The Nazi Hunters (6 page)

In a more disciplined manner, they then continued on their self-proclaimed mission of finding “the Nazis who had murdered and butchered, to seek some degree of vengeance and bring them to justice.” Reporting to the Ministry of State Security, the eager recruits were told to help round up all remaining German men between the ages of fifteen and sixty. “Let us find the Nazi scum and cleanse the city,” their new superior officer told them.

In his memoirs, Friedman had recalled his older sister Bella’s reaction to the first deportations of Jews from Radom—specifically, that “they go like sheep to the slaughter.” It was a refrain that would haunt discussions of the Holocaust for a long time. But in noting his own satisfaction at the terror he inspired in Danzig as he interrogated and imprisoned Germans there, Friedman used the same freighted analogy: “Now, the tables had turned, and thanks to my smart Polish uniform, I could order these once proud members of the master race about like so many frightened sheep.”

He admitted that he was “quite merciless” with the prisoners he interrogated, beating them to extract confessions. “My heart was filled with hate. I hated them in defeat as I had hated them in their brutal moments of victory.”

Writing long after the war, he declared: “Today, looking back, I am
somewhat ashamed, but one must remember that that was the Spring of 1945, the Germans were still fighting to the bitter end on two fronts against the Allied forces as well as the Russian forces, and I had still not heard one word about whether any one member of my family had survived the Nazi camps.” He and others were still also discovering more evidence of the horrors committed by the Germans, such as a room filled with naked bodies displaying the telltale signs of systematic torture. But he also claimed to have experienced the first pangs of unease about his growing reputation as “the unmerciful one.”

Then word came that Bella had survived Auschwitz, prompting Friedman to turn in his uniform and head back to Radom. There, both of them decided to leave Poland, which they felt was an increasingly alien country. Anti-Semitic violence was still all too commonplace, and no other immediate family members had returned from the camps. Their original plan was to go to Palestine, joining the stream of Jewish survivors who were helped by Brichah (“flight” in Hebrew), the underground organization whose mission was to organize illegal escape routes from Europe for them. This was the postwar exodus that set the stage for the creation of the state of Israel.

But Friedman’s journey was soon interrupted, and he ended up for several years in Austria instead. There he could pursue his passion for hunting Nazis. He was determined to keep settling scores—although abandoning the brutal, indiscriminate methods championed by Poland’s new communist masters.

• • •

Seeing the big tank with an American flag waving from its turret rolling into the Mauthausen concentration camp near the Austrian city of Linz on May 5, 1945, the emaciated prisoner in his striped uniform was eager to touch the white star on its side. But he couldn’t summon the strength to walk the final few yards to reach it. His knees buckled and he collapsed face first. As an American soldier lifted him up, the prisoner managed to point to the tank and touch the star—before he fainted.

When he came to in the barracks where he found himself lying alone in his bunk, Simon Wiesenthal knew he was a free man. Many of the SS
guards had fled the night before, there was only one person to a bunk, the dead bodies that had been there in the morning were now gone, and the smell of DDT filled the air. Most importantly, the Americans brought in big soup kettles. “
This was
real
soup, and it tasted delicious,” Wiesenthal recalled.

It also made him and many of the other prisoners violently ill since they could not digest such rich fare. But in the days ahead, which Wiesenthal remembered as a period of “pleasant apathy” after the daily struggles in the camp to stay alive, a steady diet of more soup, vegetables, and meat, along with pills administered by American doctors in white coats, brought him back to the land of the living. For many others—Wiesenthal puts the figure at three thousand—it was too late. They died of exhaustion or starvation after their liberation.

Wiesenthal was no stranger to violence and tragedy even before World War II and the Holocaust. On December 31, 1908, he was born in Buczacz, a small town in eastern Galicia that was at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; after World War I it belonged to Poland, and today it is a part of Ukraine. Its population was heavily Jewish, but the entire region was a mix of nationalities and languages, which meant that Wiesenthal grew up hearing German, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian.

The region was soon engulfed by the violence of World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the ensuing civil wars there pitting Russians, Poles, and Ukrainians against each other.
Wiesenthal’s father, a successful commodities dealer, died early in the war fighting for the Austrian army. Wiesenthal’s mother took her two sons to Vienna afterward, but returned to Buczacz once the Russians had retreated in 1917. When Simon was twelve, a marauding Ukrainian cavalryman slashed his thigh, leaving him with a scar for life. When Simon was still a teenager, his younger brother Hillel died from a spinal injury caused by a fall.

Wiesenthal studied architecture in Prague, but returned home to marry his high school sweetheart, Cyla Müller, and set up an office that designed residential buildings. During his student days and back in Buczacz he had many Jewish and non-Jewish friends, and he never gravitated
to radical left-wing politics as many young people at the time did. The one political idea that intrigued him related to a different cause than the ones they espoused. “
As a young person, I was a Zionist,” he reminded me and other interviewers frequently.

The Holocaust was no abstraction for him, any more than it was for Friedman and other survivors. He and his family lived through the first part of the war in Lwów, or Lviv as the city is now known, which was first taken over by Soviet forces as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that divided Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union, and then was swiftly overrun by the German army during Hitler’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union.

The Wiesenthals were at first confined to a ghetto in the city, then held in a nearby concentration camp, and next assigned to the Ostbahn (Eastern Railroad) Repair Works. There, Simon painted Nazi insignia on captured Soviet locomotives, and worked as a sign painter. All of which was merely an interlude in a procession of concentration camp experiences, escapes, and adventures that would lead to Mauthausen as the war was ending. He managed to arrange for Cyla’s escape, which allowed her to go into hiding in Warsaw under an assumed Polish Catholic name. But fate was not so kind to his mother.

In 1942, Wiesenthal warned his mother that another deportation was likely and that she should be ready to hand over a gold watch that she still possessed to avoid getting caught up in it. When a Ukrainian policeman showed up at her door, she did as instructed. But, as he painfully recalled: “A half hour later, another Ukrainian policeman came and she had nothing left to give him, so he took her away. She had a weak heart. My one hope is that she died in the train, and she didn’t have to undress and walk to the gas chamber.”

Wiesenthal recounted numerous stories about his own seemingly miraculous escapes from death. During a roundup of Jews on July 6, 1941, for instance, he claimed to have been in a row of people lined up against the wall by Ukrainian auxiliary troops who, while taking swigs of vodka, started shooting people in the neck. As the executioners were getting closer to him and he stared blankly at the wall in front of him, he suddenly
heard church bells—and a Ukrainian shouting “
Enough! Evening Mass!”

Much later when Wiesenthal became a global celebrity and he was increasingly embroiled in disputes with other Nazi hunters, the accuracy of such stories was often questioned. Even Tom Segev, the author of a largely sympathetic biography of him, suggests caution in accepting his version of events. “
As a man with literary aspirations, Wiesenthal tended to indulge in flights of imagination and more than once preferred to revel in historical drama rather than sticking to pure fact, as if he did not believe in the power of the true story to make enough of an impression on his audience,” he wrote.

But there is no doubt about the harrowing nature of Wiesenthal’s ordeal during the Holocaust, and that he only narrowly eluded death in any number of situations. There is also no doubt that, like Friedman and countless other survivors, as Wiesenthal put it, “
I did have a strong desire for revenge.” Friedman, who would soon meet Wiesenthal in Austria and initially cooperate with him in some of their efforts to track Nazi perpetrators, more than confirmed that. “
He emerged from the camp at the war’s end, an embittered, ruthless, vengeful pursuer of Nazi criminals,” Friedman wrote.

But Wiesenthal’s first experiences after liberation did not spur him to the kind of brutality that Friedman admitted to. He was still far too weak to even consider assaulting anyone, and he was in no position to take such actions even if he had wanted to. And, by all indications, he moved beyond the simple desire for vengeance relatively quickly.

Nonetheless, like Friedman, he was astounded by the instant role reversals at the end of the war—and how this transformed his former tormentors. When he had recovered enough in Mauthausen to move about, he was attacked by a Polish camp trusty, a former prisoner with special privileges, who beat him for no apparent reason. Wiesenthal decided to report the incident to the Americans. As he waited to file his complaint, he watched American soldiers interrogating SS men. When one particularly brutal guard was brought into the room, Wiesenthal instinctively turned his head, hoping to avoid his notice.

“
The sight of this man had always brought cold sweat to the back of my neck,” he recalled. But then he saw what was happening, and he couldn’t believe his eyes. Escorted in by a Jewish prisoner, “the SS man was trembling, just as we had trembled before him.” The man who had inspired so much fear now was “a contemptible, frightened coward . . . the supermen became cowards the moment they were no longer protected by their guns.”

Wiesenthal quickly came to a decision. He walked into the war crimes office in Mauthausen and offered his services to a lieutenant there. The American looked at him skeptically, pointing out that he had no relevant experience.

“And, incidentally, how much do you weigh?” he asked.

Wiesenthal said he weighed fifty-six kilos (123 pounds). That triggered a laugh from the lieutenant. “Wiesenthal, go and take it easy for a while, and come to see me when you
really
weigh fifty-six kilos.”

Ten days later Wiesenthal was back. He’d put on some weight, but still far from enough, and he had tried to disguise his pale complexion by rubbing red paper on his cheeks.

Evidently impressed by his enthusiasm, the lieutenant assigned him to a Captain Tarracusio, and soon Wiesenthal was on his way with him to arrest an SS guard named Schmidt. He had to walk up to the second floor of his house to get him. If Schmidt had resisted, the former prisoner would have been in no position to do anything because he was trembling from the exertion of mounting the stairs. He may also have been trembling because of his nervousness about what would happen. But Schmidt was trembling, too, and, after Wiesenthal sat down and caught his breath, the SS man held his arm as he helped him down the stairs.

When they reached the jeep where Captain Tarracusio was waiting, the SS guard cried and pleaded for mercy, arguing that he was both a little fish and had helped many prisoners.

“Yes, you helped the prisoners,” Wiesenthal replied. “I’ve often seen you. You helped them on their way to the crematorium.”

As Wiesenthal told it, this was the beginning to his work as a Nazi hunter. He would never move to Israel, although his daughter, son-in-law,
and grandchildren now live there. For him, Israel was the road not taken. But his personal journey involved working with—and, at times, crossing swords with—those in Israel who later sought to bring one of the chief architects of the Holocaust to justice: Adolf Eichmann.

Both Wiesenthal and Friedman claimed that they almost immediately embarked on the hunt for the man who organized the mass deportations of Jews to Auschwitz and other concentration camps. But in the earliest postwar period, the main news concerned those who were already captured or were easier to capture, and their subsequent trials. Nazi hunting—and punishment for the Nazis—was still primarily the job of the victors.

“
We’re a very obedient people. It’s our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. It enables us to build an economic miracle while the British are on strike, and it enables us to follow a man like Hitler into a great big mass grave.”

The fictional German magazine publisher Hans Hoffmann in Frederick Forsyth’s 1972 bestselling novel
The Odessa File

I
n the aftermath of Germany’s defeat, most of Hitler’s former subjects were eager to disassociate themselves from the mass murders and atrocities committed in their name. Soldiers of the victorious armies and survivors of the camps routinely encountered Germans who assured them that they had opposed the Nazis all along—not actively, but in their hearts. Many also claimed they had helped Jews and other victims of the Nazi regime. “
If all the Jews had been saved that I was told about in those months there would have been more Jews alive at the end of the war than there were when it began,” Wiesenthal dryly noted.

While many Germans were initially dismissive of Nuremberg and other trials as “victors’ justice,” there were also those who found something almost comforting in the notion that the masterminds of Germany’s undoing would be summarily punished. Saul Padover, an Austrian-born
historian and political scientist who served in the U.S. Army from Normandy through the advance into Germany, took copious notes on German attitudes. Meeting a young woman who had been a leader of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls, which was the counterpart of the Hitlerjugend or Hitler Youth for German teenage boys, he recorded in his notebook the conversation with her.