The Nazis' worst nightmare R.I.P.

The Nazis' worst nightmare! R.I.P.

Talk about pit bulls ! Simon Wiesenthal, Nazi headhunter extraordinaire, was pronounced dead yesterday at age 96. After a half-century, he is credited with locating and coordinating the snatching and take-down of more than 1,000 widely scattered remnants of the short-lived Thousand-Year Reich, including S.S. Colonel Adolph Eichmann, the icily efficient administrator of Hitler's Endloesung ("final solution") of European Jewry.

Mr. Wiesenthal had all the credentials he needed to undertake his self-appointed mission. He spent the war years in Mauthausen concentration camp (near Linz, Austria) as a condemned Jew who, when the American Army liberated him, weighed only 99 pounds. In fact, only a couple days before, with dozens of fellow inmates, he stood looking into an open pit, waiting for bullets from the execution squad behind him (inexplicably, the executioners did not complete their assignment that day).

In 1947, when it became apparent that the governments of the Allied Occupation Forces, for reasons of their own, were not going to ferret out and prosecute the thousands of Nazis who had scattered like rats in the spring and summer of 1945--ending up in sympathetic villages throughout Europe, but mostly abroad--Mr. Wiesenthal established his own Nazi-hunting project.

Wiesenthal was trained as an architectural engineer, not a businessman. So from Day One the project was a shoestring venture, usually tottering precariously on the verge of bankruptcy. Until a Foundation was established in honor of his work in 1977, he worked mostly alone out of the same one-room office in Vienna. Typically, he was always dependent on voluntary office help and had his hat out for contributions. Because he was always on someone's hit list, it's amazing that he was able to live out his very full life in a city known for high intrigue since the Hapsburg Dynasty. At a minimum, to most governments and their working agencies, he always remained that nutty cousin of embarrassing family lineage, who they nervously wished would remain out of sight, hidden among the unseemly and unmentionable family skeletons.

Of course, the U.S. was one of the most nervous post-war uncles, given the fact that it made extensive use of Nazi scientific and intelligence assets immediately after V-E Day--the most widely known, of course, being Herr Werner von Braun, the Nazi's "rocket man," with headquarters at Peenemunde, a village on the German North Sea Coast. Von Braun, of course, became America's bosom pal who led the American space program to victory against the Soviet Union with the Apollo moon landings in the 1970s, using his vast knowledge he had acquired lobbing thousands of "buzz bombs" and V-1 & V-2 rockets onto London during WWII. It's therefore understandable that the U.S. was very late (in the mid-1980s) in establishing an official, active anti-Nazi "search and identify" unit in the Department of Justice. Today, while it's noteworthy that the few bright, enthusiastic government lawyers assigned to the DOJ-Nazi unit are cleaning up the odds and ends of Wiesenthal's work, it's certainly anticlimactic. More significant, however, is a chapter in history he wrote, containing a pertinent, if laconic, political science lesson for us today.

A brief political science lesson: The lesson is that we must rely on reality, as it presents itself (or is perceived) in order to protect itself or to compete successfully among nations (or both). These days, it's fashionable in the salons of political science circles to argue that it was (at minimum) amoral that we compromised many of our professed legal and moral democratic standards by using Nazi brains and administrative skills to achieve our national goals. Or later in 1973 in Chile that we were wrongly complicit in toppling the (perceived) communist physician, Salvador Allende, and replaced him with a pro-American head of state, today's much maligned General Agosto Pinochet. Or more recently that we used the loathsome talents and geopolitical advantages of Saddam Hussein's Iraq to block Iran's anti-U.S. ambitions in the1980s. Ah yes, it's also engaging that, in hindsight, we make much of the newly framed popular paradigm, "future unintended consequences," which can and do arise unexpectedly from today's actions. But, as anyone over 35 should already have learned from personal experience, one has to deal with what is known today--not what one might better know tomorrow.

Those remaining Nazi Fluechtlinge from justice, still desperately trying to maintain low profiles in blue-collar sections in big U.S. or European cities, or in nondescript neighborhoods in countries like Costa Rica, Guatemala, Venezuela, Panama, and Uruguay, are undoubtedly breathing a sigh of relief--the pit bull's grip has relaxed a bit. The U.S. DOJ-Nazi unit, in cooperation with several European agencies, is down to rooting out old, mostly infirm, low-level functionaries such as Ukrainian and Lithuanian concentration camp guards. Considering that they're all by now well into their 80's, these efforts seem anticlimactic at best. I believe we may comfortably conclude that Wiesenthal has won the main battle in his personal war with mankind's worst nightmare-turned-real. It was fitting that he turned the tables and became the real-life nightmare of the Nazi Partei-Genossen. We are all indebted to this man who would not let mankind forget. Let us hope his legacy lives on.

Job well done, sir. A life well spent. . . a true Mensch! R.I.P. Simon Wiesenthal.

A belated postscript: Wiesenthal has his detractors; this link is one of them and is presented for readers who wish to evaluate these contentions more closely. I take no position on any aspect of this "contrarian" presentation, mainly because I haven't researched it.