The Nazi Hunters (17 page)

Royall was unmoved by any of those arguments. “In this country no general release is under consideration,” he wrote back to Jackson. “It is my opinion that the theme is contrary to present policies and aims of the government; therefore, it is felt that the picture at this time can be of no significant value to the Army and Nation as a whole.”

Many Army officers had objected to the trials of German officers in the first place, but it was the dawn of the Cold War that was the decisive factor. Americans were now supposed to view the West Germans as allies, and the film was seen as undermining that effort. William Gordon, public relations director for Universal Pictures, who saw the film, argued against any general distribution, particularly objecting to the footage of the camps and other atrocities as “
too gruesome to stomach—and I mean that literally.”

This act of censorship did not go unnoticed. Writing in the
New York Daily Mirror
on March 6, 1949, in a column titled “The Hall of Shame,” Walter Winchell mocked the rationale that the film could spur anti-German feeling in the United States. “
Could there be any wilder idiocy?” he wrote. “Those whose duty it was to eradicate Nazism are now endeavoring to eradicate evidence of its brutality—thus making themselves accessories to Nazi crimes.”

Pare Lorentz, who initially had been in charge of the film project before he quit and returned to civilian life, had even offered to buy the documentary from the Army so that he could distribute it to movie theaters himself. That, too, was a nonstarter. A
Washington Post
story on September 19, 1949, mentioned suggestions “
that there are those in authority in the United States who feel that American are so simple that they can hate only one enemy at a time. ‘Forget the Nazis,’ they advise, ‘and concentrate on the Reds.’ ”
William Shirer, the famed journalist who would later write
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
, had been to a special screening of the film for critics and writers. He denounced the Army’s efforts to block the film’s distribution as a “scandal.”

But nothing could change the Army’s and the government’s mind. The film was never released to the general public in the United States. Despite his disappointment, Stuart Schulberg continued to produce new films on denazification and reeducation for the U.S. military government in Germany, and then served as the chief of the Marshall Plan Motion Picture Section in Paris from 1950 to 1952, working on films designed to foster reconciliation between France and Germany.

In 2004, a quarter century after Stuart Schulberg’s death, his daughter Sandra presented a retrospective of the Marshall Plan films at the Berlin Film Festival. The series was preceded, at the behest of festival director Dieter Kosslick, by a screening of the German version of her father’s Nuremberg film, which she had never seen. She was immensely impressed.

When she returned to the United States, Sandra viewed the American version, and realized that the filmmakers had substituted narration in lieu of using the courtroom recordings of the English-language speakers. That prompted her to embark with filmmaker and sound editor Josh Waletzky on an ambitious effort to restore the film using the courtroom sound so that audiences could hear all the major trial participants speaking in their own languages: German, English, Russian, and French. They asked actor Liev Schreiber to record Stuart’s original English narration. The newly restored film was released in American theaters for the first time in the fall of 2010. By 2014, Schulberg had produced a high-definition Blu-ray version as well.

At long last, Americans had access to her father’s work. In the post Cold War world, no one was left to object.

“
Nothing belongs to the past. Everything is still part of the present and could become part of the future again.”

Fritz Bauer, the attorney general of Braunschweig and then Hesse, explaining his relentless push to make his countrymen acknowledge the crimes committed in their name during the Third Reich

T
he Americans who had been deeply involved in the war crimes trials and their aftermath were not alone in recognizing the rapid loss of interest in prosecuting Nazis or in exposing what they had done during their twelve-year reign of terror. The freelance Nazi hunters, who had been motivated by the horrors they had personally experienced and witnessed as Holocaust survivors, also found themselves wavering in their resolve in the face of the growing indifference or even hostility to keeping their cause alive. They, too, had to decide whether they should devote their energies to new personal and political agendas. As demonstrated by the dawn of the Cold War in the late 1940s and the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the 1950s would prove to be a very different decade from the one that preceded it, with very different issues dominating the headlines.

After he was liberated in Mauthausen on May 5, 1945, Wiesenthal remained
in the nearby Austrian city of Linz, working for the OSS.
That organization’s top officer there provided him with the support he needed in the form of a pass that attested to the fact that he was doing “confidential investigative work” for the OSS, and requesting that he should be allowed to “move freely in American-occupied Austria.” When the OSS closed its Linz office at the end of 1945, he switched over to the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). His job remained the same: helping the Americans identify and capture Nazis. In many cases, though, the victors had little interest in keeping them locked up and released detainees almost immediately.

Wiesenthal joined CIC officers in making arrests and gathering evidence for trials.
He also began working intensively with displaced persons, mostly Holocaust survivors, who were scattered all over the region. He recognized early on that they could provide valuable testimony against the perpetrators. As he helped them with everything from obtaining medical care to filling out U.S. visa applications and, most importantly, tracking missing relatives, he developed a broad network of sources. He sent around questionnaires to get their personal stories, all of which could provide new leads as well as a starting point for assessing their background.

Never afraid of controversy, Wiesenthal insisted that those seeking positions in Jewish organizations involved in the resettlement of displaced persons in the American zone produce two witnesses to offer testimony that they had not been collaborators in the camps—specifically, that they had not been
Kapos
, SS-appointed supervisors of fellow prisoners. He freely admitted that “this made me many enemies” among fellow survivors. It wasn’t the first time and certainly wouldn’t be the last. While countless displaced persons were grateful for his help, he was quickly embroiled in the inevitable feuds between the various refugee groups, often pitting former victims against each other in the scramble to survive and build new lives.

At the newly created Jewish Committee in Linz, Wiesenthal and others made up lists of survivors, exchanging copies with those who drifted in carrying their own lists as they looked for family members and friends.
But he did not expect to find the one person he was most concerned with on any of those growing lists: his wife, Cyla. He had lost contact with her after she had gone to Warsaw to live under an assumed Polish Catholic name. He later heard that during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising German troops had used flamethrowers to destroy the building on Topiel Street where she had been staying with the wife of a Polish poet. “I didn’t believe in miracles. I knew that all my people were dead,” he recalled. “I had no hope that my wife was alive.”

Yet, miraculously indeed, Cyla had escaped just before her street was leveled. Rounded up with other survivors of the uprising, she was sent as a forced laborer to a machine gun factory in the Rhineland. There, she was liberated by the British. She, too, had heard that her spouse was dead. A mutual friend in Kraków, whom Simon had been writing to, was able to give her the startling good news that her husband was alive and waiting for her. In December 1945, the couple was reunited after Simon arranged for an Auschwitz survivor who was going back to Poland to escort her to Linz. The following September Cyla gave birth to a daughter, Paulinka, their first and only child.

Wiesenthal was intent on building a new life for himself in other ways as well. As much as he had admired the Americans who liberated him from Mauthausen and then offered him the opportunity to hunt Nazis, he found it difficult to accept the rapidly evolving new situation and attitudes. A CIC colleague told him bluntly: “
You’ll see how quickly things change. The Germans are needed against the Russians. Good Germans alone are too few.”

Wiesenthal was stunned by the eagerness of former Nazis to serve the occupation forces—and how effectively they sold themselves as experts in the West’s new battle with the Soviet Union. “
The Americans in particular had an incredible talent for being taken in by tall, blond, blue-eyed Germans, simply because they looked exactly like American officers in the cinema,” he recalled. The victors were also susceptible to the pleas for the release of local Nazis by their “
best secret weapon—the
Fräuleins
,” he added. “A young American was naturally more interested in a pretty,
complaisant girl than in one of ‘those SS men,’ whom everyone wanted to forget like a bad dream.”

But Wiesenthal had no intention of forgetting them or their crimes.
In 1946, he published his first book,
KZ Mauthausen,
a collection of his black-and-white drawings based on his concentration camp experiences.
By the following year, he was running the newly created Historical Documentation Center in Linz, where he collected every bit of evidence he could get about Nazi criminals, mainly from displaced persons, the survivors who were still adrift in the postwar chaos.
Wiesenthal had convinced Avraham Silberschein, a former teacher in his Galician hometown of Buczacz, to fund the center when they met at a Zionist Congress in Basel in 1946. He only provided backing for a shoestring budget, but the irrepressible Wiesenthal was off and running.

There were plenty of people who did not appreciate his efforts, especially in a postwar Austria that was trying to portray itself as the first victim of the Third Reich rather than an enthusiastic supporter. In reality, Austrians had assumed a disproportionate percentage of top Nazi positions in the machinery of terror, especially when it came to running the concentration camps. “
Austrians accounted for only 8 percent of the population of the Third Reich, yet Nazis from Austria were responsible for half of the murders of Jews committed under Hitler,” Wiesenthal wrote. As a result, they had a lot to lose if Nazi hunting continued in earnest.
Wiesenthal’s activities and calls for the uprooting of “all of the wild growths on Nazism” in Austria produced a predictable backlash in the form of
threatening letters, and he obtained a permit to carry a pistol in 1948.

This was also the period when the Brichah organization was smuggling Jews from Europe to Palestine, and Wiesenthal cooperated with its operatives in Austria. As someone who believed he would follow the same route soon, he supported those efforts to get Jews to what would soon become Israel.
But he always opposed the Brichah operatives who advocated violent reprisals against those responsible for Nazi crimes.

Ironically, the Jewish escape routes from Europe, many of which traversed
Austria and ended up at Italian ports so that the refugees could board ships there, often overlapped with the “ratlines” of Nazi fugitives to South America. In many cases, the Nazis were helped by ostensibly humanitarian groups organized by the Catholic Church; Austrian Bishop Alois Hudel was well known for his pro-Nazi sentiments and assisted numerous war criminals on their journeys.
Wiesenthal demanded an accounting from the Vatican until the end of his life, including the opening of its archives, but he was also careful to point out that the Catholic Church helped save many Jews.

“
It seems to me probable that the Church was divided: into priests and members of the religious orders who had recognized Hitler as the Antichrist and therefore practiced Christian charity, and those who viewed the Nazis as a power of order in the struggle against the decline of morality and Bolshevism,” he wrote. “The former probably helped the Jews during the war, and the latter hid the Nazis when it was over.”

As he foraged for evidence that he hoped would lead to the capture and conviction of more Nazi criminals in Austria, Wiesenthal was often frustrated by what he saw as the naïveté of many of the new U.S. troops on duty, but he was even more irritated by the attitudes of the British occupation forces. Crossing into the British zone to gather evidence against a war criminal, he was questioned by a sergeant who “
didn’t seem to care” about his hunt for Nazis. “What do you think about the illegal transports to Palestine by way of Italy?” the sergeant immediately asked. As Wiesenthal concluded, the British were much more concerned about stopping the flow of refugees to Palestine “than about Nazi criminals in their zone.”

With all sides seemingly losing interest in the pursuit of perpetrators still on the loose, Wiesenthal was giving increasing thought to moving to Israel, which had come into existence as an independent state in 1948. Cyla was a proponent of such a move from the very beginning, according to Paulinka. “
In 1949, my parents were ready to go to Israel,” their daughter said. Simon made his first visit there that year, believing that this would become their new home.

Along with Simon’s cooperation with the Brichah, he had provided at
least indirect support to the Zionist movement in other ways as well.
In 1947, he published his second book, which focused on Palestinian leader Haj Amin el-Husseini, who had been the British-appointed grand mufti of Jerusalem.
In 1936, the mufti stirred up riots against Jewish settlers, which led to his dismissal from his post and exile from Palestine. But from abroad he continued to urge Muslims to rise up against Jews, and he urged support for Nazi Germany. He met with Hitler in November 1941, telling the German leader: “The Arabs were Germany’s natural friends because they had the same enemies as had Germany, namely . . . the Jews.” Hitler replied by pledging German backing for the Arab cause.