Nazi John Demjanjuk is on trial in Germany for his part in the extermination of thousands of Jews at Sobibor. It is for that reason that I wanted to bring everyone’s attention to the excellent interview to be found at The Browser with Times journalist Guy Walters. He is the author of eight books, which include four wartime thrillers, the critically acclaimed Berlin Games and his latest work on Nazi hunting, Hunting Evil. He told us, basically, that Simon Weisenthal, the world’s most famous Nazi hunter, is a big liar. http://thebrowser.com/books/interviews/nazi-hunters-guy-walters
Walters not only crushes the Weisenthal myth but he also had a few things to say about Odessa, the group of former SS men made famous by Frederick Forsyth’s book The Odessa File and assumed by many to be an actual organisation. ‘The problem with Odessa, which stands for Organisation of Former SS Associates,’ he said, ‘Is that if you’d been in the SS and were trying not to get hunted you’re not going to call your organisation that, are you? So, basically, it’s bollocks. But because of his book the myth persists. A man called Willhelm Hoettl fed the story to Simon Weisenthal [the famous Nazi hunter] who fed it to Anthony Terry at the Sunday Times where Forsyth picked it up and all these people put their spin on it.’ Walters thinks it’s probably true that there were various groups of former SS people and perhaps even one called Odessa in Southern Germany, but the ball has been tampered with so many times and it now lodges deep in the imagination of anyone trying to think about Nazis in the post-war period.
But although there were all kinds of myths that grew up around the hunt for the world’s biggest Nazis, the true stories are even more bizarre. Walters told me this surreal story:
Isser Harel was head of Mossad [the Israeli Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations] in the early 1950s when Mossad found, from the stories of a half-blind German Jew, that Adolf Eichmann was living in Buenos Aires. Mossad went to have a look at the house and decided there was no way he lives in this little bungalow. ‘But the half-blind Jew, Lothar Hermann, persists, and Mossad eventually collected enough information to say that he in fact is living in this crappy little house – actually, another crappy little house – in Buenos Aires, and they staged their audacious, cack-handed, brilliant kidnap of Eichmann off the street in Buenos Aires and took him back to Israel to face trial and he was hanged in 1962,’ Walters explained. ‘People say that Harel is trying to exculpate himself for dragging his feet on Eichmann, but in the early 1950s Israel had enough enemies on its doorstep to be worrying about Eichmann and it was not easy for them to mount this operation. The idea that they could have done it straight away at that time is just silly. In any case, Eichmann wasn’t a household name until after his trial, so it wasn’t as if this was a big Nazi name then. This book shows that Simon Weisenthal, despite his claims, was not involved in the kidnap or search to the extent that he says he was.’
Walters insists that Weisenthal is, in essence, a liar. ‘He’s just not this secular saint that everyone says he is. His memoirs all contradict each other and are at odds with the rest of the evidence,’ he says. ‘The Weisenthal Centre claims 1100 Nazi scalps, but the true figure is about 10. The Centre bought his name in the 1970s and is basically an Israeli brand-builder fighting anti-Semitism.’
Though he challenges the hagiographic stories about Simon Weisenthal, Walters is nonetheless appalled that the Allies failed to prosecute the thousands of Nazis who went on the run after the war. ‘It is disgraceful that if we thought it was a criminal regime we didn’t go on to prosecute the 80,000 people who committed murders and greater crimes. Nazi Hunting basically stopped after 1948 when about 5% of them had been caught, if that,’ Walters says. ‘Sure, some Nazis were useful to use against the Soviets in the Cold War, but the extent of it and the cynicism with which things were not done is disgusting. I say this without being naïve.’
