By Max Dunbar.
Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends, Tom Segev, Cape 2010
At some point during the war Simon Wiesenthal’s forced labour unit stopped at a technical college that had been converted to a military hospital. Wiesenthal was summoned to the bedside of an SS casualty: ‘[w]hite, bloodless hands, head completely bandaged with openings only for mouth, nose and ears.’ He was twenty-one, this man said, and in 1941 he had participated in the incineration of around two hundred Jewish men, women and children. The SS man knew he was dying, and before he went he wanted to be forgiven by a Jew. This is why Wiesenthal had been taken to his bedside. Wiesenthal would write of this moment: ‘two men who had never known each other had been brought together for a few hours by Fate. One asked the other for help… At last I made up my mind and without a word I left the room.’
Later, well into his half-century career as a professional Nazi hunter, Wiesenthal wrote a book about this experience and invited writers and philosophers to contribute essays on the question. He came to believe he had made the right choice: ‘I can forgive only what has been done to me, but I do not have the right to forgive in the name of others.’ He had discovered the limits of forgiveness. There was an element of revenge in his work and he endeavoured to track down officers who had mistreated him personally in the five camps where he had been imprisoned. Revenge, retribution, perhaps not as ignoble as artists and theologians always make out.
Wiesenthal spent his life following the Nazi ratlines. The Catholic Church, the CIA, the governments of Latin America, all were happy to help war criminals keep one step ahead of Nuremberg. (Segev points out that many of the ratliners were humanitarians who probably didn’t realise who they were helping.) Those who stayed, didn’t necessarily suffer. Confirmed fascists were comfortable with a Europe of light sentences and big opportunities. This was especially true in Wiesenthal’s native Austria whose historical antisemitism went unchallenged by the physical demonstration of the endpoints of its arguments. Nazis were able to serve in cabinets and run businesses under their own names. They finished easy time and were welcomed to their home villages like heroes. Wiesenthal complained that ‘The dumbest Nazis were the ones who committed suicide after the fall of the Third Reich.’
It’s become fashionable to suggest that the Holocaust saturates contemporary culture to the exclusion of other past and present genocides, and so the reader is struck by the details of what Segev calls the ‘marginality of the Holocaust in the consciousness of the world in the 1950s’. Israel was a young country and its government concentrated on getting an economy together rather than chasing the demons of Jewish past. (Wiesenthal’s relationship with the state was turbulent all his life: Jerusalem officials once described him as ‘an ambitious, loudmouthed publicity hound’.) The Americans were more interested in hunting communists, and Klaus Barbie, the ‘Butcher of Lyon’, was actually recruited by US intelligence. There were always people on the American right who saw fascism as a useful bulwark against communism. Reagan visited SS graves as late as 1985.
These were difficult times for an idealist and adventurer. His operations told more of the struggling amateur detective than the international policeman. Wiesenthal worked at a messy desk in a small apartment, with old telephone directories and fledgeling contacts, sifting the world’s hay for blades. His research led to the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Beunos Aires in 1960. (Segev argues convincingly that the CIA and Mossad could have snatched him at least seven years before.)
The Israel trial was a kind of purification ritual. The prosecutor opened with the words ‘With me, standing here, at this hour, are six million prosecutors.’ In Segev’s words, it was ‘designed as an emotional spectacle rather than as a way of teaching history.’ It would give a unifying identity to the Jewish state and deflect claims that Jewish community leaders had failed to protect their citizens from fascism. Wiesenthal agreed with Hannah Arendt that Eichmann was ‘not a moral man and neither is he anti-moral, he is amoral, a highly sophisticated type of robot.’
The history of violence and killing is full of testaments to Arendt’s ideas of the banality of evil and the evil of banality. But they were not true in Eichmann’s case. In 2000 Eichmann’s prison memoirs were unearthed, and the manuscript revealed him as a passionate Nazi acting not because he had orders but because he ’embraced the idea of racial purity and thought the Jews must be removed.’ Soldiers got to the SS through commitment and passion. They were the best of the best in the Third Reich’s upended moral cosmos. Segev: ‘It was not a ‘banality of evil’ that was at the core of their actions, as Arendt wrote, but rather a conscious and particularly intense identification with the evil itself.’
Wiesenthal insisted on staying in Austria after the war because ‘his very presence was ‘a constant irritant’ for the Nazis… and that was a good thing.’ He supported Israel in general but had no desire to live there: Jews, he said, had a duty to live everywhere. The stance was indicative of his universalist and humanist approach – he always insisted that Jews were not the only or even the first victims of Nazi oppression, and campaigned particularly on the persecution of Gypsies during the war and beyond. Starving Cambodians were the same as starving Jews in the Warsaw ghetto: ‘the differences of time, place and colour of their skin being of no importance.’
The relentless man was after all war criminals everywhere. Even those that escaped him lived in success but not in peace, and must always have heard the whisper of the village, and waited for the knock on the door.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He recently finished a full-length novel and his short fiction has appeared in various print and web journals. He is reviews editor of 3:AM.
