Fair play FF, I feel we are arguing to agree. As a ken devotee of Alan Furst's work, I feel that a bit of Balkan style obfuscation on the part of Simon Wiesenthal is to be expected. After all, who gives a sh1t whether he was an architectural student at Lwow or a furniture foreman in Krakow or whatever? His real weighing in the balance is not whether he graduated in 1934, 1937 or at all but how many Nazis who would have escaped with token punishment, if not entirely, did he actually cause to be brought to the criminal bar?

At least there can be little argument about his missing toe...ouch.

Originally Posted by FORMER_FYRDMAN

Our posts crossed - I agree entirely with that, only to add that I would have also spent every moment willing my eyes blue and my hair blond whilst singing the Horst Wessel.

Sadly, that might not have done you any good. Several German Jews were blond-haired and blue-eyed and still got exterminated. Quite a few were probably red-heads with green eyes, like my stunning neighbour when I was a teenager.

Still, it did work for some and it apparently helped Cyla Wiesenthal, who was apparently able to hide her Jewish identity from the Nazis because of her blonde hair.

Indeed - her maiden name was Muller. She passed herself off as a Pole. Ironically for a Ukrainian Jewess!

Originally Posted by Cuddles

I hastily add, if I had been in his position faced by daily prospect of liquidation, MY concentration camp would have had some of the best painted signs in the Third Reich, my overlords' boots would have shone like patent leather and the crystal set radio is behind the pillar on the third bunk, left hand side of Hut 111.

Bastard, that's my bunk!

Originally Posted by flamingo

Bastard, that's my bunk!

That's right, a confession may help you. Merciful shooting now I expect.

There's an excerpt in the NYT:

...
When Wiesenthal came to Israel, the Holocaust was still wrapped in silence. Parents never told their children what they had experienced; the children never dared to ask. Holocaust survivors made people flinch with anxiety, embarrassment, and feelings of guilt. They were not easy to live with: How can you share an apartment building with them, work with them, go to the movies or the beach with them? How can you fall in love with them and marry them? How can their children go to school with yours? It’s doubtful that any other society ever faced so difficult or painful an encounter with “the Other,” to use a phrase that came into currency later.

Many of the Israelis who had settled in the country before World War II, or were born there, tended to relate condescendingly to Holocaust victims and survivors, identifying them with the Jews of the Diaspora, whom they despised as the Polar opposite of the “new Hebrews” they were trying to create in the Land of Israel, in the spirit of the Zionist vision. It was customary to blame the victims for not coming to the country beforehand, remaining in Europe instead and waiting to be slaughtered without doing anything to prevent it.

They were despised for their weakness, because most of them had not fought against the Nazis but had gone to their deaths “like lambs to the slaughter.” Many Holocaust survivors found neither a sympathetic ear nor any compassion; often they were not even believed when they related what had happened to them. For their part, the survivors had plenty to say to the Israelis. Why, they would ask, had the Zionist movement not made greater efforts to rescue them from the Nazis? Implicit in this question was a terrible accusation, and the leaders of the movement found it difficult to explain their powerlessness. Besides the question of what they could have done, there was the far more embarrassing one of whether they had taken any interest at all in the plight of European Jews. Many survivors of the Holocaust were shocked to discover after the war that Jews in the United States and in Palestine had lived through the war in relative complacency; reports about the destruction of their brethren concerned them only to the extent that their day- to- day lives were affected.

Wiesenthal once described how, soon after the war, he had seen Jewish newspapers from America and Palestine printed in the summer of 1943, when he was a concentration camp inmate. “And what I read was terribly depressing to me,” he wrote. For the papers described the routines of community life, politics, economic prosperity, culture, entertainment, and family celebrations. Only here and there did Wiesenthal find items about the murder of the Jews in Poland, based usually on BBC reports. In the papers from Palestine, he found big headlines about Arabs who attacked a kibbutz and killed two cows. A report about what was happening in Poland, by a refugee who had made it to Palestine, was relegated to page seven. “I started asking myself, are we still one people, the same people?” he wrote.

In 1946, Wiesenthal attended the first Zionist Congress since the Holocaust, held in Basel, Switzerland, and the thought ran through his mind that the leaders of the Zionist movement deserved to be put on trial, like the heads of the Nazi regime who were tried in Nuremberg. “I took a good look at those who were our ‘leadership’ and had done very little to save Jews,” he related. He was referring to Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben- Gurion, among others. By bringing the ashes of the victims to Jerusalem for burial, Wiesenthal was demanding of the Israelis that they at long last confront the Holocaust, in the same way that in days to come he was to demand it of the other nations of the world.
...
His faith in the liberal system of justice and in America, combined with his communication skills, made him very much a man of the twentieth century. The concept of Holocaust commemoration that he developed was a broad, humanistic one. In contrast to the memorializing of only the Nazis’ Jewish victims fostered in Israel and by the Jewish establishment in the United States, Wiesenthal tended to view the murder of the Jews as a crime against the whole of humanity, and he tied it in with the atrocities committed by the Nazis against other groups, such as incurable invalids, Gypsies, homosexuals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. In his eyes, the Holocaust was not only a Jewish tragedy, but a human one.
...
More than anything else, Wiesenthal deserves to be remembered for his contribution to the culture of memory and the belief that remembering the dead is sanctifying life. Ironically, the more years went by and the more unlikely it became that the surviving Nazi criminals would be brought to justice, the more the Holocaust became a universal synonym for evil, a warning sign for every nation and every person. This happened, to a large extent, thanks to the efforts of Simon Wiesenthal. Nobody did more than he did in this respect. But even at the height of his fame as a “Nazi hunter” and as a humanist authority, he remained a lonely man, haunted throughout his adult life by memories of the horror. He was a tragic hero, always cloaked in the mysteries of his life; it is no easy task to decipher his secrets.

Unfortunately it's not guilty Gentile Holocaust consciousness that is the only legacy of the diligently publicized Nazi hunts.

It certainly wasn't Mossad's intention but the costly construction of that "culture of memory" in the 60s via acts of theater like the Eichmann trial may have provided a useful foreign policy tool, a talisman frequently waved to shame away disapproval of Israel, but it was finally damaging to Israel.

The confident Sabra's who tore Israel from Arab hands in the 40s despised the survivors of the camps as weaklings. They did not think of themselves as likely victims, victims were dusky folk whose olive trees you nicked. Too many of their grand children are irrationally paranoid about a second attempt to wipe the Jewish state from the pages of history and that explains a lot of Israel's drift towards the fearful hard right politics of team Bibi coupled with an increasing tendency to hold the second passport that would have shamed an old Kibutznik.

Was reading a not-at-all-tinfoil-hatty bit of bumf about the late, unlamented Robert Maxwell's abrupt demise in questionable circumstances. The tripe contended that Maxwell had acted in a similar manner for Mossad. The aforementioned waffle had it that some tenet of Judaism dictates that every Jew is duty-bound to render whatever aid possible to the Jewish state, hence Maxwell's work with Mossad.

Anyone know more about this? (the tenet, that is - not that horrible oik Maxwell, good riddance)

I thought the gist of the tall tale was Maxwell ratted out traitorous nuke leaker Vanunu to Mossad and then tried to blackmail them so they bounced the fat Czech overboard. All that rings true here is the impulsive circle of back stabbing.

Intra-faith solidarity is an obligation Jews are no better at keeping than of the other fractious Abrahamic faiths. Having done business with Israelis in particular they're notable only in their gleeful eagerness to stitch up slower moving members of their own confession.

Mossad excels at information operations but it's a lousy intelligence service, the aid given to it by Jews abroad is repeatedly overestimated, in the US their assets are as likely to be WASPs. Beijing is much better at utilizing the huge Han Chinese diaspora for devious purposes, the MSS does not have ham fisted Mossad's weakness for the appearance of cleverness.

Originally Posted by Excognito

Ah, 'tis feelin an Episode of Father Ted coming on, I am.

TED: (frantically) Wha.. Who.. Wha.. ?!? Dougal there were Jewish people there.
DOUGAL: Oh right yeah.
TED: I mean what is.... I mean...
DOUGAL: That's the Wiesenthal family. They're living over there in that whole Ghetto area.
TED: Ghetto area? There's a Ghetto on Craggy Island? Dougal, I wouldn't have done a Hitler impression if I'd known there was going to be a Jew there to see me do a Hitler impression.
DOUGAL: Why not Ted?
TED: Because. Because it's anti-semitic. They'll think I'm a Nazi. I'm going to have to catch up with them and explain I'm not an anti-semite.

COLM: Hello there Father.
TED: Ah, hello Colm. (laughing) Out and about?
COLM: Ah, same as yourself.
TED: Good good.
COLM: I hear you're anti-Mossad now Father.
TED: Wha...What?
COLM: How did you get interested in that type of thing?
TED: Who said I'm anti-Mossad?
COLM: Everyone's sayin' it Father. Should we all be anti-Mossad now? What's the official line the church is takin' on this.
TED: No, no.
COLM: Only the farm takes up most of the day and at night I just like a cup of tea. I mightn't be able to devote meself to the oul' National Socialism.

MRS. CARBERRY COMES IN. SHE IS AN OLD WOMAN WHO HAS JUST BEEN SHOPPING AND HAS HANDFULLS OF BAGS.

MRS. CARBERRY: Good for you Father.
TED: What? Oh, Mrs. Carberry!
MRS. CARBERRY: Good for you Father. Well someone had the guts to stand up to them at last. Comin' over here, takin' our intelligence and our war-criminals and actin' like they own the feckin' place. Well done Father. Good for you. Good for you. I'd like to feckin....

.............


TED: Mrs. Doyle we have guests. Did that stuff arrive?
MRS. DOYLE: Yes and I felt so fantastic I put it all up in less than an hour. And there was this letter.
TED: Letter? (reading letter) "Dear Father Crilly, On the instructions of our recently deceased client Father Seamus Fitzpatrick, here are some items which he specified you should have in the event of his death."

FATHER TED AND THE MOSSAD CROWD ARE NOW STANDING IN THE FRONT ROOM OF THE PAROCHIAL HOUSE. TED LOOKS AROUND HIM ONLY TO FIND THAT THE ROOM IS DECORATED WITH FATHER FITZPATRICK'S NAZI MEMOROBELIA. A BELL RINGS AND TED MOVES MR. WIESENTHAL OUT OF THE WAY OF RONALDO ON HIS BICYCLE.

TED: I can explain everything. Actually no, I can't.

When I visited the Reichstag in Berlin in 1984 when It was still more a museum than the center of politics as it is now there was a display of where Jews were sent against their will to Nazi Germany from,I was well shocked to see Ireland on this list and wondered If those responsible ever got onto Wiesanthal´s list of things to do?

Time to Google!

Originally Posted by midnight

When I visited the Reichstag in Berlin in 1984 when It was still more a museum than the center of politics as it is now there was a display of where Jews were sent against their will to Nazi Germany from,I was well shocked to see Ireland on this list and wondered If those responsible ever got onto Wiesanthal´s list of things to do?

Time to Google!

I'm a little surprised Dev's dark little state would never have allowed any of the Chosen People in.

Googling I don't think there were any cases of actual deportations to the camps but Ireland's Jews were on the extermination list drawn up at Wannsee.

Though the old Priest ridden 28C had a poor record in this area. From Jewish Ireland:

...
Ireland's behaviour towards Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust was, in the later words of Justice Minister Michael McDowell "antipathetic, hostile and unfeeling". Dr Mervyn O'Driscoll of University College Cork reported on the unofficial and official barriers that prevented Jews from finding refuge in Ireland: "Although overt anti-Semitism was untypical, the Irish were indifferent to the Nazi persecution of the Jews and those fleeing the third Reich. A successful applicant in 1938 was typically wealthy, middle-aged or elderly, single from Austria, Roman Catholic and desiring to retire in peace to Ireland and not engage in employment. Only a few Viennese bankers and industrialists met the strict criterion of being Catholic, although possibly of Jewish descent, capable of supporting themselves comfortably without involvement in the economic life of the country." It is estimated that Ireland accepted as few as 30 Jewish refugees before and during World War II.

There was some domestic anti-Jewish sentiment during World War II as well, most notably expressed in a notorious speech to the Dáil in 1943, when independent T.D. Oliver J. Flanagan advocated "routing the Jews out of the country". Two Irish Jews, Esther Steinberg and her infant son, are known to have been killed during the Holocaust, which otherwise did not substantially directly affect the Jews actually living in Ireland. Many of Ireland's Jews joined the part-time army reserve during the war. A newspaper report in the Evening Mail said of a visit to a police station that “I thought that I was in a synagogue!”. The Jewish population of Ireland reached around 5,500 in the late 1940s, but has since declined to around 1,800, mainly through emigration to larger Jewish communities such as those in England and Israel. With the arrival of the Celtic Tiger, and the inward immigration that has brought, the Jewish Communities have also benefited, with new families arriving and settling down. The Jewish School has welcomed the new youngsters, and the newly arrived families find a warm welcome. As the inward immigration continues to rise rapidly, there is a chance once again of Dublin becoming a thriving Jewish city.

I would point out that there was a good deal of reluctance to accept adult Jewish refugees in Britain and the US as well throughout the 30s and 40s. Part of the reason DC was so keen to set up Israel is the huddled masses of Bolshie holocaust survivors weren't much to then highly anti-semitic WASP tastes.

The Freestate was rather more hospitable to Nazis fleeing retribution after the war. RTE had an excellent documentary, The shamrock and the swastika on this.

...
But a two-part documentary which begins on RTE television next week reveals how a surprising number of Nazis were allowed to make a home in Ireland.

The programme’s presenter, Cathal O’Shannon, who met Skorzeny during one of his Irish visits, has delved into the movements of Nazis in and out of Ireland. He estimates that between 100 and 200 Nazis moved here.

O’Shannon (7 is himself a World War II veteran, having served in the RAF in Burma. As a Dublin teenager, he crossed the Border into the North and joined up.

“I came back in 1947, and at that time you held your head low if you had been in the British forces. At that time, there was a very strong anti-English element in Ireland that supported the Germans.

“Many of the leading Nazis who came here were not German. They were collaborators from other countries such as Belgium or Croatia. There was a lot of sympathy for them because many of them were Catholic and anti-communist.”
...

They included Andrija Artukovic "the Himmler of the Balkans" and Otto Skorzeny, a remarkably talented SS Commando who joined Die Spinne and went on to form the Paladin Group. Such men would have been of great interest to Wiesenthal.