Nieninque
09-22-2005, 01:30 PM
In Lvov concentration camp, in 1941, a young
Jewish architect decided to start remembering.
Blessed with a remarkable photographic memory, he
began to commit the names and faces of his Nazi
persecutors to his personal mental archive,
meticulously memorising the ghastly crimes they
had committed, the atrocities that he and others
had witnessed.
The young man would end up in no fewer than a
dozen concentration camps, and before each new
tableau of horrors, he added names to his mental
list of the guilty. He quizzed other inmates on
what they had seen, and began transferring the
names to notebooks.
It was a way of removing himself from the daily
inhumanity, but the growing tally also anchored
the young man to the future, to the promise of
eventual justice.
The man’s name was Simon Wiesenthal. Against all
the odds, he survived the war and in 1945 he was
liberated by American troops from Mauthausen camp.
He weighed just 99lb, but his memory was intact,
and with it the list of the guilty that would
launch a worldwide Nazi-hunt.
Wiesenthal called it “the fight against
forgetting”.
Nearly two decades after Wiesenthal began his long
campaign for justice, he received a letter that
would put him on the trail of perhaps the most
hunted Nazi fugitive of all, the man he had longed
to see captured. The letter was from a former
German soldier, and it claimed that Adolf Eichmann
was still alive and living in Argentina. For
years, Wiesenthal had been tracking the head of
the Gestapo’s Jewish department and architect of
Hitler’s “final solution”; this was the
breakthrough he had been hoping for.
Back in 1951, nearly ten years earlier, a former
SS officer had offered to make a repellent deal.
“You want to find Eichmann and bring him to
justice. We want Eichmann’s gold,” the officer had
said. The gold he had in mind had been extracted
from the teeth of murdered Jews. Wiesenthal,
appalled, would have nothing to do with any such
deal, but the offer confirmed that Eichmann was
alive. When Wiesenthal learned that Eichmann’s
family was moving to South America, he discreetly
informed the Israelis.
Eichmann’s wife swore that she had been divorced
from the Nazi war criminal, yet she had turned up
at her mother’s funeral using her married name.
That gave Wiesenthal a hunch.
Only a few, indistinct images of Eichmann existed,
so when Eichmann’s father died in 1960, Wiesenthal
secretly had the entire funeral cortege
photographed. Eichmann was not among the mourners,
but his brother Otto, the spitting image of his
fugitive brother, was: now Wiesenthal had a
likeness to work with. He persuaded one of his
agents, a fellow survivor from the camps, to
seduce Eichmann’s former girlfriends to try to
obtain another photograph. The agent succeeded,
and the photograph was later used at Eichmann’s
trial.
Wiesenthal turned over all his information to
Mossad, the Israeli secret service. In 1960,
Eichmann, living under the alias of Ricardo
Klement, was seized in Argentina by Israeli
commandos, rolled up in a carpet, and spirited to
Israel. A year later, he was tried, and then
hanged. Mossad would later claim credit for the
coup, but there was little doubt that Wiesenthal’s
evidence, the long years of watching, waiting and
scouring the world, had tipped the balance.
The arrest of Eichmann was the high point of
Wiesenthal’s Nazi-hunting career — his subsequent
book I Hunted Eichmann was a bestseller — yet the
nondescript mass-murderer who came to personify
the banality of evil was only one of more than
1,200 former Nazis tracked down by the implacable
Wiesenthal.
The tall, balding man with the toothbrush
moustache and clipped manner always insisted that
“justice, not revenge” motivated his crusade; that
a long, detailed trial was preferable to the swift
bullet of vengeance. But it was horrific personal
experience that turned the soft-spoken young
architect from Galicia (now part of Ukraine) into
the most ferocious Nazi-hunter of all. “I am
against the death sentence,” he once remarked,
revealing the fury that lay behind his detached
manner. “A death sentence is only half a minute.”
Wiesenthal was 33 when he was rounded up, along
with his wife, Cyla (a distant relative of Sigmund
Freud) and the rest of the Jewish population of
Lvov, and marched to concentration camps. Only 500
Lvov Jews survived from a pre-war population of
190,000. For Wiesenthal, the educated middle-class
boy from Buczacz, there followed nearly five years
of unrelieved brutality. He was beaten, and
prepared for execution three times.
On one of these occasions, standing naked and
awaiting death, he was pulled from line on account
of his ability as a draughtsman, and put to work
making posters for Hitler’s birthday. He escaped
from Ostbahn camp just before the Germans began
the systematic murder of inmates. Hiding under
some floorboards, he practised writing out lists
of the SS officers he knew.
He was recaptured and sent to Janwska, but yet
again cheated death when the SS retreated westward
with their prisoners. Twice he tried to cut his
own wrists, when the humiliation became
unbearable.
Some 87 of Wiesenthal’s relatives, including his
mother, died in the ensuing holocaust.
It was while working as a slave labourer in a
hospital for wounded German soldiers that the
young Wiesenthal experienced a sort of epiphany. A
dying SS man, desperate for forgiveness, asked to
make his final confession to a Jew. Wiesenthal was
summoned to his bedside. Yet as he watched the
German dying, the condemned Jewish man could only
see his own, all but certain death, to be followed
by burial in a mass grave. “No sunflower will ever
light my darkness and no butterflies will ever
dance on my terrible tomb,” he reflected. The
German reached out a hand, saying: “Without your
answer, I cannot die in peace.” But Wiesenthal
pulled away, and left the sick room without
another word. “Was my silence at the bedside of
the dying Nazi right or wrong?” he would ponder,
for the rest of his life.
When the Americans liberated Mauthausen in 1945,
an emaciated figure, more corpse than human,
immediately came forward and offered to help find
the criminal Nazis who had engineered the horror.
He overheard one of the American officers remark:
“He won’t survive.” But he did. Wiestenthal
initially produced 91 names. The accounting had
begun, and the architect began to build his
painstaking case against his persecutors.
A few months after liberation, he chanced to
accompany three rabbis on an expedition to save a
vast number of Jewish books which had been stored
by the Nazis in the Austrian town of Villach,
there to await destruction. One of the rabbis,
astonishingly, came across his sister’s own prayer
book, with a message inside written as the Nazis
descended on their home: “The murderers are in our
village. They are in the next home . . . Please
don’t forget us! And don’t forget our murderers.”
“That is what drives me, and always will,”
Wiesenthal declared, many years later.
But he still had no idea whether his wife, Cyla,
was still alive. Cyla had been told that her
husband had committed suicide. It was not until a
year later that they were reunited. With her blond
looks, Cyla had passed herself off as an Aryan,
and had been saved with the help of the Polish
resistance.
For years, short of funds, Wiesenthal and his
colleagues toiled away, but it was the capture of
Eichmann that provided the publicity, and the
money, to continue and accelerate the hunt. In
1970, he tracked down Franz Stangl, the notorious
commandant of Treblinka and Sobibor camps in
Poland, who was working as a mechanic in a car
plant in Brazil. Stangl died in prison. Gustav
Wagner, Stangl’s right-hand man, was forced to
give himself up after Wiesenthal picked up his
trail. He later committed suicide.
Wiesenthal also followed the trail of Karl
Silberbauer. He believed the Austrian Gestapo
officer had carried out the arrest of Anne Frank,
whose diaries prior to her deportation became
famous; Frank was sent to Bergen-Belsen, where she
died. Silberbauer, living in Austria and working
as a police inspector, was captured in 1963, but
remained arrogantly nonchalant about his past.
When asked by Wiesenthal if he had read Anne
Frank’s diary, Silberbauer replied dismissively:
“I bought the little book last week to see if I’m
mentioned in it. But I’m not.” Using methods that
included seduction and entrapment, Wiesenthal and
his agents steadily worked through the missing
“who was who” of the Third Reich.
At his Jewish Documentation Centre in Vienna, he
pored over the incriminating mountains of German
archives. The fall of the Berlin Wall brought yet
another avalanche of evidence, interviews,
investigations and prosecutions. Some of the worst
criminals eluded him. Josef Mengele, the notorious
Nazi doctor known as the “angel of death”, died in
Brazil, despite Wiesenthal’s relentless pursuit of
him; Martin Boorman, Hitler ’s deputy, was never
found; Alois Brunner, believed to have been
responsible for the death of 130,000 Jews, was
last seen in Syria.
Success brought fame, but also criticism, hatred,
and death threats. In 1982, a bomb exploded at
Wiesenthal’s front door. Some accused him of
arrogance, and self-promotion. “I have found the
mass murderers I was looking for and I have
outlived them all,” he once declared. Wiesenthal’s
brusque manner and driven personality alienated
many.
Ironically, it was Wiesenthal’s refusal to condemn
the wartime past of Kurt Waldheim, the former UN
Secretary General, that earned him the enmity of
the World Jewish Congress.
He has always insisted there should be no statute
of limitations on war criminals, yet at the age of
94 he declared: “If there’s a few I didn’t look
for, they are now too old and fragile to stand
trial.”
That view was hotly disputed by others.
The latter part of his life was spent battling
historical amnesia, anti-semitism and continuing
the fight against forgetting. At 96, Wiesenthal
could still remember the names of those whom he
had helped to capture, and those who had got away.
He urged the preservation of memory by others,
many born long after the events he had experienced
first hand.
The young man who expected to be thrown into a
mass grave without sunflowers, will be buried with
full honours. He helped to unravel many of the
mysteries of the post-war Nazi network, but the
essential question he asked of himself as young
victim of the holocaust — about forgiveness and
forgetting — remains: “Was my silence at the
bedside of the dying Nazi right or wrong?
You who have just read this sad and tragic
episode, can mentally change places and ask
yourself the crucial question: ‘What would I have
done’.”
WHY NO NAZI WAS SAFE: THE LIFE OF A HUNTER
December 31, 1908 Born in Buczacz
1932 Graduates from University of Prague and
becomes an architect in Lvov.
1936 Marries Cyla Mueller
1941 Wiesenthal is sent to a concentration camp.
He is separated from his wife, who escapes through
the Polish underground.
May 1945 He is at the Mauthausen camp in Austria
when it is liberated by American troops. He begins
gathering evidence to help the investigations of
the US Army’s War Crimes Unit.
1962 Adolf Eichmann is executed after being
captured by Israeli agents, tried in Israel and
found guilty of mass murder.
1966 Sixteen SS officers, nine of them found by
Wiesenthal, go on trial for the murder of citizens
in Lvov.
1973 Hermine Ryan, suspected of the murder of
hundreds of children, is sentenced to life
imprisonment after Wiesenthal tracked her down in
the US
April 2003 He announces his retirement
February 2004 Britain awards him an honorary
knighthood
Jewish architect decided to start remembering.
Blessed with a remarkable photographic memory, he
began to commit the names and faces of his Nazi
persecutors to his personal mental archive,
meticulously memorising the ghastly crimes they
had committed, the atrocities that he and others
had witnessed.
The young man would end up in no fewer than a
dozen concentration camps, and before each new
tableau of horrors, he added names to his mental
list of the guilty. He quizzed other inmates on
what they had seen, and began transferring the
names to notebooks.
It was a way of removing himself from the daily
inhumanity, but the growing tally also anchored
the young man to the future, to the promise of
eventual justice.
The man’s name was Simon Wiesenthal. Against all
the odds, he survived the war and in 1945 he was
liberated by American troops from Mauthausen camp.
He weighed just 99lb, but his memory was intact,
and with it the list of the guilty that would
launch a worldwide Nazi-hunt.
Wiesenthal called it “the fight against
forgetting”.
Nearly two decades after Wiesenthal began his long
campaign for justice, he received a letter that
would put him on the trail of perhaps the most
hunted Nazi fugitive of all, the man he had longed
to see captured. The letter was from a former
German soldier, and it claimed that Adolf Eichmann
was still alive and living in Argentina. For
years, Wiesenthal had been tracking the head of
the Gestapo’s Jewish department and architect of
Hitler’s “final solution”; this was the
breakthrough he had been hoping for.
Back in 1951, nearly ten years earlier, a former
SS officer had offered to make a repellent deal.
“You want to find Eichmann and bring him to
justice. We want Eichmann’s gold,” the officer had
said. The gold he had in mind had been extracted
from the teeth of murdered Jews. Wiesenthal,
appalled, would have nothing to do with any such
deal, but the offer confirmed that Eichmann was
alive. When Wiesenthal learned that Eichmann’s
family was moving to South America, he discreetly
informed the Israelis.
Eichmann’s wife swore that she had been divorced
from the Nazi war criminal, yet she had turned up
at her mother’s funeral using her married name.
That gave Wiesenthal a hunch.
Only a few, indistinct images of Eichmann existed,
so when Eichmann’s father died in 1960, Wiesenthal
secretly had the entire funeral cortege
photographed. Eichmann was not among the mourners,
but his brother Otto, the spitting image of his
fugitive brother, was: now Wiesenthal had a
likeness to work with. He persuaded one of his
agents, a fellow survivor from the camps, to
seduce Eichmann’s former girlfriends to try to
obtain another photograph. The agent succeeded,
and the photograph was later used at Eichmann’s
trial.
Wiesenthal turned over all his information to
Mossad, the Israeli secret service. In 1960,
Eichmann, living under the alias of Ricardo
Klement, was seized in Argentina by Israeli
commandos, rolled up in a carpet, and spirited to
Israel. A year later, he was tried, and then
hanged. Mossad would later claim credit for the
coup, but there was little doubt that Wiesenthal’s
evidence, the long years of watching, waiting and
scouring the world, had tipped the balance.
The arrest of Eichmann was the high point of
Wiesenthal’s Nazi-hunting career — his subsequent
book I Hunted Eichmann was a bestseller — yet the
nondescript mass-murderer who came to personify
the banality of evil was only one of more than
1,200 former Nazis tracked down by the implacable
Wiesenthal.
The tall, balding man with the toothbrush
moustache and clipped manner always insisted that
“justice, not revenge” motivated his crusade; that
a long, detailed trial was preferable to the swift
bullet of vengeance. But it was horrific personal
experience that turned the soft-spoken young
architect from Galicia (now part of Ukraine) into
the most ferocious Nazi-hunter of all. “I am
against the death sentence,” he once remarked,
revealing the fury that lay behind his detached
manner. “A death sentence is only half a minute.”
Wiesenthal was 33 when he was rounded up, along
with his wife, Cyla (a distant relative of Sigmund
Freud) and the rest of the Jewish population of
Lvov, and marched to concentration camps. Only 500
Lvov Jews survived from a pre-war population of
190,000. For Wiesenthal, the educated middle-class
boy from Buczacz, there followed nearly five years
of unrelieved brutality. He was beaten, and
prepared for execution three times.
On one of these occasions, standing naked and
awaiting death, he was pulled from line on account
of his ability as a draughtsman, and put to work
making posters for Hitler’s birthday. He escaped
from Ostbahn camp just before the Germans began
the systematic murder of inmates. Hiding under
some floorboards, he practised writing out lists
of the SS officers he knew.
He was recaptured and sent to Janwska, but yet
again cheated death when the SS retreated westward
with their prisoners. Twice he tried to cut his
own wrists, when the humiliation became
unbearable.
Some 87 of Wiesenthal’s relatives, including his
mother, died in the ensuing holocaust.
It was while working as a slave labourer in a
hospital for wounded German soldiers that the
young Wiesenthal experienced a sort of epiphany. A
dying SS man, desperate for forgiveness, asked to
make his final confession to a Jew. Wiesenthal was
summoned to his bedside. Yet as he watched the
German dying, the condemned Jewish man could only
see his own, all but certain death, to be followed
by burial in a mass grave. “No sunflower will ever
light my darkness and no butterflies will ever
dance on my terrible tomb,” he reflected. The
German reached out a hand, saying: “Without your
answer, I cannot die in peace.” But Wiesenthal
pulled away, and left the sick room without
another word. “Was my silence at the bedside of
the dying Nazi right or wrong?” he would ponder,
for the rest of his life.
When the Americans liberated Mauthausen in 1945,
an emaciated figure, more corpse than human,
immediately came forward and offered to help find
the criminal Nazis who had engineered the horror.
He overheard one of the American officers remark:
“He won’t survive.” But he did. Wiestenthal
initially produced 91 names. The accounting had
begun, and the architect began to build his
painstaking case against his persecutors.
A few months after liberation, he chanced to
accompany three rabbis on an expedition to save a
vast number of Jewish books which had been stored
by the Nazis in the Austrian town of Villach,
there to await destruction. One of the rabbis,
astonishingly, came across his sister’s own prayer
book, with a message inside written as the Nazis
descended on their home: “The murderers are in our
village. They are in the next home . . . Please
don’t forget us! And don’t forget our murderers.”
“That is what drives me, and always will,”
Wiesenthal declared, many years later.
But he still had no idea whether his wife, Cyla,
was still alive. Cyla had been told that her
husband had committed suicide. It was not until a
year later that they were reunited. With her blond
looks, Cyla had passed herself off as an Aryan,
and had been saved with the help of the Polish
resistance.
For years, short of funds, Wiesenthal and his
colleagues toiled away, but it was the capture of
Eichmann that provided the publicity, and the
money, to continue and accelerate the hunt. In
1970, he tracked down Franz Stangl, the notorious
commandant of Treblinka and Sobibor camps in
Poland, who was working as a mechanic in a car
plant in Brazil. Stangl died in prison. Gustav
Wagner, Stangl’s right-hand man, was forced to
give himself up after Wiesenthal picked up his
trail. He later committed suicide.
Wiesenthal also followed the trail of Karl
Silberbauer. He believed the Austrian Gestapo
officer had carried out the arrest of Anne Frank,
whose diaries prior to her deportation became
famous; Frank was sent to Bergen-Belsen, where she
died. Silberbauer, living in Austria and working
as a police inspector, was captured in 1963, but
remained arrogantly nonchalant about his past.
When asked by Wiesenthal if he had read Anne
Frank’s diary, Silberbauer replied dismissively:
“I bought the little book last week to see if I’m
mentioned in it. But I’m not.” Using methods that
included seduction and entrapment, Wiesenthal and
his agents steadily worked through the missing
“who was who” of the Third Reich.
At his Jewish Documentation Centre in Vienna, he
pored over the incriminating mountains of German
archives. The fall of the Berlin Wall brought yet
another avalanche of evidence, interviews,
investigations and prosecutions. Some of the worst
criminals eluded him. Josef Mengele, the notorious
Nazi doctor known as the “angel of death”, died in
Brazil, despite Wiesenthal’s relentless pursuit of
him; Martin Boorman, Hitler ’s deputy, was never
found; Alois Brunner, believed to have been
responsible for the death of 130,000 Jews, was
last seen in Syria.
Success brought fame, but also criticism, hatred,
and death threats. In 1982, a bomb exploded at
Wiesenthal’s front door. Some accused him of
arrogance, and self-promotion. “I have found the
mass murderers I was looking for and I have
outlived them all,” he once declared. Wiesenthal’s
brusque manner and driven personality alienated
many.
Ironically, it was Wiesenthal’s refusal to condemn
the wartime past of Kurt Waldheim, the former UN
Secretary General, that earned him the enmity of
the World Jewish Congress.
He has always insisted there should be no statute
of limitations on war criminals, yet at the age of
94 he declared: “If there’s a few I didn’t look
for, they are now too old and fragile to stand
trial.”
That view was hotly disputed by others.
The latter part of his life was spent battling
historical amnesia, anti-semitism and continuing
the fight against forgetting. At 96, Wiesenthal
could still remember the names of those whom he
had helped to capture, and those who had got away.
He urged the preservation of memory by others,
many born long after the events he had experienced
first hand.
The young man who expected to be thrown into a
mass grave without sunflowers, will be buried with
full honours. He helped to unravel many of the
mysteries of the post-war Nazi network, but the
essential question he asked of himself as young
victim of the holocaust — about forgiveness and
forgetting — remains: “Was my silence at the
bedside of the dying Nazi right or wrong?
You who have just read this sad and tragic
episode, can mentally change places and ask
yourself the crucial question: ‘What would I have
done’.”
WHY NO NAZI WAS SAFE: THE LIFE OF A HUNTER
December 31, 1908 Born in Buczacz
1932 Graduates from University of Prague and
becomes an architect in Lvov.
1936 Marries Cyla Mueller
1941 Wiesenthal is sent to a concentration camp.
He is separated from his wife, who escapes through
the Polish underground.
May 1945 He is at the Mauthausen camp in Austria
when it is liberated by American troops. He begins
gathering evidence to help the investigations of
the US Army’s War Crimes Unit.
1962 Adolf Eichmann is executed after being
captured by Israeli agents, tried in Israel and
found guilty of mass murder.
1966 Sixteen SS officers, nine of them found by
Wiesenthal, go on trial for the murder of citizens
in Lvov.
1973 Hermine Ryan, suspected of the murder of
hundreds of children, is sentenced to life
imprisonment after Wiesenthal tracked her down in
the US
April 2003 He announces his retirement
February 2004 Britain awards him an honorary
knighthood