Thread: Nazi hunter 'was Mossad agent'

Is it me, or is this story a bit "no shit, Sherlock?"

Nazi hunter 'was Mossad agent'

Thursday September 02 2010

Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal worked for Israel's Mossad spy agency, providing information on war criminals and Germans working in Arab countries, according to a new book.

Israeli historian Tom Segev says in Wiesenthal - The Life and Legends, that the Holocaust survivor began working with Israeli intelligence even before the establishment of Mossad in 1949.

The book says that in 1948 Wiesenthal participated in a failed attempt to capture top Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who was later kidnapped by Israeli agents in Argentina and executed in Israel.

Segev says that in the 1960s Wiesenthal provided Israel information on neo-Nazis and German scientists working for Egypt's rocket programme.

Wiesenthal, who founded the Jewish Documentation Centre in Vienna, reportedly tracked down more than 1,000 Nazi war criminals.

He died in 2005.

Press Association

Nazi hunter 'was Mossad agent' - World News, Breaking News - Independent.ie

Why would anyone be surprised. I would imagine Mossad is where a lot of his Intel came from anyway

This just in: Pope Wears Funny Hat, Bear Shits in Woods.

Worked 'for' or 'worked with'. The latter would be bloody obvious, the former no surprise at all.

Toilet paper journalism at it’s very best....

Readers of the ODESSA file were brain-washed to believe Simon Wiesenthal was some kind of "caped crusader". It now appears that he had feet of clay on a number of levels, so an association with Mossad in the sphere of Nazi-hunting should not seem quite so bizarre surely? Stand fast Mr Wiesenthal's oft publicly stated desire to see Nazis face the weight of the law and justice done and Mossad's "dead or alive ok, oy vey but with alive there's always paperwork already" approach.

Mr Wiesenthal's somewhat contradictory CV has been described by one biographer as an illusion created for a good cause. On balance that seems fair, because mr wiesenthal's motives seem to be about the cause and not so much about giving Mr wiesenthal fame, wealth and kudos.

Hang on, so what I'm getting from this is that a Nazi hunter was working with an Israeli intelligence group.

But surely that would have made hunting Nazis more efficient and productive - but also would have taken a lot of sport out of it. Steve Irwin wasn't part of an anti-Crocodile campaign, where's the fairness?

The nature of Simon Wiesenthal's work made him a private sector intelligence agency and Wiesenthal would have worked with lot's of agencies. We would possibly have raised our eyebrows at some of them but Mossad is no surprise whatsoever. As for being an agent for Mossad, whether he was in a paid or unpaid position, there isn't any difference really. He would have passed onto Mossad anything he discovered or heard so you could undoubtedly say he was an agent and he probably at the very least got some generous expenses from them.

Originally Posted by StrainOfCommand

Hang on, so what I'm getting from this is that a Nazi hunter was working with an Israeli intelligence group.

But surely that would have made hunting Nazis more efficient and productive - but also would have taken a lot of sport out of it. Steve Irwin wasn't part of an anti-Crocodile campaign, where's the fairness?

I don't think Nazi-hunting was seen as a sport, not at least in the sense deer-hunting, fox-hunting or witch-hunting is!

So. Jew (who survived the Holocaust but lost relatives in it) works with other Jews (many of whom probably lost relatives in the Holocaust or survived it themselves) to hunt down the people who planned and perpetrated the Holocaust.

Where is that Outrage Bus when you need it?

Well the link is to an Irish newspaper so I suppose the Paddies might be surprised to learn something incredibly new, I suspect though that the rest of the World including Haiti and the Easter Islands had probably sussed that one out already.

Quite day in Tipperlostbollock?

Originally Posted by Cuddles

Readers of the ODESSA file were brain-washed to believe Simon Wiesenthal was some kind of "caped crusader". It now appears that he had feet of clay on a number of levels, so an association with Mossad in the sphere of Nazi-hunting should not seem quite so bizarre surely? Stand fast Mr Wiesenthal's oft publicly stated desire to see Nazis face the weight of the law and justice done and Mossad's "dead or alive ok, oy vey but with alive there's always paperwork already" approach.

Mr Wiesenthal's somewhat contradictory CV has been described by one biographer as an illusion created for a good cause. On balance that seems fair, because mr wiesenthal's motives seem to be about the cause and not so much about giving Mr wiesenthal fame, wealth and kudos.

So he helped to take out a group of people who should have faced the legal music but increasingly didn't (including some of those involved in the Sagan murders) because the Cold War was on and we wanted to keep the West Germans happy (and we came to a similar arrangement with the Japanese too, for the same reasons and to our eternal shame). Why does that give him feet of clay and is there any evidence that he was responsible for the targeting of innocent parties? If you run death camps, you really can't complain about how rough the other side plays when the tide turns. Eichmann had more of a chance and more due process than he gave his victims.

It wasn't so much his conduct of the investigations I was referring to FF..big boys' games, big boys' rules after all. It is more his continuously reinvented personal history both pre-war, during the war and post war that render him slightly less heroic and make him a bit suspicious.

If I was a Nazi-hunter, I would eat lunch twice a week with Satan, if I thought good G2 would result!

Perhaps, I just never thought of him as a saintly figure -just someone doing a very dirty job. Had he been a concentration camp walt like Binjamin Wilkomirski that would have been a different matter, but how many people in Intelligence or on the fringes of it are ever exactly as they seem?

Originally Posted by FORMER_FYRDMAN

Perhaps, I just never thought of him as a saintly figure -just someone doing a very dirty job. Had he been a concentration camp walt like Binjamin Wilkomirski that would have been a different matter, but how many people in Intelligence or on the fringes of it are ever exactly as they seem?

His time in custody with the Germans seems to be a particular grey area. There is no doubt he was a prisoner. The real issue seems to be what he may or may not have compromised on, in order to survive.