Simon Wiesenthal: The Controversial Nazi-Hunter
Sermon, September 23, 2005
Rabbi Bruce Kadden
This past week the man that many called the “conscience” of the Holocaust,
Simon Wiesenthal, died at 96 years of age at his home in Vienna, Austria.
Calling himself a “deputy for the dead,” he was the first and most persistent
Nazi-hunter, responsible for identifying and helping to bring to justice more
than 1000 Nazi war criminals. He maintained throughout his life that he sought
justice, not vengeance, which was the title he used for his memoir. Yet
Wiesenthal often clashed with others who shared his goal of bringing Nazis to
justice
Wiesenthal was born in Buczacz, a town in the Austro-Hungarian province of
Galicia; as a youth he experienced pogroms, as well as discriminatory quotas,
which forced him to go to Prague to earn his degree in architectural
engineering. After earning his degree, he returned to Lvov, Poland, near his
birthplace.
When the Soviets took control of Lvov in 1939, he bribed officials to avoid
being deported to Siberia. With the Nazi invasion in 1941, he narrowly escaped
death as Jews were rounded up and shot, ending up in a forced-labor camp. His
skills as an architect probably saved his life, as he worked as a draftsman
under the auspices of Adolf Kohlrautz, one of the camp’s leaders.
In 1943, Wiesenthal began working for the Polish underground, drawing charts
of railroad junctions to be targeted in exchange. In return, the underground
took his wife Cyla to Lublin, where she became Irene Kowalska, a Polish woman of
Aryan descent.
Kohlrautz saved his life more than once, finally hinting that Wiesenthal
should escape rather than being sent to a death camp. He moved from place to
place for more than eight months until he was arrested in June, 1944. He
attempted suicide three times, fearing torture, was hospitalized and then sent
back to the work camp.
Only 34 prisoners out of more than 100,000 remained. They were going to be
killed, when eh commandant realized that without any prisoners to guard, he and
his officers would be sent to the front; so once again, Wiesenthal avoided
death. He and the other prisoners were moved to other camps in the West,
murdering many along the way. He finally ended up at Mauthausen Concentration
Camp; when he collapsed on a four-mile walk to the Camp, he was placed in a
truck carrying corpses of those who died on the way. Other prisoners saved him;
he weighed less than 100 pounds, but managed to survive until May 5, 1945, when
the U.S. 11th Armored Division liberated the camp.
Wiesenthal’s decision to devote the rest of his life to bringing Nazi war
criminals to justice was, according to his biographer, Hella Pick, the result of
a conversation he had while a prisoner with a German officer who asked him what
he would do if he survived the war and people asked him about the camps. When
Wiesenthal answered that he would tell them what he had experienced, the guard
mocked him: “They wouldn’t believe you. They’d say you were crazy.”
Immediately upon liberation of the camp, the U.S. Army set up a War Crimes
office. Wiesenthal offered his help, but was turned away because he was so
weak. He persisted, however, and 10 days later began, making his first arrest
of an SS guard at Mauthausen.
Meanwhile, he also began trying to locate the remains of his wife, who he had
been told had been killed when the street on which she had been living had been
burned down. But his wife was very much alive, and the two were soon reunited.
Their joy was tempered by the fact that between them 89 of their family members
had been murdered. They soon had a daughter, Paulinka, who now lives in Israel
with her children and grand-children.
Wiesenthal recognized that if he was going to be successful as a Nazi hunter,
he would need eye-witness accounts. He corresponded with about 100,000
survivors, and opened the Historical Documentation Center in Linz, Austria with
the help of some 30 volunteers. Some of the material he collected was used at
the Nuremburg Tribunal, which tired the highest ranking Nazi war criminals.
Many war criminals, however, had disappeared, assumed aliases, and tried to
start their lives anew. Chief among them was Adolf Eichmann, who had been in
charge of the implementation of the Final Solution. His wife, who had already
divorced him, asked the court to declare he was dead so that she could receive a
pension. She had an affidavit from someone who claimed he had been killed in
Prague, but Wiesenthal found people who had seen him alive after the war and
persuaded a judge not to declare him dead.
Wiesenthal’s role in the ultimate capture of Eichmann by Israel is widely
debated. He traced his movement first to Rome, where he was apparently hidden
in a monastery, and then to Argentina in 1953. Wiesenthal passed this
information on to the Israeli government and to the head of the World Jewish
Congress, but was disappointed with their lack of support. He even closed his
Documentation Center and sent his archives to Yad Vashem, but never gave up
tracking Eichmann.
When Eichmann was captured, Yad Vashem brought Wiesenthal to Israel where,
for the first time, he was honored for his efforts. However, Isser Harel, head
of the Mossad, later claimed that Wiesenthal had contributed nothing of value to
Eichmann’s capture, a charge that many dispute. At the very least, he had kept
the issue on agenda for 15 years and may have provided important information
that eventually contributed to his capture.
Buoyed by the capture of Eichmann, Wiesenthal re-opened his Documentation
Center in Vienna in 1961. Many Nazis had still avoided capture and over the
next four decades Wiesenthal would pursue them; while some were still in Europe,
a few were in South America and some in the United States. His successful
identification of Hermine Braunsteiner, a brutal Austrian guard at Majdanek, who
had been convicted in absentia of war crimes, but who had obtained U.S.
citizenship and was living in New York, prompted the Justice Department to
create its Office of Special Investigations.
Wiesenthal also drew sharp criticism from many Jewish leaders for his failure
to oppose Kurt Waldheim for the Presidency of Austria. News accounts had
accused Waldheim of serving on the staff of the general whose units deported
42,000 Greek Jews to the death camps. Although his precise role in these
deportations has never been determined, Waldheim clearly lied about and covered
up any involvement. Only after Waldheim had been elected, and a military
commission had determined that he “had repeatedly assisted in connection with
illegal actions and thereby facilitated their execution,” did Wiesenthal urge
Waldheim to resign.
Another controversy concerned Wiesenthal’s insistence on referring to the 11
million victims of Nazi genocide, rather than the six million Jews. No one
questioned whether there were non-Jewish victims, but many historians question
whether the number even approached five million.
Numbers aside, the dispute reflects a disagreement among Jewish leaders as to
whether to emphasize the uniqueness of Jewish victimhood at the hands of the
Nazis rather than seeing it as a universal tragedy. Among those opposing
Wiesenthal was Elie Wiesel, whose vision was instrumental in shaping the United
States Holocaust Museum, which focuses primarily on the Jewish experience, while
acknowledging that communists, Gypsies, Homosexuals and others were also
systematically murdered.
Although Wiesenthal seemed fixated on bringing Nazis to justice, he remained
haunted by an unusual incident in his life, which became the basis for his book,
The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness.
One day a nurse at a medical facility where Wiesenthal and other prisoners
were working took him to the bed of an SS man who was critically injured. He
told Wiesenthal how he had participated in a mission to herd hundreds of Jews
into a house, which was then set on fire. He described the scene in some
detail, and then begged for forgiveness so that he might die in peace. After a
few moments, Wiesenthal walked out of the room without saying a word.
He admits to being “profoundly disturbed by the incident,” and after setting
it down in writing, invited a wide range of prominent thinkers, Jewish and
non-Jewish, religious and secular, to speculate on what they would have done.
The collected essays make fascinating reading on the theme of forgiveness,
particularly as it pertains to the Holocaust. This work indicates that
Wiesenthal was able to separate the issue of justice from the more personal
issues of repentance and forgiveness.
We learn much from the life of Simon Wiesenthal. First of all, we learn that
persistence pays off. It would have been easy for him to give up when very few
people were interested in tracking down Nazi war criminals, and when he often
was the recipient of anti-Semitic remarks in Austria, but he did not and because
of it more than 1000 war criminals were brought to justice.
Second, we learn the importance of remembering the victims of the Holocaust.
Wiesenthal’s activities were a form of remembrance; he did not object to
memorials, but he felt that the most important thing that he could do to
remember the victims was to bring those who were responsible for their deaths to
justice.
Third, by insisting that the Holocaust was not an exclusively Jewish event,
he assured that all of the victims would be remembered. When he agreed to lend
his name to an institution in Los Angeles, he insisted that it be a Museum of
Tolerance, focusing on all forms of prejudice and discrimination. While his
insistence on universalizing the message of the Holocaust was not always
popular, it assured that the Jewish community would look beyond its own
victimization and recognize that others, too, lost their lives.
Wiesenthal was often asked why he did what he did. He often offered this
response, recalling an exchange he had with a jeweler who was also a survivor.
“You're a religious man. You believe in God and life after death. I also
believe. When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died
in the camps and they ask us, 'What have you done?' there will be many answers.
You will say, 'I became a jeweler.' Another will say, 'I smuggled coffee and
American cigarettes.' Still another will say 'I built houses,' but I will say.
'I didn't forget you.'"
And we should not forget this great champion of justice. Zecher Tzadeek
Livracha. May the memory of the righteous be for a blessing.
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