Nazi Hunter (80 page)

As a former judge, Kirchschläger told his people: ‘Do not expect from me any verdict. I have no right to pronounce a guilty verdict or an acquittal. Both would contradict the
constitutional principle of the rule of law.’ Furthermore, he had not conducted a hearing with witnesses. Nevertheless, he declared, ‘if I were placed in the position of State
Prosecutor, I would not dare . . . to level charges in an ordinary court on the basis of the pieces of evidence submitted to me.’

Kirchschläger gave six principal reasons why he wouldn’t go into court: the order for ruthless reprisals (‘expiation measures’) bore a different departmental reference
number from Waldheim’s branch . . . Lieutenant Waldheim was never a counter-intelligence officer, as claimed in the charges; nor was he ever deputy head of Section
Ic
, but just an
aide . . . ‘As an aide, he had no power vested in him to order retaliatory measures’ . . . ‘All this must have been known to the key witness [the late Sergeant Johann] Mayer,
owing to his
assignment as personnel clerk’ . . . Given his circumstances as a German captive under suspicion, Mayer might well have given false testimony to improve
his own situation . . . and ‘finally – and this seems to be decisive for me – the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which was the prosecutor then, obviously has not
undertaken any steps towards actual prosecution.’

Saying he had taken on the assignment ‘to inject some calm into the very vehement international reporting by the mass media, which has gripped the entire Western world and, to a certain
extent, the Third World as well’, Kirchschläger acknowledged only partial success. ‘The wave of information has acquired a life of its own, which can be contained only with great
difficulty. However, the press conferences of the World Jewish Congress, which were held daily or at two-day intervals in New York, have come to an end.’ Also abating, he added, were the
tensions provoked by ‘mass solidarity towards an action that was interpreted as external interference in the presidential election campaign’, which ‘inevitably also had an impact
on our Jewish fellow citizens.’ Here, the tall, austere outgoing President sounded a stern warning in his most teary quaver:

‘Today I again beseech all fellow citizens, and primarily those who bear political responsibility, to promote with all their strength this process of bringing internal calm. Throughout our
history, anti-Jewish sentiments have never brought us any benefits or blessings. In addition, they are most deeply inhumane.’

Whether one’s choice was Kurt Waldheim or Kurt Steyrer – or one of the two fringe candidates: ‘Greens’ nominee Frieda Meissner-Blau, a fifty-seven-year-old self-styled
‘child of the ’68 Revolution, though I could be their mother’, and ‘Germanic’ nominee Otto Scrinzi, sixty-eight, a psychiatrist and former SA officer favouring
restoration of the death penalty and opposing all things Jewish – one couldn’t help wishing that Kirchschläger, whose own ‘fulfilment of duty’ at the end of the war
cost some 1200 Austrian teenagers their fives, could stay on for a third term.

Simon Wiesenthal had no fault to find with Kirchschläger’s analysis, ‘except if he thinks the World Jewish Congress has quieted down, he will surely find out
other.’

Sure enough, the WJC had been quick to rejoin that ‘Dr Kirchschläger’s conclusion was that he could neither convict nor
acquit Waldheim.’ Meanwhile,
in an open letter to US Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Attorney General Edwin Meese III, the WJC’s president, Seagram liquor heir Edgar M. Bronfman, denounced Waldheim as ‘a
man who is a proven liar . . . who participated in the most cruel behaviour of the National Socialists, and who is not only unrepentant of his past activities, but still has the nerve to stand
before the world as one who simply obeyed orders and runs for the Presidency of Austria.’ Waldheim said he would sue.

‘Waldheim’s deceit knows no bounds,’ said the World Jewish Congress in late April. The WJC was seeking to have Waldheim placed on the US Immigration and Naturalization
Service’s ‘Watch List’; based on a 1978 federal statute known as the ‘Holtzman Amendment’, it bars entry of aliens who ‘ordered, incited, assisted, or otherwise
participated in the persecution of any person because of race, religion, national origin, or political opinion.’ By the end of April 1986, Neal Sher, who had succeeded Allan Ryan as director
of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, was reported to have said that if someone less prominent than Waldheim had been involved, ‘a determination of excludability
would be clearly and routinely made’ on the basis of evidence already at hand. The OSI recommended to Attorney General Meese that Waldheim be barred from entering the country. Meese put it
under consideration – which took a year.

Of the whole commotion in the States, Wiesenthal said with a sigh: ‘This is so typically American. A great big cloud rises, but nothing comes of it. These World Jewish Congress people are
young fellows who have never learned to read German military documents. A lot of people who read German don’t know how to read a German military document. I myself needed a few years to
become acquainted with the language: to know that when somebody signed a report on the left side, it was only for the accuracy. In all the [Waldheim] documents I have seen so far, they are signed
by him on the left side. There are no conclusions by him what should be done.

‘These boys from the WJC, they do not differentiate between an intelligence officer and a reconnaissance man. And it’s nonsense to believe that the Yugoslavs by now don’t know
everything that happened in the Balkans. They’ve utilized or archived or published the war diaries of every German unit that was ever there.’

After what Rabbi Abraham Cooper called a ‘bum rap in the
Daily News
headline, which registered on lots of American Jews who don’t even read the
News
, but saw it on the stands’, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre began to argue with Simon Wiesenthal about ‘how his statements were being posited in the US
and Canada. So we’re
shreyen
[Yiddish for
screaming
] from the Pacific Coast all the way across America, all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, and halfway across Europe to
try to tell him the harm he’s doing himself over here and how frustrating this was to us.’

At the other end of the satellite connection, Simon simply explained the overheated political climate in Austria and the hyperbole heard there.

‘Quite frankly, Simon, our main concern is that Gerhard Waldheim is over here and he and his father’s Austro-American supporters are trying to cash in on your back,’ Cooper
told him – and he stopped Simon in his tracks when he told him Neal Sher of the OSI had called Waldheim ‘legally excludable’ from the US. After Cooper had explained this part of
the Holtzman Amendment to Simon, he says Simon told him: ‘Look, I have full confidence in Neal Sher, so if you are telling me that under US law an alien has no rights and is guilty until
proven innocent, then you do whatever you want to do in America. I am not going to address the American issue. I am just going to say what I have to say here in Austria.’

Rabbis Cooper and Hier took this as a cue to launch a postcard campaign similar to a successful one they had used in 1979 to stave off expiration of the German statute of limitations on war
crimes. On the front of the 1986 model, all in black and white: the newly unearthed and already world-famous photo of Lieutenant Waldheim standing between two generals at Podgorica in 1943; a
portrait of Secretary General Waldheim at his UN desk, and the headline ‘
AMERICA SAYS NO TO WALDHEIM
!’ On the back: a pre-printed message – pre-addressed
to Ronald Reagan in the White House with four lines at the bottom for the sender’s full name and address. The text:

‘We gave out a million postcards,’ Rabbi Hier told me that summer, ‘and the White House admits to receiving 100,000, which they say is an astronomical sum on
any given issue.

Simon had said nothing to me about the postcard campaign, but had made an ‘I-don’t-want-to-hear-about-it’ grimace when I’d mentioned it, so I asked Rabbi Hier whether
he’d cleared it with him first.

‘No,’ he replied, ‘but we told him what we were doing and that this was our point of view on the matter. It’s great that we can sometimes disagree on issues. I
don’t consider Simon a defender of Waldheim. I think he is being more cautious than we are on the Waldheim case. He’s operating like a jury and we’re working like a grand jury.
Our obligation is just to gather the information and present it to the authorities with a recommendation. At this point in time, I think there’s no reason to give Waldheim the benefit of the
doubt. I refuse to do so.’

‘So you’re saying that the Wiesenthal Centre is independent even of Wiesenthal?’

‘Yes, we are independent. We’re an American organization: totally American. You know, Mr Wiesenthal is not the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre – and, in this case,
it’s very clear and it’s a good thing.’

Rabbi Hier even professed admiration for the World Jewish Congress: ‘They had no other option. People called them to Vienna and said, “Here are documents.” If the WJC had sat
on those documents and done nothing about it, the people who gave it to them would have leaked it anyway and they would have said, “Look at these guys! We’ve given them decent documents
and they don’t even want to make it public.” So I don’t think any Jewish organization in the world, given those documents, would have behaved differently. They’d have made
them public.’

‘What if they’d given them to Simon Wiesenthal?’ I asked. ‘Wasn’t he the logical place to bring them?’

‘Well, maybe as Socialists, they felt he was too close to Waldheim’s party and also anti-Kreisky,’ Hier answered. ‘I don’t know.’

Rabbi Cooper added that the feud between Wiesenthal and the WJC had ‘nothing to do with fund-raising, but with all the years Nahum Goldmann and the WJC shut the door in his face and made
it easier for former Nazis to be accepted. Then they shafted him on Kreisky and left him standing all alone. No wonder it’s a reflex that he bristles at the mention of the World Jewish
Congress. So now, where there’s no smoking gun, why should he go out and raise hell for a guy like Israel Singer? – who, by the way, doesn’t come across as a normal human being to
Simon. He just says “this guy is a frustrated
yeshiva bucket
’” – a Yiddish term for an inexperienced, unrealistic Talmudic student. To me later that year,
Wiesenthal would call Singer a ‘young boy building his career on this case. I just had a talk with him in New York. He tried to tell me what is a Nazi. I say to Singer: “When I am
meeting my first Nazi, you are not born yet.’”

As the 4 May election neared, the campaign momentum was moving in Waldheim’s direction. So intense was the anti-WJC backlash (‘
The Jews didn’t ask us if
we objected to them making Begin their Prime Minister!
’) that Socialist candidate Steyrer started pleading for the past to be forgotten as he plodded through 1200 election rallies and
spoke to half a million voters in the hope that if no candidate won at least fifty per cent of the ballots cast on 4 May, there would have to be a run-off election in June between the top two
vote-getters. But the front runner’s newest poster offered to spare the public as well as himself that further ordeal: ‘
WALDHEIM ON MAY
4
WILL
SAVE YOU A SECOND ROUND
!’

Austrian elections are held on Sundays, with voting compulsory in some provinces. When the results were tallied that night, Kurt Waldheim had 2,343,227 votes – an impressive figure in a
land of seven and a half million people (many of them minors ineligible to vote), but, at 49.6 per cent, 16,000 votes short of a majority. Steyrer had 43.7 per cent. Frau Meissner-Blau polled a
surprisingly strong 5.5 per cent, and Dr Scrinzi a hard-core 1.2 per cent. A run-off election between the two Kurts – Steyrer and Waldheim – was set for 8 June 1986.

‘True, I have only an outside chance,’ Steyrer admitted, ‘but if those who didn’t vote on 4 May and those who voted for the
Environmentalist
candidate come into my camp, I have a good chance of winning.’

Taking no chances, a weary Waldheim resumed his barn-storming, trying to touch all the bases he’d missed in his first 1986 campaign. But it all seemed grubbier as a re-run. By now,
Waldheim had a sore throat and his Paul Henreid matinee-idol voice was a chronic croak as he said over and over: ‘I have always been a practising Catholic and I can tell you my religion has
helped me a lot. Our generation has suffered so much [but] I shall be able to stand anything that comes now: all the defamation and the rest.’

As one correspondent noted:

Though the Israeli government had remained remarkably cool toward the Waldheim controversy, it suddenly came to a boil when Yitzhak Shamir, then the Foreign Minister, urged Austrians not to vote
for Waldheim: ‘The election of such a man to such a position would be a tragedy.’ Once again, Waldheim was being ‘victimized’ by outside interference in Austrian politics
and he exploited this fully. At no meeting, no press conference, no TV interview did he fail to mention the WJC or Shamir and his terrorist past.
⁸⁴
‘The media and the World Jewish Congress can go on hunting me, but I’ll go right on saying that I had no knowledge,’ Waldheim insisted from the outset, often referring to his
nemesis as ‘that private institution, the World Jewish Congress.’ He told French journalist Claire Tréan in
Le Monde
: ‘But the international press is dominated by
the World Jewish Congress. It’s well known!’