Wiesenthal Center

Mahatma coat

ITS OK Mark, once the Weisenthall Centre finishes persecuting these old men for their Wartime Allegiances there are plenty of Surviving SonderKomando Living in the State of Israel, I'm sure these men and Women did Equally horrible things under Orders from the Nazis. And I KNOW that in the pursuit of Equality and Fairness the Weisenthall Centre Treats ALL War Criminals Equally :rolleyes:

Morlar

There is another interesting article about wiesentahl on the Der Spiegel ww2 site :

http://www.spiegel.de/international/topic/world_war_ii/

A Critical Look at Simon Wiesenthal
Examining the Legacy of the Nazi Hunter

09/16/2010

A Critical Look at Simon Wiesenthal
Examining the Legacy of the Nazi Hunter

By Jan Friedmann

Until his death in 2005, Simon Wiesenthal was the world's best-known Nazi hunter. But a new biography finds fault with the way he pursued his quarry and asks whether his "soaring ego" and "tendency to fantasize" actually got in the way of his mission.

The Austrian police were searching for Adolf Eichmann. He was rumored to be hiding in a house at Fischerndorf 8 in the central Alpine village of Altaussee.

But the officers accidentally knocked on the wrong door, at Fischerndorf 38. Instead of finding the logistical genius behind the Holocaust at the door, as expected, they came upon Anton Burger, a former colleague of Eichmann who went on to become the commandant of the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

It was a mistake -- but one that turned out to be a stroke of luck.

Simon Wiesenthal, who had tipped off the police, was overjoyed by the inadvertent catch shortly after the end of the war. And of course he was there on the scene, Wiesenthal said in describing the incident, adding that he personally handed Burger over to the US Army after the capture.

The Nazi Hunter's Other Side

Drawing attention to himself and his successes was the Nazi hunter's modus operandi -- and he became world-famous in the process. Having survived the Holocaust himself, Wiesenthal spent the next 60 years ferreting out Nazi war criminals who had managed to disappear.

Indeed, Wiesenthal's tireless search turned him into a celebrity. He was portrayed as a hero in films, American presidents invited him to the White House, and dozens of universities awarded him honorary doctorates.

But there was also another side to the Nazi hunter: He used questionable methods. He took credit for the achievements of others. And, over the years, he succeeded in antagonizing many people who actually shared the same goals.

This side of Wiesenthal is presented in "Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends," a new biography by Tom Segev, an Israeli historian and journalist. Although Segev describes Wiesenthal as a "brave man who launched some breathtaking ventures," he also writes that Wiesenthal had a "soaring ego" and a harmful "tendency to fantasize."

Wiesenthal's Roots

Wiesenthal's activities had a lot to do with the country he lived in. Austria was even more indulgent than the young Federal Republic of Germany in its treatment of Nazi functionaries who had slipped into ordinary civilian life. They were protected by right-wing sympathizers in positions of political leadership and in the judiciary, but also by a widespread desire to forget. To make himself heard, Wiesenthal had to be very loud.

Wiesenthal had a love-hate relationship with the Austrians. "I am their bad conscience," he once said, "because each one of them should have taken upon himself what I have done for Austrian society." In return, he received bushels of insulting and threatening letters, such as the one that found its way to him despite only being addressed to "The Jew Pig, Austria."

Wiesenthal was born in 1908 in Buchach, a city in what is now western Ukraine, into a family that supported the Habsburg monarchy. His father, a sales representative for a sugar refinery, died in World War I. Simon studied architecture in Prague and then moved to what was then the eastern-Polish city of Lvov (now the western Ukrainian city of Lviv). There, he married Cyla Müller, also Jewish, in 1936.

When German troops occupied Lvov in 1941, life became a living hell for its Jewish inhabitants. Only 3,400 of the Jewish community's 160,000 members survived. Wiesenthal was forced to work as a slave laborer in a railroad repair yard. He later escaped, was recaptured and then spent time in a series of concentration camps -- including Plaszow, Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald and Mauthausen -- before being liberated by American soldiers on May 5, 1945.

After the war, he discovered that his wife had survived, working as a forced laborer with a forged passport in the western German city of Solingen. When the couple was reunited in a refugee camp in Linz, Austria, they calculated that 89 of their relatives had been murdered.

The Birth of the Nazi Hunter

Wiesenthal then assumed a role that hardly anyone had envisioned at the time. Working for the US military administration, he interviewed Jewish survivors to document their memories of their tormentors.

The register that emerged would go on to become the cornerstone of the archive that Wiesenthal first set up in Linz and later moved to Vienna. He funded the effort with donations -- and regular payments from the Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence agency. For Wiesenthal, emigrating to Israel wasn't an option. Instead, it was his duty, he once wrote, to serve as an "Austrian patriot" and to "provide a warning against future excesses."

Wiesenthal spent his days in a small office filled with files, cards and registration records. He had a secretary and a few volunteers, who addressed him as "Herr Engineer." But that was it. "Contrary to the myths he spun around himself," Segev writes, "he never operated a worldwide dragnet, but worked almost on his own from a small apartment, surrounded by high piles of old newspapers and yellowing index cards." The Nazi hunter made up for a lack of resources with a pronounced sense of mission. And he scuffled with the competition. He once, for example, denounced Nazi hunter Beate Klarsfeld by telling West German authorities that she was working for the Stasi, East Germany's secret police -- despite a lack of evidence for the claim.

Concocting Stories

In 1960, after tracking down Eichmann in Buenos Aires, Mossad agents took him to Israel. When Eichmann's trial began in Jerusalem, Wiesenthal published a book entitled "Ich jagte Eichmann" ("I Hunted Eichmann"). Given the fact that it was an armada of researchers and intelligence agencies that hunted down the Nazi war criminal, rather than just Wiesenthal by himself, the title was a bit of a stretch. Still, Wiesenthal did play a key role: Several years earlier, in 1953, it was he who had alerted the Israelis that Eichmann was living in Argentina.

Nevertheless, much of the other information Wiesenthal provided was wrong, such as his conclusions on the whereabouts of the Nazi concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele. Information he provided once sent a reporter working for the German magazine Quick to the Greek island of Kythnos. When the journalist returned empty-handed, Wiesenthal claimed that Mengele had left the island only 12 hours earlier. In reality, though, Mengele was in Brazil -- one of the few countries Wiesenthal had never mentioned -- where he died in a swimming accident in 1979.

Wiesenthal also concocted legends surrounding the story of the Holocaust and his own suffering. It was years before he corrected a claim he made after the war that the Nazis had used the bodies of dead Jews to make soap. Similarly, the number of camps he was supposedly interned in grew over time -- until the list eventually included 12 camps, including Auschwitz.

In one of their memorandums, even the Israelis found that he was a "publicity hound" and complained that he often made assertions that couldn't be proven. The memo hinted that he was egomaniacal and was addicted to publicity.

Part 2: 'Sleazenthal'

Those words were written at the peak of Wiesenthal's feud with Bruno Kreisky, Austria's charismatic Social Democratic chancellor. Kreisky, who was Jewish, ironically came into power in 1970 with the help of the right-wing Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ). Because he led a minority government, he was forced to bring several ministers with unappetizing pasts into his cabinet. The ministers of agriculture, construction, transportation and the interior were all former members of the Nazi Party.

By publicizing the histories of the new ministers, Wiesenthal provoked Kreisky, who saw himself as a man of the people and sensed that Austrians were not interested in rehashing the past. "I'm just waiting for Mr. Wiesenthal to come up with proof that I was in the SS, too" the chancellor once caustically quipped. He was quoted in the press as saying that Wiesenthal was a "Jewish fascist."

Kreisky even had his staff search for incriminating information about Wiesenthal. Although he was never able to prove the allegation, Kreisky told the press that Wiesenthal only survived the war by collaborating with the Nazis. In 1987, the two rivals ended up in court. In the end, Kreisky was found liable for defamation, but he died soon thereafter without having paid the court-ordered fine. Segev characterizes the conflict as a dispute between two Jews who desperately wanted to be a "part of Austrian society."

Wiesenthal's behavior in another Nazi affair underscored his yearning for approval. When it was revealed that Austrian President Kurt Waldheim had concealed certain aspects of his service in the German military during the war, Wiesenthal backed the politician, with whom he was in close contact.

Wiesenthal's reputation suffered as a result. In internal World Jewish Congress documents, he was dubbed "Sleazenthal." During an interview on German television for a 1996 documentary on Wiesenthal, Eli Rosenbaum, the US Justice Department's chief Nazi hunter at the time, described Wiesenthal as "incompetent," "an egomaniac," "a spreader of false information" and "a tragic figure." Rosenbaum's office once wrote to Wiesenthal's center that not a single one of its accusations had led to a trial.

Wiesenthal's Legacy

It is practically impossible to verify whether Wiesenthal truly brought 1,100 war criminals to justice, as he himself claimed. He was always more of a PR man than a serious investigator -- perhaps his primary service to a society determined to forget the past.

Today, the Simon Wiesenthal Center continues to perform this PR role. Derided by criminal prosecutors, the center issues a list of the most-wanted Nazi criminals as well as an annual assessment of the efforts of individual countries to track them down.

Wiesenthal died in September 2005, at 96, two years after his wife Cyla. Speaking about her life at the side of the famous Nazi hunter, she once said: "I am not married to a man I am married to thousands, maybe millions, of dead."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

jonniebgood1

Mahatma coat wrote: »

ITS OK Mark, once the Weisenthall Centre finishes persecuting these old men for their Wartime Allegiances there are plenty of Surviving SonderKomando Living in the State of Israel, I'm sure these men and Women did Equally horrible things under Orders from the Nazis. And I KNOW that in the pursuit of Equality and Fairness the Weisenthall Centre Treats ALL War Criminals Equally :rolleyes:

Maybe I am not understanding your post correctly, forgive me for paraphrasing but you saying that a convicted war criminal should not be punished because 'other people were made do bad things'. That is just absurd.

Mahatma coat

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

Maybe I am not understanding your post correctly, forgive me for paraphrasing but you saying that a convicted war criminal should not be punished because 'other people were made do bad things'. That is just absurd.

No You've got that totally AssBackwards

I'm saying that IF you Convict someone of a Specific Crime, and then find that other people have committed the same Crime, then those other individuals should swing from the Gallows too.

What I am against is the Baying for the Blood of these old men, whilst conveniently ignoring the Crimes of other Old Men because they happen to have been Jews.

All should be Equal in the eyes of the Law.

jonniebgood1

Mahatma coat wrote: »

No You've got that totally AssBackwards

I'm saying that IF you Convict someone of a Specific Crime, and then find that other people have committed the same Crime, then those other individuals should swing from the Gallows too.

What I am against is the Baying for the Blood of these old men, whilst conveniently ignoring the Crimes of other Old Men because they happen to have been Jews.

All should be Equal in the eyes of the Law.

It may have been as you put it 'assbackwards' but after your clarification (which was all I was looking for) I would agree with you almost 100%.

Unlike other cases (like the one posted in a different post of Frank) I would feel that Faber is slightly different in that he was already convicted for his crime and subsequently escaped his sentence and thus should serve his sentence. Similarily I would agree that people of all extractions who have committed of serious crimes should serve their time which basically equates to your last statement. But because others have escaped justice it should not follow that Faber escapes in the same way IMO.

Morlar

Here's another example of their outstanding and important work, labelling a uk independent newspaper journalist anti-semitic

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/christina-patterson/christina-patterson-how-i-was-smeared-as-an-antisemite-2167310.html

Christina Patterson: How I was smeared as an anti-Semite

Thursday, 23 December 2010

The Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal died five years ago, at 96. Just, perhaps, before he could hunt me down, too

At the end of a long and exhausting year, it's sometimes hard to know what will hit the spot. A spa break in Thailand? A month-long marathon of black and white weepies? Or, perhaps, a little surprise. The surprising news, for example, that an organisation famed for hunting down Nazis has named you as one of its top 10 villains for 2010.

It was on Twitter, that online refuge for the bored and wanting-to-be-witty, that I suddenly saw my name next to the words "Simon Wiesenthal". I clicked on the link and there, on something called "Fishbowl LA", I was. "This," it said, "is definitely an awards season Top Ten list no one wants to be on". The LA Simon Wiesenthal Centre had, it said, "unveiled its Top Ten Anti-Semitic Slurs" for 2010 and I – nestling between a Lithuanian Holocaust-denier, who described the Nuremberg trial as "the biggest legal farce in history", and anonymous contributions on the Goldman Sachs message boards, which begged for the return of the Gestapo and exhorted readers to "burn all the Jews" – was at No 9.

Simon Wiesenthal, as far as I could remember, was the Holocaust survivor who was involved in the capture and conviction of Adolf Eichmann. A quick check online (but not on the Goldman Sachs message boards) established that he was also involved in the capture of Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka death camp, and Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan, who had ordered the torture and murder of thousands of women and children at Majdanek, and Karl Silberbauer, the Gestapo officer responsible for the arrest of Anne Frank. Wiesenthal died five years ago, at the age of 96. Just, perhaps, before he could hunt me down, too.

The work he started continues in his name. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, based in LA but with franchises in New York, Toronto, Miami, Paris, Buenos Aires and Jerusalem, is "an international Jewish human rights organisation" that "confronts anti-Semitism", "stands with Israel" and "defends the safety of Jews worldwide". Its last press release, before the one in which I star, was headed "Wiesenthal Centre Welcomes Rejection by Budapest Court of Libel Suit by Convicted Nazi War Criminal Against its Chief Nazi-Hunter Dr Efraim Zuroff". Personally, I think I'd put that in my Top Ten Unsnappy Headlines With Way Too Many Capital Letters of 2010, to be unveiled on my new website, Fishbowl Hackney, but style, it's clear from the cake stands, fig baskets and salt and pepper shakers in the online store of the Simon Wiesenthal's "Museum of Tolerance", isn't anyone's top priority.

The "Museum of Tolerance", by the way, is a "human rights laboratory and educational centre" funded by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. There's one in New York and there's going to be one in Jerusalem, on the site of a Muslim cemetery, which the Muslims haven't regarded as all that tolerant, which the Muslims have, in fact, been quite upset by. Since their protests have got them nowhere, they might consider taking part in the "Museum of Tolerance" online poll about bullying. "Have you been bullied?" it asks, and then invites you to tick the box for "race", "religion", "appearance", "sexual orientation" or "other", which pretty much ensures that the proportion of the world's population who can claim to be a victim is around 100 per cent.

Is it my style that the Wiesenthal lot don't like? My prose style, or the hairstyle in my photo? It is, to be honest, rather hard to work out, because next to a photo of me – looking, no doubt, just like Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan – they've simply chucked a chunk of text from a column I wrote in July. The column was about the limits of multiculturalism. In it, I criticised the bad manners of some of my Hasidic Jewish neighbours and, much more importantly, certain practices, in different religious communities, which conflict with some of the values in British society – free speech, sexual equality, gay rights, the rights of children not to be mutilated by their parents – that have been hardest won. The bad manners, I argued, were the acceptable face of multiculturalism. Some of the practices weren't.

The column, it's true, created a bit of a stir. On the blogosphere, I was Stoke Newington's answer to Eichmann. In my email inbox, however, I was Julian Assange, and with almost as many offers of what we might politely call marriage. Some of them, or at least some of the messages of support, were from people called Solomon, Symons or Greenfeld. Some were from some of my Hasidic Jewish neighbours. Some of them wanted to meet me, to tell me more about the pressures of living in a community that "survives because of the virtual imprisonment of its participants". Fearing discovery, they, at the last minute, didn't.

The day after Twitter's not-so-secret Santa, I had an email from an Orthodox Jew ("you may even," he said, "say 'Ultra' Orthodox") from New York. He had, he said, seen the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list. "What you said," he said, "is not anti-Semitic. I apologise to you for their wrong". A Jewish man in Canada wrote to say that the Simon Wiesenthal Centre "purposely gave an inaccurate impression" and that he had written to them to complain. Another said that the Wiesenthal Centre had been "irresponsible". Another that they were "obviously desperate". The Wiesenthal Centre, he said, was, "quite simply, not serious".

Well, I don't know if they're desperate, but they seem pretty damn serious to me. They, and their friends in this country, seem pretty damn serious that anyone, anywhere, who criticises the behaviour of anyone who happens to be Jewish should be stuck in the stocks and slapped with a label that marks them out as not just racist, but a hater of a particular, entire race, so that when anyone puts their name in Google, what pops up is words like "anti-Semitic", "prick" and "bigot". They seem pretty damn serious that their support for "Jewish Rights in the World" translates into direct support of Israel, too. "Had enough of Israel-bashing?" asks the Wiesenthal website. "Act now!" To speed things along, it has even written the letter. "To the President, Prime Minister and Leaders of Israel," it says. "We are with you!! Don't heed the world's Israel-bashers. We, Jewish and non-Jewish lovers of peace, are with you in your just defensive war against Hamas terror."

It doesn't matter if a UN report says that Israel's raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla "betrayed an unacceptable level of brutality". It doesn't matter if its soldiers use weapons banned by the Geneva Convention. It doesn't matter if they use a nine-year-old child as a human shield. It doesn't matter if its citizens raze homes and build new ones on someone else's land. Or if they destroy their neighbours' crops and treat them like criminals. It doesn't matter what they do. "We stand," says the Wiesenthal website, "in solidarity." And we know what they call those who don't.

When Hannah Arendt, whose book about Eichmann she called "a report on the banality of evil", was told by her fellow German-Jewish philosopher, Gershom Scholem, that he could find "little trace" of "love of the Jewish people" in her work, she said this. "You are quite right," she told him in a letter. "I am not moved by any 'love' of the sort, and for two reasons: I have never in my life 'loved' any people or collective... The only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons." The same, she didn't add, but might have, goes for hate, too.

The article which triggered this response is here :

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/christina-patterson/christina-patterson-the-limits-of-multiculturalism-2036861.html

jonniebgood1

Only fair to post the other side of the argument to be thorough on this:

Response to her linked article in previous post- copied from http://www.thejc.com/blogpost/the-limits-multi-culturalism

I have just finished reading one of the ugliest, most vile pieces ever published in the British press. It is actually dripping with venom.

I am speaking, of course, of Christina Patterson's piece in the Indy today, The Limits of Multi-Culturalism. Her piece begins as a mild rant against her annoying and rude neighbours in the Charedi neighbourhood of Stamford Hill. They drive while using their mobile phones; park in the wrong spots, don't say please or thank you in their shops and occasionally disdain their non-Jewish customers.

Fine. I daresay all these things really happened to her. Certainly they are all complaints that have aired so often they have become cliches.

But that's only the first couple of paragraphs. After she gets her complaints about the "armies of children" and the "funny suits and hats" out of the way, she really gets going:

When I moved to Stamford Hill, 12 years ago, I didn't realise that goyim were about as welcome in the Hasidic Jewish shops as Martin Luther King at a Klu Klux Klan convention. I didn't realise that a purchase by a goy was a crime to be punished with monosyllabic terseness, or that bus seats were a potential source of contamination, or that road signs, and parking restrictions, were for people who hadn't been chosen by God. And while none of this is a source of anything much more than irritation, when I see an eight-year-old boy recoiling from a normal-looking woman (because, presumably, he has been taught that she is dirty or dangerous, or, heaven forbid, dripping with menstrual blood) it makes me sad.

"Normal-looking woman"? What's that? A woman who looks like you, Ms Patterson?

She then goes on about a series of Muslim practices that similarly make her "sad" - including little girls "being taught that their tiny bodies, and their lovely hair, are things to be protected from the male gaze". The very concept of modesty - in clothing, in contact between the sexes - actually offends her. I'd love to hear what she has to say, by contrast, on the armies of young girls in London sleeping around, drinking and minimally dressed. That's what offends me.

All these things make me sad, but I accept that people should, except in certain professional situations which involve dealing with the public, be allowed to wear whatever they like, and that laws which prevent this are self-defeating, and that you can't stop parents, or rabbis, teaching little boys that adult women shouldn't even be brushed against on a bus, and I accept that some of these things are an inevitable consequence of a modern, and in many ways magnificent, multi-cultural society.

Again, she seems to think that she is the 'normal', normative one, and that the rabbis preaching modesty are the 'modern' ones. She fails to grasp that in the context of history, she's the modern, new one, not them.

I love, by the way, she pays lip service to the "in many ways magnificent" multi-cultural society. In her political milieu, she has to profess to believe in it, but at the end of the day, she's not exactly live-and-let-live, is she? You rather get the feeling that she (a) hates the Jews and Muslims really, seriously more than is strictly necessary and (b) feels they really ought to thank her for generously giving them permission to exist.

G-d, this is painful, but let's go on.

But there's one thing I will never accept. In the next few weeks, between 500 and 2,000 British schoolgirls – yes, British schoolgirls – will be sent abroad, ostensibly on holiday, and taken to the home of a woman who will, using an often dirty razor, and no anaesthetic, slice off their labia, and clitoris, and then, using sewing thread or horse-hair and an often dirty needle, stitch their vaginas closed. Sometimes, the girls faint. Sometimes, they die. But the people who do this to them (in East Africa and India and Pakistan and the Middle East) believe that it's what God wants. They believe that it promotes "cleanliness" and "chastity". Oh, and men's sexual pleasure. But not, for obvious reasons, women's.

Female circumcision has been illegal in Britain since 1985. Since 2003, it has also been illegal to take girls out of the country to have them "cut" abroad. The maximum penalty is 14 years. So far, there have been no prosecutions. Not a single one. I don't care if evidence is difficult to get, and I don't care if parents think they're doing the right thing for their children, and I don't care if it's a "sensitive" issue. This is a total and utter disgrace. Parents are being allowed to mutilate their children, and the institutions in this country are doing sweet FA.

There is, I'm sure, nothing in the Koran to indicate that hacking off a girl's labia is an all-round great idea, just as there's nothing in the Torah to say that Volvos should always be driven with a mobile phone in hand, and goyim should be treated with contempt.

Wow. We started off with rude Jewish drivers and somehow, four columns later, we've got to Muslims "hacking off a girl's labia". Amazing - no one at the Indy has yet spotted that the two things really have nothing to do with each other. Except that they are both carried out by those repulsive foreigners.

People will believe what they believe, but a civilised society will have laws to indicate what is acceptable in that society and what isn't, and it will act on those laws. A properly civilised society would also ensure that children are not subject to the crazed whims of their parents, and hived off into "faith schools" where they're taught that the world was created in seven days, or that they need special gadgets to switch on the lights on a Saturday, or that women who show their face are sluts.

"Crazed whims of parents"? Now we get to the nub. She dislikes Islam and Judaism and sees them and their practitioners as irrational and "uncivilised". That is what this is all about, as evidenced by the next paragraph:

A properly civilised society would accept that while lovely little C of E schools were once an excellent place for children to learn about the religion that shaped their culture, art and laws, you can't have them without having the madrassa run by the mad mullah next door, and therefore, sadly, you can't have either, but have, instead, a system of compulsory state secular education, in which children learn to get on with people from all religious backgrounds and none, and are taught about all religions, but also that the culture of the country they're living in was, for 2,000 years, largely based on one.

Hold on - she doesn't hate all religions. C of E schools = "lovely"! Muslim and Jewish schools = bad! I understand, Ms Patterson.

By now, of course, her tone is totally crazed - hate-filled and hateful. Even if I were reading this with the most charitable of attitudes, and wished to assume that Ms Patterson did not mean to come across as a complete bigot, this is how it reads to me. Maybe we ought to send her to visit one of those state schools where children "learn to get on with people from all religious backgrounds and none". She certainly sounds like she needs a refresher course.