Authors: Alan Levy
Nazi Hunter
A
LAN
L
EVY
was born in New York City in 1932 and educated at Brown University and the Columbia University
Graduate School of Journalism. After seven years as a reporter for
The Louisville Courier-Journal
and another seven years freelancing in New York, he took his family to Prague in 1967 on
an assignment to adapt a play for director Milo
ŝ
Forman.
Rowboat to Prague
, Levy’s eyewitness account of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia
(published in England as
So Many Heroes
), was hailed by
Newsweek
as ‘the definitive book about a tiny nation’s hope and tragedy, written with an intimacy of detail
and emotion that transcends mere journalistic reporting.’ For it, he and his family were expelled and deported in 1971. After nearly two decades in Vienna, Alan Levy returned to Prague in
late 1990 and, the following autumn, became the founding editor-in-chief of a pioneering English-language weekly newspaper,
The Prague Post
. When this book was first published in England
in 1993 as
The Wiesenthal File
, it was on Best of the Year lists for the
Good Books Guide
and
The Observer
. Published in America a year later, it earned Levy the 1995
Author of the Year award from the American Society of Journalists & Authors.
Praise for
The Wiesenthal File
:
‘Wiesenthal has played his part in a disturbing episode of post-war history. He deserves this readable and intelligent book.’
Norman Stone,
The Times
‘This biography of famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal is so well written that it often seems like a thriller.’
Kirkus Reviews
‘Levy is ruthless in his determination to make every act of barbarity clear. It is impossible to turn the pages without feeling not just despair but revulsion . . . A
valuable addition to the literature of Nazi atrocities.’
Caroline Moorehead,
New Statesman & Society
‘There is scarcely a page from first to last when one does not flinch, take a deep breath and consider what it is to belong to the species that could bring such
nightmares on the world . . . Alan Levy writes affectingly and simply of great tragic matters.’
Simon Ward,
Literary Review
‘This moving account . . . is filled with Wiesenthal’s outspoken comments and impromptu recollections . . . As much suspense and high drama as a
thriller.’
Publishers Weekly
‘His approach to Wiesenthal is fair minded and critical.’
International Herald Tribune
‘[This book] should be read, lent, and referred to.’
Observer
‘
The Wiesenthal File
is more than the sum of its parts. It throws light on themes such as the nature of evil, and is also a portrait of a man the author knows
intimately and obviously admires.’
Emma Klein,
The Tablet
‘[A] thorough, objective book . . . compellingly detailed.’
Good Book Guide
‘Alan Levy’s biography presents us with the real Wiesenthal, warts and all. It is a candid exploration of a man whose image as an avenger of the Holocaust has, in
the popular mind, reached almost biblical proportions.’
Bernard Josephs,
Jewish Chronicle
‘Levy recounts the complex events so skilfully that the book does full credit to Simon Wiesenthal . . . one of the most readable fact-bulging Holocaust reports yet . . .
[a] dark, disturbing and brutally honest volume.’
Austria Today
‘Despite the book’s sober topic, the author packs in revealing anecdotes and rich detail that capture the ironic humour of Wiesenthal.’
American Booksellers Association, Bookman’s Weekly
‘Alan Levy can write of truly horrendous acts of inhumanity with clarity and restraint.’
Fergus Pyle,
Irish Times
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK as
The Wiesenthal File
by
Constable Publishers 1993
This revised edition first published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2002
Reprinted 2005, 2006
Copyright © Alan Levy 1993, 2002
The right of Alan Levy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any
form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication data is available from the British Library
ISBN 1-84119-607-X
ISBN 978-1-84119-607-7
eISBN 978-1-47210-800-5
Printed and bound in the EU
10 9 8 7 6 5
To
Cyla and Simon Wiesenthal
and to
Lisa Keloufi
born 3 September 1993
and to
Mélina Keloufi
born 26 September 1996
2 The many liberations of Szymon Wiesenthal
9 ‘Don’t forget our murderers!’
12 Wannsee: the final solution
19 The Wallenberg disappearance
22 The world’s biggest battlefield
PART V: FRANZ PAUL STANGL, GUSTAV WAGNER, HERMINE BRAUNSTEINER RYAN
27 The man in the white jacket
32 The mare of Majdanek went to Germany
PART VI: BRUNO KREISKY, KURT WALDHEIM
36 The denazification of Lieutenant Waldheim
38 The prisoner of the Hofburg
40 A letter from Waldheim to Wiesenthal
PART VII: EPISODES AND EPILOGUES
43 ‘I wish not to provoke the Lord’
between pages 180 and 181
Treblinka camp (
Wiener Library
)
Auschwitz inmates (
Wiener Library
)
Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem (
Popperfoto
)
Raoul Wallenberg (
Topham Picture Library
)
Josef Mengele (
Associated Press
)
Mengele’s experiment victims (
Wiener Library
)
Photographers of Josef Mengele in São Paulo (
Associated Press
)
between pages 372 and 373
Franz Stangl with daughter (
Topham Picture Library
)
Kurt Waldheim at Yugoslav airstrip (
Topham Picture Library
)
Oberleutnant Kurt Waldheim (
Popperfoto
)
Kurt Waldheim at the United Nations (
Topham Picture Library
)
Dr Israel Singer of the World Jewish Congress (
Topham Picture Library
)
Simon Wiesenthal in his office (
Horst Tappe
)
Four 1992 photographs of Simon Wiesenthal (
Antonin Novy
)
Bregenz, the capital of Austria’s westernmost province, the Vorarlberg, is less than two hours and seventy-seven miles by train from Zürich, Switzerland, but, to the
federal capital in Vienna, it is an all-day trip of almost 500 miles on the crack Bodensee Express. Settling into the dining car with Austria’s weightiest daily,
Die Presse
, in hand
in the early 1970s, a gentleman in his sixties was paired for breakfast with a Vorarlberger in his twenties who boarded in Bludenz almost an hour later, when there were no empty tables left.
Discovering that the man opposite him was reading the other side of his paper, the older man was amused and asked, before turning the page, if he was finished. Flustered, the younger man tried to
pretend he wasn’t reading the other’s paper, but he accepted when his neighbour said he’d finished the first section and wouldn’t he like to look at it?
The Vorarlberger punctuated his reading of the news with interpretive comment: ‘Another traffic detour in Innsbruck! Those Jews in City Hall are always messing things up for the rest of
us.’ . . . ‘The price of gas is going up! It’s all because of what the Jews have done to the Arabs.’. . . ‘A bomb went off in the South Tyrol! The Italians say German
extremists did it, but it’s all the work of the Jews.’
‘There are still Jews in the South Tyrol?’, the older man wondered gently.
‘You can’t believe what you read in the papers anyway,’ the Vorarlberger replied. ‘They’re all run by Jews!’ Passing through some of the most gorgeous
mountain scenery in the world, the older man tried not to focus on the ugliness he was hearing.
Finally, though, he could bear it no more, so he asked: ‘Do you know any Jews?’
‘Of course not!’ the man replied proudly. ‘I am from Bludenz, where there
are
no Jews.’
‘Would you ever sit at a table with one?’
‘Certainly not!’
‘Well, you’re just as wrong about that as you’ve been about everything else you’ve said today. You just had breakfast with a Jew.’
The man stood up spluttering ‘Waiter! Waiter! I want to pay.’
‘But I haven’t brought you the second coffee you ordered,’ the waiter protested.
‘That’s all right. I’ll pay for it,’ the man insisted, thrusting an exorbitant tip at him and exiting in haste.
Simon Wiesenthal reflected on the encounter all the way home. That night, over dinner, he told his wife Cyla and a couple of friends about it. The next morning, he went to the Austrian National
Library and did a little research before writing a feuilleton for the
Salzburger Nachrichten
.
‘There is only one person who has declared himself a Jew in the whole Vorarlberg,’ Wiesenthal reported, ‘out of a quarter-million people. Statistically, that means my breakfast
guest had a fifty times better chance of being hit by a car while waiting on the sidewalk in Bludenz than of having anything to do with a Jew. And yet he was a confirmed anti-Semite.’ To me,
Wiesenthal added when we met soon thereafter: ‘Even if Hitler had succeeded in exterminating us, we still would have been a menace to the Nazis. They don’t need a living Jew. The
phantom of a Jew is already enough.’