Nazi Hunter Warns About Populism Risks

Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal used a ceremony to honor him as an occasion to warn of the dangers of populism before an audience that included the rising leader of a right-wing party.

Wiesenthal received an honorary doctorate from the University of Sarajevo during a presentation here Thursday night. In his acceptance speech, he reminded the 300 politicians, diplomats, officials and intellectuals in attendance about his lifelong struggle for justice and freedom.

Among those present was Joerg Haider, leader of the Freedom Party, which is the third largest party in parliament and made huge gains in European parliamentary elections last Sunday. Among the two-thirds of Austrians who do not support him, Haider is widely considered a demagogic populist.

Wiesenthal recalled how Jews failed to recognize the danger represented by Adolf Hitler before he rose to lead Germany in 1933.

“We saw in him a peripheral figure who would disappear,” Wiesenthal said. “It was our mistake to think that a people who loved Goethe and Schiller [Germany’s two greatest classic writers] would never elect” Hitler.

“But Hitler always had an answer” for every problem the Germans then faced, Wiesenthal noted: “The Jews were to blame.”

“Since then,” he added to applause, “I am allergic to all forms of populism.”

Haider’s reaction was not evident. But he did join in the standing ovation at the end of Wiesenthal’s speech.

The two men did not speak or shake hands during the 90-minute ceremony. Wiesenthal did not go to an adjacent museum to view an exhibit on Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Jews.

Haider did, viewing several photographs of gravestones in Sarajevo’s Jewish cemetery, overturned and destroyed in the 3 1/2-year Bosnian war.

In contrast to the jubilant reception he enjoys from his supporters, all but a handful in Thursday night’s crowd shunned Haider.

Two years ago, Haider was shocked by an exhibit in the Los Angeles museum that bears Wiesenthal’s name that depicted Haider as a neo-Nazi.

Haider, who last year praised veterans of Hitler’s dreaded Waffen SS units as “decent folk,” appears to be trying--at least publicly--to jettison such associations as his chances of taking real power improve.