An Imperfect Nazi Hunter
Early in his career as a Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal enlisted the help of a handsome, 24-year-old Austrian Jew named Manus Diamant in his pursuit of Adolf Eichmann. Diamant’s parents had been murdered by the Nazis, and after the war he posed as a Dutch SS officer in his personal search for Nazi criminals. Eichmann’s wife, Veronika, and their three young children had been located in the Austrian lakeside village of Altaussee, so Diamant was dispatched there. He quickly ingratiated himself with Eichmann’s family, so much so that one day he was entrusted to take the children out on the lake in a rowboat. Diamant thought how easy it would be “to drown Eichmann’s three children to punish the chief butcher, so that he would feel what millions of Jewish mothers and fathers had felt when their children were torn away from them by force and murdered by his orders.” This became Diamant’s plan of action, but first he consulted Wiesenthal.
“There is no room for revenge!” Wiesenthal adamantly replied, and Diamant’s plan was abandoned.
Such is the man at the center of Tom Segev’s artful portrait: a deeply committed humanist philosopher, guided by moral precepts of the highest order. This characteristic is also central to the tragedy of Wiesenthal’s post-war life, the one that led him to acrimonious relationships with many prominent Jews, including Elie Wiesel, and to his astounding and highly questionable friendship with the former Third Reich minister, Albert Speer.
Segev’s fascinating, exhaustively researched, painstakingly balanced and very readable biography delves into many other aspects of Wiesenthal’s personality and life: his egocentrism, his proclivity for exaggeration and outright mendacity, his gift for public relations and political maneuvering, his stubbornness and contentiousness. But it is Wiesenthal’s profoundly felt and constantly reexamined moral-mindedness that emerges from these pages as the essence of the man.
As a Jew who survived the Holocaust through both good luck and acts of honor by decent Germans, Wiesenthal, who died in 2005, was an outspoken critic of the idea of the “collective guilt” of the German people, a concept that had been embraced by many Jews immediately after the war. For Wiesenthal, there were only individuals and their decisions and deeds that should be held to account, a principle that compelled him to also investigate Jews who had been complicit with Nazis during the war, a pursuit that caused rancor among many Jews as well as many gentiles.
Indeed, it was Wiesenthal’s insistence on equal accountability for Jewish collaborators that initiated his lifelong clash with Elie Wiesel. Recounts Segev: “Wiesel … observed that Wiesenthal had tried to persuade him that it was not just six million Jews but 11 million human beings” of various (or no) religious persuasion who had perished in the death camps, including Poles, Ukrainians, Russians and Germans, homosexuals and gypsies, and not one of them must be forgotten. “All of the victims must be united in a single memory,” Wiesel quoted Wiesenthal as saying.
“Wiesel was incensed,” Segev writes. “He said that there was no historian who cited the number 11 million and Wiesenthal lost his temper. ‘You think only of the Jews!’ he exclaimed. ‘For you, they were all saints. I can prove to you that among them there were the worst kind of scoundrels, worse than the non-Jews.’”
Wiesenthal apologized for his outburst, but the line between them had been drawn. In this incident, we see Wiesenthal’s penchant for playing fast and loose with the facts—the figure, 11 million, is arbitrary at best—and for ugly hyperbole in the words, “worse than.” But we also see Wiesenthal’s unwavering moral conviction about the “brotherhood of all the victims.”
Later, when Wiesenthal and Wiesel were in competition for the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize—which Wiesel won after an active campaign—their rift was complete. But in Segev’s account, there is little doubt which of the two men was the more humanistic.
Wiesenthal was not simply against the persecution and destruction of the Jews but rather on a crusade against evil. And he repeatedly stated that his famous acts of hunting down Nazi criminals and bringing them to justice were more in the service of preserving history and its lessons than in meting out retribution. Said Wiesenthal, “I realize that the crimes of the Nazis cannot be punished, that every sentence can only be symbolic because these crimes were so monstrous that they cannot be addressed by any penal code.” Indeed, the eventual capture and trial of Eichmann achieved his ultimate goal—it brought the horrors of the Holocaust to the world stage as nothing else had done since the Nuremberg trials.
Yet here again Wiesenthal’s predilection for fabricating self-aggrandizing stories is evident. As time went on, Wiesenthal expanded his role in Eichmann’s capture to that of its prime mover, while in the real story, related by Segev, Wiesenthal is far from the hero of the manhunt. It was planned and executed by Israeli special forces who brought Eichmann from Buenos Aires to Jerusalem for trial. On the other hand, Wiesenthal’s role in keeping the search alive over the decades—especially his winning fight to prevent Eichmann’s wife from having her husband proclaimed officially dead while he was still in hiding—cannot be underestimated. Nonetheless, Wiesenthal paid for his feckless mendacity with a public loss of credibility and esteem.
But if the man was flawed, the moral philosophy he espoused was complex, subtle and consistent. Wiesenthal’s role as a moral philosopher reached its apex with the publication of The Sunflower, his third book to become a bestseller and one that remains on the reading lists in many American classrooms. In this 1976 book, Wiesenthal recounts his work camp experience of being brought to a dying Nazi soldier’s bedside to hear him confess his crimes and beg for Wiesenthal’s forgiveness—as a Jew—before he passed away. Wiesenthal could not grant the soldier his wish, but afterward remained tortured by the request and his reaction to it.
Of all the fundamental ethical questions raised by the Holocaust, perhaps the most compelling is the question of forgiveness. If one cannot conceive of forgiving a remorseful and penitent perpetrator of a crime of this magnitude, is the entire idea of forgiveness void? If some acts are deemed unforgivable, what virtue is left in forgiving other acts? Although such questions resonate in Jewish ethics, as in many readings on Yom Kippur, they are primary in Christian thought, where forgiveness is essential to achieving salvation. Wiesenthal’s story has justly taken on the status of a defining moral fable for Jews and Christians alike.
Yet Wiesenthal’s thoughts and actions on this ethical dilemma took an unexpected turn in 1966, one that confounds many to this day: He opted for an extreme forgiveness. Albert Speer, minister of armaments and war production for Hitler, after having served the full 20-year sentence of the Nuremberg court, published his memoirs, an apparently sincere mea culpa. Wrote Wiesenthal,“This man has served his sentence, he has admitted his guilt, he has shown contrition—more than this cannot be demanded of him, and he is therefore acceptable.” The forgiveness he could not bestow upon the soldier in The Sunflower he now offered to one of Hitler’s closest advisors. With this act, Wiesenthal may have reached a moral perspective reserved for the most saintly among us. Or he may have lost his perspective on one of the greatest horrors in human history.
Daniel Klein’s play, Mengelberg and Mahler, an exploration of the moral ambiguity of the actions of the exiled Dutch conductor, Willem Mengelberg, during the Nazi era, premiered at Shakespeare and Company Theater in Lenox, Massachusetts, in 2010. He is co-author of The New York Times bestseller, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar.
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