Your tireless and devoted efforts in this context have earned you the widespread respect and acknowledgement of which the present Award is a most appropriate expression.
When Waldheim was named secretary-general of the United Nations in 1971, Wiesenthal reported – without thoroughly checking – that there was no evidence of a Nazi past, an opinion that was shared by the American Counterintelligence Corps and Office of Strategic Services after they examined Waldheim’s records immediately after the war.
However, in what was surely not his finest moment, Wiesenthal, embarrassed that he had previously cleared Waldheim of any wrongdoing, allegedly attempted to help Waldheim defend himself. A panel of historians issued a report eighteen months after Waldheim’s election as president in which they concluded that, while there was no evidence that Waldheim had committed atrocities, he must have known they were occurring yet failed to act. Wiesenthal then shifted gears and unsuccessfully demanded that Waldheim resign.
One of the most prominent and detailed attacks against Wiesenthal in the Waldheim affair was by Eli M. Rosenbaum, a very important Nazi hunter who served as director of the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations (OSI), which was primarily responsible for identifying, denaturalizing, and deporting Nazi war criminals. He also later directed the World Jewish Congress investigation that resulted in the 1986 exposure of Waldheim’s Nazi past and, in Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up, he and co-author William Hoffer demonstrated that Waldheim was involved in the commission of Nazi war crimes.
Rosenbaum characterized Wiesenthal’s failure to uncover Waldheim’s past despite access to incriminating evidence as “malpractice” and gross negligence, specifically with respect to evidence from Waldheim’s file in the restricted French-administered archives of the Berlin Documentation Center. These archives included documents establishing that, among other things, Waldheim joined the Nazi Party of the German Student Union on April 1, 1938; joined the Nazis’ “brown-shirt” paramilitary organization in November 1938; joined the Wehrmacht on Aug. 15, 1939; transmitted a 1942 German Army order to shoot captured partisans and their backers; had taken part in the deportation of civilians from Kozara in Bosnia; and served as a lieutenant under the command of Gen. Alexander Loehr, who was later hanged for atrocities.
In his defense, Wiesenthal explained that at the request of Yad Vashem in 1979, he had merely sent a query to the Berlin Document Center, a source of information on Nazis, which responded that it had no information on Waldheim. He argued that he did no more than report that fact to Israeli officials, an action that has been twisted by some critics into constituting a defense of Waldheim. He maintained that before a public accusation could be made against Waldheim – or against any alleged Nazi, for that matter, particularly by a Jewish organization – extreme care had to be taken under the strictest rules of evidence and credibility. Indeed, as we have seen all too often, Holocaust deniers pounce with glee any time a false claim is made with respect to the Shoah.
Many believe Wiesenthal’s role in the Waldheim affair cost him the Nobel Prize. (It was widely believed that on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II – and thus the end of the Holocaust – the Nobel Committee was looking to give its Peace Prize to a Holocaust-related candidate and, indeed, the 1985 prize went to Elie Wiesel.)
Rosenbaum wrote that in addition to his shortcomings in the Waldheim affair, Wiesenthal consistently exaggerated his role in capturing high-profile war criminals like Adolf Eichmann and that he functioned more as a “publicist” than the “Jewish James Bond” many believe him to be. A number of prominent Holocaust scholars, including notably Deborah Lipstadt and Israeli historian Tov Segev, agree that Wiesenthal exaggerated his role and, in fact, often lied about it, and Wiesenthal’s reputation has been tainted.
