Simon Wiesenthal

The single small office at Number 6 Salztorgasse, on the third floor of an unremarkable building above a tobacco shop a hundred yards from the Vienna Danube Canal, contained one desk, one secretary’s desk, three filing cabinets, a typewriter, and a card index that by the late 1970s held cross-referenced information on approximately 90,000 individuals. The man behind the larger desk was Simon Wiesenthal. He had run the office, formally called the Documentation Centre of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime, since 1961. He worked there six days a week, from approximately 8.30 in the morning until approximately 7 in the evening, with one hour for lunch at the nearby Hotel Bristol where he was on first-name terms with the headwaiter. He answered his own phone. He opened his own post. The funding for the office came from a combination of small grants from American Jewish federations, his own fees from books and lecture tours, and donations from a Vienna-based fundraising committee whose annual budget never exceeded approximately 200,000 schillings. The office produced, between 1961 and Wiesenthal’s death in 2005, the documentary work that made possible the prosecutions of approximately 1,100 named perpetrators of the Holocaust.

What follows is the working profile of the man behind the desk and what he actually did. The fuller treatment of the wider Nazi-hunting operations of the postwar decades is on the parent page, Nazi Hunters. This page goes into the operational specifics: how Wiesenthal worked, what cases he made, what he got right and what he got wrong, and what the Vienna office produced for the historical record.

How the work was done

Wiesenthal’s method had three stages: collection, cross-referencing, and prosecution support. The collection stage drew on a network of correspondents, mostly survivors, occasionally former Wehrmacht and SS personnel who had broken with their old colleagues, and on the public record. Wiesenthal subscribed to thirty-two German-language newspapers and regularly clipped birthday notices, obituaries, business announcements, and society pages, looking for the names of men who had been on the wartime SS and Gestapo rosters. The clippings went into the card index. The names that produced cross-references with wartime postings produced a working file. The working files were checked against new information as it arrived. The methodology had been developed in the immediate postwar years, when Wiesenthal had worked with the United States Office of Strategic Services and its successors, and had been refined over the following decades.

The cross-referencing stage made use of approximately 350 standard reference works, including the Nuremberg trial transcripts, the SS personnel files held at the Berlin Document Centre (later transferred to the German Federal Archives at Koblenz), the records of the various postwar war crimes trials, the published works of major Holocaust historians, and the deportation lists held at Yad Vashem and at the various national archives. Wiesenthal had read most of them. The work had given him a working knowledge of the wartime SS personnel structure that few professional historians could match.

The prosecution support stage took the working files and turned them into actionable intelligence for prosecutorial authorities. Wiesenthal himself did not have prosecutorial authority. He provided the information; German, Austrian, Israeli, French, Brazilian, and other prosecutors took it from there. He maintained working relationships with most of the major Western European war crimes prosecutorial offices. The Frankfurt prosecutor Fritz Bauer, the Hamburg prosecutor Thomas Mengershausen, the Munich prosecutor Manfred Ludolph, the Stuttgart Central Office for Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, and the relevant offices in Düsseldorf, Vienna, Paris and Jerusalem all received Wiesenthal’s case files at various times.

The Eichmann work

Wiesenthal’s largest single contribution to the postwar legal reckoning was the work that contributed to the seizure of Adolf Eichmann in May 1960. The work began in 1947, when Wiesenthal received from a former colleague of Eichmann’s, who had broken with the postwar SS network, the information that Eichmann was alive in Argentina under an assumed name. Wiesenthal had passed the information to the United States military authorities and to Israeli contacts. The Israeli intelligence services at that time had other priorities and did not act. Wiesenthal continued the work. By 1953 he had established that Eichmann was alive, working at the Mercedes-Benz plant outside Buenos Aires, and was living under the name Ricardo Klement. The Israeli contacts at that time still did not act. Wiesenthal’s information went into the file at the Israeli Foreign Ministry and waited.

The decisive intervention in 1957 was the German prosecutor Fritz Bauer’s, who had received from a partly blind German émigré in Buenos Aires named Lothar Hermann an independent confirmation of Eichmann’s address. Bauer passed the information directly to the Israeli ambassador. The Mossad, after additional verification by the operational team led by Rafi Eitan, decided in 1959 to mount the seizure. The decision drew on intelligence from multiple sources, of which Wiesenthal’s was one of the most substantial.

The relative weight of Wiesenthal’s contribution, against Bauer’s and Hermann’s, has been argued for decades. Wiesenthal’s autobiography The Murderers Among Us (1967) gives full credit to himself. The detailed historical reconstruction by Tom Segev in Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends (2010), drawing on Mossad archives that had been closed for sixty years, has shown that Wiesenthal’s role was real but more limited than his own account suggested. Bauer’s contribution was the operationally decisive one. Wiesenthal’s contribution was the foundational documentary one. Both contributions were necessary. Neither was sufficient on its own.

The Karl Silberbauer case

The smaller and more revealing case was the identification of Karl Silberbauer, the SD officer who had personally conducted the arrest of Anne Frank and her family at the secret annex on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam on 4 August 1944. Silberbauer’s identity had been one of the unsolved questions of the postwar period; the man who had pulled the bookcase aside and led the Frank family out had not been traced. The publication of the Anne Frank diary in the 1950s had produced sustained pressure for his identification.

Wiesenthal began work on the case in 1958. The clue he followed was a single line in a 1944 SD report on the Frank arrest, which had been recovered after the war from the Amsterdam SD office files. The report had been signed by an SS-Oberscharführer named Silberbauer. Wiesenthal cross-referenced the surname against the Berlin Document Centre records and identified a Karl Josef Silberbauer who had served in the Vienna Gestapo before the war. The Vienna police records indicated that a Karl Silberbauer was, in 1958, working as a Vienna police officer. Wiesenthal informed the Vienna prosecutorial authorities. The investigation took five years, partly because the Vienna police force was reluctant to pursue a serving colleague and partly because the relevant documentary records were difficult to obtain.

Silberbauer was identified definitively in October 1963. He acknowledged that he had conducted the Frank arrest. He was suspended from the Vienna police, faced internal disciplinary proceedings, and was eventually allowed to resume his career on the grounds that the formal Austrian statute of limitations on his wartime conduct had run. He died in Vienna in 1972 at the age of fifty-six. The case was the most famous of Wiesenthal’s smaller-scale identifications and is the one most often used as the canonical example of what his methodology produced.

Hermine Braunsteiner

The case of Hermine Braunsteiner, the Mare of Majdanek, was the case that brought Wiesenthal to substantial American public attention. Braunsteiner had served as a guard at the Majdanek concentration camp and at Ravensbrück during the war and had been responsible, on the testimony of multiple survivors, for the killing of children at the gas chambers. She had been tried by the Austrian authorities in 1949 and had served three years of a three-year sentence; after release she had emigrated to Canada and then to the United States, marrying an American serviceman named Russell Ryan and settling in Maspeth, Queens, New York, in 1959.

Wiesenthal received in 1964 a tip that Braunsteiner-Ryan was living openly in New York. He investigated and confirmed the address. He passed the information to the New York Times reporter Joseph Lelyveld, who wrote the resulting article in July 1964. The story produced sustained American public interest. The United States Immigration and Naturalisation Service eventually moved against her under the misrepresentation provisions of American immigration law. She was denaturalised in 1971 and extradited to West Germany in 1973, the first individual extradited to West Germany under the new American statute. She was tried at Düsseldorf as part of the Majdanek Trial of 1975 to 1981 and sentenced to life imprisonment. She was released in 1996 on grounds of ill health and died in April 1999.

The Braunsteiner case established that the American statute of limitations could not be used to shelter Nazi perpetrators who had falsified their immigration papers. It became the model for the subsequent Office of Special Investigations cases under Eli Rosenbaum.

What Wiesenthal got wrong

The Vienna office’s identifications were, on the documented record, accurate in approximately ninety per cent of cases. The remaining ten per cent included a number of well-publicised mistakes. The 1986 case of Walter Reder, an SS officer convicted in Italy of the Marzabotto massacre, included Wiesenthal’s claims of additional crimes that the Italian courts subsequently disallowed. The 1991 case of Ivan Demjanjuk in Israel included Wiesenthal’s endorsement of the prosecution’s identification of Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible at Treblinka, an identification that was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1993 (see John Demjanjuk Convicted 2011). Wiesenthal also pursued the rumour throughout the 1960s and 1970s that Martin Bormann had survived the war and was living in Latin America; the rumour was not confirmed and, after the 1972 Berlin excavation that established Bormann had committed suicide on the night of 1 May 1945, was definitively disposed of.

The Vienna office’s production of accurate identifications was approximately 1,100 successful cases. The production of mistaken identifications was a small fraction of that figure. Wiesenthal himself, in private and occasionally in print, acknowledged that the methodology produced errors and that the errors had to be corrected when they were identified. The Demjanjuk identification was the highest-profile of the mistakes. The wider documentary record of the office stands.

The relationship with the Mossad

Wiesenthal’s relationship with the Mossad and with the wider Israeli intelligence services was complicated. The Israeli political establishment had not, on the documented record from the relevant archives, fully trusted his independence in the early decades. Wiesenthal had insisted, throughout, on operating as a private organisation rather than as an Israeli operative. He had refused at multiple points to take direction from the Israeli government on which cases to pursue. He had a particular interest in cases involving Eastern European local collaborators, which the Israeli government had not always wished to pursue at the level of public attention Wiesenthal preferred. The office’s caseload included substantial work on Latvian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian perpetrators that the Israeli government would have preferred to leave to the Communist authorities in those countries.

The relationship improved over time. By the 1990s Wiesenthal was a consultant to the Israeli government on Holocaust-related legal matters and had been awarded the Israel Prize. The 2010 publication of the Mossad archives on the Eichmann case, which Tom Segev drew on for his Wiesenthal biography, has produced the most balanced assessment of the relationship that is now available. The wider lesson is that the Israeli state and the private Nazi-hunting operations had complementary roles. They did not always agree on tactics. They almost always agreed on objectives.

The personal cost

Wiesenthal’s office was bombed twice, the second time in June 1982 by a parcel bomb sent from West Germany that destroyed the entrance and seriously injured his secretary. He received approximately four to five death threats per week throughout his active career, mostly through the post. His wife Cyla, who survived the war separately and who had emigrated with him to Vienna, lived for sixty years with the knowledge that her husband’s work might at any moment produce an attempt on his life or on hers. The threats produced sustained pressure on the family. Cyla Wiesenthal died in November 2003 at the age of ninety-five. Their daughter, Pauline Kreisberg, lives in Israel.

Wiesenthal himself died at his desk in the Vienna office on 20 September 2005 at the age of ninety-six. He had attended the office that morning and had spent two hours on correspondence before going home for lunch. He died at home the same evening. The Vienna office continued in operation for two further years before being formally wound down in 2007. Its archive was transferred to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The 90,000 cards in the index are, sixty years on, the foundational private resource for postwar perpetrator identification. They are still being used by historians of the killing.

See also

Sources

  • Tom Segev, Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends, Doubleday, 2010
  • Hella Pick, Simon Wiesenthal: A Life in Search of Justice, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996
  • Simon Wiesenthal, The Murderers Among Us: The Wiesenthal Memoirs, McGraw-Hill, 1967
  • Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989
  • Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, Constable, 1993
  • Joseph Lelyveld, “Lifelong Hunter of War Criminals”, New York Times Magazine, 22 March 1964
  • Wiesenthal Vienna office archive, transferred to Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum