Nazi Hunters

By Paul Neumann

The search for war criminals was far from the office routine, and the unsung heroes still had to get out of the archives. The story of real Nazi hunters is full of unexpected twists, turns, and tragic endings. And there was also a place in it for abductions, bomb blasts, one ringing slap in the face, and several suspicious suicides.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Former Naval Person
• Release date: Dec 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9788383240114

Book preview

Paul Neumann

Nazi Hunters

The True Neverending Story That Really Happened

© Paul Neumann, 2022

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

Contents

Nazi Hunters

Enough of Auschwitz!

Ratlines to the Paperclip

The Nazi hunters

Avengers

Executioner that didn’t hide

The Finale solution

Friends thought they were crazy

The butcher of Lyon

Angels of death

Landmarks

Cover

In memory of Chaim.

When a tank flying an American flag entered the Nazi concentration camp Mauthausen on 5 May 1945, Simon Wiesenthal did not have enough strength to take a few steps to touch the armoured vehicle and see the reality of what was happening before his own eyes.

He weighed less than 50 kilograms, and looked and felt like a skeleton covered with skin. The saviours fed him with warm soup – a man with a heart sinking with delight ate a full plate, but after a couple of hours, he writhed in pain. Accustomed to turnips and stale bread crusts, his body did not accept normal food.

Wiesenthal was lucky – many concentration camp prisoners died after being freed from exhaustion, pain, and stress. The survivors coped with the terrible experience in different ways: some never spoke about the camp nightmares, even alone with loved ones, others described the Nazi hell in biographies and achieved popularity. Simon belonged to the latter, although he did not limit himself to creativity – after the rescue, he set the goal of documenting the crimes and bringing the perpetrators to justice.

Even before leaving the camp, he unsteadily walked to the hastily assembled War Crimes Executive Committee, and offered the Americans assistance in investigations and detentions. They accepted him on the second try – Wiesenthal was still too weak, but the Allies appreciated his tenacity. That same year, a Jew from the city of Buczacz, which in his childhood belonged to Austro-Hungary, and later to Poland, detained his first SS man. Wiesenthal barely reached the apartment on the third floor – the criminal could have easily escaped from the exhausted pursuer if he himself had not been seized by terror. The Nazi readily surrendered, and assured Simon that he was actually innocent.

Almost none of the accomplices of the Hitler régime in the post-war years did admit their guilt. It turned out that even among the most notorious Nazi executioners there were no sadists, no murders, no tortures, and atrocities were committed purely out of necessity. Everyone made excuses in different ways: some simply followed orders, others actually tried to help the prisoners, and others were afraid of punishment for refusing to obey their superiors. No one hated Jews, no one shared the ideology of the Nazi Reich, many did not even hear about concentration camps, and those who worked there, were not aware of the existence of gas chambers.

This hypocrisy motivated Wiesenthal and his colleagues the most. They sifted through the archives in search of data on the names and number of victims, information about the executors of sentences, and ideologists of the Holocaust. They made History as Nazi hunters, although it is not easy to understand the true meaning of this term: popular culture has created an image of fearless Jews who travel around the world and fight embittered war criminals for life and death. Their stories are full of danger and resemble a spy thriller, and their opponents are secretly reviving Nazism somewhere in the Latin American jungle.

The stories of Wiesenthal and his colleagues prove that the reality is very different from such films as The Boys from Brazil with Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier, where the German doctor plans to clone Hitler, and from the series Hunters with Al Pacino, where the Nazis are hunted by superheroes with unlimited resources and spy skills, and Hitler’s followers infiltrated all American government agencies. In fact, those were quite ordinary people who, for various reasons and in different ways, sought justice for the victims of the Nazi régime. They rarely acted together, but they were united by the desire to bring the escaped Nazis to justice – and that is where the similarities ended. Some hunters collected evidence and handed it over to the authorities, some arranged lynchings, and others personally entered into a confrontation with Hitler’s accomplices.

The journalist and writer Alan Elsner spoke quite accurately about Wiesenthal and other enthusiasts’ activities through the mouth of one of the characters of the novel The Nazi Hunter:

I’m an attorney, not an adventurer, not a secret agent, not even a private investigator, but an ordinary lawyer. I wear dark suits and sober ties. I spend my days in archives going through microfilm, and in meetings, and occasionally in courtrooms. The Nazis I deal with – far from dangerous warlords – usually turn out to be gray little men in their seventies and eighties leading dull anonymous lives in the suburbs of Cleveland or Detroit, tens of years and thousands of miles away from the horrors they committed as young men.

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However, even in real life, the search for war criminals was far from the office routine, and the unsung heroes still had to get out of the archives. The story of real Nazi hunters is full of unexpected twists, turns, and tragic endings. And there was also a place in it for abductions, bomb blasts, one ringing slap in the face, and several suspicious suicides.

Enough of Auschwitz!

At the end of the war, when the defeat of Germany was already inevitable, the Allies faced the question: what to do with the Nazis? Soldiers liberating concentration camps saw a nightmare. The effects of mistreatment, tortures, and massacres were revealed to them. They saw what the captives had become after many years in terrible conditions, and heard the stories of those, who lost everything: families, hope, and the meaning of life. It is not surprising that people, who saw Auschwitz and Buchenwald, believed that the monsters, who had done that were deprived of the right to trial and deserved immediate death.

Eyewitnesses left the stories of how the prisoners and the guards traded places: the liberated themselves finished off the executioners, but the liberators did not interfere with them, because they considered such an outcome to be the most just one. It was difficult for American civilians from across the ocean to assess the scale of the horrors of war in Europe, and the Holocaust. Hastily organized processes, on the contrary, seemed to them too harsh, a demonstrative triumph of the winners. In addition, it was not clear how to establish the guilt of the suspects