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The Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Memoirs
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- GenresHolocaustNonfiction
340 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1967
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May 28, 2012
A stunning primary source document for those interested in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the search for justice against those who were involved in those shameful events against humanity. The book is subtitled The Wiesenthal Memoirs after Simon Wiesenthal, who diligently pursued leads and searched for the first-hand accounts which would stand up to scrutiny in a trial situation.
It was saddening to see how quickly many on both sides wanted to see these events covered up and forgotten, and how many of the major perpetrators lived out their lives in secrecy and comfort.
It was saddening to see how quickly many on both sides wanted to see these events covered up and forgotten, and how many of the major perpetrators lived out their lives in secrecy and comfort.
May 8, 2024
THE PROFOUND AND HAUNTING MEMOIR OF THE FAMED ‘NAZI-HUNTER’
Editor Joseph Wechsberg wrote in his introductory ‘A Profile of Simon Wiesenthal’ that begins this 1967 book, “Assigned to collaborate with Wiesenthal on this book, I phoned him during the summer of 1965 to suggest that we meet and to propose that I compile the histories of a few of the most unusual among his hundreds of unusual cases.” (Pg. 2) Wiesenthal explained during a telephone call, “at least six thousand SS men worked at Auschwitz---as guards, technical personnel in gas chambers and crematoriums, medics, and office workers. Only nine hundred of them are known by name. Naturally, the SS guards didn’t introduce themselves formally to their victims. One third of the known nine hundred were handed over to the Polish authorities. Of the remaining six hundred, about half are known to us: the names and addresses are in my files… Many Nazi criminals have been acquitted, and prosecutors in Germany and Austria are reluctant to ask for an indictment unless they feel they have enough evidence to convince a jury that may well be in sympathy with the Nazi defendant.” (Pg. 5-6) Wiesenthal acknowledged, “At the end of the war, when I was liberated after almost four years in more than a dozen concentration camps, I had little physical strength left, but I did have a strong desire for revenge. I’d lost my own family. My mother had been taken away before my eyes. I thought my wife was dead. I had no one to live for.” (Pg. 6)
Author Simon Wiesenthal notes, “I also didn’t believe … when people [Germans] tried to convince me that that they had known absolutely nothing. Maybe they had not known the whole truth about what went on inside the death camps. But almost all of them had noticed SOMETHING after Hitler invaded Austria on March 11, 1938. They couldn’t help seeing Jewish neighbors taken away by men in black SS uniforms. Their children came home from school and reported that their Jewish classmates had been thrown out. They noticed the swastikas on the broken windows of plundered Jewish stores. They couldn’t ignore the rubble of the synagogues burned down during [Kristallnacht]. People knew what was going on, although many were ashamed and preferred to look the other way so they wouldn’t see too much. Soldiers and officers on leave from the Eastern Front often talked about Jewish massacres there. People knew much more than they admitted, and that is why today so many have an acute sense of guilt.” (Pg. 9)
He said of Adolf Eichmann, “He could have been executed without a trace in Argentina. But the Israelis knew it was necessary to drag him across the ocean and risk antagonizing world opinion and being accused of violating international law. Why? Because Eichmann HAD TO BE TRIED. The trial was more important than the defendant. Eichmann was already a dead man when he entered the courtroom. But the trial would convince millions of people … All of them saw the seedy, bald man in the glass box who had engineered the ‘final solution’---the killing of six million people. They heard the evidence, they read the newspapers, they saw the pictures. And at long last they knew not only that it was true but that it was much worse than anyone could imagine.” (Pg. 71-72)
He recalls, “At the Nuremberg trial I met a German who was there as a witness. I shall call him Hans… he asked Hans, ‘How did the big Nazis get away?’ ‘Didn’t you ever hear of Odessa?’ Hans asked. “…the secret escape organization of the SS underground… Odessa … has a remarkable record of getting SS criminals and Gestapo members out of the country. It has even helped them escape from prison.” (Pg. 77-79)
He reports, “I had studied books about the psychology of crime, about motivation and the early childhood of criminals, but I had made a mistake: I thought of Eichmann as an ordinary criminal, which he was not. In his … early childhood… the problems that usually lead to crime didn’t exist…. Eichmann never showed any aggressive feelings toward the local Jews. He was just another obedient, rather colorless… sergeant.” (Pg. 111)
He explains, “The name of Dr. Josef Mengele was known to all former concentration-camp inmates, even those who had never been in Auschwitz. Mengele had thousands of children and adults on his conscience: in 1944 it was he who determined which of thousands of Hungarians at Auschwitz would live or die. He particularly hated gypsies (perhaps because he looked like one) and ordered thousands killed. I have the testimony of a man who had seen Mengele throw a baby alive into a fire. Another man testified that Mengele once killed a fourteen-year-old girl with a bayonet.” (Pg. 154)
He observes, “the people of Germany and Austria are divided into three groups. There are the guilty ones who have committed crimes against humanity, although sometimes these crimes cannot be proved. There are their accomplices---those who haven’t committed crimes but knew about them and did nothing to prevent them. And there are the innocent people. I believe it is absolutely necessary to separate innocent people from the others. The young generation is innocent. Many of the young people I know are willing to walk the long road toward tolerance and reconciliation. But only if a clean and clear accounting is given will it be possible for the youth of Germany and Austria to meet the young people on the other side of the road---those who remember, from personal experience or from reports of their parents, the horrors of the past. No apology can silence the voices of eleven million dead. The young Germans who pray at the grave of Anne Frank have long understood this. Reconciliation is possible only on the basis of knowledge. They must know what really happened.” (Pg. 172-173)
He explains, “I have no personal motive for going after these jurists… But in a democracy the legal branch of the government is the safeguard of continuity, the citizen’s protection against arbitrary acts by the Executive. A rotten judiciary is the handmaiden of dictatorship. In Germany and Austria, justice was administered in the name of injustice… The Germans had invaded the Netherlands illegally… How could they establish law based on an act of lawlessness? If I break into my neighbor’s house, do I have the right to sentence him to death because he resists my attack? This is exactly what the German jurists in the Netherlands did when they sentenced Dutchmen to death.” (Pg. 250-251)
Wechsberg wrote, “Even people who were with Wiesenthal in the concentration camps are slightly awed by his fervor… Wiesenthal realizes that he seems ‘eerie’ to many people---a somewhat mystical man who has been close to death often and now takes considerable risks to carry out what many people think is a dangerous mission. His heritage of mysticism… helped him survive his long, dark journey through the concentration camps…. He feels that the whole of Jewish history is in essence the story of guilt and punishment… He believed… in the end their torturers would die too and have to account for their crimes before the court of higher justice.” (Pg. 253-254)
He reports, “Wiesenthal is often asked by his young friends, both German and Jewish, how it could happen that millions of people---Jews, Poles, Yugoslavs, others---let themselves be dragged away like cattle to the slaughterhouses, without trying to resist…. Why didn’t the vast majority of victims at least make an attempt to revolt against the tiny majority of executioners?” [Wiesenthal said] “The young people who now ask these questions were born after the war and grew up in freedom… They never really learned what fear meant. The victims of the Nazi regime had been numbed by shock long before they stepped into the gas chambers. The SS succeeded in killing their victims’ instinct of survival. Many of them no longer wanted to live; they were tired of torture… In the concentration camp society that was ruled by the SS, the [victims were] reduced to subanimal status. They registered our gold teeth. They stripped us naked. They branded our wrists. They shaved a strip in the center of a man’s hair… They did many other things until they had squeezed out of men the last reserves of human dignity.” (Pg. 259-260)
He admits, “The whereabouts of Martin Bormann remains the biggest unsolved Nazi mystery. Hitler’s chief deputy has occasioned more rumors and legends, more spilled printer’s ink than any other Nazi leader… No other prominent Nazi has been declared dead and then revived so many times.” (Pg. 319)
He concludes, “Concerning the problem of Nazism as a whole, it must be said that although more than twenty years have passed since all this happened, the foregoings in the Third Reich must still be brought to the attention of the world. The crimes of the Nazis were so terrible and unbelievable that we will be busy with them as long as our generation lives. Day after day we hear about their crimes. But the whole truth will never be known, nor will all the criminals be caught and tried. We lack hundreds of pounds of German documents which were destroyed, and before all we miss the testimony of 11 million murdered people.” (Pg. 342)
This book will be “must reading” for anyone studying the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Editor Joseph Wechsberg wrote in his introductory ‘A Profile of Simon Wiesenthal’ that begins this 1967 book, “Assigned to collaborate with Wiesenthal on this book, I phoned him during the summer of 1965 to suggest that we meet and to propose that I compile the histories of a few of the most unusual among his hundreds of unusual cases.” (Pg. 2) Wiesenthal explained during a telephone call, “at least six thousand SS men worked at Auschwitz---as guards, technical personnel in gas chambers and crematoriums, medics, and office workers. Only nine hundred of them are known by name. Naturally, the SS guards didn’t introduce themselves formally to their victims. One third of the known nine hundred were handed over to the Polish authorities. Of the remaining six hundred, about half are known to us: the names and addresses are in my files… Many Nazi criminals have been acquitted, and prosecutors in Germany and Austria are reluctant to ask for an indictment unless they feel they have enough evidence to convince a jury that may well be in sympathy with the Nazi defendant.” (Pg. 5-6) Wiesenthal acknowledged, “At the end of the war, when I was liberated after almost four years in more than a dozen concentration camps, I had little physical strength left, but I did have a strong desire for revenge. I’d lost my own family. My mother had been taken away before my eyes. I thought my wife was dead. I had no one to live for.” (Pg. 6)
Author Simon Wiesenthal notes, “I also didn’t believe … when people [Germans] tried to convince me that that they had known absolutely nothing. Maybe they had not known the whole truth about what went on inside the death camps. But almost all of them had noticed SOMETHING after Hitler invaded Austria on March 11, 1938. They couldn’t help seeing Jewish neighbors taken away by men in black SS uniforms. Their children came home from school and reported that their Jewish classmates had been thrown out. They noticed the swastikas on the broken windows of plundered Jewish stores. They couldn’t ignore the rubble of the synagogues burned down during [Kristallnacht]. People knew what was going on, although many were ashamed and preferred to look the other way so they wouldn’t see too much. Soldiers and officers on leave from the Eastern Front often talked about Jewish massacres there. People knew much more than they admitted, and that is why today so many have an acute sense of guilt.” (Pg. 9)
He said of Adolf Eichmann, “He could have been executed without a trace in Argentina. But the Israelis knew it was necessary to drag him across the ocean and risk antagonizing world opinion and being accused of violating international law. Why? Because Eichmann HAD TO BE TRIED. The trial was more important than the defendant. Eichmann was already a dead man when he entered the courtroom. But the trial would convince millions of people … All of them saw the seedy, bald man in the glass box who had engineered the ‘final solution’---the killing of six million people. They heard the evidence, they read the newspapers, they saw the pictures. And at long last they knew not only that it was true but that it was much worse than anyone could imagine.” (Pg. 71-72)
He recalls, “At the Nuremberg trial I met a German who was there as a witness. I shall call him Hans… he asked Hans, ‘How did the big Nazis get away?’ ‘Didn’t you ever hear of Odessa?’ Hans asked. “…the secret escape organization of the SS underground… Odessa … has a remarkable record of getting SS criminals and Gestapo members out of the country. It has even helped them escape from prison.” (Pg. 77-79)
He reports, “I had studied books about the psychology of crime, about motivation and the early childhood of criminals, but I had made a mistake: I thought of Eichmann as an ordinary criminal, which he was not. In his … early childhood… the problems that usually lead to crime didn’t exist…. Eichmann never showed any aggressive feelings toward the local Jews. He was just another obedient, rather colorless… sergeant.” (Pg. 111)
He explains, “The name of Dr. Josef Mengele was known to all former concentration-camp inmates, even those who had never been in Auschwitz. Mengele had thousands of children and adults on his conscience: in 1944 it was he who determined which of thousands of Hungarians at Auschwitz would live or die. He particularly hated gypsies (perhaps because he looked like one) and ordered thousands killed. I have the testimony of a man who had seen Mengele throw a baby alive into a fire. Another man testified that Mengele once killed a fourteen-year-old girl with a bayonet.” (Pg. 154)
He observes, “the people of Germany and Austria are divided into three groups. There are the guilty ones who have committed crimes against humanity, although sometimes these crimes cannot be proved. There are their accomplices---those who haven’t committed crimes but knew about them and did nothing to prevent them. And there are the innocent people. I believe it is absolutely necessary to separate innocent people from the others. The young generation is innocent. Many of the young people I know are willing to walk the long road toward tolerance and reconciliation. But only if a clean and clear accounting is given will it be possible for the youth of Germany and Austria to meet the young people on the other side of the road---those who remember, from personal experience or from reports of their parents, the horrors of the past. No apology can silence the voices of eleven million dead. The young Germans who pray at the grave of Anne Frank have long understood this. Reconciliation is possible only on the basis of knowledge. They must know what really happened.” (Pg. 172-173)
He explains, “I have no personal motive for going after these jurists… But in a democracy the legal branch of the government is the safeguard of continuity, the citizen’s protection against arbitrary acts by the Executive. A rotten judiciary is the handmaiden of dictatorship. In Germany and Austria, justice was administered in the name of injustice… The Germans had invaded the Netherlands illegally… How could they establish law based on an act of lawlessness? If I break into my neighbor’s house, do I have the right to sentence him to death because he resists my attack? This is exactly what the German jurists in the Netherlands did when they sentenced Dutchmen to death.” (Pg. 250-251)
Wechsberg wrote, “Even people who were with Wiesenthal in the concentration camps are slightly awed by his fervor… Wiesenthal realizes that he seems ‘eerie’ to many people---a somewhat mystical man who has been close to death often and now takes considerable risks to carry out what many people think is a dangerous mission. His heritage of mysticism… helped him survive his long, dark journey through the concentration camps…. He feels that the whole of Jewish history is in essence the story of guilt and punishment… He believed… in the end their torturers would die too and have to account for their crimes before the court of higher justice.” (Pg. 253-254)
He reports, “Wiesenthal is often asked by his young friends, both German and Jewish, how it could happen that millions of people---Jews, Poles, Yugoslavs, others---let themselves be dragged away like cattle to the slaughterhouses, without trying to resist…. Why didn’t the vast majority of victims at least make an attempt to revolt against the tiny majority of executioners?” [Wiesenthal said] “The young people who now ask these questions were born after the war and grew up in freedom… They never really learned what fear meant. The victims of the Nazi regime had been numbed by shock long before they stepped into the gas chambers. The SS succeeded in killing their victims’ instinct of survival. Many of them no longer wanted to live; they were tired of torture… In the concentration camp society that was ruled by the SS, the [victims were] reduced to subanimal status. They registered our gold teeth. They stripped us naked. They branded our wrists. They shaved a strip in the center of a man’s hair… They did many other things until they had squeezed out of men the last reserves of human dignity.” (Pg. 259-260)
He admits, “The whereabouts of Martin Bormann remains the biggest unsolved Nazi mystery. Hitler’s chief deputy has occasioned more rumors and legends, more spilled printer’s ink than any other Nazi leader… No other prominent Nazi has been declared dead and then revived so many times.” (Pg. 319)
He concludes, “Concerning the problem of Nazism as a whole, it must be said that although more than twenty years have passed since all this happened, the foregoings in the Third Reich must still be brought to the attention of the world. The crimes of the Nazis were so terrible and unbelievable that we will be busy with them as long as our generation lives. Day after day we hear about their crimes. But the whole truth will never be known, nor will all the criminals be caught and tried. We lack hundreds of pounds of German documents which were destroyed, and before all we miss the testimony of 11 million murdered people.” (Pg. 342)
This book will be “must reading” for anyone studying the aftermath of the Holocaust.
March 12, 2015
In light of the continued denial that the Nazi atrocities occurred, it is such a wonderful thing that Simon Wiesenthal worked tirelessly to bring the perpetrators to justice. An effort that has still not been completed. Thanks to his efforts, the world should never forget and be in danger of repeating the horror of the Third Reich.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews