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After the Second World War, in 1945, hundreds of Holocaust survivors began searching for Nazi fugitives to try to take them to court or make justice with their own hands. The one who became mostly well-known with this initiative was Simon Wiesenthal (1908-2005), whose history is linked to Otto Wächter, a SS commander and former governor of Krakow, Poland, and of Galicia, in northwestern Ukraine.
In his book “The Murderers Among Us”, Wiesenthal said he saw Wächter on August 15, 1942, coordinating the death trains that took Jew citizens of Lemberg, today Ukraine, for extermination. About four thousand elderly people were enlisted and sent to concentration camps. Among them, recalls the Jewish activist, was his mother, who he would never see again.
From rowing champion to the Holocaust: unpublished photos reveal Wächter’s trail
Wächter's son, Horst, denies the information. When he met with Opera Mundi’s journalist in the Hagenberg Castle, Horst presented as evidence a letter from the Nazi leader to his wife, saying he was at a party meeting in Krakow. He also says that Wiesenthal mistook his father for Fritz Katzmann, who was the head of the SS in Lemberg.
Wiesenthal’s career
Horst’s version, besides the document, is supported by Wiesenthal’s history of errors. In trying to capture the famous Auschwitz doctor Joseph Mengele (1911-1979), who came to Brazil after the war, the researcher spread at least two false stories.
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The first stated that Mengele was in Porto São Vicente, in the Alto Paraná area. However, Paraguayan authorities responded that the location never even existed. Before that, in November of 1968, Wiesenthal distributed to the press and to the police alleged pictures of Mengele in the streets of Asunción. The man photographed, however, wasn’t the Auschwitz’s doctor.
[Simon Wiesenthal was known for “hunting” nazis]
Wiesenthal's work, however, was fundamental to many successful arrests of Nazis. He played a significant role in the search for Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962), finally captured in 1960, in Argentina, and taken to Israel by the country's secret service agents, the Mossad.
Eichmann was responsible for the bureaucratic assembling of the Nazi extermination system, and his trial, in 1962, was a milestone in the history of war criminals’ convictions. The case is also known because it was the object of philosopher Hannah Arendt’s reflection, which resulted in the book Eichmann in Jerusalem.
The arrest of another Nazi high-ranking officer, the head of the Treblinka extermination camp, Franz Stangl (1908-1971), is a direct result of Wiesenthal’s researches. Stangl’s son-in-law would have provided Wisentheal, already famous for seeking Nazis, with the location of Stangl, arrested in 1967 in Brazil. At the time, he worked under his real name in Volkswagen, in São Bernardo do Campo (SP), and was extradited to Germany, where he was tried and sentenced to life in prison.
Immediately after Eichmann’s arrest, excited by his prison, he started considering Wächter “the most hated Nazi fugitive”. His whereabouts were unknown until then and the circumstances of his death, dubious.
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The SS commander and governor had escaped to Rome under a false name, in the postwar period. He was calling himself Alfredo Reinhardt and was under the care of the Austrian bishop Alois Hudal, who covered up and facilitated the escape of war criminals to South America – including Mengele and Stangl. He kept Wächter and his archive, known as The Wächter Archive, under his protection on Santa Maria Dell ‘anima monastery, near the Piazza Navona, in Rome.
My father thought he could convince Hitler against the extermination of jews, says Wächter’s son
Opera Mundi had access to some of the Jewish activist correspondence in the Simon Wiesenthal Institute, in Vienna, which narrate the investigation of the SS commander’s and his archives — a box of documents from the Nazi government in Galicia, which contained important information on the death of thousands of Jews in Eastern Europe — whereabouts.
In his research, Wiesenthal was able to gather extensive documentation that came from Berlin, such as the SS commander’s full record and all his steps in the military, but still sought relevant information about the ghettos and death trains in Krakow, Poland, and Lviv, today Ukraine, where the locomotives and wagons that led his mother started their trips.
Governo da Polônia
Otto Wächter (esq.) com Heinrich Himmler (centro), durante a ocupação alemã na Polônia
The correspondence, however, shows that precious information about the whereabouts of Wächter and his archive denied by the elusive bishop Hudal.
Persistence and frustration
During the 1950s and 1960s, when Wiesenthal most struggled to find the archive, Wächter's death in Rome had already been reported by Austrian and Italian newspapers. Even so, suspicious of the circumstances, the Jewish activist asked third parties for help several times, who probed the bishop Alois Hudal about the SS commander’s death and the location of his belongings.
“A colleague of mine, a top Austrian aristocrat, visited bishop Hudal in 1950 and asked about the Wächter Archive. Hudal told him that the files were deposited in the 'Anima', but he could not access it”, Wiesenthal wrote on June 21, 1961, to a city attorney of Waldshut, in southern Germany.
Not giving up, Wiesenthal addressed more letters to German and Italian prosecutors, exposing the need to find the documents. On March 28, 1962, the Jewish activist received a discouraging response from Ludwigsburg attorney’s office, dedicated to investigating Nazism crimes.
“Bishop Hudal said he never saw the Wächter Archive. He saw Wächter once and he had been poisoned, dying in a hospital in Rome. He is the director of the so called German church and gave him the last rites”, said the prosecutor. He continues: “I see no need for further research, after all, information prove that Dr. Wächter is no longer alive.”
Even after the negative, Wiesenthal corresponded with one of his informants, Theodor Faber, in Salzburg. On April 3, 1962, shortly after receiving Ludwigsburg’s attorney’s office letter, the Jewish activist said he still believed that the documents were in the church, relying on the first information he received. However, the archive was never found.
In a letter from the files, Wächter writes about escaping to Brazil
Dear Ladurner!
Here I am back to the city completely exhausted. During the day the temperature reaches considerably warmer degrees. But the nights cool off marvelously. I now understand why all men here wear tank tops underneath their shirts. One can catch a cold easily with the weather changes, which is why to the guide Baadecker, and in Deterling’s experience here is much worse than up North.
The file’s destination
Horst Wächter, son of the SS commander, told Opera Mundi that his mother, “desperate and not knowing what to do with the documents,” destroyed the files and left a permanent gap in the story. Even without access to Galicia’s Nazi administration’s numbers, data and protocols, there are documents in the Hagenberg Castle, compiled by Horst, and under the analysis of German researchers, that can be considered a new incalculable-valued source for the history of Nazism.
Hundreds of photographs and letters between Otto Wächter and his wife, Charlotte Bleckmann, bring new information on the SS commander’s role in Galicia’s administration. The letters date back to the Second World War and go as far as the period when the Nazi was hiding in Rome, under the protection of bishop Hudal. The information draws a detailed profile of him and would be a sight for Simon Wiesenthal’s sore eyes.
The Jewish activist died in 2005 without knowing the whereabouts of the person he considered his greatest enemy. Wiesenthal tried until the 1980s, to seek more information about Wächter, again without success. Horst says that, at that time, “he was not ready” to open the archive. It was only during the 2000s that he dove into the documents. “Over the years, the need to tell the truth increased, as did my family’s resistance,” he said.