On 16 October 1946, ten Nazi leaders sentenced to death by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg were hanged. Three wooden scaffolds with gallows, all painted black, were set up in the gymnasium where, just three days earlier, American soldiers had been playing basketball. Two of them were to be used on a rotating basis, while the third was to be kept in reserve in case something went wrong with the first two. A new rope was to be used for each suspension.
According to witnesses, the American official executioner, John C. Woods, was dressed as carelessly as ever, had not shined his shoes, and had not shaved this time either. Woods was certainly not inexperienced, having brought 347 people to the other side of the world in his 15-year career. When he finished this time, he told Stars and Stripes, the US military magazine, that everything had gone as he had imagined: “I hanged ten Nazis in Nuremberg, and I’m proud of it. I did a good job. No execution has ever gone better. It’s just a pity that the Göring one got away with it. No, I was not nervous. I have no nerves at all. You can’t afford them in my line of work. I wanted this job terribly badly and that’s why I stayed here even a little longer than I should have, even though I could have gone home to America.”
Later reports suggest that the hanging just did not go as smoothly. Things got a little complicated for Julius Streicher, publisher of the poisonous anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer, and also for Fritz Sauckel, who oversaw the slave labour empire. The fall down through the opening was too short and the rope too poorly tied, so that groans could be heard from behind the curtain, proof that something had gone wrong and that the victims were slowly giving up. Woods quickly climbed down the ladder, disappeared behind the curtain and the moaning soon stopped; Woods must have grabbed the hanged man by the legs and dragged him down.
Then an American and a Russian doctor disappeared behind a curtain and confirmed the deaths of the convicts. “So that was it,” the people said to themselves, “they have received a just punishment for their crimes.” A similar punishment befell many other Nazi criminals who were convicted by various European courts, but then, with the onset of the Cold War, the zeal of the judges slowly waned and thousands of war criminals never saw a judge. Some disappeared, others fled to other continents, others went into hiding and changed addresses and identities. Only a few determined individuals, who refused to accept that the victims were dead and their killers were still alive, went hunting them down.
Master of Auschwitz
Rudolf Höss was the commander of Auschwitz from the beginning of 1940, when he oversaw its creation, until the end of 1943. The first 728 Poles, mostly political prisoners, were moved into the former military barracks near the Polish town of Oswiecim in June 1940. During the war, 150,000 Polish political prisoners were brought to Auschwitz, but by the end of the war, only half of them were counted.
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Russian prisoners began to be sent to Germany. Soon there were so many that SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered an additional prison complex to be built at Birkenau, just over three kilometres from Auschwitz. Russian prisoners were dying rapidly from starvation, disease and beatings, so Himmler ordered Höss to prepare the camp to receive large numbers of European Jews. The camp was at once labour and extermination, and soon became the largest death factory in the world, with more than a million victims, mostly Jews.
In April 1945, when Soviet troops had already penetrated deep into German territory, Höss and his wife Hedwig considered following the fate of Adolf Hitler, but changed their minds for the sake of their children. “With the firer gone, our world collapsed, life no longer made any sense.” To avoid being recognised, they travelled separately to the north of Germany and Höss, under the name Franz Lang, applied to the naval intelligence school on the island of Sylt.
British forces soon occupied it and sent all senior officers to prison. They paid no attention to the inconspicuous Lang-Höss and soon released him. He started working on a farm in Gotrrupel, a village near the Danish border, was a hard worker and lived in a barn for eight months without complaining. His wife Hedwig lived with their children in St Michaelisdonn, 100 kilometres away, so they sometimes kept in touch. And that was fatal for him.
Hedwig was under surveillance by war crimes investigators, who discovered one of the letters written by her husband. In March 1946, Lieutenant Hanns Alexander, a German Jew who had fled to London before the war and was now a British war crimes investigator, was convinced that Hedwig knew where her husband was hiding. He had her imprisoned and began to question her, but she refused to say anything and her children remained silent. She insisted that her husband had died, so Alexander imprisoned her 12-year-old child and told her that he would be sent by train to Siberia and that she would never see him again. The desperate mother relented and gave out her husband’s address.
In May 1946, military police surrounded the barn where Höss was hiding and arrested him. His identity was confirmed by the inscription on his wedding ring, which read Rudolf and Hedwig, and Höss only handed it over to the investigators when they threatened to cut off his finger.
Like most war-crime hunters, Alexander Höss was not prepared to surrender immediately to the military court system. He told the military police that he would be back in ten minutes, and they would put Höss on a truck until then. The policemen understood the order “correctly”, took the liberty of beating Höss with wooden crucifixes so that he was all black. Only then was he put on the truck. Before being imprisoned, the 46-year-old prisoner was stripped naked and locked up. After the first interrogation, the British decided it was best to send him to Nuremberg, where the International War Crimes Tribunal had been sitting for four months.
Those psychiatrists who had studied the mental health of Hitler’s assassins also showed a great interest in Höss. Thus, the American investigators found Höss to be “completely calm, unassuming and cooperative”. Right at the start of the trial, Höss’s statement that he estimated that at least 2.5 million people died at Auschwitz as a result of fumigation and shooting, and that half a million died of starvation, came as a surprise. He admitted that the figures were probably exaggerated, but that Eichmann had communicated them to Himmler. What shocked the audience most was how calmly he spoke of how he had followed orders from his superiors to make Auschwitz the most efficient extermination camp. There was no doubt that he knew what he was doing.
“The final solution to the Jewish question meant the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe,” he said. He told how he had personally inspected all the new gas chambers. “It took us between three and fifteen minutes to kill the people in them. We knew when they were dead because they stopped moaning.”
Höss was not tried at Nuremberg because the Americans decided that he would only appear as a witness to help provide evidence against the accused Nazis. Two military psychiatrists interviewed him separately to try to determine his inclinations. Höss showed no emotion. “He is without moral principles and reacts to an order to kill a human being as if he were being ordered to cut down a tree.” He described his work in purely technical terms: “It is not difficult at all to kill so many people, you could kill more. Killing took the least time, burning the bodies took much more. To disobey an order? Such a thing could not have happened with me. Otherwise, I did not kill anyone myself. I was only the director of the Auschwitz camp. I got all my orders from Hitler through Himmler, and Eichmann gave me orders about the transports.”
His next stop was Poland, and the Americans flew him there.
A killer writes his autobiography
Jan Sehn was a lawyer and lecturer in law at Jagiellonian University, and prepared all the necessary documents for the trial of Höss and other Auschwitz personnel in Poland. He began interrogating Höss in November 1946, trying to obtain as much information as possible about the camp and his personal history. Each morning the prisoner was brought to his office, where he was interrogated until midday. Höss also told him everything without embarrassment and at length, and at one point Sehn suggested that he put these events on paper; the result was a unique biography of one of the Nazis’ greatest criminals.
As the interrogations drew to a close, Höss took off his wedding ring and asked Sehn to give it to his wife after his death. “I never expected to be treated with the decency and consideration I received in a Polish prison,” he confessed. He was also pleased that Sehn had encouraged him to write his biography. “This task saved me hours of fruitless and exhausting self-pity,” he explained. This writing was the basis for his autobiography, which was published in Poland in 1951, four years after he was hanged.
“In the following pages I want to tell you the story of my inner being.” With these words Höss began to write his memoirs, which were later translated into other languages. He described his lonely childhood on the outskirts of Baden-Baden, among isolated farmhouses near the forest. “My only confidant was a pony and I believe he understood me.” He wrote that although he had sisters, he did not socialise with them and that his guards were not particularly fond of him. One day, when he was playing alone in the woods, a group of gypsies came by and took him with them. Fortunately, a neighbour came by, took him away and took him home. It didn’t take a psychologist much to realise that this had led Höss to believe that dangerous strangers with bad intentions were roaming the world. His father, a merchant traveller, had brought him up in a religious spirit and Höss was convinced that one day he would be a missionary somewhere in the jungles of Africa.
During World War I, he secretly enlisted in the army at the age of 16 and was sent to Turkey and Iraq, where he killed his first opponent. “My first dead man”, he wrote with pride. He was wounded twice and had his first experience of a woman in hospital. In his biography, Höss constantly avoided describing anything that might contradict the high opinion he had of himself.
In Auschwitz, he paid special attention to Eleanor Hodys, an Austrian seamstress who was imprisoned for forging Nazi documents. When she was working in his villa, he persistently stalked her so that she began to lock herself in the bathroom from him. As punishment, he locked her in solitary confinement and visited her secretly. When she became pregnant, he moved her to the basement of his villa, where she had to live naked with minimal food. When he finally released her, she was six months pregnant. He sent her to a doctor to have an abortion. Of course, he did not write anything about this event in his biography. As he waited to be executed, he was convinced that his story proved that he was a man of principle.
His path to the camp commander was also, in his opinion, principled and too straightforward. His mother died during the First World War and he immediately broke with all his relatives. After the end of the war, “full of anger”, he enlisted in the Freikorps, a paramilitary group of former soldiers. He joined the Nazi Party in 1922 and was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for killing what he called a “traitor” to the movement. This was an act of principle for him, because he was convinced that traitors must be punished. He constantly complained about the conditions in prison, even though they were infinitely better than those in Auschwitz. In 1928, he was granted amnesty and was free. Five years later, he joined the SS, but was soon sent to Dachau, a camp for political opponents.
In 1938, he became assistant camp commandant at Sachenhausen and soon led an execution platoon to shoot prisoners every day. Interestingly, he usually had mercy on them at the end with a merciful shot in the head. “I was not cut out for this kind of work,” he wrote. And, he added: “I was never unmoved by the suffering of the people.”
Jan Sehn was convinced that Höss was not lying about his lack of enthusiasm for some of the work in the camp, or at least did not share the kind of enthusiasm shown by his sadistic subordinates. The ideal Nazi concentration camp commanders were not supposed to be personally brutal, they were supposed to be cold bureaucrats driven forward by ambition to reach the highest possible position in the SS. They left the brutality to their subordinates. But if brutality and mass murder were part of their job, they did it as best they could.
Höss directly observed the effect of Zyklon B gas on Soviet prisoners and verified its effectiveness. After seeing the bodies of nine prisoners, he felt uncomfortable, “even though I had imagined that the execution by gas would be worse than it was”. He added that he was reassured to see that Jews could be massacred by such executions. He accepted responsibility for these acts and understood that he would have to pay for what he had done with his life, but he blamed Hitler and Himmler, who gave the orders.
Primo Levi, an Italian writer of Jewish descent who survived Auschwitz, wrote the introduction to a later edition of Levi’s autobiography, in which he wrote: “The book is full of malice and Höss narrates it with a disturbing bureaucratic insensitivity.” He added that this autobiography was one of the most enlightening books he had ever read, showing how a man who in different circumstances would probably have been a kind of dull functionary, committed to discipline, turned into one of the greatest criminals in history.
Höss was hanged in Auschwitz in April 1947. Four days before his execution, he made the following statement to the prosecutor. I have come to the terrible realization that I have sinned gravely against humanity. As Commandant of Auschwitz, I was responsible for carrying out part of the Third Reich’s brutal plan for the destruction of mankind. In doing so, I had inflicted terrible wounds on humanity. I have caused untold suffering, especially to the Polish population. I shall therefore pay with my life. May God one day forgive me for what I have done.”
The Clave from Lyon
Captain Klaus Barbie, head of the Gestapo in Lyon, France, is hardly in the same league of Nazi criminals as Eichmann, Mengele or Auschwitz camp commander Rudolf Höss. He was only a middle-ranking Nazi criminal. But that does not mean that the significance of his crime is any less. He was the symbol of the Gestapo in Lyon. High-ranking Gestapo officers never had direct contact with their victims; they worked through the likes of Barbie. He was the one who was remembered by those victims who survived, because he was a particularly conscientious and fanatical local operative. He was responsible for thousands of deaths in occupied France and personally tortured many of his victims.
In a world of utter brutality, he soon became famous, being called the “Butcher of Lyon”. His most famous victim was the leader of the French Resistance, Jean Moulin. But it was not only French resisters he tortured, his “speciality” was hunting down hidden Jews. On 6 April 1944, acting on a tip-off from a provocateur, he surrounded the small French village of Izieu, where Jewish children were hiding in a school. The Germans, with unusual brutality, threw them onto a lorry as if “they were sacks of potatoes”. The children cried and called for help, but to no avail. Barbie immediately informed the Gestapo headquarters in Paris of this achievement. Forty-four children, aged between three and thirteen, and seven of their educators were taken to Auschwitz, and only one of the adults survived.
For the Klarsfelds, the fate of these children was more than just one of the many tragedies of the Second World War, as they would almost have suffered a similar fate in another village during the war. Serge Klarsfeld and his wife Beate decided to do everything possible to make Barbie pay for her crimes. They also decided to tell the world that Barbie had worked for US intelligence after the war, which had gone out of its way to allow him to escape to Latin America. The search for the criminal therefore took two decades.
Barbie was sentenced to death in absentia by a Lyon court twice before – first in 1947 and again in 1954. But by then he had long disappeared. He left Germany in 1951 and settled with his family in Bolivia under the name Klaus Altmann, a successful businessman with good connections in the Bolivian army.
In 1971, when Beate Klarsfeld heard that the prosecutor in Munich was going to drop the case against him, Barbie was firmly convinced that he had put his past behind him. But he did not count on the Klarsfelds, who began to gather evidence of his Nazi past and his links to the Americans. They were convinced that he had started working for them as soon as the war ended. They published all the evidence in the newspapers and called on members of the resistance to help them and join the public protest in front of the Munich court. Serge Klarsfeld found Raymond Graissmann, the leader of the Jewish community in Lyon during the war, who confirmed that Barbie knew what would happen to the Jewish children, telling him: “Shot or deported, there is no difference.”
Beate and a group of supporters appeared before the Munich court holding a photograph of Auschwitz survivor Fortuna Benguigui, who arrived in the camp a year before her three children were sent from the village of Iziue to be taken away from her. None of them returned. The banner read: “I will go on hunger strike as long as the investigation against Klaus Barbie, who murdered my children, is stopped.”
The Munich public prosecutor reopened the investigation and gave Beata two important photographs. One was taken in 1943 and the other was of him sitting at a table with a group of businessmen. This picture was taken in 1968 in La Paz, Bolivia. One of the businessmen looked very much like a slightly older Klaus Barbie. The prosecutor said to Beata: “You have proved that you are very successful. Why don’t you help me identify this man?”
Both photos were published in newspapers, along with a request for anyone who recognised the man in the La Paz picture to come forward. A German living in Peru came forward and said that he had met the man as Klaus Altmann when he was visiting La Paz. This is how Mr and Mrs Klarsfeld and the Munich prosecutor obtained Altmann’s address in Bolivia and found that the dates of birth of Barbie’s and Altmann’s children matched perfectly.
Beata flew first to Peru and then to La Paz, met journalists and told her story. Of course, the Bolivian authorities, who were protecting Altmann, were not happy with the publicity and even prevented her from moving freely around the city. “We are detaining you for your safety. You risk being killed by members of the Nazi organisations in the city who are furious about the campaign you are waging against them.”
Early in 1972, the French judiciary was also alarmed. President Georges Pompidou wrote to the Bolivian President that France could not allow the crimes of the past to be forgotten. Beate returned to La Paz with the mother of the two children who had been taken from Izeu. The Bolivian authorities were embarrassed and did not obstruct them, but they were forbidden to speak in public. In protest, the women chained themselves to a bench outside the building where Altmann worked, holding a sign in Spanish: “In the name of the millions of Nazi victims, hand over Barbie-Altmann.”
Barbie has now stopped claiming to be Altmann, but the Bolivian authorities have argued that the case is time-barred under their law. “I was only fulfilling my military duty”, Barbie claimed in front of journalists who had started to gather in large numbers in La Paz. Beate now had no idea how to proceed. Some even advised her to kill Barbie, others suggested kidnapping him and handing him over to justice, just as they had done in the Eichmann case. Her husband Serge even flew to Chile and met Regis Debray, the French Marxist who had joined Che Guevara for a time when he was about to overthrow the Bolivian regime by guerrilla action. Che Guevara’s attempt failed in 1967 and Debray found himself in a Bolivian prison, sentenced to 30 years in prison. He was only released three years later after an international campaign for his release.
Serge and Debray planned to kidnap Barbie and take him across the border to Chile, where the Marxist President Salvador Allende was then in power. Debray had already bought a getaway car with $5000, but it was not the best deal, as he stopped working after only a few kilometres. So there was nothing to the kidnapping.
For almost the next ten years, the Klarsfelds managed to keep the Barbie case alive, even though there was no visible progress. They were also too busy with the cases of Lisckha, Hagen and Heinrichson, former SS officers who had served in France during the war. They were more vulnerable as they were still living in West Germany. When they were finally convicted in 1980 for their role in the deportation of 50,000 Jews from France, the Klarsfelds were satisfied with their work. They were once again able to take up the Barbie case with full energy.
In 1982, a Bolivian living in France visited them and told them he was ready to kill Barbie. But when the would-be assassin arrived in Bolivia, he told them that the military regime was being overthrown and that Bolivia was likely to get a civilian government. The Klarsfelds abandoned the idea of forcibly removing Barbie from the world, and French President François Mitterrand gave them new hope.
Barbie was arrested on 25 January 1983 on the pretext of economic crime. The Bolivian authorities had made it clear that they wanted to get rid of the troublesome resident of La Paz. Since the German authorities were hesitant to try the criminal, the Bolivian authorities simply put Barbie on a plane to French Guiana, where he was then flown to France in a French military plane. In the run-up to the trial, Serge Klarsfeld wrote a book entitled The Children of Izieu, in which he described all 44 children who went to their deaths, thus saving them from anonymity.
Barbie was brought to trial in 1987 and maintained his innocence until the end. The trial took place in Lyon, the place where he committed his crimes as head of the Gestapo. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, where he died four years later. He was 77 years old.
Over the years, as the Klarsfelds tried to bring Barbie to justice, the role of US intelligence in helping him escape to Bolivia became clearer and clearer. While the French government repeatedly asked the Americans to tell them where Barbie was hiding, they hid the fact that she was already working for them. Initially, they denied any involvement in the case, but when Barbie was brought to France for trial, they only presented a three-finger-thick dossier on him to the public. The last document was a 1951 report by two American agents who had taken Barbie, who already had a passport in the name of Altmann, to Genoa and sent him on to South America.
For the first and last time, the Americans used the so-called Nazi “rat-trail”, organised by the Nazis themselves with the help of the Vatican, to send fugitive war criminals to safety, mainly in South America, to escape Barbie. The Americans paid Father Krunoslav Draganovic, a Croatian priest who was one of the organisers of these escapes, to get Barbie and his family from Genoa on a boat to South America.
US intelligence had known since 1947 that Barbie was a high-ranking Gestapo officer and war criminal, but they were more interested in his knowledge of the communists in occupied Germany. They considered him “honest both personally and intellectually, an anti-communist and a Nazi idealist who was convinced that his ideals had been betrayed by the Nazis in power”. They decided to keep him as long as he worked for US intelligence. He was of particular interest to the Americans because he was said to know a great deal about French intelligence, which they believed was infiltrated with Communists.
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Mr President
If the Barbie affair was a clear, albeit late, victory for justice, the Waldheim affair was far from it. When the former UN Secretary-General appeared on the list of possible candidates for the presidency of Austria in 1986, certain revelations about his work during the Second World War caused a storm, not only among the public, but also among the many Nazi hunters, the Jewish community in Austria and even the World Jewish Congress in New York. There was no victor in this conflict, but many were left without a reputation.
In January 1986, at a meeting of the International Jewish Congress in Jerusalem, Eli Rosenbaum was summoned to see Israel Singer, the Secretary of the organisation, and told that he was going to Vienna to do some research. “The case is about Kurt Waldheim. Believe it or not, it seems that our Dr Waldheim was a Nazi. And this is the one.”
Rosenbaum, who had just finished working in a Manhattan law firm and was now general counsel of the World Jewish Congress, was sceptical. It was known that Waldheim had been in the Wehrmacht during the war and that he had been wounded on the Eastern Front, but nothing was known of his having been a member of the Nazi Party or having done anything more than his duty as a soldier. Rosenbaum knew how difficult it was to make someone who had served in the army of the Third Reich personally guilty of war crimes, so he wanted to avoid this task at all costs.
Singer, whose parents had fled Austria before the war, did not want to hear about it and introduced him to another participant in the Jerusalem conference. Leon Zelman was a Polish internee who had survived Auschwitz and Mathausen and who ran a Jewish Welcome Centre in Vienna, which was dedicated to overcoming Austria’s deep-rooted anti-Semitism. Zelman showed him an article that had just appeared in the Austrian weekly Profil about the Austrian military academy’s controversial decision to erect a memorial plaque to General Alexander Löhr, commander of the Austrian air force before Austria’s annexation to Germany.
As commander of the Luftwaffe, Löhr was responsible for the bombing of Belgrade in April 1941, where thousands of civilians were killed, and was convicted as a war criminal and hanged in Yugoslavia in 1947. Before that, in 1942, he became a member of the Wehrmacht and commander of Army Group E, responsible for Yugoslavia and Greece. At the end of the Profile article there was a note that Kurt Waldheim was then serving on his staff as a junior officer. Zelman was convinced that this could be explosive information.
But Rosenbaum was still in doubt. If Waldheim, who had reached the pinnacle of his career as UN Secretary-General, was indeed in the service of a war criminal, why had this information never been made public before? And since Löhr was convicted as a war criminal for acts committed before he was transferred to the Wehrmacht, it was difficult to link Waldheim to war crimes.
But Zelman pointed out that Waldheim’s official biography omitted the period of service in the Balkans. What was Waldheim afraid of? When he was wounded on the Eastern Front in 1941, he returned to Austria and that was to be the end of his military career. “Since I was no longer fit to serve at the front, I continued my legal studies and graduated in 1944,” he described this missing part of his biography.
“Something is wrong here,” said Zelman. “If he left active military service in 1941, how could he have served on Löhr’s staff, since Löhr didn’t start his service in the Wehrmacht until 1942?” Zelman offered to accompany Rosenbaum to Vienna, where Rosenbaum would investigate the whole matter as discreetly as possible. But when they arrived in Vienna and Rosenbaum started asking him where he should start his research, Zelman started to dodge. “You know that my position in Vienna is already difficult. I love the city and I know what’s cooking under the surface.”
His message was clear. As a Jew in Vienna, he did not want to be involved in something Rosenbaum might discover. “Please keep me out of this matter.” He then added that he would be happy if Rosenbaum informed him of the final result and that he was ready to help him if he got into trouble. It was clearly one thing to be a fearless Jew in Jerusalem, but another to be fearless in Vienna, Rosenbaum concluded.
Zelman knew that during the presidential elections, any rummaging through Waldheim’s military career would draw the ire of his supporters, which could ultimately turn against the Jews and Waldheim’s opponent in the presidential elections, the socialist Steyer. Waldheim’s supporters, in particular, have everywhere stressed the international experience he gained as UN Secretary-General. “An Austrian the world trusts!” said the election posters.
Thanks to the personal contacts provided by Singer, Rosenbaum came into contact with people who were already digging into Waldheim’s past. These were mainly members of the socialist parties, who had also provided Profil with information about Waldheim and were disappointed that there was no response. Rosenbaum met “Karl Schuller”, which was the pseudonym of his source. Schuller and colleagues at the American-run Berlin Documentation Centre found nothing on Waldheim, but had better luck at the Austrian State Archives. Waldheim’s military file was sealed, but with the help of a “friend”, Schuller managed to obtain some copies.
In them, he could read that Waldheim was originally anti-Nazi, but quickly turned the tide after the annexation of Austria. He soon became a member of the Nazi student organisation and a member of the SA Cavalry, the Nazi paramilitary force. As if this were not enough, Schuller managed to obtain a photograph, bearing an official military insignia and taken on 22 May 1943, showing three officers on an airfield runway. The caption said that they were an Italian officer, an SS general and Kurt Waldheim. The recording was made in Podgorica, Montenegro, although Waldheim claimed to have been in Vienna studying law at the time. This was proof that he had served in the Balkans, where Löhr was in command.
All this was enough for Rosenbaum, although he still wanted to know what he could do to support the veracity of this evidence. The next step seemed to him perfectly logical. “Did you show these photographs and documents to Simon Wiesenthal?” Wiesenthal, as the most famous Nazi hunter, had the most extensive dossier on all known Nazis.
“Oh, God forbid, of course not!”, Rosenbaum was surprised to hear Schuller’s reply, and immediately afterwards asked if Wiesenthal knew he was in Vienna. When Rosenbaum told him that he had not informed Wiesenthal of his arrival, Schuller sighed with relief and said that Wiesenthal must not know what he was doing because he supposedly hated the Socialists. “But how can we expect him to help us if we tell him nothing?” Rosenbaum insisted, but Schuller said only that their cooperation would be over if Wiesenthal was included in the research.
Rosenbaum then returned to New York and informed Edgar Bronfman, President of the World Jewish Congress, what he had learned. “We are not in the business of persecuting Nazis,” he told him. Everyone knew that publishing this information would be seen as interference in the Austrian presidential election. But everyone also knew that they could be accused of covering up the truth if they remained silent.
After much deliberation, Bronfman finally gave his consent to make the matter public. The New York Times was the first to publish the Waldheim data, and Profil followed up with further research. The New York Times reporter explained that Waldheim was under the command of General Löhr, who brutally repressed the partisan movement in Yugoslavia and sent Greek Jews from Salonika to Auschwitz. In particular, he pointed out that Waldheim was assigned to the German military command in Salonika in March 1942 and that he was also an interpreter for German and Italian officers in Yugoslavia.
Waldheim was caught by journalists while relaxing in the mountain resort of Semmering and agreed to an interview, saying he would quickly clarify this “misunderstanding”. He had never been a member of the SA or a Nazi student organisation, he said. He had only trained horses a few times and had only attended student debates a few times. His service in the German army is no secret. Asked by a journalist why his recently published official biography did not mention his service in the Balkans, he replied that he had not bothered with the details in his biography because he did not think it was important.
He became more heated when asked about the deportations of Jews from Thessaloniki. He claimed that he had been nothing but an interpreter in the Balkans and that he regretted this terrible holocaust, but he knew nothing about it and this was the first time he had heard that such deportations had taken place. “I know nothing about these things. This is just a well-organised campaign against me.” He did not realise that this was only the beginning of what he would have to endure.
When Simon Wiesenthal, who headed the Documentation Centre for Jewish Victims of Nazi Crimes in Vienna, learned that Rosenbaum was researching Waldheim’s past, he was surprised and later wrote in his memoirs, “He did not visit me, nor did he telephone me.” He was offended that such a thing was happening without his knowledge.
This is not the first time that rumours of Waldheim’s Nazi past have surfaced. The Israelis had already asked Wiesenthal in 1979 to investigate whether Waldheim’s pro-Arab views were, in their view, the result of a Nazi past. A search of the archives revealed nothing dramatic, except that he had been in the Balkans during the war. When the Waldheim affair broke out, even some journalists were able to tell that membership of a Nazi student organisation could not be particularly controversial, since it was sometimes necessary “to get a bed in the dormitory”.
Waldheim then called Wiesenthal and claimed that he did not know what was happening to the Thessaloniki Jews. “It is impossible that you did not know,” Wiesenthal replied. “The Jews made up a third of the city’s population at that time and the deportations lasted for six weeks. Every day at least 2,000 were taken to the camps and freight trains carrying equipment for the Wehrmacht took back the Jews of Salonika.” Wiesenthal was also convinced that Waldheim knew of the crimes that were taking place in Yugoslavia, but all this did not mean that he welcomed the offensive launched against Waldheim by the World Jewish Congress. On the contrary, he underestimated the work of the Congress and claimed that, although Waldheim was a liar and an opportunist, he was not a Nazi and a war criminal.
There was also the question of why no country, especially Yugoslavia and Greece, demanded Waldheim’s extradition after the war.Waldheim was more than just an interpreter, he was an intelligence officer who wrote reports on captured British commandos who then disappeared, and reported on partisan activities in Yugoslavia.
Waldheim sent his son Gerhard to Washington with a 13-page memorandum justifying his military career and denying all accusations that he had participated in the massacre of three Yugoslav villages in October 1944. At that time, Löhr’s troops were already retreating northwards through Macedonia and needed a safe route to retreat, especially between Štip and Kočani. There, they then shot hostages en masse in villages they suspected of supporting the partisans. At that time, Waldheim wrote in his report about increased partisan activity in the area.
Despite all this information, which did not directly prove that Waldheim was a war criminal, he was elected Austrian President in the second round. In the first post-war years, the Austrians successfully presented themselves as victims of the Nazi regime rather than as its ardent supporters. Although they represented less than 10% of the population of Nazi Germany, they were responsible for as many as 50% of Nazi crimes and three quarters of the concentration camp commandants were Austrian. But the reaction of the Austrian Jewish community was also surprising. “Among the young generation of Austrians, we have managed to win many friends of Israel. Now all these efforts of ours have been destroyed,” they wrote.
Ghost hunting
The hunt for the Nazis, who successfully hid for years, has been dragged into the 21st century. At that time, the search was still on for Aribert Heim, the Austrian doctor who worked at Mathausen and earned the name “Doctor Death”. He killed by injecting petrol or other poisonous substances into the hearts of his victims. He operated on them, cutting out their organs and leaving them to die on the operating table.
After the war, both the German judicial authorities and Simon Wiesenthal were looking for him, but Danny Baz claimed that they had been searching for the ghost for a quarter of a century. Baz is said to be a member of the secret Jewish death squad that killed Heim in 1982. This group of Jewish Holocaust survivors was called “The Owl” and consisted of highly trained former members of the US and Israeli security services.
The “Sova” was responsible for the discovery and execution of many war criminals. But Baz claimed that its greatest success was the discovery of Heim, who was not hiding in some exotic land, as some people assumed, but in North America. The Avengers first discovered him in New York State, followed him to Canada, kidnapped him from a hospital in Montreal, transported him to their court in California, sentenced him to death and executed him. “We wanted these rats to look their victims in the eye before they die.”
But this was not the only story of high-profile Nazi criminals who were supposed to have evaded the official hand of justice and died before it reached them. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary and chief of staff, disappeared from Hitler’s bunker shortly after the firer committed suicide. He was sentenced to death in absentia by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. His disappearance led to rumours that he had survived or that he had bitten through a cyanide capsule as he left Hitler’s bunker. Some saw him in northern Italy, others in Chile, others in Argentina or Brazil.
In 1970, a former British intelligence officer claimed, “Bormann is dead because I searched his body with an automatic rifle.” Ronald Gray was stationed near the Danish border when, in March 1946, someone offered him a ride across the border into Denmark for about $8000. Gray agreed, hoping to discover the route taken by Nazi criminals. Near the border, however, he realised that the fugitive was Bormann and that he was being ambushed and would eventually be killed by Bormann’s associates as an unwilling witness. He emptied the magazine of his automatic rifle into Bormann, and he lay motionless. In the end, it turned out that Gray had probably shot someone else who was on the run, and not Bormann, whose remains were found during construction work in Berlin and identified by DNA analysis in 1972.
As for Heim, the German ZDF television presented convincing documents that “Dr Death” lived in Cairo after the war, converted to Islam and took the name Taker Hussein Farid. The doctor’s medical report showed that Farid died of cancer in 1992, ten years after he was allegedly liquidated by Israeli avengers. Normally, however, the search for Nazi criminals – whether by state authorities or private sleuths – has proceeded very slowly through the courts, where protracted legal battles have been fought. Only in rare cases were kidnappings and shootings carried out.
In addition to the arrest of Eichmann, there are several other known incidents where the avengers are believed to have been working from behind the scenes. Such was the case of Cherim Soobzokov from the North Caucasus. At first sight, Tom, as he was known to the inhabitants of the small town of Peterson in New Jersey, was a success story. After the war, he found himself in Jordan with other refugees before coming to America in 1955. He first worked in a car wash, then organised a local union, joined the Democratic Party and became the company’s purchasing manager. He was well-mannered, well-connected and almost wealthy.
But some of his Caucasian compatriots did not believe his story. Tom is said to have immediately offered his services to the Germans who came to the Caucasus, going around the villages in an SS uniform and helping them to find Jews and Communists. His name appeared on a list of Nazi war criminals and ended up in the hands of the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service. Although he served in the Waffen SS, after the war he presented himself as an ordinary refugee. So he lied about his past.
In Jordan, he started working for the CIO. His employers had no illusions about his background. Even after coming to America, he continued to work for the CIO until 1960. In 1970, the INS checked his file but found nothing incriminating. What is more, his work was supposedly “beneficial to America”.
Despite the confusion surrounding his past, Soobzokov was a winner and sued anyone who claimed to have collaborated with the Germans in World War II. On 15 August 1985, a bomb exploded outside his house, Tom was seriously injured and died in September. The FBI later claimed that the Jewish Defence League was probably responsible for the assassination, although the case was never solved.
Eight years later, a new killing reminded us that justice never lapses. In a prominent district of Paris, the victim was René Bousquet, an 84-year-old former police chief who had organised the deportation of Jews from occupied France, including thousands of children. Although he was tried after the war, he was only given a suspended sentence for allegedly helping the resistance. He became a successful entrepreneur and his involvement in the Holocaust was almost forgotten, although evidence was still sought later to retry him.
Bousquet was convinced that he was not in danger and walked peacefully with his dog twice a day in the forest of Bologna. On 8 June 1993, a man called Christian Didier knocked on his door, saying he had some court documents to hand over. When Bousquet opened the door, Didier later told French television, “I shot at him at point-blank range”. Although he hit him, Bousquet ran after him. “I shot a second time, but he was still following me. I shot a third time and then he started to wobble. The fourth shot hit him in the head and he collapsed on the ground, blood pouring out of him in rivulets.”
Didier escaped and later called a TV crew to tell them his story. He was unrepentant, because for him Bousquet was evil incarnate, and killing him was the same as killing a poisonous snake. It was Didier who had already tried to kill Klaus Barbie and who had tried to force his way into the premises of French television. He also spent some time in a psychiatric clinic. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, but after five years he was released, saying: “If I had killed him fifty years ago, I would have been decorated.”
For the Klarsfelds, the whole affair was a nasty blow. “Jews want justice, not revenge,” they said.
Until the Demjanjuk case came before the courts, German prosecutors had great difficulty proving concrete acts against war criminals. As a result, there were very few convictions. In 2011, Demjanjuk was convicted in Germany for his role in the murder of 28,060 Jews as a former guard at Sobibor. As a Soviet soldier, he was captured by the Germans during the war and emigrated to the US after the war. America extradited him to Israel in 1986 because 11 witnesses identified him as “Ivan the Terrible” from Treblinka.
The verdict in Israel was later overturned on the grounds that the witnesses were unreliable. Demjanjuk returned to America, but in 2001 new evidence came to light that he had been a guard at Sobibor and Majdanek. He was stripped of his US citizenship and deported to Germany in 2009 to face a new trial. He was sentenced to five years in prison, but appealed and died in Germany in 2012 before his appeal was resolved.
Finding witnesses and evidence of mass killings was not difficult, but finding documents and witnesses directly linking someone to the mass killings was a challenge. According to the Institute of Modern History in Munich, by 2005, 172 294 people had been investigated for war crimes in Germany and 6656 convictions had been handed down, but only 1174 for proven murders. Thus, only a tiny fraction of murderers were convicted for their actions. The problem with Demjanjuk was that instead of proving guilt for specific murders, the prosecution accepted the formulation that he was an accomplice to mass killings. In other words, one who served in the death camps was guilty by virtue of the position he occupied in this machinery of death.
“We take the position that working at Auschwitz-Bikrenau, regardless of what a person can be specifically accused of, makes him an accomplice to murder.” This is how another 30 former Auschwitz guards, some of them well over 90 years old at the time, ended up on the prosecution’s list. In 2015, an investigation was opened against 13 concentration camp guards, but only one was indicted.
When Oskar Gröning, the 93-year-old “bookkeeper” at Auschwitz, was accused of complicity in the murder of 300,000 prisoners and brought to trial in Lüneburg in 2015, he admitted to being a guard at the camp and to distributing the money confiscated from prisoners before they entered the gas cells. But like many others accused in similar cases, he claimed that he was just an insignificant cog in the great killing machine of Nazism. “I ask for forgiveness, I am morally guilty, but whether I am also guilty under criminal law is for the court to decide. ”
In July 2015, he was sentenced to four years in prison, which was longer than the prosecution had asked for. “Too late, but not too late” was the motto of Ephraim Zuroff , Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, the last remaining centre dedicated to the prosecution of Nazi criminals. In 2013, posters of his appeared in all major German cities, featuring footage of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, calling on anyone with information about anyone who had been involved in Nazi war crimes to report it. On the basis of these posters, Zuroff obtained 111 names. The prosecution started investigating two of them and came across a guard at Dachau, who had advanced Alzheimer’s disease. The second person was a collector of Nazi decorations and weapons, but had since died.
