The Nazi Hunters (40 page)

The report also pointed out that at the time Barbie was not known as a major war criminal, and it gives the benefit of the doubt to the CIC officers who first worked with him. According to David Marwell, OSI’s historian on the investigation, it was “
unclear if they knew at the time they recruited him that he was more than a journeyman intelligence officer.” But by May 1949, the evidence was certainly there that Barbie was wanted for serious war crimes, and the CIC repeatedly hid the fact that he was working for them, fending off all inquiries from the U.S. High Commission for Germany. The result was that the military brass there “did not know that Barbie’s whereabouts were known to CIC officers, and had no reason to suspect that CIC was not telling the truth.” This led to the High Commission’s repeated denials to the French that they knew anything about Barbie’s whereabouts.

The report concluded that the CIC also deliberately kept the CIA in the dark about Barbie. The two agencies were fierce rivals and deeply suspicious of one another. After Barbie arrived in South America, the
report added, there was no evidence that he ever worked for the CIA or any other U.S. government agency.

All of which led Ryan to assert in the report’s conclusions that “the decision to use a former Nazi, even a former Gestapo officer, is one thing; the decision to use a person wanted for war crimes is another.” As for the CIC’s record once it knew it had crossed that line, his judgment is even harsher. “Fear of embarrassment cannot be a valid excuse for one government agency knowingly providing false information to another,” he wrote.

The report was equally blunt in spelling out the CIC’s role in getting Barbie out of Europe. While the Americans had helped other former Nazis get out of Germany before, this was the first and only case, it maintained, when they had used the infamous ratline to do so. They paid Father Krunoslav Dragonović, a Croatian priest who had helped a stream of alleged war criminals from his homeland escape by the same route, to arrange for Barbie and his family to sail from Genoa on a ship to Buenos Aires. From there, they made their way to Bolivia.

In his memoirs, Ryan called the whole episode “
a chronicle of dishonor.” But he was proud of OSI’s report and the immediate impact it had. In a formal note to the French government that accompanied the copy of the report, Secretary of State George Shultz expressed “
deep regrets to the Government of France” for the U.S. role in delaying justice for so long. While the media coverage also played on that theme, there was widespread praise for Washington’s willingness to deal honestly with its historical record. Ryan was especially pleased by the message that French Minister of Justice Robert Badinter dispatched to Attorney General Smith. “
This particularly rigorous work reveals a concern for the investigation of the truth that honors your society,” he wrote.

The Klarsfelds’ long campaign to track down Barbie had produced a ripple effect that was larger than they had ever imagined.

“There is a history in all men’s lives.”

—William Shakespeare,
Henry IV

I
f the handling of the Barbie case represented an unmistakable win for justice and a laudable effort to set the historical record straight, the Kurt Waldheim affair could not have been more different. When the former secretary-general of the United Nations emerged as the leading candidate in Austria’s 1986 presidential election, a series of revelations about his wartime past not only ignited a fiery debate on the campaign trail but also led to angry recriminations among rival Nazi hunters, and between the Jewish community in Austria and the New York–based World Jewish Congress. No one emerged a clear winner, and many reputations were tarred in the process.

On January 29, 1986, Eli Rosenbaum was attending the WJC’s Global Plenary Assembly in Jerusalem when Israel Singer, the organization’s secretary general, abruptly informed him that he was dispatching him to Vienna. There was something that needed checking out there. “
It has to do with Kurt Waldheim,” he explained. “Believe it or not, it looks like our Dr. Waldheim may have been a Nazi. A
real
one.”

Rosenbaum, who had only recently ended his brief stint at a Manhattan
law firm to take the job of general counsel at the WJC, was skeptical. It was no secret that Waldheim had served in the Wehrmacht and that he had been wounded on the Eastern Front, but that was no indication that he was either a member of the Nazi Party or had done anything beyond his duty as a soldier. Rosenbaum’s earlier job at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations had made him acutely aware of how difficult it was to pin personal responsibility for specific crimes on those who had served the Third Reich. “Too frustrating,” he told Singer, trying to fend off the assignment. He was only thirty at the time, but he already felt weary just thinking about the possibility of returning to his old line of work.

Singer, whose parents had fled Austria, was not about to be put off so easily. He took Rosenbaum over to meet another participant in the conference. Leon Zelman was a Polish-born survivor of Auschwitz and Mauthausen who ran the Jewish Welcome Service in Vienna, situated in a small office just opposite St. Stephen’s Cathedral. In that capacity, he had worked hard to encourage Jews to visit Austria and to combat manifestations of that country’s deep-seated anti-Semitism. A recent troubling development, he immediately told Rosenbaum, had raised new questions about Waldheim’s past.

Zelman pulled out an article from the Viennese weekly
Profil
about a controversy triggered by the decision of an Austrian military academy to install a plaque honoring General Alexander Löhr, the commander of the country’s air force before the Anschluss with Germany. As a Luftwaffe commander in World War II, Löhr supervised the surprise bombing of Belgrade on April 6, 1941, obliterating much of the Yugoslav capital and killing thousands of civilians. In 1947, he was tried in Yugoslavia, sentenced to death, and hanged as a war criminal.

In 1942, Löhr had been transferred to the Wehrmacht to serve as the commander of Army Group E, which was responsible for Yugoslavia and Greece. At the very end of the article, the writer mentioned “a rumor” that Waldheim had served on Löhr’s staff during his tenure there. It emphasized that he was only a junior officer, but Zelman saw this as potentially explosive information.

Given the scrutiny Waldheim had undergone during the time he was the head of the United Nations, Rosenbaum was still skeptical. If he had indeed served on the staff of a convicted war criminal, why had that fact not surfaced before? And since Löhr was hanged for crimes he committed before he switched over to the Wehrmacht, thus before any possible involvement on Waldheim’s part, Rosenbaum reasoned that this was “not grounds for condemnation” even if the “rumor” could be confirmed.

Before Rosenbaum could express those doubts, Zelman pointed out the “missing ingredient” in the
Profil
report. In his autobiography, official biographies, and correspondence, Waldheim had omitted any mention of wartime service in the Balkans. After he was wounded on the Eastern Front in 1941, he returned to Austria—and his accounts had always indicated that this had ended his military career.
In a 1980 letter to U.S. Congressman Stephen Solarz, for example, he offered his standard explanation of what happened next: “Being incapacitated for further service on the front, [I] resumed my law studies at Vienna University where I graduated in 1944.”

“But then something is very wrong, you see,” Zelman continued. “If he left [active service] in 1941, how could he ever have served with Löhr in the army? Löhr did not even arrive from the Luftwaffe into the Army
until
1942. There must be a deception.”

Zelman offered to accompany Rosenbaum to Vienna once the conference ended, urging him to make “discreet” inquiries there. Although the American remained doubtful that there was anything new to discover about Waldheim and had been looking forward to returning to New York, he felt he had no choice but to agree. At least Zelman would be there to help provide him with the leads he would need to check out the questions raised by the
Profil
article.

But on his first day in Vienna, Zelman apologetically disabused him of that notion. When Rosenbaum asked him for suggestions on how to start inquiring about Waldheim’s past, his whole demeanor changed. He turned pale and he suddenly looked older and fearful. “You know my situation in Austria is already a difficult one, my dear Eli,” he said. “I love this city, really, but also I know what is underneath the surface.”

The message was clear: as a Jew living in Vienna, he did not want to be linked to anything that Rosenbaum might uncover. When the American asked if he could at least keep him posted about his progress, Zelman was emphatic: “Please, no. No, I don’t think so. You please must keep me out of this.”

He added that he would like to hear the final result, and that Rosenbaum could turn to him if he got into any sort of trouble. But beyond that he was clearly ending his involvement.

“Evidently, it was one thing to be a fearless old Jew in Jerusalem; it was quite another matter in Vienna,” Rosenbaum concluded.

• • •

It was not a simple matter of courage or fear, as Rosenbaum initially assumed. Zelman knew that any probe of Waldheim’s wartime record during the presidential race would trigger a backlash from his supporters, which could be easily directed both against Jews and his Socialist opponents. Waldheim was a candidate of the conservative People’s Party, while the Socialists had put up Kurt Steyrer, who was the underdog in the race. The front-runner was playing up his U.N. leadership role to impress his countrymen with his international credentials. “Dr. Kurt Waldheim: An Austrian the World Trusts,” his campaign posters proclaimed. As Rosenbaum sardonically observed, Waldheim was “
the best-known Austrian since Hitler.”

Thanks to other contacts that Singer had provided, Rosenbaum started connecting with people who had been digging into Waldheim’s past. As he noted, most of them were linked to the ruling Socialist Party; they were the ones who had leaked the initial story to
Profil
but were disappointed that it seemingly had no impact. Rosenbaum’s arrival in Vienna gave them another shot at it—and, in the meantime, they had made more discoveries about Waldheim. The American visitor arranged a meeting with “Karl Schuller,” the pseudonym he gave to the man who swore him to secrecy about his identity. Schuller and some associates had launched the informal investigation, hoping to nail Waldheim.

They had checked in at the U.S.-run Berlin Document Center, which held captured Nazi records, but found nothing on him. They had much
better luck tapping into the Austrian State Archives. Waldheim’s military service record was in a sealed file there, but Schuller said “
a friend of mine who works in the government” had managed to make a copy of a few pages. Although Waldheim had presented his family background as anti-Nazi and he in fact had campaigned against Austria’s incorporation into Germany, those records indicated he had quickly adapted to the new regime once the Anschluss took place in 1938. He was soon listed as a member of the Nazi student organization and, more tellingly, of a riding unit of the SA, the Nazi paramilitary arm known as the Storm Troopers.

As if all that were not explosive enough, Schuller produced a photo taken on May 22, 1943, bearing an official military stamp, showing four officers on an airstrip. As the caption indicated, they included an Italian officer, an SS major general, and First Lieutenant Kurt Waldheim. The location of the photo was listed as Podgorica, placing him in Montenegro’s capital at a time when he had consistently implied he was only studying law in Vienna. This served as additional confirmation that he had served in the Balkans, where Löhr was in charge.

As Rosenbaum realized, the information Schuller and his team had pulled together on Waldheim’s war years was far from exhaustive, but his initial skepticism gave way to the growing conviction that it could fuel major media coverage. Still, he wanted to see what else they had done to verify their findings. He asked what he thought was the obvious question: “
Have you shown the photographs and documents to Simon Wiesenthal? I could call him and—”

Schuller cut him off. “Oh, God, no!” he said, and immediately asked if Wiesenthal knew that Rosenbaum was in Vienna.

When Rosenbaum said he had not told him yet, Schuller was relieved. “Good. He must not find out what you are doing,” he said. He explained that Wiesenthal despised the Socialists and, as a result, favored the People’s Party. If the Nazi hunter was looped in, he “would go straight to Waldheim,” Schuller maintained.

According to Rosenbaum’s account of their conversation, he tried to argue that it would be a mistake to keep Wiesenthal in the dark. “We are
in Vienna,” he said. “It’s right under Wiesenthal’s nose. If we don’t involve him from the start, it’ll be very difficult to ask him for help later.”

But Schuller wouldn’t budge. He told the American he would cut off all cooperation with him if he contacted Wiesenthal.

Rosenbaum chose to obey. The consequences would prove far more serious than even he had predicted.

• • •

Rosenbaum returned to New York to brief his bosses about his findings. WJC President Edgar M. Bronfman, the billionaire chairman of Seagrams, initially questioned whether their group should go public with what it had learned to date. “We’re
not in the Nazi-hunting business,” he said. Everyone knew that this would be seen as “political mudslinging” aimed at stopping Waldheim’s election, Rosenbaum recalled. But they also knew that if they kept quiet until after the voting, they could be accused of trying to protect Waldheim. Singer, armed with a memo from Rosenbaum, urged Bronfman to approve immediate action. After pondering their arguments, Bronfman sent back Rosenbaum’s memo with the handwritten message: “Do it—EMB.”

Rosenbaum reached out to
The New York Times,
and John Tagliabue, one of its most talented correspondents, took the lead on the reporting.
Profil
continued its investigation as well, and broke the news of Waldheim’s membership in the Nazi student organization and the SA in its issue that was published on March 2.