Rabbi Explains Nazi Hunter’s Waldheim View

The dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based organization actively seeking to persuade people that Austrian President Kurt Waldheim was involved in Nazi war crimes, says it is “not an embarrassment” that the person for whom the center is named, famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal of Vienna, has yet to be convinced.

Wiesenthal “wants the smoking gun. He wants incontrovertible evidence (although) I don’t think we’re going to find such evidence,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Wiesenthal Center.

“It’s an honest difference of opinion. He takes a very conservative approach,” said Hier, interviewed after Wiesenthal expressed his doubts recently in Vienna.

Waldheim, the former U.N. secretary general who was elected president of Austria last June, has been accused of hiding his role in the German military during World War II. The World Jewish Congress has charged that Waldheim took part in, or at least knew about, deportations to Nazi death camps and reprisals against people in the Balkan countries where his army unit was active in 1942-43.

‘Protecting the Truth’

Wiesenthal, who has compiled evidence against more than 1,000 former Nazis, told The Times recently in Vienna that he is not trying to protect Waldheim.

“I am protecting the truth. Give me evidence against him, iron evidence. I have seen no evidence that he was involved in a crime, ordered a crime, or proposed a crime. If I did, I as an Austrian citizen would ask him to resign.”

Wiesenthal said his proposal to form a committee of military historians from seven countries to investigate the charges was not accepted by the New York-based World Jewish Congress.

Waldheim’s autobiography, published in 1977, said that he left the German Army in 1941 and returned to law school in 1941. But an international furor erupted last year when it was disclosed that he was actually reassigned to army duty in the Balkans in 1941.

While admitting that he omitted writing about his later German military service, Waldheim has called the accusations against him as politically motivated, “crude fabrications” and has denied knowledge of or complicity in any atrocities.

Israel withdrew its ambassador to Austria after Waldheim’s election. Other governments have avoided contact with Waldheim, who in turn said he would not travel outside his country’s borders for his first year in office in light of the suspicions raised about his war record.

Waldheim’s Doctoral Thesis

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has been active this year pursuing the case against Waldheim. In testimony prepared for a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on human rights last April, Hier alleged that Waldheim’s doctoral thesis, written at the University of Vienna in 1944, showed that he was sympathetic with Adolf Hitler’s goal of absorbing other European countries under Berlin’s rule.

In May, the center said it distributed a million anti-Waldheim post cards to its members and supporters. Addressed to President Reagan, the cards urged that Waldheim be barred from entering the United States. The cards cited charges of murder and slaughter against Waldheim made by Yugoslavia in 1947 to the U.N. Crimes Commission.

Hier, while lauding Wiesenthal as the “conscience of the Holocaust and its lessons,” said he thinks that Wiesenthal wants to be “doubly sure” in the case of a prominent person like Waldheim. “He (Wiesenthal) has many neo-Nazi groups looking over his shoulder” ready to discredit him if he were to wrongly accuse Waldheim, Hier said.

At the same time, Hier maintained that Wiesenthal is distancing himself from Waldheim. The Austrian president this year appeared unannounced at a Roman Catholic-sponsored seminar on Jewish issues in which Wiesenthal was speaking, but the latter ended his lecture abruptly when he became aware of it, Hier said.

“To have done that, in public, shows that Simon Wiesenthal is not prepared to be in the same room with Waldheim and to allow Waldheim to claim that he supports him,” Hier said.