The Nazi Hunters (18 page)

According to Wiesenthal’s account, the Palestinian had also visited Auschwitz and Majdanek with Eichmann to learn about the machinery of the Final Solution. As Wiesenthal’s biographer Tom Segev points out, “there is no reliable evidence for its [this story’s] veracity,” and Wiesenthal failed in his efforts to get the book published in English. But his interest in the mufti’s activities remained undiminished, and he passed along anything else he picked up to Silberschein, his funder, who he believed was then relaying the information to Israel.

On his first visit to Israel in 1949, Wiesenthal brought more documents about the contacts between Arabs and the Nazis. He also reported that it was on this visit that Boris Guriel, an Israeli Foreign Ministry official, urged him to stay in Europe, since the new state’s intelligence service needed him there. Segev refers to Wiesenthal “as a recruit in Israel’s secret services” in that period, and he was provided with an Israeli travel document that helped him obtain an Austrian residency permit. He also was outfitted with press credentials as a correspondent for a couple of Israeli publications.

But Wiesenthal’s relationship with the nascent Israeli intelligence services was hardly clear-cut. He provided reports on anti-Semitism and political developments in Austria, maintaining contacts with Israeli diplomats there. But, according to Segev, they saw him as “a partner,” which implies that he was something less than a full-fledged intelligence agent. By 1952, the Israelis had decided not to renew his travel documents; they also rebuffed his appeals that he be paid by the consulate for continuing
to supply information or that they take him on as an employee. While he protested loudly enough to get his travel documents renewed until the end of 1953, he was on his own after that.

Wiesenthal could have become an Israeli citizen simply by moving to Israel, but at that point he wanted both Israeli citizenship and to remain in Austria. While failing in that effort, he managed to obtain Austrian citizenship. Despite Cyla’s eagerness to move to Israel, he had changed his mind. Although it did not look that way at the time, this would prove to be the critical decision that enabled him to gain growing international recognition in the decades to come.

• • •

Tuvia Friedman, who had exacted revenge on Germans in Danzig at the end of the war when he served in the new Polish communist security forces there, had ended up in Vienna, where he took charge of another small Documentation Center. In those and other ways, his initial experiences and activities were similar to Wiesenthal’s in Linz.
He and his colleagues collected testimony and documents from the Jews who were arriving in Vienna from Eastern and Central Europe, offering them as evidence in the trials of SS and other security officers. “Our office kept the Austrian police busy arresting dozens of suspects,” he boasted.

On one occasion, a Romanian Jewish student from the University of Vienna came to him with a pack of letters he had discovered in a drawer in his rented room in an Austrian woman’s house. They were from SS Lieutenant Walter Mattner, who had served in the Ukraine shortly after Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941. The student had read the letters, he told Friedman, and thrown up. They were missives addressed to his wife in Vienna, who was pregnant at the time. They described the systematic shooting of Jews, matter-of-factly mentioning that the number of victims in Kiev was 30,000 and in Mogilev 17,000. He also wrote about the public hangings of Communist Party officials that local civilians were forced to watch. “Here in Russia I can appreciate what it means to be a Nazi,” he added.

Friedman took the letters to an Austrian police inspector, who was
visibly shaken by them. He called in several colleagues to read them as well. “I understood the shame that these men felt,” Friedman noted.

The police tracked down Mattner a couple of days later in a small town in Upper Austria, and brought him back to Vienna. The inspector who had first read the letters invited Friedman to witness his interrogation of the prisoner. When Mattner quickly admitted that he had written the letters, the inspector angrily shot back: “God damn you! How could you write to your pregnant wife that you were shooting children in Russia, without mercy?”

Mattner tried to excuse himself. “I—I wanted to look important to her,” he said. According to Friedman, that earned him a slap from the inspector, who pointed out that his letters were explicit about his involvement in mass murder. When Mattner started claiming that he shot above the heads of prisoners, the inspector slapped him again. “Why did you shoot Jews with such pleasure in Russia?” he demanded.

Mattner kept trying to defend himself, saying he had been “the best friend of Jews” in Vienna and shopped at Jewish stores until 1938, the year of the Anschluss that incorporated Austria into the Third Reich. Whatever happened afterward, he insisted, was not his fault. “It was Hitler’s propaganda, it poisoned people, and all that wild power in our hands,” he said.

Watching with mounting anger, Friedman abruptly left, fearful that he might throw himself at the prisoner. Mattner was tried and hanged.

During the immediate postwar period when the Allied occupation troops were looking on, Austrian courts did handle more cases than generally realized: 28,148 people were tried, and 13,607 of those were convicted. But, as Friedman, Wiesenthal, and others were discovering, the rapidly changing political environment in the early days of the Cold War meant that the enthusiasm for such trials was rapidly diminishing and many of those convicted were quickly released. In Austria, a country that was clinging to its alibi that it was Hitler’s first victim, many Nazis were not only eluding prison but also returning to their old jobs.

“
The situation grew embarrassing,” Friedman recalled. “It seemed
that half of the Austrian policemen had carried out Nazi-ordered programs against Jewish communities, especially in Poland. I began to feel resistance against my Documentation Center, and against me.” Police officials like the ones who had cooperated with him earlier were sidelined.

Exasperated, Friedman went to discuss the situation with his chief contact at the CIC headquarters in Vienna. “
This is Austria, Friedman,” the Jewish U.S. Army major told him bluntly. “The Russians want to lower their Iron Curtain over it, and we don’t want it to happen. And these people are playing us both against the middle. They’re not stupid, you know. And they simply don’t want their courts filled with Nazi war crimes trials.”

The strategy appeared to work, with the Allied occupation forces—including the Soviet contingent—withdrawing from Austria in 1955, allowing that country to become independent and neutral.
From 1956 to 2007, not coincidentally, Austria held a mere thirty-five trials of Nazis accused of crimes.

Like Wiesenthal, Friedman also worked with the Brichah as it funneled Jews to Palestine. In 1947, a year before Israel’s founding, he had a revealing exchange with a leader of the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization whose members often accompanied the refugees as they were smuggled to Palestine. The official applauded Friedman’s efforts to bring Nazis to justice but cautioned him to remember the first priority: the establishment of a Jewish state. “Put your whole heart into this task, Tadek,” he told him. “The Nazis can wait. We can no longer wait for a Jewish homeland.”

Friedman claimed he provided support for Haganah squads that seized trucks transporting weapons destined for Arab countries—and then diverted them to Jewish units in Palestine.
In 1949, the year after the founding of the Jewish state, a new Israeli agent showed up in Vienna who took over local intelligence activities. Friedman was given to understand that his services in that arena were no longer needed. “An odd feeling developed in Vienna at that time,” he noted. “There were the Israelis; and there were the other Jews. I was, technically, a Polish subject.”

He continued working in his Documentation Center, but, like Wiesenthal’s
office in Linz, it was struggling to keep afloat. By the early 1950s, the flow of Jewish refugees into Austria had slowed significantly, and funding was drying up. Even more discouraging was the rapidly declining interest in its work. “
My files were bulging with documents, with sworn affidavits,” Friedman recalled. “But nobody clamored to get at them and use them to prosecute Nazis. The Germans did not want them; the Austrians did not want them; nor did the Western Allies nor the Russians.”

By 1952, the Vienna Documentation Center closed its doors, and Friedman sent off his files to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the new Israeli institution for documenting and commemorating the Holocaust. Friedman decided to follow his files, moving to Israel that same year. He vowed to continue his efforts to track Nazis from there, but he recognized he also had to make a new life for himself in his new country.

In recalling that era, Friedman noted that he had withheld one file from his shipment of his former center’s documents to Jerusalem. “
That was the file on Adolf Eichmann,” he declared.

• • •

During his time in Vienna, Friedman had met and corresponded frequently with Wiesenthal in Linz. “
We agreed to help each other, exchanging information, and co-operating in every way possible,” Friedman maintained. This willingness of two self-proclaimed Nazi hunters to cooperate was genuine at the beginning. Friedman had worked for the Polish communists at the end of the war in Danzig while Wiesenthal had worked for the Americans in Austria. This made them somewhat suspicious of each other, but they were both committed to the same cause of tracking Nazi criminals. It was only later that this common goal became a source of barely concealed rivalry.

According to Friedman, they were both preoccupied early on with the search for Eichmann, the mastermind of the logistics of the Final Solution who had disappeared at the end of the war.
Wiesenthal claimed he was told about Eichmann and his role by Asher Ben-Natan, an Austrian-born Jew who had fled to Palestine in 1938, joined the Haganah, and, after the war, ran the Brichah operation in his former homeland using the name Arthur Pier. Meeting in Vienna on July 20, 1945, Wiesenthal
recounted, “Arthur” gave him a list of war criminals drawn up by the Jewish Agency’s political department; it included Eichmann’s name and the affiliations “high official of Gestapo H.Q., Department for Jewish Affairs, member of the NSDAP [National Socialist Party].”

According to both his first and second autobiographies, Wiesenthal then got another tip from an unlikely source: his landlady on Landstrasse 40, a couple of houses away from the OSS office in Linz. One evening when he was studying his lists of war criminals, she came in to make his bed and looked over his shoulder. “Eichmann,” she said. “That must have been the SS General Eichmann who was in command of the Jews. Did you know that his parents live here, in this street, just a few houses along at number 32?”

Eichmann only had the rank of lieutenant colonel, despite his critical role in the Holocaust, but the landlady was right about where he had lived. Wiesenthal reported that, acting on this tip, two Americans from the OSS office visited the Eichmann house two days later and talked to his father, who insisted he hadn’t heard anything from his son since the end of the war.

This was the beginning of what Wiesenthal described as his increasingly obsessive search for Eichmann, which led to the questioning of a woman named Veronika Liebl in the spa town of Altaussee. She admitted she had been married to Eichmann, but claimed they were divorced in Prague in March 1945 and she had had no contact with him since then. As Wiesenthal pursued the case further, he reported that he became known as “
Eichmann Wiesenthal” around Linz, and he was “swamped with information.” A key goal was to find a photo of Eichmann, who had made a point of keeping his distance from cameras when he was orchestrating mass murder. Wiesenthal reported that one of his colleagues managed to get a 1934 photo of him from a former girlfriend in Linz, which was added to the warrant for Eichmann’s arrest.

Later, when Wiesenthal’s critics and rivals began attacking him for what they claimed was his vastly inflated account of his role in the hunt for Eichmann, they tried to dissect and dismiss almost every part of his
increasingly complex narrative of events.
In some cases, they even questioned whether he had begun his search for Eichmann right after the war as he always insisted.

Friedman, who had arrived in Austria from Poland in 1946, reported that “Arthur”—Asher Ben-Natan—was also the first person to tell him about Eichmann, describing him as “
the greatest murderer of them all.” When the new arrival admitted he hadn’t heard of him, he added, the Brichah leader instructed him: “Friedman, you must find Eichmann. I will say it to you again:
You must find Eichmann.
”

There is no doubt that both Wiesenthal and Friedman took an interest in Eichmann’s whereabouts very soon after the war, whatever the exact timing. Robert Kempner, a German-born Jewish member of the U.S. prosecution team at Nuremberg, wrote in his memoirs that Wiesenthal came to him there and asked: “
Do you have material against a certain Adolf Eichmann? Will he be charged by you?”

In 1947, according to Wiesenthal’s account, an American friend informed him that Veronika Liebl, who was also known as Vera, had requested that the district court declare her alleged ex-husband dead “in the interest of the children.” A purported witness had sworn under oath that he saw Eichmann killed during the fighting in Prague on April 30, 1945, just as the war was ending. Wiesenthal discovered that the witness was married to Liebl’s sister, information that he passed along to an American intelligence officer, who in turn let the district court know about this suspicious circumstance. As a result, the court turned down Liebl’s appeal to have Eichmann declared dead. “This unspectacular move was probably my most important contribution to the Eichmann case,” Wiesenthal wrote.

His critics later questioned whether a death declaration would have changed anything—or deterred the Israelis from hunting Eichmann. But given the general decline in interest in pursuing war criminals, everything that kept the issue alive—and the perpetrators alive in the minds of potential pursuers—could have played a crucial role.
According to Friedman, three Israelis arrived in Austria in 1950 to search for Eichmann. At
the time, they believed he was still hiding in Austria after successfully eluding identification when he was detained by Allied troops in a series of temporary camps at the end of the war.