The Nazi Hunters (42 page)

Concentrating all his fire in that direction, Waldheim refused to debate his Socialist opponent and announced that he would not take more questions from the foreign press. When I approached him at the beginning of the rally to see if he would make an exception, he let loose with his anger. “I tell you frankly that the reporting of your magazine was so bad and so negative and so against good faith that I do not intend to give any interview. You accept always the negative arguments and never accept the positive as far as I am concerned.” As for the accusations against him, “it’s all not true, it’s all an invention,” he said. Then, pointing to the tape recorder I had been holding up to him, he added: “It’s not an official statement.”

All of which encapsulated the widespread bitterness as the campaign entered its final days. Vienna psychiatrist Erwin Ringel pointed out “
the absurdity” of Waldheim’s campaign that had started by playing up his stature abroad and ended the way it did. “At first, it was ‘Elect Waldheim because the world loves him,’ ” he said. “Now it’s ‘Elect Waldheim because the world hates him.’ ”

In electoral terms, those tactics worked: Waldheim won the run-off decisively. In the wake of that victory, he could not resist taunting the group that he held responsible for the “
slander campaign” that he had been subjected to. “Even if the World Jewish Congress rummages around in archives until the end of time, it will not find anything to incriminate me,” he declared.

In the end, the WJC could claim a partial victory when, in April 1987, the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, Rosenbaum’s former employer, issued its own report on Waldheim, arguing that an examination of his duties in the Balkans “
reveal him to have assisted in the smooth operation of a Nazi military organization that committed
numerous and direct acts of persecution against Allied nationals and civilians.” It specifically mentioned, among other events, “the Kocane-Stip massacres, and the deportation of Greek Jews.” On that basis he was placed on the U.S. Watch List, which meant he was not permitted entry to the United States ever again, even to speak at the United Nations, the organization he once headed. He served out one term in office and then did not seek reelection in 1992.

Herzstein, the World War II historian the WJC dispatched to investigate Waldheim’s record, produced a book summing up his conclusions. While agreeing with the Justice Department decision to put Waldheim on the Watch List, he noted that Waldheim was “
a man who was not evil but merely ambitious and clever. . . . He was a man, like many of his generation, who had tried to dispose of the awkward baggage of his past by forgetting about it.” He concluded: “Given what we know now, it is fair to say that while Waldheim assisted many individuals who fell into the war-criminal category, he was not a war criminal himself. Rather he was a bureaucratic accessory to both the criminal and the legitimate military activities [of his unit]. . . . Waldheim was a facilitator. The Western Allies did not generally prosecute such individuals after the war.”

That was a far more nuanced view than the WJC leaders and their supporters had offered during the campaign. “
In a perfect world he would stand trial,” WJC executive director Elan Steinberg declared, ignoring the fact that no smoking gun was ever produced that could have led to a conviction.
Beate Klarsfeld showed up at Waldheim rallies to harass him, joining small groups of protesters who released balloons saying “Happy is he who forgets” and holding up posters denouncing the candidate as a liar and a war criminal. Waldheim supporters angrily tore the posters from their hands.

“
I came here to show that it’s a danger for Austria to elect a man like Waldheim,” Klarsfeld told me in between her protests in Vienna. “The Austrians have to open their eyes to this.” But such warnings only seemed to help Waldheim. When Klarsfeld attempted to interrupt the candidate as he spoke at another rally, she was blocked from taking the microphone. “Sit down, Mrs. Klarsfeld,” said Vienna Mayor Erhard Busek, who was
chairing the session. “You are a guest here. This is not a Klarsfeld rally.” Members of the audience shouted “Get out, Mrs. Klarsfeld.”

Singer, the WJC secretary general, did not help matters by appearing to make a direct threat in a widely quoted interview in
Profil.
“
It should be clear to the Austrian public that if Waldheim is elected, the next few years won’t be easy for the Austrians,” he said. He added that the accusations the organization had leveled would “haunt and follow” not just Waldheim but also the Austrian nation, and tourism and trade would suffer.

Even Rosenbaum conceded later that his boss had spoken “intemperately,” but the top leaders had few second thoughts. WJC President Bronfman dismissed those who flinched at their tactics. “
Many Jewish leaders believed this ‘attack’ would create bad will, and worse,” he wrote in his memoirs. “I believed it was a moral imperative, and everywhere I went, the audiences I spoke to were 100 percent behind me.” He added that the campaign was “terrific publicity for the WJC, and put us front and center.”

But many members of Austria’s small Jewish community were appalled by the blowback from that publicity. Wiesenthal was the most vociferous among them, directly blaming the WJC for the resurgence of open anti-Semitism. “
We had created many friends of Israel within the young population,” he said, referring to the Jewish community’s efforts to promote dialogue and understanding. “Now this whole building effort has been destroyed.”

Other leaders of the Austrian Jews shared Wiesenthal’s frustration with the WJC for failing to consider their perspective or to consult with them. Paul Grosz called the organization’s performance “
very apt as far as publicity in the Western media was concerned [but] very amateurish as far as the whole case was handled, especially as regards the repercussions within Austria. A lot of damage has been done.” At a meeting of European Jewish members of the WJC where he represented the Austrians, Grosz won support for his recommendation that in the future local Jewish communities had to be consulted before actions were taken that could affect them.

Still keeping quiet about how he had tipped the WJC to the initial Waldheim news, Zelman said it was the WJC’s obligation to raise the issue “but they were speaking from the perspective of American Jews, which is not understood here.” He was deeply troubled by what he called the return of a “we and you” mentality when Austrians dealt with Jews. “The worst thing they [the WJC] did was to identify Waldheim with everyone here over 65,” he added. “That was terrible.” Wiesenthal argued that their mistake was even greater. “They threatened the whole Austrian nation, seven and a half million people, and among them are five million who were born after the war or were small children at the end of the war.”

It was not only a question of the nature of the accusations but also how they were delivered. “They first accused and then looked for the documents,” Wiesenthal charged. That was an oversimplification, since the WJC already had significant evidence in hand when they began their publicity campaign. But by their own admission, it was far from complete—which meant they had to keep scrambling to search for more evidence afterward. According to Grosz, this dramatically weakened the impact of their findings. “The fact that the evidence against Waldheim was put forth piecemeal had the effect of immunization,” he said. “Like when you get a drop of poison every few days until you are able to drink a full glass.”

There was a critical reason why so many Austrians felt defensive to begin with. During the early postwar period they had successfully presented themselves as the first victims of the Third Reich, rather than the enthusiastic supporters that so many of them were. For many Austrians, including demobilized Wehrmacht soldiers, the moment of truth never came. “Nobody told these men after they came home that those were lost years and that this had been an unjust war,” said Erika Weinzierl, the director of the Institute of Contemporary History in Vienna.

By comparison, Germans had been forced to confront such truths on an almost daily basis, including their responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust and other mass killings. I was based in Bonn when the Waldheim affair was propelled into the headlines, and many Germans I
knew made no effort to hide their Schadenfreude. They loved seeing the debunking of the myth that the Austrians were victims not perpetrators. “The Austrians have convinced the world that Beethoven was an Austrian and Hitler was a German,” they joked. A Bonn official who had served in the Wehrmacht at the end of the war told me: “
I’m one of those Germans who say the Austrians are finally getting the justice they deserve.”

A positive result of the Waldheim affair was that at least some Austrians, particularly younger teachers, began pushing to offer a more honest accounting of their country’s recent history. And in the wake of Waldheim’s victory, Foreign Minister Peter Jankowitsch argued that “a new kind of sensitivity” had emerged that was producing a period of “soul searching.” Lectures and conferences on topics like anti-Semitism proliferated, and Austrian diplomats stepped up their efforts to convince foreign audiences that the country was no bastion of neo-Nazi thinking. This may have been mostly a public relations exercise at first, but it allowed the discussion of issues that had largely been ignored before.

Nonetheless, emotions were still extremely raw on all sides. And in the conflict between Wiesenthal and the World Jewish Congress, those emotions escalated even further after Waldheim’s victory.

• • •

As Rosenbaum repeatedly pointed out, he had considered Wiesenthal his hero when he was growing up. But during and after the 1986 campaign, he and the leaders of the WJC were furious that, as they saw it, he undercut their assault on Waldheim at every turn. Wiesenthal questioned much of the evidence, arguing that none of it constituted proof that Waldheim was involved in war crimes. But what infuriated his accusers even more were his assertions that the WJC was to blame for the anti-Semitism that had become all too visible in the People’s Party campaign.

Venting to Singer about Wiesenthal, Rosenbaum declared: “
I hate to say it, but that’s the anti-Semites’ line: ‘The Jews are getting what they deserve.’ ” Singer was equally enraged. “What’s
wrong
with Wiesenthal?” he demanded as he reviewed the Nazi hunter’s latest statements. “Somebody oughta remind him: Jews don’t cause anti-Semitism;
anti-Semites
cause anti-Semitism.” It was a short leap from that to charging that Wiesenthal
was, in Singer’s words, “in bed with those People’s Party pigs”—in effect, defending their candidate.

By the time Waldheim emerged battered but victorious, Rosenbaum wanted to go public with all his pent-up frustrations and accusations. He drafted a response for Singer to an article by Wiesenthal in Vienna’s Jewish newspaper
Der Ausweg
where he once again attacked the WJC. “
There can be little doubt that it was Mr. Wiesenthal who ensured the electoral victory of Dr. Waldheim,” he wrote, adding that whenever more evidence was produced about the candidate “the world’s most famous Nazi hunter was there with one or another unlikely ‘explanation.’ ”

Rosenbaum also pointed out that Wiesenthal had rejected the WJC’s belated offer to him, after the Waldheim story broke, to examine their documentation. “His whitewashing of Kurt Waldheim will long be a stain on his reputation,” he concluded. “He has humiliated himself and embarrassed the Jewish world. For Simon Wiesenthal, we have only pity.” Although a colleague toned down his draft before sending it off to
Der Ausweg,
it was never published.

In his subsequent book about the Waldheim affair, Rosenbaum developed an even more elaborate theory, which was spelled out in its title:
Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up.
He argued that both Waldheim and Wiesenthal were guilty of a cover-up—
“each had a secret, and their secrets would have to share the same destiny,” he wrote. Wiesenthal’s secret, he maintained, was that he had previously absolved Waldheim when he was asked by the Israelis to check him out in 1979. “
If one can be guilty of malpractice in the field of Nazi-hunting, this was surely it,” he wrote. Which was why he was desperate to discredit the WJC’s accusations; otherwise it would be clear that “
he had failed so horribly.”

Having arrived at that conclusion, Rosenbaum turned much of his book about the Waldheim affair into a scathing denunciation of Wiesenthal’s entire career. Picking up on the charges of Mossad chief Isser Harel that Wiesenthal had built his early reputation on false claims of credit for Eichmann’s capture, he painted a portrait of a man who “
played loosely with the facts of his background” in his autobiographies, inflating
both the drama of his wartime experiences and his accomplishments in the postwar period. “Those of us who had actually prosecuted Nazi criminals knew that the myth of the man was far larger than his life,” he wrote. Many people, he added, knew that he was “
pathetically ineffective” as a Nazi hunter. “
But who was daring—or foolish—enough to stand up and say so?”

Rosenbaum had clearly decided to become that someone from then on. He does acknowledge Wiesenthal’s critical role in keeping the issue of “
unprosecuted, unpursued Nazis” alive during the early days of the Cold War. “Without in particular Simon Wiesenthal’s work and Tuvia Friedman’s as well, I think the pursuit of justice would have ended sometime in the late 1960s,” he told me in 2013. But ever since the Waldheim affair, he has fumed whenever Wiesenthal is characterized as an accomplished Nazi hunter with a legitimate claim to that designation. His anger has never abated.

A variety of factors fed into the Rosenbaum-Wiesenthal conflict, some intensely personal. After he left government service, Martin Mendelsohn, the lawyer who first hired Rosenbaum as an intern at OSI, frequently cooperated with Wiesenthal and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles as he handled other Nazi cases. He ascribed Rosenbaum’s anger at Wiesenthal to his disillusionment with his former hero. “
He started out idolizing Simon, and when he found out the man had clay feet and was actually a human being not a god, he turned on him,” he said. Another former OSI colleague suggested that Rosenbaum felt like a spurned son when Wiesenthal contemptuously dismissed his efforts to build a case against Waldheim. “
I think Eli was personally offended the way Wiesenthal treated him like a little kid,” he said.