topic by
Turpitz
6/14/2002 (15:18) |
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The Los Angeles Wiesenthal Center pays the Vienna 'Nazi Hunter' $75,000 a year for the use of his name, the director of Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust center said in 1988.
Both the Center and Wiesenthal 'commercialise' and 'trivialise' the Holocaust, the director added.
Wiesenthal 'threw out' the figure of '11 million who were murdered in the Holocaust -- six million Jews and five million non-Jews,' said the Yad Vashem official. When asked why he gave these figures, Wiesenthal replied: 'The gentiles will not pay attention if we do not mention their victims, too.' Wiesenthal 'chose 'five million (gentiles)' because he wanted a 'diplomatic' number, one that told of a large number of gentile victims but in no way was larger than that of Jews ...'
Reckless charges in Walus case
One of Wiesenthal's most spectacular cases involved a Polish-born Chicago man named Frank Walus. In a letter dated December 10, 1974, he charged that Walus 'delivered Jews to the Gestapo' in Czestochowa and Kielce in Poland during the war. This letter prompted a US government investigation and legal action. The Washington Post dealt with the case in a 1981 article entitled 'The Nazi Who Never Was: How a witch hunt by judge, press and investigators branded an innocent man a war criminal.' The lengthy piece, which was copyrighted by the American Bar Association, reported: In January 1977, the United States government accused a Chicagoan named Frank Walus of having committed atrocities in Poland during World War II.
In the following years, this retired factory worker went into debt in order to raise more than $60,000 to defend himself. He sat in a courtroom while eleven Jewish survivors of the Nazi occupation of Poland testified that they saw him murder children, an old woman, a young woman, a hunchback and others ...
Overwhelming evidence shows that Walus was not a Nazi War criminal, that he was not even in Poland during World War II.
... In an atmosphere of hatred and loathing verging on hysteria, the government persecuted an innocent man. In 1974, Simon Wiesenthal, the famous 'Nazi hunter' of Vienna, denounced Walus as 'a Pole in Chicago who performed duties with the Gestapo in the ghettos of Czestochowa and Kielce and handed over a number of Jews to the Gestapo.'
The Chicago weekly newspaper Reader also reported on the case in a detailed 1981 article headlined: 'The Persecution of Frank Walus: To Catch a Nazi: The U.S. government wanted a war criminal. So, with the help of Simon Wiesenthal, the Israeli police, the local press and Judge Julius Hoffman, they invented one.' The article stated:
... It is logical to assume that the 'reports received by Wiesenthal [against Walus] actually were rumours... In other words, Simon Wiesenthal had no evidence against Walus. He denounced him anyway.
While [Judge] Hoffman had the Walus case under advisement, Holocaust aired on television. During the same period, in April 1978, Simon Wiesenthal came to Chicago, where he gave interviews taking credit for the Walus case. 'How Nazi-Hunter Helped Find Walus,' was the Sun-Times headline on a story by Bob Olmstead. Wiesenthal told Sun-Times Abe Peck that he 'has never had a case of mistaken identity.' 'I know there are thousands of people who wait for my mistake,' he said.
It was only after an exhausting legal battle that the man who was vilified and physically attacked as 'the butcher of Kielce' was finally able to prove that he had spent the war years as a peaceful farm labourer in Germany. Frank Walus died in August 1994, a broken and bitterly disappointed man, man.
Wiesenthal's recklessness in the Walus case should have been enough to permanently discredit him as a reliable investigator. But his Teflon reputation survived even this.
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