Текст книги "ГУЛаг Палестины"
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genetically programmed to be worse anti-Semites than the Nazis (Mr. Morley's position), or
whether it was just Ukrainian police units that deserve this description (Mr. Wiesenthal's
position). Now to balance this image of unrelieved Ukrainian anti-Semitism, Mr. Wiesenthal
could have mentioned that on numerous occasions Ukrainians risked their lives, perhaps even gave
their lives, to save his (Mr. Wiesenthal's) life – and not only civilians, but the very same
Ukrainian police auxiliaries whom both Mr. Safer and Mr. Wiesenthal agree were uniformly
sub-human brutes. Here, for example, is Mr. Wiesenthal's own story (as told to Peter Michael
Lingens) concerning a member of a Ukrainian police auxiliary who is identified by the Ukrainian
surname "Bodnar." The story is that Mr. Wiesenthal is about to be executed, but:
The shooting stopped. Ten yards from Wiesenthal.
The next thing he remembers was a brilliant cone of light and behind it a
Polish voice: "But Mr. Wiesenthal, what are you doing here?" Wiesenthal
recognized a foreman he used to know, by the name of Bodnar. He was wearing
civilian clothes with the armband of a Ukrainian police auxiliary. "I've got
to get you out of here tonight."
Bodnar told the [other] Ukrainians that among the captured Jews he had
discovered a Soviet spy and that he was taking him to the district police
commissar. In actual fact he took Wiesenthal back to his own flat, on the
grounds that it was unlikely to be searched so soon again. This was the first
time Wiesenthal survived. (Peter Michael Lingens, in Simon Wiesenthal, Justice
Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 8)
Bodnar must have known that the punishment for saving a Jew from execution and then helping him
escape would be death. And how could he get away with it? In fact, we might ask Mr. Wiesenthal
whether Bodnar did get away with it, or whether he paid for it with his life, for as the
escapees were tiptoeing out, they were stopped, they offered their fabricated story, and then:
The German sergeant, already a little drunk, slapped Bodnar's face and said:
"Then what are you standing around for? If this is what you people are like,
then later we'll all have troubles. Report back to me as soon as you deliver
them [Wiesenthal along with a fellow prisoner]." (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal
File, 1993, p. 37)
These passages invite several pertinent conclusions. First, we see a Ukrainian police auxiliary
having his face slapped by a German sergeant, which serves to remind us that Ukraine is under
occupation, to show us who is really in charge, to suggest that the German attitude toward
Ukrainians is one of contempt and that the expression of this contempt is unrestrained. We see
also that Bodnar's flat is subject to searches, indicating that although he is a participant in
the anti-Jewish actions, he is a distrusted participant, and a participant who might feel
intimidated by the hostile scrutiny of the occupying Nazis. But most important of all, we see
that the German sergeant is waiting for Bodnar to report back. Alan Levy writes that "Bodnar
was ... concerned ... that now he had to account, verbally at least, for his two prisoners" (p.
37). If Bodnar reports back with the news that Wiesenthal and the other prisoner escaped, then
how might Bodnar expect the face-slapping German sergeant to respond? For Bodnar at this point
in the story to actually allow Wiesenthal and the other prisoner to escape is heroic, it is
self-sacrificing, it is suicidal. And yet Bodnar does go ahead and effect Wiesenthal's escape,
probably never imagining that to Wiesenthal in later years this will become an event unworthy of
notice during Wiesenthal's blanket condemnation of Ukrainians.
And so these three things – the heroic actions of Lviv's Metropolitan Sheptytsky, the
self-sacrificing intervention of the Ukrainian police official, Bodnar, in saving Mr.
Wiesenthal's own life, and the existence of numerous other instances of Ukrainians saving Jews
these are things that were highly pertinent to the 60 Minutes broadcast, and they are things
that would have begun to transform the broadcast from a twisted message of hate to balanced
reporting, but they are things that were deliberately omitted. It is difficult to imagine any
motive for this omission other than the preservation of the stereotype of uniform Ukrainian
brutishness.
Following the writing of the above section on the topic of Ukrainians saving Jews, a flood of
similar material – actually more striking than similar – has come to my attention, far too great
a volume to integrate into the present paper. Therefore, I merely take this opportunity to
present three links to such similar material that has been placed on UKAR: (1) one item is
evidence that Ukrainian forester Petro Pyasetsky may hold the record for saving the largest
number of Jewish lives during World War II (in all likelihood greatly exceeding individuals like
Oscar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg); (2) another item relates the case of lawyer Volodymyr
Bemko who recounts his participation as defense attorney in numerous prosecutions by the Germans
of Ukrainians on trial for the crime of aiding Jews; and (3) a briefer item outlining how the
Vavrisevich family hid seven Jews during World War II. The first two of these three items are
not brief, and so might best be read at a later time if interruption of the reading of the
present paper seems undesirable.
CONTENTS:
Preface
The Galicia Division
Quality of Translation
Ukrainian Homogeneity
Were Ukrainians Nazis?
Simon Wiesenthal
What Happened in Lviv?
Nazi Propaganda Film
Collective Guilt
Paralysis of the Comparative
Function
60 Minutes' Cheap Shots
Ukrainian Anti-Semitism
Jewish Ukrainophobia
Mailbag
A Sense of Responsibility
What 60 Minutes Should Do
PostScript
Were Ukrainians Really Devoted Nazis?
Pointing out such salient and pertinent instances of Ukrainian heroic humanitarianism as those
mentioned above would have been a step in the right direction, but it still would not have told
the whole story. Another vital component of the story is that Ukrainians were the victims of
the Nazis, hated the Nazis, fought the Nazis, died to rid their land of the Nazis and to
eradicate Naziism from the face of the earth. This conclusion is easy to document, and yet it
is a conclusion that was omitted from the 60 Minutes broadcast.
Following the trauma of Soviet oppression, following the brutal terror of Communism, the
artificial famine of 1932-33 in which some six million Ukrainians perished, following the
deportation by the Communists of 400,000 Western Ukrainians and the slaughter of 10,000 Western
Ukrainians by retreating Communist forces, the Ukrainian population did indeed welcome the
Germans in 1941. However, disillusionment with the German emancipation was immediate:
The brutality of the German regime became evident everywhere.
The Germans began the extermination of the population on a mass scale. In
the autumn of 1941 the Jewish people who had not escaped to the East were
annihilated throughout Ukraine. No less than 850,000 were killed by the SS
special commandos. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, especially
during the winter of 1941-42, died of hunger in the German camps – a tragedy
which had a considerable effect upon the course of the war, for as a
consequence Soviet soldiers ceased to surrender to the Germans.
At the end of 1941, the Nazi terror turned against active Ukrainian
nationalists, although most of them were not in any way engaged in fighting the
Germans as yet. Thus, in the winter of 1941-42, a group of writers including
Olena Teliha and Ivan Irliavsky, Ivan Rohach, the chief editor of the daily ...
Ukrainian Word, Bahazii, the mayor of Kiev, later Dmytro Myron-Orlyk, and
several others were suddenly arrested and shot in Kiev. The majority of a
group of Bukovinians who had fled to the east after the Rumanian occupation of
Bukovina were shot in Kiev and Mykolayiv in the autumn of 1941. In
Dnipropetrovske, at the beginning of 1942, the leaders of the relief work of
the Ukrainian National Committee were shot. In Kamianets Podilsky several
dozen Ukrainian activists including Kibets, the head of the local
administration, were executed. In March, 1943, Perevertun, the director of the
All-Ukrainian Consumer Cooperative Society, and his wife were shot. In 1942-43
there were shootings and executions in Kharkiv, Zyhtomyr, Kremenchuk, Lubni,
Shepetivka, Rivne, Kremianets, Brest-Litovsk, and many other places.
When, in the second half of 1942, the conduct of the Germans provoked the
population to resistance in the form of guerrilla warfare, the Germans began to
apply collective responsibility on a large scale. This involved the mass
shooting of innocent people and the burning of entire villages, especially in
the Chernihiv and northern Kiev areas and in Volhynia. For various even
minor – offenses, people were being hanged publicly in every city and village.
The numbers of the victims reached hundreds of thousands. The German rulers
began systematically to remove the Ukrainians from the local administration by
arrests and executions, replacing them with Russians, Poles, and Volksdeutshe.
(Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 1, pp. 881-882)
Major-General Eberhardt, the German Commandant of Kiev, on November 2, 1941
announced that: "Cases of arson and sabotage are becoming more frequent in Kiev
and oblige me to take firm action. For this reason 300 Kiev citizens have been
shot today." This seemed to do no good because Eberhardt on November 29, 1941
again announced: "400 men have been executed in the city [of Kiev]. This
should serve as a warning to the population."
The death penalty was applied by the Germans to any Ukrainian who gave aid,
or directions, to the UPA [Ukrainian Partisan Army] or Ukrainian guerrillas.
If you owned a pigeon the penalty was death. The penalty was death for anyone
who did not report or aided a Jew to escape, and many Ukrainians were executed
for helping Jews. Death was the penalty for listening to a Soviet radio
program or reading anti-German leaflets. For example, on March 28, 1943 three
women in Kherson, Maria and Vera Alexandrovska and Klavdia Tselhelnyk were
executed because they had "read an anti-German leaflet, said they agreed with
its contents and passed it on." (Andrew Gregorovich, World War II in Ukraine,
Forum, No. 92, Spring 1995, p. 21)
The notion of "collective responsibility" or "collective guilt" mentioned above by means of
which the Nazis justified murdering a large number of innocent people in retaliation for the
acts of a single guilty person is founded on a primitive view of justice which Western society
has largely – but not completely – abandoned, as we shall see below.
The Ukrainian opposition manifested itself primarily in the underground Ukrainian Partisan Army
(UPA):
The spread of the insurgent struggle acquired such strength that at the end of
the occupation the Germans were in control nowhere but in the cities of Ukraine
and made only daylight raids into the villages. ... They [the Ukrainian
guerrillas] espoused the idea of an independent Ukrainian state and the slogan
"neither Hitler nor Stalin." (Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 1, p.
884)
During the most intensive fighting against the Germans in the fall of 1943 and
the spring of 1944, the UPA numbered close to 40,000 men.... Among major
losses inflicted upon the enemy by the UPA, the following should be mentioned:
Victor Lutze, chief of the SS-Sicherungsabteilung, who was killed in battle in
May, 1943.... (Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 2, pp. 1089-1091)
Up to 200 innocent Ukrainians were executed for one German attacked by
guerrillas. In spite of this a total of 460,000 German soldiers and officers
were killed by partisans in Ukraine during the War. (Andrew Gregorovich, World
War II in Ukraine, Forum, No. 92, Spring 1995, p. 21)
Photograph of partisans
executed by the Nazis.
Photograph of young woman executed by the Nazis, and
young man about to be executed, for partisan activities.
If Morley Safer feels impelled to instruct 60 Minutes viewers that Ukrainians were loyal Nazis,
then he should also pause to explain how it is that the Ukrainians were able to reconcile their
loyalty with German contempt:
When the time came to appoint the Nazi ruler of Ukraine, Hitler chose Erich
Koch, a notoriously brutal and bigoted administrator known for his personal
contempt for Slavs. Koch's attitude toward his assignment was evident in the
speech he delivered to his staff upon his arrival in Ukraine in September 1941:
"Gentlemen, I am known as a brutal dog. Because of this reason I was appointed
as Reichskommissar of Ukraine. Our task is to suck from Ukraine all the goods
we can get hold of, without consideration of the feelings or the property of
the native population." On another occasion, Koch emphasized his loathing for
Ukrainians by remarking: "If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy of sitting at the
same table with me, I must have him shot." (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A
History, 1994, p. 467)
Koch often said that Ukrainian people were inferior to the Germans, that
Ukrainians were half-monkeys, and that Ukrainians "must be handled with the
whip like the negroes." (Andrew Gregorovich, World War II in Ukraine, Forum,
No. 92, Spring 1995, p. 15)
If Morley Safer wishes to proclaim to the 60 Minutes audience that Ukrainians were enthusiastic
Nazis, then he should simultaneously explain how Ukrainians were able to maintain their
enthusiasm as 2.3 million of them were being shipped off to forced labor in Germany:
By early 1942, Koch's police had to stage massive manhunts, rounding up young
Ukrainians in bazaars or as they emerged from churches or cinemas and shipping
them to Germany. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, p. 469)
If Morley Safer insists on announcing to 60 Minutes viewers that Ukrainians were devoted Nazis,
then he should explain to these viewers how Ukrainians were able to maintain their devotion when
the Kiev soccer team – Dynamo – beat German teams five games in a row, and then received the
German reward:
Most of the team members were arrested and executed in Babyn Yar, but they are
not forgotten. There is a monument to them in Kiev and their heroism inspired
the film Victory starring Sylvester Stallone and Pele. (Andrew Gregorovich,
World War II in Ukraine, Forum, No. 92, Spring 1995, p. 21)
If Morley Safer will not swerve from his position that Ukrainians were keen on Naziism, then he
should explain how Ukrainians were able to maintain their keenness when their cities were being
starved:
Koch drastically limited the flow of foodstuffs into the cities, arguing that
Ukrainian urban centers were basically useless. In the long run, the Nazis
intended to transform Ukraine into a totally agrarian country and, in the short
run, Germany needed the food that Ukrainian urban dwellers consumed. As a
result, starvation became commonplace and many urban dwellers were forced to
move to the countryside. Kiev, for example, lost about 60% of its population.
Kharkiv, which had a population of 700,000 when the Germans arrived, saw
120,000 of its inhabitants shipped to Germany as laborers; 30,000 were executed
and about 80,000 starved to death.... (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History,
1994, p. 469)
Among the first actions of the Nazis upon occupying a new city was to plunder it of its
intellectual and cultural treasures, material as well as human, and yet somehow – if we are to
believe Morley Safer – being so plundered failed to dampen the enthusiasm of the Ukrainians for
Naziism:
Co. 4 in which I was employed seized in Kiev the library of the medical
research institute. All equipment, scientific staff, documentation and books
were shipped out to Germany.
We appropriated rich trophies in the library of the Ukrainian Academy of
Sciences which possessed singular manuscripts of Persian, Abyssinian and
Chinese writings, Russian and Ukrainian chronicles, incunabula by the first
printer Ivan Fedorov, and rare editions of Shevchenko, Mickiewicz, and Ivan
Franko.
Expropriated and sent to Berlin were many exhibits from Kiev's Museums of
Ukrainian Art, Russian Art, Western and Oriental Art and the Taras Shevchenko
Museum.
As soon as the troops seize a big city, there arrive in their wake team
leaders with all kinds of specialists to scan museums, art galleries,
exhibitions, cultural and art institutions, evaluate their state and
expropriate everything of value. (Report by SS-Oberstrumfuehrer Ferster,
November 10, 1942, in Kondufor, History Teaches a Lesson, p. 176, in Andrew
Gregorovich, World War II in Ukraine, Forum, No. 92, Spring, 1995, p. 23)
Only genetic programming could explain how – according to Morley Safer anyway – Ukrainians could
have been among the most loyal of Nazis when their intelligentsia were being decimated and they
were being treated as Untermenschen:
Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the SS, proposed that "the entire Ukrainian
intelligentsia should be decimated." Koch believed that three years of grade
school was more than enough education for Ukrainians. He even went so far as
to curtail medical services in order to undermine "the biological power of the
Ukrainians." German-only shops, restaurants, and sections of trolley cars were
established to emphasize the superiority of the Germans and the racial
inferiority of the Ukrainian Untermenschen. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A
History, 1994, p. 469)
There must not be a more advanced education for the non-German population
of the east than four years of primary school.
This primary education has the following objective only: doing simple
arithmetic up to 500, writing one's name, learning that it was God's command
that the Germans must be obeyed, and that one had to be honest, diligent, and
obedient. I don't consider reading skills necessary. Except for this school,
no other kind of school must be allowed in the east....
The [remaining inferior] population will be at our call as a slave people
without leaders, and each year will provide Germany with migrant workers and
workers for special projects ... and, while themselves lacking all culture,
they will be called upon under the strict, purposeful, and just rule of the
German nation to contribute to [Germany's] eternal cultural achievements and
monuments.... (Himmler, May 1941, in Hannah Vogt, The Burden of Guilt: A Short
History of Germany, 1914-1945, Oxford University Press, New York, 1964, p. 263)
The notion proposed by 60 Minutes that Ukrainians were as one with the Nazis – or if we are to
believe Mr. Safer, more Nazi than the Nazis themselves – is a colossal fiction based on colossal
prejudice:
A graphic indication of the extremes of Nazi brutality experienced in Ukraine
was that for one village that was destroyed and its inhabitants executed in
France and Czechoslovakia, 250 villages and their inhabitants suffered such a
fate in Ukraine. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, pp. 479-480)
CONTENTS:
Preface
The Galicia Division
Quality of Translation
Ukrainian Homogeneity
Were Ukrainians Nazis?
Simon Wiesenthal
What Happened in Lviv?
Nazi Propaganda Film
Collective Guilt
Paralysis of the Comparative
Function
60 Minutes' Cheap Shots
Ukrainian Anti-Semitism
Jewish Ukrainophobia
Mailbag
A Sense of Responsibility
What 60 Minutes Should Do
PostScript
Simon Wiesenthal
Discovered Under the Floorboards
In reading Simon Wiesenthal's biography, one cannot but be impressed by his exactitude. Take
this account of how he was discovered underneath the floorboards:
In early June 1944, during a drinking bout in a neighbouring house, a chief
inspector of the German railways was beaten and robbed by his Polish
companions. A house-to-house police search was ordered. Simon reburied
himself several times and was in his makeshift coffin on Tuesday, 13 June 1944,
when more than eight months of cramped and perilous "freedom" came to an end.
As the Gestapo entered the courtyard of the house, the Polish partisans fled,
leaving Wiesenthal trapped beneath the earth "in a position where I couldn't
even make use of my weapon." (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 1993, pp. 52-53)
To remember not only that it was the 13th of June, but that it was a Tuesday – how impressive!
And how appropriate that Mr. Wiesenthal be credited with a photographic memory:
He is helped by his phenomenal memory: Wiesenthal is able to quote telephone
numbers which he may have happened to see on a visiting card two years before.
He can list the participants in huge functions, one by one, and he can add what
colour suit each wore. Although he writes up to twenty letters a day, and
receives more than that number, he can, years later, quote key passages from
them and indicate roughly where that letter may be found in a file. ... A
man's civilian occupation, his origins in a particular region, his accent
mentioned by someone – all these stick in Wiesenthal's memory for years. And,
just like a computer, he can call them up at any time.
This permanent readiness of recall means that the horror is not relegated,
as it is with most people (and increasingly also with victims), to a remote
recess of the mind, but is always at the forefront, at the painful boundary of
consciousness. Wiesenthal possesses what is usually called a photographic
memory: he is a man who cannot forget. (Peter Michael Lingens, in Simon
Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, pp. 20-21.)
But from someone in Mr. Wiesenthal's position, one expects no less one expects just such
exactitude as he is gifted with, just such precision, just such vivid and accurate recall of
detail. All such things are essential when one is entrusted with the grave responsibility of
accusing individuals and ascribing guilt to nations. And precise memory of such events is to be
expected all the more of someone who was young when the events occurred, and when the events
were traumatic and seared into his memory.
As Mr. Wiesenthal has related the story of his life to more than one biographer, it is not a
difficult matter for a reader to compare these stories in order to be further edified by the
demonstration of Mr. Wiesenthal's remarkable memory. Take, for example, this other account of
the same story of being discovered underneath the floorboards:
One evening in April 1943 a German soldier was shot dead in the street. The
alarm was raised: SS and Polish police officers in civilian clothes searched
the nearby houses for hidden weapons. Instead they found Simon Wiesenthal. He
was marched off for the third time to, as he believed, his certain execution.
(Peter Michael Lingens, in Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p.
11)
But this parallel version of the story is not precisely what the claims concerning Mr.
Wiesenthal's memory led us to expect. The astonishingly accurate "Tuesday, 13 June 1944" has
turned into "April 1943," "beaten" has become "murdered," "in a house" has become "in the
street," the "railway inspector" has become a "German soldier," and the "Gestapo" has become the
"SS." The last might seem like a fine point, but in fact the Gestapo and the SS had clearly
defined and mutually exclusive duties: "A division of authority came about whereby the Gestapo
alone had the power to arrest people and send them to concentration camps, whereas the SS
remained responsible for running the camps" (Leni Yahil, The Holocaust, 1987, p. 133). Perhaps
a fine point to someone who had not lived through these events, but to someone who had lived
through them, then one would imagine a memorable point, one that should be easier to remember
than, say, what color suit each participant wore at some huge function.
And so now we are forced to wonder whether this is the same event badly remembered, or whether
Mr. Wiesenthal was discovered twice under the floorboards, once in 1943 and again in 1944. The
more cynical reader might even go on to wonder whether any such event took place at all.
As the above comparison illustrates, and as a reading of Mr. Wiesenthal proves a hundred times
over, Mr. Wiesenthal's salient characteristic is not that he has a photographic memory, but
rather that he cannot tell a story twice in the same way. For a second example, take the case
of the Rusinek slap.
The Rusinek Slap
Former inmates took over command. One of them was the future Polish Cabinet
Minister Kazimierz Rusinek. Wiesenthal needed to see him at his office to get
a pass. The Pole, who was about to lock up, struck him across the face – just
as some camp officials had frequently treated Jews. It hurt Wiesenthal more
than all the blows received from SS men in three years: "Now the war is over,
and the Jews are still being beaten."
... He sought out the American camp command to make a complaint. (Peter
Michael Lingens in Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 12)
That is one version, but here is another:
A Polish trusty named Kazimierz Rusinek pounced on Simon for no good reason and
knocked him unconscious. When Wiesenthal woke up, friends had carried him to
his bunk. "What has he got against you?" one of them asked.
"I don't know," Simon said. "Maybe he's angry because I'm still alive."
(Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 1993, p. 69)
These two accounts are so different that one wonders whether they are of the same event. In the
first account Wiesenthal is addressing Rusinek when Rusinek slaps him, while in the second
Rusinek pounces on him, which suggests an ambush. But more important, when you have been
pounced on and knocked unconscious, when you become aware that your friends have carried you to
your bunk only after you have regained consciousness, then you would not ordinarily describe
that as merely having been "struck across the face." Mr. Wiesenthal is a skilled raconteur – in
fact an erstwhile professional stand-up comic – so that it is inconceivable that he would weaken
a story, drain it of its significance, by turning a knock-out into a mere slap. With his
training as a stand-up comic, however, it is conceivable that he would turn a slap into a
knock-out.
Mr. Wiesenthal's stories are cluttered with this sort of self-contradiction. Take, for still
another example, the case of the Bodnar rescue: In Justice Not Vengeance, Bodnar saves only
Wiesenthal, and takes him to his apartment. In The Wiesenthal File, however, Bodnar saves
Wiesenthal together with another prisoner and takes the two to the office of a "commissar" which
office they spend the entire night cleaning.
And on top of outright contradiction, there are a mass of details that fail to ring true. For
example, although many Ukrainians did risk their lives to save Jews, the number who knowingly
gave their lives to save Jews must have been considerably smaller – and yet, as noted above,
that is what Wiesenthal seems to be asking us to believe that Bodnar did. And then too,
Wiesenthal tells us that in the execution which he had just barely escaped, the prisoners were
being shot with each standing beside his own wooden box, and dumped into his own box after he
was shot – where we might have expected the executioners to follow the path of least effort, Mr.
Wiesenthal's account shows them going to the trouble of providing each victim with a makeshift
coffin.
And just how did it come to pass that the executioners stopped before killing Wiesenthal
himself? – According to Simon Wiesenthal, they heard church bells, and being devoutly religious,
stopped to pray. But what an incongruous juxtaposition – Ukrainians at once deeply Christian
and deeply genocidal. If Christianity invited the murder of Jews, then this would make sense,
but in fact – in modern times at least – Christianity has stood against such practices, and more
emphatically so in Ukraine than perhaps anywhere else, as we have already noted above.
But what has Mr. Wiesenthal's inability to come up with a consistent or credible biography got
to do with the quality of his professional denunciations? – The evidence suggests that the two
are equally shoddy. Had 60 Minutes looked into Mr. Wiesenthal's professional background, it
would quickly have found much to wonder at. It would, for one thing, have quickly come across
the case of Frank Walus, The Nazi Who Never Was.
Frank Walus: The Nazi Who Never Was
In 1976 Simon Wiesenthal, in Vienna, had gone public with charges that a Polish
emigre living in Chicago, Frank Walus, had been a collaborator involved in
persecuting Polish Jews, including women and children, as part of a Gestapo-led
auxiliary police unit. Walus, charged Wiesenthal, "performed his duties with
the Gestapo in the ghettos of Czestochowa and Kielce and handed over numerous
Jews to the Gestapo." (Charles Ashman Robert J. Wagman, The Nazi Hunters,
1988, p. 193)
Walus, in turn, was convicted by judge Julius Hoffman, who
ran the trial with an iron hand and an eccentricity that bordered on the
bizarre. He allowed government witnesses great latitude, while limiting
severely Korenkiewicz's cross-examination of them. When Walus himself
testified, Hoffman limited him almost entirely to simple yes and no answers.
(Charles Ashman Robert J. Wagman, The Nazi Hunters, 1988, p. 193)
Despite weaknesses in the prosecution case, Judge Hoffman went on to convict Walus, and later
despite accumulating evidence of Walus's innocence, refused to reconsider his verdict. But
then a formal appeal was filed. The process took almost two years, but in
February 1980, the court ruled. It threw out Hoffman's verdict and ordered
Walus retried. In making the ruling, the court said that it appeared the
government's case against Walus was "weak" but that Hoffman's handling of the
trial had been so biased that it could not evaluate the evidence properly.
(Charles Ashman Robert J. Wagman, The Nazi Hunters, 1988, p. 195)
In view of irrefutable documentary and eye-witness evidence that Walus had served as a farm
laborer in Germany during the entire war, he was never re-tried. And what, we may ask, was the
occasion for Simon Wiesenthal's fingering Walus in the first place?
