The Nazi Hunters (49 page)
Authors: Andrew Nagorski
At the end of his life, Wiesenthal declared that one of his greatest satisfactions was to outlive most of the perpetrators who had put him and millions of others into concentration camps. “I’ve tried to make sure that people don’t forget what happened,” he told me during our last conversation. Since his death in 2005, Austria—his postwar home and the country he so often denounced for not facing up to its Nazi past—has increasingly acknowledged his contributions. The people who bought the Wiesenthals’ semidetached house in Vienna’s 19th district asked his daughter, Paulinka, if they could put up a plaque in his honor—and if she could provide the wording. It reads: “Here lived Simon Wiesenthal who dedicated his life to justice and his wife who made this possible.”
The story of the Nazi hunters is almost at its end, at least the part that involves trying to track down surviving war criminals. But their legacy endures.
(1)
U.S. Army Master Sergeant John C. Woods (center) was supposed to hang eleven top Nazis in Nuremberg on October 16, 1946. Hermann Göring (top left) eluded the noose by committing suicide. The other ten were (top row, after Göring) Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick and Julius Streicher; (second row) Fritz Sauckel and Joachim von Ribbentrop; (third row) Alfred Jodl and Arthur Seyss-Inquart; (bottom row) Alfred Rosenberg, Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Wilhelm Keitel. The lingering question: did Woods deliberately botch one or two of the hangings?
(2)
No other Nazi hunter achieved as much fame—or generated as much controversy and, at times, fury—as Simon Wiesenthal. But even his critics acknowledge that he played a pivotal role in keeping up the pressure on Hitler’s executioners who had evaded justice.
(3)
Like Wiesenthal, Tuvia Friedman was a Holocaust survivor who ended up in Austria, tracking war criminals. The two Nazi hunters worked together on occasion, but largely parted ways when Friedman moved to Israel.
(4)
William Denson, the U.S. Army chief prosecutor at the Dachau trials of concentration camp personnel, produced a remarkable scorecard: guilty verdicts in all 177 of his cases. But his success rate led to accusations that there had been a rush to judgment.
(5)
Dubbed “the Bitch of Buchenwald,” Ilse Koch, the widow of the camp’s commandant, was infamous for sexually taunting prisoners. Denson called witnesses who offered lurid testimony, including dubious stories about lampshades made of the skin of her victims.
(6)
Benjamin Ferencz was only twenty-seven when he became the chief prosecutor of what the Associated Press called “the biggest murder trial in history”: the Nuremberg trial of twenty-two commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, the special mass murder units on the Eastern Front.
(7)
Otto Ohlendorf was the highly educated commander of Einsatzgruppe D, the most notorious killing squad. General Telford Taylor called him and the other defendants the leaders of “the trigger men in this gigantic program of slaughter.” Ohlendorf was hanged in 1951.
(8)
Polish investigating judge Jan Sehn interrogated Rudolf Höss, Auschwitz’s longest serving commandant, and convinced him to write his memoirs before he was hanged in 1947. The account reflected his pride in the “improvements” he made in the camp’s machinery of death, providing a chilling glimpse into the mind of a mass murderer. Subsequent Nazi hunters viewed the book as essential reading.
(9)
From left, Richard Baer, the last commandant of Auschwitz, at a retreat with Josef Mengele and Rudolf Höss (front, right of center) in July 1944, following Höss’s reassignment to the Concentration Camp Inspectorate.
(10)
After receiving the tip that Eichmann was in Buenos Aires, Mossad chief Isser Harel (above) launched the investigation that eventually led to Eichmann’s capture. He deployed a team of agents to Buenos Aires who mounted the elaborate operation that stunned Argentina and the world.
(11)
Rafi Eitan (above, at a shooting range in Israel in 1984) was in charge of the commando unit that kidnapped Eichmann in Buenos Aires on May 11, 1960. He emphasized that, until then, Israel had not made Nazi hunting a top priority.
