by the Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers/Anti-Defamation League) in which she and other members of her family were honored for having hidden a Jewish couple during World War II in Ukraine made the following remarks, the concluding sentence of which bears a particular relevance to our present discussion of 60 Minutes: "At the time we were fully aware of consequences that might expect us. We were aware that our family were doomed to perish together with the people we sheltered if detected. But sometimes people ask 'would you do it again?' And the answer is short. Yes. We tell them point blank that our Christian religion taught us to love your neighbor as yourself, be your brother's keeper," she stated. "Sometimes," she continued, "we hear the people asking why so few did what we did. Ladies and gentlemen, I am sure there were many, many people like us risking their lives while hiding Jews, but how many of those rescued had the courage to report the names of their rescuers to Yad Vashem? Somehow being free of danger they have forgotten what risk those people took." (Ukrainian Weekly, June 21, 1992, p. 9, emphasis added) The Forgotten Bodnar Yes, how some of them do seem to have forgotten. Take Simon Wiesenthal, for example. The chief focus of discussion between him and Morley Safer seems to have been whether Ukrainians are all genetically programmed to be worse anti-Semites than the Nazis (Mr. Morley's position), or whether it was just Ukrainian police units that deserve this description (Mr. Wiesenthal's position). Now to balance this image of unrelieved Ukrainian anti-Semitism, Mr. Wiesenthal could have mentioned that on numerous occasions Ukrainians risked their lives, perhaps even gave their lives, to save his (Mr. Wiesenthal's) life - and not only civilians, but the very same Ukrainian police auxiliaries whom both Mr. Safer and Mr. Wiesenthal agree were uniformly sub-human brutes. Here, for example, is Mr. Wiesenthal's own story (as told to Peter Michael Lingens) concerning a member of a Ukrainian police auxiliary who is identified by the Ukrainian surname "Bodnar." The story is that Mr. Wiesenthal is about to be executed, but: The shooting stopped. Ten yards from Wiesenthal. The next thing he remembers was a brilliant cone of light and behind it a Polish voice: "But Mr. Wiesenthal, what are you doing here?" Wiesenthal recognized a foreman he used to know, by the name of Bodnar. He was wearing civilian clothes with the armband of a Ukrainian police auxiliary. "I've got to get you out of here tonight." Bodnar told the [other] Ukrainians that among the captured Jews he had discovered a Soviet spy and that he was taking him to the district police commissar. In actual fact he took Wiesenthal back to his own flat, on the grounds that it was unlikely to be searched so soon again. This was the first time Wiesenthal survived. (Peter Michael Lingens, in Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 8) Bodnar must have known that the punishment for saving a Jew from execution and then helping him escape would be death. And how could he get away with it? In fact, we might ask Mr. Wiesenthal whether Bodnar did get away with it, or whether he paid for it with his life, for as the escapees were tiptoeing out, they were stopped, they offered their fabricated story, and then: The German sergeant, already a little drunk, slapped Bodnar's face and said: "Then what are you standing around for? If this is what you people are like, then later we'll all have troubles. Report back to me as soon as you deliver them [Wiesenthal along with a fellow prisoner]." (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 1993, p. 37) These passages invite several pertinent conclusions. First, we see a Ukrainian police auxiliary having his face slapped by a German sergeant, which serves to remind us that Ukraine is under occupation, to show us who is really in charge, to suggest that the German attitude toward Ukrainians is one of contempt and that the expression of this contempt is unrestrained. We see also that Bodnar's flat is subject to searches, indicating that although he is a participant in the anti-Jewish actions, he is a distrusted participant, and a participant who might feel intimidated by the hostile scrutiny of the occupying Nazis. But most important of all, we see that the German sergeant is waiting for Bodnar to report back. Alan Levy writes that "Bodnar was ... concerned ... that now he had to account, verbally at least, for his two prisoners" (p. 37). If Bodnar reports back with the news that Wiesenthal and the other prisoner escaped, then how might Bodnar expect the face-slapping German sergeant to respond? For Bodnar at this point in the story to actually allow Wiesenthal and the other prisoner to escape is heroic, it is self-sacrificing, it is suicidal. And yet Bodnar does go ahead and effect Wiesenthal's escape, probably never imagining that to Wiesenthal in later years this will become an event unworthy of notice during Wiesenthal's blanket condemnation of Ukrainians. And so these three things - the heroic actions of Lviv's Metropolitan Sheptytsky, the self-sacrificing intervention of the Ukrainian police official, Bodnar, in saving Mr. Wiesenthal's own life, and the existence of numerous other instances of Ukrainians saving Jews - these are things that were highly pertinent to the 60 Minutes broadcast, and they are things that would have begun to transform the broadcast from a twisted message of hate to balanced reporting, but they are things that were deliberately omitted. It is difficult to imagine any motive for this omission other than the preservation of the stereotype of uniform Ukrainian brutishness. Following the writing of the above section on the topic of Ukrainians saving Jews, a flood of similar material - actually more striking than similar - has come to my attention, far too great a volume to integrate into the present paper. Therefore, I merely take this opportunity to present three links to such similar material that has been placed on UKAR: (1) one item is evidence that Ukrainian forester Petro Pyasetsky may hold the record for saving the largest number of Jewish lives during World War II (in all likelihood greatly exceeding individuals like Oscar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg); (2) another item relates the case of lawyer Volodymyr Bemko who recounts his participation as defense attorney in numerous prosecutions by the Germans of Ukrainians on trial for the crime of aiding Jews; and (3) a briefer item outlining how the Vavrisevich family hid seven Jews during World War II. The first two of these three items are not brief, and so might best be read at a later time if interruption of the reading of the present paper seems undesirable. CONTENTS: Preface The Galicia Division Quality of Translation Ukrainian Homogeneity Were Ukrainians Nazis? Simon Wiesenthal What Happened in Lviv? Nazi Propaganda Film Collective Guilt Paralysis of the Comparative Function 60 Minutes' Cheap Shots Ukrainian Anti-Semitism Jewish Ukrainophobia Mailbag A Sense of Responsibility What 60 Minutes Should Do PostScript Were Ukrainians Really Devoted Nazis? Pointing out such salient and pertinent instances of Ukrainian heroic humanitarianism as those mentioned above would have been a step in the right direction, but it still would not have told the whole story. Another vital component of the story is that Ukrainians were the victims of the Nazis, hated the Nazis, fought the Nazis, died to rid their land of the Nazis and to eradicate Naziism from the face of the earth. This conclusion is easy to document, and yet it is a conclusion that was omitted from the 60 Minutes broadcast. Following the trauma of Soviet oppression, following the brutal terror of Communism, the artificial famine of 1932-33 in which some six million Ukrainians perished, following the deportation by the Communists of 400,000 Western Ukrainians and the slaughter of 10,000 Western Ukrainians by retreating Communist forces, the Ukrainian population did indeed welcome the Germans in 1941. However, disillusionment with the German emancipation was immediate: The brutality of the German regime became evident everywhere. The Germans began the extermination of the population on a mass scale. In the autumn of 1941 the Jewish people who had not escaped to the East were annihilated throughout Ukraine. No less than 850,000 were killed by the SS special commandos. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, especially during the winter of 1941-42, died of hunger in the German camps - a tragedy which had a considerable effect upon the course of the war, for as a consequence Soviet soldiers ceased to surrender to the Germans. At the end of 1941, the Nazi terror turned against active Ukrainian nationalists, although most of them were not in any way engaged in fighting the Germans as yet. Thus, in the winter of 1941-42, a group of writers including Olena Teliha and Ivan Irliavsky, Ivan Rohach, the chief editor of the daily ... Ukrainian Word, Bahazii, the mayor of Kiev, later Dmytro Myron-Orlyk, and several others were suddenly arrested and shot in Kiev. The majority of a group of Bukovinians who had fled to the east after the Rumanian occupation of Bukovina were shot in Kiev and Mykolayiv in the autumn of 1941. In Dnipropetrovske, at the beginning of 1942, the leaders of the relief work of the Ukrainian National Committee were shot. In Kamianets Podilsky several dozen Ukrainian activists including Kibets, the head of the local administration, were executed. In March, 1943, Perevertun, the director of the All-Ukrainian Consumer Cooperative Society, and his wife were shot. In 1942-43 there were shootings and executions in Kharkiv, Zyhtomyr, Kremenchuk, Lubni, Shepetivka, Rivne, Kremianets, Brest-Litovsk, and many other places. When, in the second half of 1942, the conduct of the Germans provoked the population to resistance in the form of guerrilla warfare, the Germans began to apply collective responsibility on a large scale. This involved the mass shooting of innocent people and the burning of entire villages, especially in the Chernihiv and northern Kiev areas and in Volhynia. For various - even minor - offenses, people were being hanged publicly in every city and village. The numbers of the victims reached hundreds of thousands. The German rulers began systematically to remove the Ukrainians from the local administration by arrests and executions, replacing them with Russians, Poles, and Volksdeutshe. (Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 1, pp. 881-882) Major-General Eberhardt, the German Commandant of Kiev, on November 2, 1941 announced that: "Cases of arson and sabotage are becoming more frequent in Kiev and oblige me to take firm action. For this reason 300 Kiev citizens have been shot today." This seemed to do no good because Eberhardt on November 29, 1941 again announced: "400 men have been executed in the city [of Kiev]. This should serve as a warning to the population." The death penalty was applied by the Germans to any Ukrainian who gave aid, or directions, to the UPA [Ukrainian Partisan Army] or Ukrainian guerrillas. If you owned a pigeon the penalty was death. The penalty was death for anyone who did not report or aided a Jew to escape, and many Ukrainians were executed for helping Jews. Death was the penalty for listening to a Soviet radio program or reading anti-German leaflets. For example, on March 28, 1943 three women in Kherson, Maria and Vera Alexandrovska and Klavdia Tselhelnyk were executed because they had "read an anti-German leaflet, said they agreed with its contents and passed it on." (Andrew Gregorovich, World War II in Ukraine, Forum, No. 92, Spring 1995, p. 21) The notion of "collective responsibility" or "collective guilt" mentioned above by means of which the Nazis justified murdering a large number of innocent people in retaliation for the acts of a single guilty person is founded on a primitive view of justice which Western society has largely - but not completely - abandoned, as we shall see below. The Ukrainian opposition manifested itself primarily in the underground Ukrainian Partisan Army (UPA): The spread of the insurgent struggle acquired such strength that at the end of the occupation the Germans were in control nowhere but in the cities of Ukraine and made only daylight raids into the villages. ... They [the Ukrainian guerrillas] espoused the idea of an independent Ukrainian state and the slogan "neither Hitler nor Stalin." (Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 1, p. 884) During the most intensive fighting against the Germans in the fall of 1943 and the spring of 1944, the UPA numbered close to 40,000 men.... Among major losses inflicted upon the enemy by the UPA, the following should be mentioned: Victor Lutze, chief of the SS-Sicherungsabteilung, who was killed in battle in May, 1943.... (Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 2, pp. 1089-1091) Up to 200 innocent Ukrainians were executed for one German attacked by guerrillas. In spite of this a total of 460,000 German soldiers and officers were killed by partisans in Ukraine during the War. (Andrew Gregorovich, World War II in Ukraine, Forum, No. 92, Spring 1995, p. 21) Photograph of partisans executed by the Nazis. Photograph of young woman executed by the Nazis, and young man about to be executed, for partisan activities. If Morley Safer feels impelled to instruct 60 Minutes viewers that Ukrainians were loyal Nazis, then he should also pause to explain how it is that the Ukrainians were able to reconcile their loyalty with German contempt: When the time came to appoint the Nazi ruler of Ukraine, Hitler chose Erich Koch, a notoriously brutal and bigoted administrator known for his personal contempt for Slavs. Koch's attitude toward his assignment was evident in the speech he delivered to his staff upon his arrival in Ukraine in September 1941: "Gentlemen, I am known as a brutal dog. Because of this reason I was appointed as Reichskommissar of Ukraine. Our task is to suck from Ukraine all the goods we can get hold of, without consideration of the feelings or the property of the native population." On another occasion, Koch emphasized his loathing for Ukrainians by remarking: "If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy of sitting at the same table with me, I must have him shot." (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, p. 467) Koch often said that Ukrainian people were inferior to the Germans, that Ukrainians were half-monkeys, and that Ukrainians "must be handled with the whip like the negroes." (Andrew Gregorovich, World War II in Ukraine, Forum, No. 92, Spring 1995, p. 15) If Morley Safer wishes to proclaim to the 60 Minutes audience that Ukrainians were enthusiastic Nazis, then he should simultaneously explain how Ukrainians were able to maintain their enthusiasm as 2.3 million of them were being shipped off to forced labor in Germany: By early 1942, Koch's police had to stage massive manhunts, rounding up young Ukrainians in bazaars or as they emerged from churches or cinemas and shipping them to Germany. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, p. 469) If Morley Safer insists on announcing to 60 Minutes viewers that Ukrainians were devoted Nazis, then he should explain to these viewers how Ukrainians were able to maintain their devotion when the Kiev soccer team - Dynamo - beat German teams five games in a row, and then received the German reward: Most of the team members were arrested and executed in Babyn Yar, but they are not forgotten. There is a monument to them in Kiev and their heroism inspired the film Victory starring Sylvester Stallone and Pele. (Andrew Gregorovich, World War II in Ukraine, Forum, No. 92, Spring 1995, p. 21) If Morley Safer will not swerve from his position that Ukrainians were keen on Naziism, then he should explain how Ukrainians were able to maintain their keenness when their cities were being starved: Koch drastically limited the flow of foodstuffs into the cities, arguing that Ukrainian urban centers were basically useless. In the long run, the Nazis intended to transform Ukraine into a totally agrarian country and, in the short run, Germany needed the food that Ukrainian urban dwellers consumed. As a result, starvation became commonplace and many urban dwellers were forced to move to the countryside. Kiev, for example, lost about 60% of its population. Kharkiv, which had a population of 700,000 when the Germans arrived, saw 120,000 of its inhabitants shipped to Germany as laborers; 30,000 were executed and about 80,000 starved to death.... (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, p. 469) Among the first actions of the Nazis upon occupying a new city was to plunder it of its intellectual and cultural treasures, material as well as human, and yet somehow - if we are to believe Morley Safer - being so plundered failed to dampen the enthusiasm of the Ukrainians for Naziism: Co. 4 in which I was employed seized in Kiev the library of the medical research institute. All equipment, scientific staff, documentation and books were shipped out to Germany. We appropriated rich trophies in the library of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences which possessed singular manuscripts of Persian, Abyssinian and Chinese writings, Russian and Ukrainian chronicles, incunabula by the first printer Ivan Fedorov, and rare editions of Shevchenko, Mickiewicz, and Ivan Franko. Expropriated and sent to Berlin were many exhibits from Kiev's Museums of Ukrainian Art, Russian Art, Western and Oriental Art and the Taras Shevchenko Museum. As soon as the troops seize a big city, there arrive in their wake team leaders with all kinds of specialists to scan museums, art galleries, exhibitions, cultural and art institutions, evaluate their state and expropriate everything of value. (Report by SS-Oberstrumfuehrer Ferster, November 10, 1942, in Kondufor, History Teaches a Lesson, p. 176, in Andrew Gregorovich, World War II in Ukraine, Forum, No. 92, Spring, 1995, p. 23) Only genetic programming could explain how - according to Morley Safer anyway - Ukrainians could have been among the most loyal of Nazis when their intelligentsia were being decimated and they were being treated as Untermenschen: Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the SS, proposed that "the entire Ukrainian intelligentsia should be decimated." Koch believed that three years of grade school was more than enough education for Ukrainians. He even went so far as to curtail medical services in order to undermine "the biological power of the Ukrainians." German-only shops, restaurants, and sections of trolley cars were established to emphasize the superiority of the Germans and the racial inferiority of the Ukrainian Untermenschen. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, p. 469) There must not be a more advanced education for the non-German population of the east than four years of primary school. This primary education has the following objective only: doing simple arithmetic up to 500, writing one's name, learning that it was God's command that the Germans must be obeyed, and that one had to be honest, diligent, and obedient. I don't consider reading skills necessary. Except for this school, no other kind of school must be allowed in the east.... The [remaining inferior] population will be at our call as a slave people without leaders, and each year will provide Germany with migrant workers and workers for special projects ... and, while themselves lacking all culture, they will be called upon under the strict, purposeful, and just rule of the German nation to contribute to [Germany's] eternal cultural achievements and monuments.... (Himmler, May 1941, in Hannah Vogt, The Burden of Guilt: A Short History of Germany, 1914-1945, Oxford University Press, New York, 1964, p. 263) The notion proposed by 60 Minutes that Ukrainians were as one with the Nazis - or if we are to believe Mr. Safer, more Nazi than the Nazis themselves - is a colossal fiction based on colossal prejudice: A graphic indication of the extremes of Nazi brutality experienced in Ukraine was that for one village that was destroyed and its inhabitants executed in France and Czechoslovakia, 250 villages and their inhabitants suffered such a fate in Ukraine. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, pp. 479-480) CONTENTS: Preface The Galicia Division Quality of Translation Ukrainian Homogeneity Were Ukrainians Nazis? Simon Wiesenthal What Happened in Lviv? Nazi Propaganda Film Collective Guilt Paralysis of the Comparative Function 60 Minutes' Cheap Shots Ukrainian Anti-Semitism Jewish Ukrainophobia Mailbag A Sense of Responsibility What 60 Minutes Should Do PostScript Simon Wiesenthal Discovered Under the Floorboards In reading Simon Wiesenthal's biography, one cannot but be impressed by his exactitude. Take this account of how he was discovered underneath the floorboards: In early June 1944, during a drinking bout in a neighbouring house, a chief inspector of the German railways was beaten and robbed by his Polish companions. A house-to-house police search was ordered. Simon reburied himself several times and was in his makeshift coffin on Tuesday, 13 June 1944, when more than eight months of cramped and perilous "freedom" came to an end. As the Gestapo entered the courtyard of the house, the Polish partisans fled, leaving Wiesenthal trapped beneath the earth "in a position where I couldn't even make use of my weapon." (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 1993, pp. 52-53) To remember not only that it was the 13th of June, but that it was a Tuesday - how impressive! And how appropriate that Mr. Wiesenthal be credited with a photographic memory: He is helped by his phenomenal memory: Wiesenthal is able to quote telephone numbers which he may have happened to see on a visiting card two years before. He can list the participants in huge functions, one by one, and he can add what colour suit each wore. Although he writes up to twenty letters a day, and receives more than that number, he can, years later, quote key passages from them and indicate roughly where that letter may be found in a file. ... A man's civilian occupation, his origins in a particular region, his accent mentioned by someone - all these stick in Wiesenthal's memory for years. And, just like a computer, he can call them up at any time. This permanent readiness of recall means that the horror is not relegated, as it is with most people (and increasingly also with victims), to a remote recess of the mind, but is always at the forefront, at the painful boundary of consciousness. Wiesenthal possesses what is usually called a photographic memory: he is a man who cannot forget. (Peter Michael Lingens, in Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, pp. 20-21.) But from someone in Mr. Wiesenthal's position, one expects no less - one expects just such exactitude as he is gifted with, just such precision, just such vivid and accurate recall of detail. All such things are essential when one is entrusted with the grave responsibility of accusing individuals and ascribing guilt to nations. And precise memory of such events is to be expected all the more of someone who was young when the events occurred, and when the events were traumatic and seared into his memory. As Mr. Wiesenthal has related the story of his life to more than one biographer, it is not a difficult matter for a reader to compare these stories in order to be further edified by the demonstration of Mr. Wiesenthal's remarkable memory. Take, for example, this other account of the same story of being discovered underneath the floorboards: One evening in April 1943 a German soldier was shot dead in the street. The alarm was raised: SS and Polish police officers in civilian clothes searched the nearby houses for hidden weapons. Instead they found Simon Wiesenthal. He was marched off for the third time to, as he believed, his certain execution. (Peter Michael Lingens, in Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 11) But this parallel version of the story is not precisely what the claims concerning Mr. Wiesenthal's memory led us to expect. The astonishingly accurate "Tuesday, 13 June 1944" has turned into "April 1943," "beaten" has become "murdered," "in a house" has become "in the street," the "railway inspector" has become a "German soldier," and the "Gestapo" has become the "SS." The last might seem like a fine point, but in fact the Gestapo and the SS had clearly defined and mutually exclusive duties: "A division of authority came about whereby the Gestapo alone had the power to arrest people and send them to concentration camps, whereas the SS remained responsible for running the camps" (Leni Yahil, The Holocaust, 1987, p. 133). Perhaps a fine point to someone who had not lived through these events, but to someone who had lived through them, then one would imagine a memorable point, one that should be easier to remember than, say, what color suit each participant wore at some huge function. And so now we are forced to wonder whether this is the same event badly remembered, or whether Mr. Wiesenthal was discovered twice under the floorboards, once in 1943 and again in 1944. The more cynical reader might even go on to wonder whether any such event took place at all. As the above comparison illustrates, and as a reading of Mr. Wiesenthal proves a hundred times over, Mr. Wiesenthal's salient characteristic is not that he has a photographic memory, but rather that he cannot tell a story twice in the same way. For a second example, take the case of the Rusinek slap. The Rusinek Slap Former inmates took over command. One of them was the future Polish Cabinet Minister Kazimierz Rusinek. Wiesenthal needed to see him at his office to get a pass. The Pole, who was about to lock up, struck him across the face - just as some camp officials had frequently treated Jews. It hurt Wiesenthal more than all the blows received from SS men in three years: "Now the war is over, and the Jews are still being beaten." ... He sought out the American camp command to make a complaint. (Peter Michael Lingens in Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 12) That is one version, but here is another: A Polish trusty named Kazimierz Rusinek pounced on Simon for no good reason and knocked him unconscious. When Wiesenthal woke up, friends had carried him to his bunk. "What has he got against you?" one of them asked. "I don't know," Simon said. "Maybe he's angry because I'm still alive." (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 1993, p. 69) These two accounts are so different that one wonders whether they are of the same event. In the first account Wiesenthal is addressing Rusinek when Rusinek slaps him, while in the second Rusinek pounces on him, which suggests an ambush. But more important, when you have been pounced on and knocked unconscious, when you become aware that your friends have carried you to your bunk only after you have regained consciousness, then you would not ordinarily describe that as merely having been "struck across the face." Mr. Wiesenthal is a skilled raconteur - in fact an erstwhile professional stand-up comic - so that it is inconceivable that he would weaken a story, drain it of its significance, by turning a knock-out into a mere slap. With his training as a stand-up comic, however, it is conceivable that he would turn a slap into a knock-out. Mr. Wiesenthal's stories are cluttered with this sort of self-contradiction. Take, for still another example, the case of the Bodnar rescue: In Justice Not Vengeance, Bodnar saves only Wiesenthal, and takes him to his apartment. In The Wiesenthal File, however, Bodnar saves Wiesenthal together with another prisoner and takes the two to the office of a "commissar" which office they spend the entire night cleaning. And on top of outright contradiction, there are a mass of details that fail to ring true. For example, although many Ukrainians did risk their lives to save Jews, the number who knowingly gave their lives to save Jews must have been considerably smaller - and yet, as noted above, that is what Wiesenthal seems to be asking us to believe that Bodnar did. And then too, Wiesenthal tells us that in the execution which he had just barely escaped, the prisoners were being shot with each standing beside his own wooden box, and dumped into his own box after he was shot - where we might have expected the executioners to follow the path of least effort, Mr. Wiesenthal's account shows them going to the trouble of providing each victim with a makeshift coffin. And just how did it come to pass that the executioners stopped before killing Wiesenthal himself? - According to Simon Wiesenthal, they heard church bells, and being devoutly religious, stopped to pray. But what an incongruous juxtaposition - Ukrainians at once deeply Christian and deeply genocidal. If Christianity invited the murder of Jews, then this would make sense, but in fact - in modern times at least - Christianity has stood against such practices, and more emphatically so in Ukraine than perhaps anywhere else, as we have already noted above. But what has Mr. Wiesenthal's inability to come up with a consistent or credible biography got to do with the quality of his professional denunciations? - The evidence suggests that the two are equally shoddy. Had 60 Minutes looked into Mr. Wiesenthal's professional background, it would quickly have found much to wonder at. It would, for one thing, have quickly come across the case of Frank Walus, The Nazi Who Never Was. Frank Walus: The Nazi Who Never Was In 1976 Simon Wiesenthal, in Vienna, had gone public with charges that a Polish emigre living in Chicago, Frank Walus, had been a collaborator involved in persecuting Polish Jews, including women and children, as part of a Gestapo-led auxiliary police unit. Walus, charged Wiesenthal, "performed his duties with the Gestapo in the ghettos of Czestochowa and Kielce and handed over numerous Jews to the Gestapo." (Charles Ashman & Robert J. Wagman, The Nazi Hunters, 1988, p. 193) Walus, in turn, was convicted by judge Julius Hoffman, who ran the trial with an iron hand and an eccentricity that bordered on the bizarre. He allowed government witnesses great latitude, while limiting severely Korenkiewicz's cross-examination of them. When Walus himself testified, Hoffman limited him almost entirely to simple yes and no answers. (Charles Ashman & Robert J. Wagman, The Nazi Hunters, 1988, p. 193) Despite weaknesses in the prosecution case, Judge Hoffman went on to convict Walus, and later despite accumulating evidence of Walus's innocence, refused to reconsider his verdict. But then a formal appeal was filed. The process took almost two years, but in February 1980, the court ruled. It threw out Hoffman's verdict and ordered Walus retried. In making the ruling, the court said that it appeared the government's case against Walus was "weak" but that Hoffman's handling of the trial had been so biased that it could not evaluate the evidence properly. (Charles Ashman & Robert J. Wagman, The Nazi Hunters, 1988, p. 195) In view of irrefutable documentary and eye-witness evidence that Walus had served as a farm laborer in Germany during the entire war, he was never re-tried. And what, we may ask, was the occasion for Simon Wiesenthal's fingering Walus in the first place? Only later was the source of the "evidence" against Walus that had reached Simon Wiesenthal identified. Walus had bought a two-family duplex when he came to Chicago. In the early 1970s, he rented out the second unit to a tenant with whom he eventually had a fight. Walus evicted the tenant, who then started telling one and all how his former landlord used to sit around and reminisce about the atrocities he had committed against Jews in the good old days. Apparently one of the groups to which he told the story was a Jewish refugee agency in Chicago, which passed the information along to Simon Wiesenthal. (Charles Ashman & Robert J. Wagman, The Nazi Hunters, 1988, p. 195) For a statement concerning the Walus case made by Frank Walus himself, please read Frank Walus's letter to Germany. The Deschenes Commission But is the Walus case a single slipup in Simon Wiesenthal's otherwise blemish-free career? No, other slipups can be found - in one instance a batch of 6,000 others. Simon Wiesenthal kicked the ball into play with the accusation that Canada harbored "several hundred" war criminals (Toronto Star, May 19, 1971). The Jewish Defense League caught the ball, found it soft and inflated it to "maybe 1,000" (Globe and Mail, July 5, 1983) before tossing it to Edward Greenspan. Edward Greenspan mustered enough hot air to inflate it to 2,000 (Globe and Mail, November 21, 1983) before tossing it to Sol Littman whose lung capacity was able to raise it to 3,000 (Toronto Star, November 8, 1984). The ball, distended beyond recognition, was tossed back to Wiesenthal who boldly puffed it up to 6,000 (New York Daily News, May 16, 1986) and then made the mistake of trying to kick it - but poof! The ball burst! Judge Jules Deschenes writing the report for Canada's Commission on War Criminals first certifies that the ball had indeed reached the record-breaking 6,000 Canadian war criminals: The Commission has ascertained from the New York Daily News that this figure is correct and is not the result of a printing error. (Jules Deschenes, Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, 1986, p. 247) But now the big ball was gone, and all that was left was the deflated pigskin which Mr. Wiesenthal lamely flopped on the Commission's table - a list of 217 names (which in other places becomes a list of 218 or 219 names). The list was focussed on Ukrainians - Mr. Wiesenthal's Vienna Documentation Center Annual Report for 1984 claimed that "218 former Ukrainian officers of Hitler's S.S. (elite guard), which ran death camps in Eastern Europe, are living in Canada." Upon subjecting the deflated ball to close and prolonged scrutiny, Judge Deschenes, arrived at the following conclusions: Between 1971 and 1986, public statements by outside interveners concerning alleged war criminals residing in Canada have spread increasingly large and grossly exaggerated figures as to their estimated number ... [among them] the figure of 6,000 ventured in 1986 by Mr. Simon Wiesenthal.... (p. 249) The high level reached by some of those figures, together with the wide discrepancy between them, contributed to create both revulsion and interrogation. (p. 245) It was obvious that the list of 217 officers of the Galicia Division furnished by Mr. Wiesenthal was nearly totally useless and put the Canadian government, through the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] and this Commission, to a considerable amount of purposeless work. (p. 258) The Commission has tried repeatedly to obtain the incriminating evidence allegedly in Mr. Wiesenthal's possession, through various oral and written communications with Mr. Wiesenthal himself and with his solicitor, Mr. Martin Mendelsohn of Washington, D.C., but to no avail: telephone calls, letters, even a meeting in New York between Mr. Wiesenthal and Commission Counsel on 1 November 1985 followed up by further direct communications, have succeeded in bringing no positive results, outside of promises. (p. 257) From the conclusions of the Deschenes Commission alone, 60 Minutes might have decided that Simon Wiesenthal is not the kind of person whose pronouncements may be aired without verification. Had any Ukrainian come to 60 Minutes carrying such a load of hatred toward Jews as Simon Wiesenthal carries toward Ukrainians, and displaying - or rather flaunting - such credentials of unreliability, 60 Minutes would never have given him air time, or if it did, it would be only to excoriate him. Instead of exposing Mr. Wiesenthal, 60 Minutes has joined him in portraying a world filled with Nazis, and so has lent support to a witch hunt more hysterical than Joe McCarthy's sniffing out of Communists in the 50's. Consider the following excerpts from cases submitted to the Deschenes commission for investigation as suspected Nazi war criminals, and see if you don't agree. In the Commission report, all of the following cases end with the words, "On the basis of the foregoing, it is recommended that the file on the subject be closed." The selection is not intended to be representative, as the overwhelming number of cases are simply dismissed for lack of evidence - but rather is a sample of cases that upon casual browsing stand out as being particularly comical, pathetic, or alarming depending upon one's mood. The sample, furthermore, is far from exhaustive - a vastly greater number of similarly striking cases abound within the Commission report: CASE NO. 73. This individual was brought to the attention of the Commission by Mr. Sol Littman. Mr. Littman made no particular allegation against the subject, but referred to information obtained from a particular individual as