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开 本: 16开纸 张: 胶版纸包 装: 精装是否套装: 否国际标准书号ISBN: 9780385519465
This first fully documented biography of Simon
Wiesenthal, the legendary Nazi hunter, is also a brilliant
character study of a man whose life was part invention but wholly
dedicated to ensuring both that the Nazis be held responsible for
their crimes and that the destruction of European Jewry never be
forgotten.
Like most Jews in Eastern Europe on the eve of
Hitler’s invasion of Poland, twenty-four-year-old Simon Wiesenthal
did not grasp the nature of the Nazi threat. But six years later,
when a skeletal Wiesenthal was liberated from the concentration
camp at Mauthausen, he fully fathomed the crimes of the Nazis.
Within days he had assembled a list of nearly 150 Nazi war
criminals, the first of dozens of such lists he would make over a
lifetime as a Nazi hunter. A hero in the eyes of many, Wiesenthal
was also attacked for his unrelenting pursuit of the past, when
others preferred to forget.
For this new biography, rich in newsworthy revelations, historian
and journalist Tom Segev has obtained access to Wiesenthal’s
private papers and to sixteen archives, including records of the
U.S., Israeli, Polish, and East German secret services. Segev is
able to reveal the intriguing secrets of Wiesenthal’s life,
including his stunning role in the capture of Adolf Eichmann, his
relationship with Israel’s Mossad, his controversial investigative
techniques, his unlikely friendships with Kurt Waldheim and Albert
Speer, and the nature of his rivalry with Elie Wiesel.
Segev’s challenge in writing this biography was Wiesenthal’s own
complicated relationship to truth. Wiesenthal told many versions of
his life, his suffering in the camps, and his involvement with the
arrest of individual Nazis. Segev shows that in order to gain the
information he sought and twist the arms of reluctant government
figures, Wiesenthal needed to seem more influential than he really
was.
For two generations of Americans, Simon Wiesenthal was a Jewish
superhero—depicted on film by Ben Kingsley and Laurence Olivier—and
the muse for a Frederick Forsyth thriller. Now Segev demonstrates
that the truth of Wiesenthal’s existence is as compelling as the
fiction. Simon Wiesenthal is an unforgettable life of one of
the great men of the twentieth century.
Introduction: The Glass Box
1. “Eichmann Is My Passion”
2. “During That Period, We Never Took Hitler Seriously”
3. “See You on the Soap Shelf”
4. “Who Knows Her? Who Has Seen Her?”
5. “The Duty of an Austrian Patriot”
6. “That’s How I Became a Stamp Collector”
7. “I Hope You’re Not Coming to See Me”
8. “I Always Said He’s in Buenos Aires”
9. “Sleuth with 6 Million Clients”
10. “You May Have Thought He Was Happy, but He Also Cried
Sometimes”
11. “A Huge Mass of Rotten Flesh”
12. “Auschwitz Lines”
13. “What Would You Have Done?”
14. “Kreisky Is Going Mad”
15. “Better Than Any Monster”
16. “Mr. Wiesenthal, I Claim, Had Different Relations with the
Gestapo from Mine”
17. “It’s Not Easy to Be My Wife”
18. “The Children… Were Actually the Same Children”
19. “Only So That Mengele’s Name Would Not Be Forgotten”
20. “As If I Were Already Dead”
21. “Sleazenthal”
22. “WO All Made Mistakes in Our Youth”
A&nowledgments
Notes
Index
Praise for Tom Segev’s Simon
Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends
“Mr.
Segev, justly celebrated for his histories of formative moments of
the state of Israel, is as careful a biographer as he is an
historian….Gripping yet sober, this meticulous portrait of a
complicated man is unlikely to be bettered.”
—The Economist
“[A] meticulous yet forceful new biography…[Segev’s] book
delivers not merely an intimate account of Wiesenthal’s life and
times, but also judicious examinations of the many controversial
and little-known aspects of that life….It is a serious pleasure
to imagine a new generation of readers discovering his life in this
careful telling.”
—The New York Times
“Segev reveals…a man of profound conflict and contradiction, a
lightning rod for controversy and recrimination, but unquestionably
a crucial figure in the struggle to retrieve and preserve the
evidence of the Holocaust….Segev himself sticks to the ‘true
story’. That’s his stock-in-trade and that’s what makes all of his
work so compelling. But telling the unvarnished truth ultimately
honors the man he is writing about, and Wiesenthal emerges from
Segev’s book as an even richer and more consequential character
than the one he invented for himself.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Segev is one of the world’s great investigative
reporters—in a class with bloodhounds like Seymour Hersh and the
late David Halberstam….The real achievement of this warts-and-all
biography [is] that truth, justice, and memory are the province not
of saints, but of flawed human beings.”
—Susan Jacoby, The Washington Post
“Tom Segev has produced a biography that is a model of fascinating
de*ion and measured analysis.”
—The Sunday Times (UK)
“Segev paints a vivid portrait of this human dynamo who made it his
life’s work to make people not only confront and remember the Nazi
genocide but also to punish as many of its perpetrators as
possible.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A brilliant and gripping account of an extraordinary life. It
draws upon extensive research to offer new insights into the
complex personality as well as the notable achievements of Simon
Wiesenthal.”
—Sir Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler: A Biography
Praise for Earlier Books by Tom Segev
The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust
“Richly documented and written with great passion.”
—Elie Wiesel, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Superb . . . Throws new light on the central trauma of Israeli
society, and the uses and abuses of this trauma for political
manipulation. I, for one, learned from this book that, in order to
survive, societies must learn not only to remember but also to
forget.”
—Amos Elon, author of The Israelis: Founders and Sons
“Indispensable reading for anyone interested in Israel’s self-image
and identity . . . Any further discussion of the Holocaust must
confront Tom Segev’s work.”
—George L. Mosse, author of Nazi Culture
1967: Israel and the Year That Transformed the Middle
East
“A marvelous achievement . . . Anyone curious about the
extraordinary six days of Arab-Israeli war will learn much from
it.”
—The Economist
“Tom Segev’s 1967 offers a brilliant de*ion of the
Six-Day War in its widest context . . . This is probably the best
book on those most fateful days in the history of Israel and the
Middle East.”
—Saul Friedl?nder, author of The Years of Extermination: Nazi
Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945
One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British
Mandate
“The best single account of Palestine under the British mandate . .
. This will doubtlessly become the authoritative text for the
pre-state history of Israel.”
—Omer Bartov, New York Times Book Review
“A brilliant, truthful, and compassionate book . . . In all the
vast literature about Palestine/Israel, this is the only book with
equal insight into all of the protagonists.”
—Arthur Hertzberg, author of Jews: The Essence and Character of
a People
1.
“Eichmann Is My Passion”
1. Between Vengeance and Justice
Adolf Eichmann was the most senior Nazi official to speak to Jewish
leaders before the war, first in Berlin and afterward in Vienna and
Prague. At first he worked in the Nazi party’s security service and
later in the Reich Central Security Office. He also talked to
several representatives of the Zionist movement. The object of
these contacts was to arrange for the transfer of Jews from Germany
and some of the territories conquered by the Nazis. As of 1941,
Eichmann directed the deportation of the Jews of Europe, first to
ghettos and then to systematic annihilation in the death
camps.
In January 1942, Eichmann attended an interdepartmental conference
held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss the organization of
the extermination. He was never a maker of policy; he implemented
it. He was one of those Nazi killers who as a rule did their work
sitting behind a desk, but he also took many trips into the field.
In his memoirs he mentioned an incident that occurred near the city
of Minsk in the German-occupied Soviet republic of Byelorussia. As
a group of Jews was being readied for execution, Eichmann wrote, he
saw a woman with a baby in her arms. He tried to pull the infant
away to save it, he wrote, but someone opened fire and it was
killed. Fragments of its brain splashed onto his leather coat, and
his driver helped him clean them off. The Jews, who never
encountered a more senior Nazi than him, looked upon him and Hitler
as the two Adolfs who perpetrated the Holocaust.
The leaders of the Jewish people kept a watch on Eichmann’s
activities. Three months after the war broke out, Ben-Gurion
recorded in his diary a report he had received from a
Czechoslovakian Zionist official, to the effect that the condition
of the Jews in Prague had deteriorated greatly since Eichmann
arrived there. Ben-Gurion noted that Eichmann was directly
subordinate to the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler. This was
not accurate, but it reflected the prevalent notion that Eichmann
was a very senior Nazi official.
Indeed, as late as April 1944, Eichmann appeared to be omnipotent,
as he initiated negotiations that were to decide not only the fate
of Hungary’s Jews, but perhaps also the outcome of the whole war.
Some of the leaders of Budapest’s Jews, among them Rezso Kastner,
heard him offer them a deal: the lives of a million Jews in
exchange for an assortment of goods, including several thousand
trucks. Kastner said that Eichmann had told him the Jews were being
sent to be exterminated at Auschwitz, but that he, Eichmann, was
prepared to stop this. The proposal was conveyed to the Western
Allies by an emissary.
The story of the “blood for trucks” affair was retold many times,
and although fewer than two thousand Jews were saved as a result of
a deal between Kastner and Eichmann, the proposition contributed to
the inflation of Eichmann’s image and his identification with the
Holocaust. “He is the guiltiest of all in the extermination of
millions of Jews in Europe,” wrote a Jewish journalist in Palestine
soon after the war ended.
The Jewish Agency, which functioned as the government of the Jewish
state in the making, began to collect material on the Nazi
criminals toward the end of the war from refugees who had managed
to reach Palestine, and from other sources. Based on this
information, in June 1945 a standard form for war criminals was
filled out at the Agency under Eichmann’s name; out of several
hundred such forms filled out, Eichmann was listed as the most
senior of the wanted Nazis. The information was very incomplete and
flawed. Even his first name was missing, and he was erroneously
listed as having been born in Sarona, a German colony next to Tel
Aviv. In the explanatory remarks, he was accurately described as
one of those responsible for the annihilation of the Jews.
A few weeks later, one of the heads of the World Jewish Congress,
an international federation of Jewish communities and
organizations, petitioned the American prosecutor at the Nuremberg
war crimes trials and requested that steps be taken to arrest
Eichmann and prosecute him along with the prominent Nazis being
tried there.6 But Eichmann had vanished. Straight after the war,
various people had begun searching for him: emissaries from the
Jewish community in Palestine, American intelligence agents, and
Holocaust survivors, among them Simon Wiesenthal. It was a joint
effort and though not always well coordinated, not to mention
amateurish, reckless, and replete with mistakes, it was informed
entirely by inner passion and devotion to the goal.
Accurate details about Eichmann’s life and even a hint as to where
he might be hiding were obtained without much difficulty from his
deputy, Dieter Wisliceny, who had been arrested in May 1945 by
American soldiers. He provided detailed testimony on the
destruction of the Jews, placing most of the responsibility on
Eichmann’s shoulders. Some leaders of the Zionist movement who were
in Europe at the time met with Wisliceny; one of them was Gideon
Ruffer, who would later change his family name to Rafael and become
a top Israeli Foreign Ministry official. What seems to have
interested Ruffer most was the cooperation between Eichmann and the
Grand Mufti of Palestine, Haj Amin el-Husseini. Wisliceny was
extradited to Czechoslovakia, where, in Bratislava Prison, he gave
a statement to Arthur Piernikraz, an Austrian-born emissary from
Palestine who went by the name of “Pier” and was later to change
his name to Asher Ben Natan. In days to come he became one of the
heads of the Israeli defense establishment, and the Jewish state’s
first ambassador to Germany.
Pier was based in Vienna, where he was one of the commanders of the
Briha-the operation for getting the Jews who had survived the
Holocaust out of Eastern Europe and sending them to Palestine
(briha is Hebrew for “flight” or “escape”). His mission was
not to hunt Nazi criminals, but he nevertheless harbored a hope of
trapping Eichmann. Wisliceny told him that Eichmann’s chauffer was
in detention. The driver was interrogated and gave the names of a
number of women whom Eichmann was friendly with. Wisliceny also
reported that Eichmann had left his wife and three sons in a
village called Altaussee. This was the most significant information
that existed then.
In Vienna, Pier had agreed to assist a refugee from the Polish city
of Radom to find the murderers of his family and the other Jews
there. The man’s name was Tadek (Tuvia) Friedman. Pier gave him a
little money and Friedman opened a “center for documentation.” His
aim was to take revenge on the murderers of Radom’s Jews. Pier
instructed him to concentrate on one man. “He is the greatest
murderer of them all,” he told Friedman, and Friedman began the
search for Adolf Eichmann.
Wiesenthal heard about Eichmann only after the war, and he later
recalled precisely from whom he had heard the name and when: from
Aharon Hoter-Yishai, an officer in the Jewish Brigade (which had
fought the Axis as part of the British army) and a well-known
attorney in Palestine, in July 1945. Wiesenthal, who had begun
public activities on behalf of the refugees, was then in touch with
the American occupation forces and was helping them locate Nazi war
criminals. On one or two occasions, he traveled to Nuremberg to
attend the trials.
One of the Briha agents, Avraham Weingarten, put him in touch with
Pier, and not long after that Gideon Ruffer also came to see him in
Linz. They brought with them the list of Nazi criminals drawn up by
the Jewish Agency, and told him that Eichmann was the most
important of all.
Eichmann’s family had settled in Linz when he was a child. His
parents had an electrical goods store on one of the city’s main
streets. It still bore their family name after the war, and finding
them was no problem. But Wiesenthal, who lived nearby in a rented
room, was not sure that they were the same Eichmanns. He found out
for sure by chance, as he relates in his memoirs. One evening, his
landlady was serving him tea, and when she placed the tray on his
desk she glanced at the papers lying there.
Her eye caught the name Eichmann. “Eichmann? Isn’t that the SS
general who persecuted the Jews?” she asked inquisitively, and
mentioned that his parents lived nearby. Wiesenthal was excited and
he asked her if she was sure. “What do you mean, sure? Don’t I know
my own neighbors?” the landlady replied. The next day, the police
questioned Eichmann’s parents, but they said they had no idea where
he was.
It may have been this development that led Pier to write to Ruffer,
“In the matter of Eichmann, we have begun to address it. So far,
only Wiesenthal has done anything, because I was away for a week in
Prague and Bratislava. Yesterday he told me that there has been
some progress, and that I’d get a letter from him today. In two or
three days’ time I’ll know more.” But Pier had also taken action.
On the basis of the information divulged by Wisliceny, he sent one
of the Jewish refugees in Vienna to get to know one of Eichmann’s
female friends, in order to get a photograph of him. The man was
Manus Diamant, from Katowice in Poland, who was then twenty-four
years old.
During the war, Diamant roamed from city to city; the Nazis had
killed his mother and his father. After the war he found himself in
Vienna, where he met Tuvia Friedman and through him reached Pier.
The passion for revenge raged within him. He had known Eichmann’s
name since 1943. A handsome young man, Diamant posed as an SS
officer from Holland and set out to search for Eichmann’s
girlfriend. It was not an easy task, and when he found her he could
not get her to show him her photo album right away. But eventually
he managed to get a photograph of Eichmann out of her.
Pier sent Diamant to Linz to work with Wiesenthal, who showed him
the Eichmann family’s electrical goods store. Diamant began to keep
an eye on it. Eichmann’s brother also worked there. One day, the
brother set out in the direction of the…
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