The Nazi Hunters (35 page)

But many Latvians enthusiastically applauded the performances, preferring to remember Cukurs as the popular aviator of the 1930s while ignoring his murderous record afterward. In that sense, Yoav, the Mossad officer who instructed Meidad on his mission, was right: when it comes to the Holocaust, memories are often short—and dangerously selective.

Nazi hunters were always aware of that. For those who refused to give up the fight, it only spurred them on.

“
To the police and the press he’s a boring old nuisance with a file cabinet full of ghosts; kill him and you’re liable to turn him into a neglected hero with living enemies still to be caught.”

Dr. Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s “Angel of Death,” speaking about the character modeled on Simon Wiesenthal in Ira Levin’s bestselling novel
The Boys from Brazil

A
mong the many myths that developed about Nazi hunters, none is more off the mark than the portrayal of Wiesenthal as an avenger who was eager to confront his prey directly, personally tracking fugitive Nazis down to the most remote hiding places in South America if necessary. As portrayed by Laurence Olivier in the 1978 film
The Boys from Brazil,
the Wiesenthal character caught up with Mengele (played by Gregory Peck) at a farm in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, leading to a life-and-death battle. When Olivier literally unleashed the dogs—the famed snarling Dobermans—to prevail, the popular image of Wiesenthal lost all touch with reality: from then on, he was seen as part-Columbo, part–James Bond.

Wiesenthal bore some of the responsibility for those misconceptions.
He had published his book
Ich jagte Eichmann
(I Hunted Eichmann) in 1961 when Mossad chief Isser Harel could not claim credit for the kidnapping or explain what leads had proved to be critical to its success. Despite Wiesenthal’s protestations that he was only one part of “a mosaic” of people who made small contributions to Eichmann’s capture, he was delighted to see his fame growing.
That helped him recover from the closure of his Linz Documentation Center in 1954. On October 1, 1961, he launched his new Documentation Center in Vienna with the help of that city’s Jewish community.

Wiesenthal was reenergized, and he would continue to demonstrate an uncanny knack for self-promotion that included cooperating on occasion with those who transformed the story of Nazis on the run and Nazi hunters into a staple of popular culture.
Frederick Forsyth turned to him for help in providing background for
The Odessa File
, his 1972 bestselling novel, which was made into a hit movie two years later, telling him that he was inspired by a chapter in his 1967 memoir,
The Murderers Among Us.
Wiesenthal was happy to oblige. He even persuaded Forsyth to make his villain a real person: Eduard Roschmann, an Austrian who was the former commander of the Riga Ghetto. Like the Latvian Herbert Cukurs, he was infamous for his brutality.

After the war, Roschmann fled to Argentina, but the book and film ratcheted up the pressure for his capture and extradition. “Roschmann became the hunted man portrayed in the film,” Wiesenthal noted with satisfaction. The former Nazi fled to Paraguay in 1977, dying from a heart attack two weeks after he arrived there. In the film, there was an even more cathartic ending: he was caught and killed.

Wiesenthal claimed he was offered the chance to play himself in the movie for a hefty fee, “but I didn’t want to get involved to that extent with the entertainment industry.” Still, the entertainment industry could not get enough of him, and in a recent rendition it came pretty close to capturing Wiesenthal’s ambivalence and amusement about how he was portrayed. In the advertisements for the 2014 Off-Broadway play
Wiesenthal
, written by Tom Dugan, who also starred in the one-man show,
the Nazi hunter is described as “the Jewish James Bond.” Dugan’s Wiesenthal laughingly dismissed all such notions. “My weapons are persistency, publicity and paperwork,” he told the audience. Which was exactly right.

But if Wiesenthal could both exploit and mock his image, he was very serious about defending his reputation as the leading private Nazi hunter—and dismissing or at least keeping at a distance anyone who might have aspired to challenge him on that score. Tuvia Friedman, who had set up the first Documentation Center in Vienna after the war but then moved to Israel in 1952, was visibly frustrated by how he was eclipsed by Wiesenthal, particularly in the aftermath of the Eichmann kidnapping. “
You are the great Nazi hunter, and I am the little puppy,” Friedman wrote to him. Wiesenthal biographer Tom Segev maintained that his subject treated Friedman “like a poor relation” who had made a critical mistake by moving to Israel, where his activities attracted less and less attention.

Wiesenthal remained firm in his resolve to stay put in Vienna, even after a group that included a former German Nazi who had escaped from prison planted a bomb at the entrance to the building where he lived on July 11, 1982. The device exploded, damaging his building and shattering windows in the house next door, but no one was hurt. While the Vienna authorities placed a guard at his office and house to protect him, he continued to rebuff anyone who suggested that the incident and the hate mail he received might be good reasons to finally move to Israel. “
No, I’m still chasing alligators and I have to live in the swamp,” he told an American lawyer with his characteristic wry smile.

Serge Klarsfeld was one of the younger Nazi hunters who had admired Wiesenthal, and he made a point of visiting him for the first time in Vienna in August 1967. The Frenchman, who was thirty-one then, was surprised that Wiesenthal was “
not shaken” by the fact that Kiesinger, a former Nazi propagandist, was the German chancellor at the time. Wiesenthal later disapproved of Beate Klarsfeld’s famous slap of the German leader and the Klarsfelds’ other dramatic protests. “We did not have the same vision on how to act vis-à-vis the Germans, nor the same methods,”
Serge concluded. “While Simon Wiesenthal maintained good relations with the German leaders, we went to prison.”

Serge maintained—and continues to maintain today—that Wiesenthal deserves great recognition for having kept up the fight to bring Nazis to justice during the 1950s and early 1960s when so many of them were freed or not hunted at all. But he and Beate found themselves quickly at odds with him. Aside from deploring their confrontational tactics—which Beate, in particular, continued to employ on trips to Latin America to demand that Nazis be brought to justice and to protest against right-wing regimes there—Wiesenthal had no sympathy for their leftist politics.

Wiesenthal was conservative both in his personal style and politics, and staunchly anticommunist, denouncing the Polish communist regime for “
using anti-Semitism in exactly the same way it had been used for centuries: to divert attention from its own incompetence and its own crimes.”
He often charged that the Polish communists and the Kremlin were spreading malicious disinformation about him, including forged documents that accused him of everything from collaboration with the Nazis to working for the Israelis and the CIA. Beate, by contrast, was proud of the accolades she regularly received from the East German government and press and wrote articles for a pro-communist West German weekly, although she, too, protested against the use of anti-Semitic propaganda by communist regimes.

Such differences would lead to growing tensions among the Nazi hunters in the years ahead.

• • •

From the very beginning, Wiesenthal believed that his mission was as much about educating the next generation as it was about seeking a measure of justice for the millions of victims of his generation. Those two goals were intertwined, and so were the methods to achieve them. The exposure and, in the best case, capture and trial of former Nazis provided the evidence to counter the postwar efforts to, if not deny outright, at least downplay the horrors of the Third Reich. In some cases, mere exposure—in effect, the personalization of actions that were otherwise
too huge and abstract to make an impact—was enough for Wiesenthal to feel that he had scored a genuine success, even when this did not lead to any legal consequences.

The most dramatic example: his quest to find the Gestapo officer who arrested Anne Frank.
In October 1958, when Wiesenthal was still living in Linz, the Landestheater staged
The Diary of Anne Frank
. A friend called him one evening to tell him to come quickly to the theater to witness the open displays of anti-Semitism that were taking place. Arriving at the theater when the play had just ended, Wiesenthal learned that teenage hecklers had been shouting “Traitors! Toadies! Swindle!” They also threw leaflets in the theater claiming that the famous diarist never existed: “The Jews have invented the whole business to squeeze out more compensation. Don’t believe a word of it. It’s all pure invention.”

All of this, as Wiesenthal saw it, was part of a broader effort by former Nazis and their sympathizers to discredit the hugely popular book that personalized the Holocaust in a way that they found immensely threatening. They were trying “to poison the minds” of the young generation, he concluded. Two days later when he and a friend were sitting in a coffeehouse discussing the incident, some high school boys were sitting at the next table. Wiesenthal’s friend asked one of them what he thought of the whole controversy, and the boy echoed the claim that Anne Frank was not a real person.

“But the diary?” Wiesenthal asked. The boy replied that it could be a forgery and offered no proof that Frank had existed. Nor was he swayed by the fact that Otto Frank, Anne’s father and the only survivor of the family, had testified about how the Gestapo had arrested them, which led to their deportation to Auschwitz. (Later, Anne and her older sister, Margot, were transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where they both died just as the war was ending; Anne was only fifteen at the time.)

Finally, Wiesenthal asked whether he would be convinced if he could hear what happened from the officer who had carried out the arrest. “Okay, if he admits it himself,” the boy replied, clearly convinced that would never happen.

Wiesenthal took the boy’s statement as a challenge. He did not make
any progress for years, but an appendix to the young girl’s diary mentioned a former employee of Otto Frank’s company who had gone to Gestapo headquarters after the family was arrested, hoping to help them. The man recalled that he had spoken to the officer who had carried out the arrest, an SS man from Vienna whose name started with something like “Silver.” Wiesenthal assumed that had to be “Silber” in German. He found several “Silbernagels” in the Vienna phone book who had been SS men, but none of them panned out.

His break came on a visit to Amsterdam in 1963. A Dutch police officer gave him a photocopy of the 1943 phone directory for the Gestapo in Holland, which listed three hundred names. On his flight back to Vienna, under a heading that read “IV B4, Joden (Jews),” he found the name “Silberbauer.” Knowing that most of the officers in that department were police officers, Wiesenthal contacted an Interior Ministry official who claimed they would look into the matter. They did, but tried to hush up the discovery that Karl Silberbauer, the officer who admitted to arresting Anne Frank, was still on duty in the Vienna police. They suspended him, but
Volksstimme
, the Austrian Communist Party newspaper, picked up on the story after Silberbauer complained to a colleague that he was “having some bother because of Anne Frank.” Radio Moscow trumpeted the story as well.

Wiesenthal did not succeed in getting anyone to prosecute Silberbauer. But his efforts paid off when other journalists picked up on the story. Tipped off by Wiesenthal, a Dutch reporter went to interview Silberbauer in Vienna. “Why pick on me after all these years?” the former SS officer complained. “I only did my duty.” Asked if he felt sorry about what he did, he replied: “Sure I feel sorry. Sometimes I feel downright humiliated.” Why? Because he had been suspended from the police force and lost his privilege of riding trams for free; he had to buy tickets like everyone else.

The reporter asked if he had read Frank’s diary. “Bought the little book last week to see whether I’m in it,” Silberbauer said. “But I am not.” It seemingly did not occur to him that his arrest of its author meant that she no longer had the opportunity to write in it.

Silberbauer only became known because of his famous victim, but he was a minor functionary of the Third Reich. Like so many others who sent less famous people to their deaths, he never paid any real price for his actions. Wiesenthal would have liked to have seen something more than his public exposure, but the authorities were not interested in pursuing a case against him.

Nonetheless, Wiesenthal had ample reason to feel vindicated. In the decades since then, Anne Frank’s diary has continued to serve as one of the most powerful personal testimonies about the Holocaust, educating successive new generations of schoolchildren. The efforts to discredit it fizzled out. Even the most ardent Nazi sympathizers could not contradict the direct testimony of a former SS officer who saw nothing wrong with what he had done.

• • •

As Wiesenthal recalled in his later memoir,
Justice Not Vengeance
, he was sitting on the terrace of the Café Royal in Tel Aviv in January 1964 when he was paged to come to the phone. Returning to his table, he found it occupied by three women. He was about to take the magazine he had left there and look for another place when one of the women got up and apologized in Polish for sitting at his table. “But when we heard your name on the loudspeaker we wanted to talk to you,” she said. “All three of us were in Majdanek. So we thought we should ask you. You must know what happened to Kobyła.”

In Polish, “Kobyła” means mare, but Wiesenthal did not know who or what she was talking about.

“Forgive me, we always think everybody must know who Kobyła was,” she added. She explained that this was the nickname for an Austrian guard who was especially feared because of her habit of viciously kicking women prisoners and freely using the whip that she carried whenever a new transport arrived. Her real name was Hermine Braunsteiner.