BIOGRAPHY: Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and LegendsBy Tom Segev Jonathan Cape, 482pp. £25
SOON AFTER it ended the facts about the atrocities committed during the second World War became generally known. But although executions were carried out locally, and the Nuremburg Trials brought about 200 Nazi leaders to court, there was surprisingly little further sustained effort to track down Nazi war criminals.
Governments were struggling to rebuild shattered societies; collaboration had been widespread; some felt it would be better not to reopen old wounds; and the priorities of the cold war meant several Nazis had new roles serving European or US masters.
A man whose name became identified with the continued search for Nazi criminals was Simon Wiesenthal, who for decades operated almost alone from a small apartment in Vienna. Against a tide of opinion that would have preferred to forget the crimes of the Holocaust, he made sustained efforts to track down the former Nazi leadership, even as their numbers dwindled over the decades.
His work depended to a large degree on information supplied by hundreds of informants, often simply individuals seeking justice for one reason or another. A Holocaust survivor, Wiesenthal, who came from Buczacz in eastern Galicia (now part of Ukraine), worked as an architect in Lviv before the war. With the invasion of Poland he, his wife and his mother were taken prisoner by the Nazis; although he and his wife, Cyla, survived, they lost 89 relatives between them during the Holocaust.
After helping US forces track down former Nazi officers and working with Jewish refugees, Wiesenthal set himself up in an office in Linz, appointing himself president of the Organisation of Jewish Concentration Camp Prisoners in Austria – it was not the last time he would exaggerate his status. He worked at gathering information against Nazis, helped to smuggle Jews to Israel and was employed as a secret agent for the US and Israel. Over a life devoted almost obsessively to his task, he was involved in locating and prosecuting hundreds of Nazi criminals and assisted in the conviction of dozens.
The most famous of Wiesenthal’s quarries was Adolf Eichmann, who had directed the deportation of the Jews of Europe first to ghettos and then to the death camps. After the war he went into hiding and became the most senior of the wanted Nazis. Wiesenthal located his wife, and in 1953 he was able to inform both the Israeli and US governments that Eichmann was in Argentina. His reports were ignored, however, and it was seven more years before Eichmann was abducted from Argentina and brought to Israel, where he was tried and executed.
Autobiographical memoirs apart, this is the first full-length biography of Wiesenthal. Tom Segev, a weekly columnist for the newspaper Haaretz, has published books on the Israelis and the Holocaust, the 1967 war, and Jews and Arabs under the British mandate. He is among a group called the New Historians, who have challenged Israel’s traditional accounts of its past. Although clearly sympathetic to his subject, his is by no means an uncritical study. Wiesenthal is shown to have been egotistical, contentious and willing, on occasion, to falsify information to suit his purposes. Many of the “legends” of the title were self-generated by Wiesenthal about his own experiences and achievements.
A man of the right since his student days, in the 1920s, Wiesenthal became caught up in the cold war to the point where his judgment was clouded. In the 1970s he engaged in an unedifying struggle with Bruno Kreisky, the Austrian Social Democratic chancellor. Both men, who were of Jewish background, attempted to portray each other as associating or having collaborated with Nazis.
On the other hand, Wiesenthal concerned himself with violations of human rights worldwide, from Kurdistan to Argentina. He formulated a convention for the protection of political prisoners, joined the campaign against anti- personnel mines and supported prominent figures such as the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov and the Dalai Lama. He differed sharply with other Jewish leaders, such as Elie Wiesel, in seeking to include gypsies, homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses in Holocaust remembrance rather than confining it to Jews alone.
By the end of his life Wiesenthal had become a celebrity, honoured by governments from the Netherlands to the US, presented with some 20 honorary doctorates and admired by personalities such as Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra. Two feature films were based on his life story, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center was established in Los Angeles; today it also maintains offices in New York, Toronto, Palm Beach, Paris, Buenos Aires and Jerusalem.
Nonetheless, he also had to face constant threats of attack from neo-Nazis: his home was lit by spotlights and guarded following an attempt to blow it up; and he carried a gun, which he kept under his pillow at night. His lifestyle took its toll on Cyla, who suffered repeated nervous breakdowns. Segev points out that Wiesenthal’s determination to remain in Austria, a country that took so long to come to terms with its Nazi past, was hard on his wife and daughter. Wiesenthal claimed the right as a naturalised Austrian citizen to criticise his adopted country from within.
In the final chapter Segev describes Wiesenthal’s astonishing friendship with Albert Speer, formerly one of Hitler’s closest allies. He also provides a convincing analysis of what motivated Wiesenthal, suggesting the hunt for Nazis was a self-inflicted punishment for the fact he survived the Holocaust and suffered less than some of its victims.
This is a fascinating study of a complex man and his task: thoughtful, carefully researched and a thoroughly absorbing read.
Carla King is a lecturer in modern history at St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, Dublin
