look at all these (escaped Nazis) in South America, in South Africa, in Australia, here in the States. Their life is not worth any importance.
”What they do is they wish to die in peace. The fact is that in many American countries, South American countries, they don`t sleep longer than two weeks in the same bed. They have bodyguards. When they are going somewhere, they look to see maybe if someone is behind them. This is the warning.”
YET CONSIDER: A man whom Wiesenthal identifies as a Nazi criminal may come before a court of law and well may be acquitted because the trail of evidence is cold after 40 years. In the eyes of society, such a man is wiped clean of guilt. Jewish survivors, according to Wiesenthal, have refused to shake his hand because they hold him responsible for setting into motion legal processes that have set monsters free.
”Sometimes I see an acquittal in absolutely another way,” said Wiesenthal, who was on one of his frequent visits to the United States. ”An acquittal make protest. A protest is a revolt of an individual against a situation. Individuals are thinking about this. When is an acquittal–they say, `This is absolutely impossible!` (A person) is talking to his friends; he is coming home and saying, `Look, this is terrible. What kind of world we are living in that such a murderer was acquitted?` ”
THERE IS another reason he plays by civilized rules. At the end of World War II, Wiesenthal said, he was approached by Jewish partisans.
”They was coming from Russia, they was coming from Yugoslavia and saying, `Give us the names. Why wait for trials? Who knows when the trials will happen? For us, will be enough if you say guilty.`
”And I say, `How many can you kill? Six. Sixty. Maybe. But when the number will be bigger than that, the world will stop you.
”And what will happen? A balance. People will say, `The Nazis killed Jews, and after the war, the Jews kill Nazis.` It`s end of the story. There will be 60 against 6 millions. And the matter is over.”
WIESENTHAL`S STORY has been told and retold. A 1967 book about his work,
”The Murderers Among Us,” relates that he was born Dec. 31, 1908, in an area that is now part of the Soviet Ukraine. He was the son of a wholesale commodity dealer who died in action in World War I.
By 1936, Wiesenthal was a successful architect, a career that ended in 1941 with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. He and his wife, Cyla, were able to escape death in a series of concentration camps and hideaways. To the happy amazement of both, they found each other after the war. (They live in a Vienna home equipped with an alarm system and guarded by Austrian police; it was bombed in 1982, but neither Wiesenthal nor his wife was hurt.)
Eighty-nine members of Wiesenthal and his wife`s families, including his mother, did not survive the Nazis. The biography tells how Wiesenthal ”looked on helplessly on one occasion as the SS crammed old Jewish women in freight cars. . . . They let the cars stand for three days in the blazing August sun while the women begged for water. One of them was his 63-year-old mother.” He learned that she died later at the Belzec concentration camp.
WEIGHING ABOUT 90 pounds, a weakened and demoralized Wiesenthal was liberated May 5, 1945, by American troops at Mauthausen. He worked for a while with the U.S. Army`s War Crimes section but became disillusioned by what he saw as the Americans` on again, off again investigation methods and their inclination to be sidetracked by pretty German women.
He opened the Jewish Historical Documentation Center in 1947. It closed during the Cold War, when public interest turned from Nazis to newer enemies, and reopened after the Israelis` 1960-61 capture, trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann, chief of the Gestapo`s Jewish department.
Wiesenthal`s painstaking detective work aided in Eichmann`s capture. (On the other hand, he confesses in ”Murderers,” his incautious talk to a blabby Israeli probably torpedoed an attempt to capture Eichmann in Europe in 1949.) WIESENTHAL AND his center claim responsibility for helping to track down about 1,100 Nazi war criminals, among them Fritz Stangl, commander of the Treblinka and Sobibor concentration camps in Poland, and Karl Silberbauer, who arrested Anne Frank.
Wiesenthal, who has been called a ”Jewish James Bond,” has been highly decorated for his work. There are other Nazi hunters, but none so committed to the task as and none with his international stature and respect.
Even such a man as Simon Wiesenthal, though, is not without controversy.
A long-standing debate–much anger, in fact–swirls around Wiesenthal`s determination to regard all victims of the Holocaust, whether they be Jews, Poles, Gypsies or others, as equals in death.
”You should present our Jewish tragedy as a human tragedy,” he said.
”Through this, we have the right to motivate other people to help us fight against its repetition.
”FOR 2,000 YEARS the world was silent when they heard the Jews are murdered. It made absolutely no influence on them. This was normal–like epidemic, the flu. . . . (And then came) the first time in our 2,000-year history that the Jews and 15 other nations had the same enemy.
”And you know what happened? We have reduced Nazism to a Jewish question. And this is the big guilt, it is a very big guilt. (Other victims)
are not forgetting it. And sometimes we hear from them bitter words: `You Jews separated yourselves. And now you are crying your eyes over it.` ”
One of the Jewish leaders who disagrees strongly with Wiensenthal on that point is Elie Wiesel, author, professor and concentration-camp victim, who heads the federally established U.S. Holocaust Memorial Committee. Wiesel said he did not wish to engage in public debate with Wiesenthal, but he said in a recent phone interview that ”the (Holocaust) survivors are angry at him. They believe he is watering it down.”
WIESEL VIEWS the Holocaust as ”a uniquely Jewish tragedy with universal implications.” This ”does not mean there were not other victims nor that we should not use it to learn lessons that pertain to humankind,” he said. But Adolf Hitler`s overriding purpose was to annihilate all Jews, and if this fact is obscured and forgotten, Wiesel and others fear, the world will be less prepared to recognize racism and genocide, directed at Jews or other groups, when they arise again.
There is some controversy, too, over the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, an educational center and museum that is independent of Wiesenthal`s documentation center in Vienna.
A lengthy article in the September issue of Baltimore Jewish Times, headlined ”The Simon Wiesenthal Center: State-of-the art activism or Hollywood hype?”, repeated the opinions of some in the Jewish community that Marvin Hier, a rabbi who is the director of the center, is using overly slick fund-raising methods and also is overdramatizing isolated instances of anti-Semitism to win publicity and funds.
WIESENTHAL LENT his name to the California center and makes frequent appearances there, and the Vienna center receives regular donations from Los Angeles. Wiesenthal wholeheartedly supports the efforts of Hier, noting that the staff of the Los Angeles center, which was defaced by swastikas in 1981, successfully pushed for passage of a California law increasing penalties for vandalism against places of worship and cemeteries.
”Jews should be happy that such an organization exists and that they are doing something,” he said.
When Wiesenthal is no longer the world`s premier Nazi hunter (and there is no indication he will leave this role any time soon), who will replace him? WIESENTHAL himself is hoping that the ”extremists” section of his documentation center will continue to monitor political extremists, including neo-Nazis, around the world. And Hier has said that the Los Angeles center is committed to continuing Wiesenthal`s work.
Wiesenthal`s long preoccupation with mass murderers has not affected his warmth or humor.
”When we celebrated my 75th birthday,” he said. ”I was sitting with a group of people, and they say, `How long?` I said, `I will prolongate my work only on two conditions: The Lord should give me help, and my friends, money.` ”
