Susan Cohen
2024-10-02 02:42:23 UTC
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Permalinkthe famed Austrian Nazi-hunter, Simon Wiesenthal, a connection that
turns out to be appropriate in disturbing but unexpected ways. That
is, both Simon Wiesenthal and the Center named after him have been
accused of flagrant lying, exaggerations and half-truths. Wiesenthals
confabulations were never a matter of published discourse among
scholars, so far as this writer can determine, nor were they popular
knowledge until quite recently. In any case, it is now known that
Wiesenthal, a born story-teller, rarely let the facts get in the way
of a good storyin fact many of the things he claimed to have done
were fabrications. This recently came to light with the publication,
in June of 2009, of Hunting Evil, by British Author Guy Walters, in
which he characterizes Simon Wiesenthal as a liarand a bad one at
that. Wiesenthal, he maintains, would concoct outrageous stories
about his war years and make false claims about his academic career.
Walters found that there were so many inconsistencies between his
three main memoirs and between those memoirs and contemporaneous
documents, that it is impossible to establish a reliable narrative
from them. Wiesenthals scant regard for the truth makes it possible
to doubt everything he ever wrote or said.1
Daniel Finkelstein, grandson of the founder of the Wiener Library in
London, one of the oldest and most reputable institutions for the
study of the Holocaust, had this to say in an August 2009 article in
the London Times about Guy Walters Hunting Evil: Walterss
documentary evidence on Wiesenthals inconsistencies and lies is
impeccable. He shows how the Nazi hunters accounts of his wartime
experiences are contradictory and implausible. He demonstrates that he
had no role, contrary to his own assertion, in the capture of Adolf
Eichmann. He pitilessly dissects Wiesenthals overblown claims about
the number he brought to justice, suggesting it was not much more than
a handful.2
So far the Wiener Library itself has not responded directly to this
revaluation of Wiesenthal. That is interesting because one assumes
that they, like many others in the field of Holocaust Studies, may
have been aware for some time that there were problems with
Wiesenthals resume.
So what is the truth about Simon Wiesenthal? Born in 1908 in Galicia,
Wiesenthal attended the Czech Technical University in Prague in 1929,
where he had a reputation as a gifted raconteur. (Walters says he
appeared as a stand-up comedian, which could be a British
approximation of the cabaret theatre popular at that time.) Wiesenthal
claimed to have graduated from Czech Technical, but records show that
he didnt. He also maintained that he studied at Lwow Polytechnic in
Galicia in 1935, but there is no record of him ever attending classes
there. Wiesenthal likewise claimed to have operated his own
architectural office and built elegant villas, but again Polish
records do not support this. Instead he appears to have worked as a
supervisor in a Lviv furniture factory from 1935 until 1939, a
somewhat more mundane occupation, and one that Wiesenthal himself
acknowledged before he became a famous celebrity in Vienna.
During the Second World War, Wiesenthal was apprehended by the Nazis,
and was in at least six different Nazi camps. For reasons unknown,
however, he claimed later to have been in 13 of them. This raises the
question that must inevitably come up when contemplating Wiesenthals
stories about himself. Being in a single Nazi camp would clearly be a
horrific, mind-blowing experience, much less being in six of them.
(This writer cannot confirm which ones were death camps and which ones
labor or concentration camps.) So why did Wiesenthal feel it necessary
to inflate the number of camps hed been in to 13, particularly since
such claims were likely to be checked later?
Part of the answer seems to be that Wiesenthal was a natural-born
confabulator and liar who had a powerful need to create the persona of
a superhero. But that alone does not explain his behavior. The
Holocaust raises questions about human nature, and there is a demand
for accounts that can explain, rationalize, and create a moral context
for it. Wiesenthal offered people a plausible narrative with a moral
framework: Nazis incarcerated him; he miraculously escaped; he now
tracked them down. The systemic evil of the Holocaust was so huge and
so threatening that it could be successfully addressed only by a
superman whose capacity to survive evil and punish transgressors was
larger than life. Wiesenthal was acutely aware of this; and his
heart-stopping accounts of last-minutes escapes from the Nazis played
to this anxiety. And the fact that he was bringing masses of Nazi war
criminals to justice was the happy ending to the success story, the
kind peopled wanted to hear; but as Walters demonstrates in Hunting
Evil, at least one of Wiesenthals accounts of last-minute escapes
from the Nazis can be shown to be a fabrication, and others are
questionable.
After the war, Wiesenthal founded two organizations that sought to
collect and centralize information on Nazi war criminals at large.
Sometimes these war criminals were hiding in plain sight, in the
sense that governments knew where they were but lacked the political
will to arrest them. The main function of Wiesenthals organizations,
then, was to keep the issue current in the public eyeand he had the
kind of personality, and the public relations skills, to do just that.
This is the real reason for Wiesenthals notoriety. The organizations
set up by Wiesenthal were research organizations, and had no real
investigative functions, such as law enforcement might have, and no
power to arrest people. Guy Walters concludes (correctly, in my
opinion) that the disinterestedness of western governments in hunting
down Nazi criminals was far more repugnant morally than Wiesenthals
experiments with the truth. That said, the fact that Wiesenthal told
so many unnecessary lies, and that people who might have suspected
this said nothing to challenge them, is one more example of the
Holocausts ability to corrupt.
Although Wiesenthal claimed to have brought over a thousand Nazi
criminals to justice, he generated information leading to the arrest
of less than a hundred at most. His most outrageous claim was that he
participated in the tracking down of Adolf Eichmann. This was, and
remains, a falsehoodthe tracking and kidnapping of Eichmann was the
work of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, and Wiesenthals
involvement was limited to passing on whatever information he had to
them. This inconvenient reality was widely knowncertainly it was
known to Mossad, which despised and resented Wiesenthals self-serving
storiesbut apparently few people were willing to question
Wiesenthals many claims.
Except in Austria, that is, where Wiesenthal was for a long time a
controversial figure. It the 1970s, Wiesenthal publicly berated
Austrian Prime Minister Bruno Kreisky for having so many ex-Nazis in
his cabinetand in this, Wiesenthal was undoubtedly right. The
controversy he stirred up was especially important because Austrians
had, up to that time, generally avoided much public discussion about
their own responsibility for Nazi crimes; and Wiesenthal may have
welcomed the opportunity to open up this issue when he made his
sensationalbut accurateaccusations about Kreiskys cabinet choices.
Kreisky, a Jewish Social Democrat, hinted that Wiesenthal had survived
the war only because he collaborated with the Gestapo; but Wiesenthal
sued for libel and won. Wiesenthal also drew fire for emphasizing that
others besides Jews died in the gas chambers, which brought him into
conflict with Elie Wiesel, who took the view that the Holocaust should
be seen as an exclusively Jewish event. Some of Wiesenthals ideas
were good oneshow ironic, then, that his ideas were given serious
consideration only because of the rough-and-tumble public persona that
Wiesenthal had invented for himself as part of his entrepreneurial and
overly-imaginative self-promotion as a swashbuckling Nazi-hunter.
Wiesenthal received practically every honor known to the 20th century,
over 100 of them. Mainly because of his own self-promotion, Wiesenthal
became much more than an author with some dubious and not particularly
well-written bookshe became a secular saint. But of what secular
religion was Saint Wiesenthal the exemplar? The trouble with
Wiesenthal was not his extraordinary efforts to focus public attention
on Nazi criminalsthe problem was, and is, that his accounts of his
own experiences were never challenged by people who professed to have
an interest in historical truth. His addiction to confabulation made
him a prisoner of what Norman Finkelstein has called The Holocaust
Industry, which we may describe as the systematic use of the Holocaust
for personal and organizational gain.
We are left with the sense that perhaps some who noticed discrepancies
in Wiesenthals books said nothing because they were afraid of being
denounced as anti-Semites. Author Guy Walters refers to this in his
July 2009 article in the Sunday Times. Some may feel I am too harsh
on [Wiesenthal] and that I run a professional danger in seemingly
allying myself with a vile host of neo-Nazis, revisionists, Holocaust
deniers and anti-Semites. I belong firmly outside any of these squalid
camps and it is my intention to wrestle criticism of Wiesenthal away
from their clutches. His figure is a complex and important one. If
there was a motive for his duplicity, it may well have been rooted in
good intentions. Guy Walters made this caveat a month after his book
came out last summer; the fact that he made it at all indicates the
sensitivity with which a professional historian must approach anything
having to do with the Holocaust.
In fact, the appearance of Walters book has some of the
characteristics of a literary campaign, although not necessarily of
pre-arrangement. Walters Hunting Evil was published in Britain on
June 18, 2009, at the beginning of last summer. A month later, in
July, an article by Walters appeared in the Sunday Times, which set
forth his reasons for revealing Wiesenthals duplicities. (One might
think that because something is true might be reason enough for a
historian to reveal it.) In August, 2009, a month later, Daniel
Finkelsteins supportive review appears in the Jewish Chronicle,
validating Walters research. Finkelsteins review was pivotal,
sinceas the grandson of the founder of the worlds oldest library on
Holocaust historyhe is assumed to speak with an authority that others
lack, including perhaps Guy Walters himself.
That is not to say that the above was part of a coordinated campaign.
Walters wrote on his website that he does not know Finkelstein, and
based on internal evidence this writer believes that to be true. It
simply indicates how complicated telling the truth can become when one
writes about the Holocaust, and how important it is for many
historians to carefully consider the public-relations angle before
revealing things that might make people uncomfortable. In Guy Walters
case, he received support for his findings from a man whose
credentials in Holocaust Studies cannot be challenged. (There is at
least one new book about Wiesenthal coming out soon, which after the
Walters revelations will almost surely be forced to deal with obvious
discrepancies in Wiesenthals narrative.)
There is ongoing fallout to the Walters book in other areas. On
November 26, 2009, there appeared a sensational Associated Press
report (carried on Walters website) that 12 members of the 15 member
international advisory board of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for
Holocaust Studies have resigned, apparently after a hysterical uproar
about the availability of research material to scholars. (The AP
report gives as the reason for the international hullabaloo certain
objections by scholars that restrictions on access to files made
independent research impossible.) Inevitably, one of those involved
in the AP report warned that unrestricted access to the Institutes
files might encourage holocaust deniers. The opposite seems much
more likely. The longer people are denied access to primary sources,
the more doubts it will create about how objectively historians are
able to write about the Holocaust.
Beginning with the publication in 1961 of Raul Hilbergs The
Destruction of the European Jews, people on the Left, political and
cultural progressives, and some psychologists sought to deconstruct
the Holocaust so that they could learn how systemic evil operates. If
the Shoah was historys greatest crime, why not try to understand how
it happened, so such crimes could be thwarted in the future? That was
the right approach to take, but it quickly led to a kind of truth that
many people did not want to acceptthat there is a Nazi in every
person, and that any tribe, national group or country in the world
could experience the same moral collapse as Germany experienced, given
the right conditions. That was too threatening for many people,
because they did not want to acknowledge how deep evil ran in human
nature.
And it was, also, the ultimate threat to the neo-cons that were
beginning to gain power in the US. If the same moral collapse that
happened in Germany could happen elsewhere, such an analysis could be
applied anywhere, which meant that the big neo-conservative
foundations could not control discourse about the Holocaust. An
objective deconstruction of the development of evil in Germany could
even serve as a guide to what is happening in Israel. The neo-cons
could not allow that to happen, because of their position that
Israels government could never be criticized; and because the
neo-conservatives did not want a truly objective deconstruction of the
Holocaust that could teach people how to defeat systemic evil. On the
contrarythey sought to create their own systemic evil in the US and
in the Middle East, by using the Holocaust to arouse fear, anger,
guilt and aggression, as well as religious nationalism generally.
Invoking the Holocaust in social and political discourse became a way
for the powerful neo-cons and the Israel Lobby to use the unresolved
trauma of the Holocaust, in some cases to generate ideas and in other
cases to suppress them. The use of the Holocaust to manipulate people
and societies to uncritically support Israel depends on a
particularization of the Holocaustit insists, in other words, that
Nazi evil cannot be compared to any other form of systemic evil. It
insists that the causes of German moral collapse (violent nationalism,
fanatical identification with victim status, deep feelings of
inferiority, a longing for apocalyptic solutions) cannot be applied
anywhere else. That is despicable nonsense.
Not only can the causes of German moral collapse be seen in other
nations and situations; such an analysis must be applied to other
nations and situations, if we are to learn anything about how systemic
evil works. Neo-cons generally dislike that, because they wish to
discuss the Holocaust only within a context of Jewish exceptionalism.
But sadly, theres a Nazi in everybodyin fact, thats the most
important thing that the Holocaust teachers us. As Avraham Burg
writes, todays Israel feels a lot like Weimer, not because Israeli
culture is so similar to central Europes culture, but because the
decline into evil is always similar wherever it occurs. How could
Israel not look like Weimer, when so much of what passes for a
national consciousness in Israel is simply trauma from the Holocaust,
which people do not attempt to deconstruct along universal lines but
to which they cling as personal as well as national identities?
It was not until after Simon Wiesenthal died in 2005 that a British
historian was able to write frankly about the duplicity in Simon
Wiesenthals stories. Again I must ask, why did not the people who may
have known about Wiesenthals casual relationship with the truth speak
up about it? Predictably, the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles,
California, is in no hurry to accept this new historical appraisal of
their namesaketheir website, in fact, faithfully replicates many of
Wiesenthals lies and inaccuracies. But that should not surprise us,
because the Simon Wiesenthal Center, like Simon Wiesenthal himself, is
not interested in historical truth, nor is it committed to teaching
about the history of the Holocaust in all its complexity. The Simon
Wiesenthal Center is, rather, committed to using the Holocaust to
raise money, and using the trauma associated with it to promote the
Centers extremist political perspectives.
https://mondoweiss.net/2010/01/deconstructing-simon-wiesenthal/