SMITH'S REPORT
 
 
 
 
 
America's Only Monthly
Revisionist Newsletter
 
 
 

 
- Number 53 -
April 1998

Contents

• CODOH Raises New Questions about the Soviet Past of Simon Wiesenthal
• Interest in Revisionism surging in the Middle East
• CODOHWeb Establishes Turkish Connection
• History 101: Truth revealed at Western Washington University
• and more!

and now... our front page!

CODOH RAISES NEW QUESTIONS ABOUT
THE SOVIET PAST OF
SIMON WIESENTHAL

RESEARCHERS ASSOCIATED with the Committee for Open Debate of the Holocaust have gathered evidence which raises serious questions as to Simon Wiesenthal's past associations with the Soviet Union. Most of this evidence appears to stem from Simon Wiesenthal himself, and it points to Wiesenthal's voluntary cooperation with Soviet authorities on more than one occasion and for considerable periods of time. Furthermore, the evidence--developed from biographies favorable to Wiesenthal and from an official U.S. document--indicates that the famous "Nazi hunter" held positions of trust and authority under the Soviets, at the apogee of Joseph Stalin's rule of terror in the decade 1934-1944.

   Simon Wiesenthal is doubtless our century's most noted advocate of a justice without statutory or territorial limitations, and its most honored champion of remembering past crimes rather than forgiving or forgetting. He boasts of tracking down and exposing more than a thousand alleged Nazi war criminals; the well-financed and publicity-savvy center that bears his name specializes not only in bedeviling aging veterans of the SS, but in working to muzzle and censor revisionist scholars and activists around the globe. Only a few weeks ago, the Simon Wiesenthal Center's representative in Canada, Sol Littman, succeeded in getting local authorities to cancel a revisionist gathering in Oliver, British Columbia. At around the same time, the SWC's "dean," Rabbi Marvin Hier, began a campaign to "bring to justice" Canadian immigrants from Ukraine who fought with Hitler's Germans against Stalin's Soviets over half a century ago.

Soviet Simon?

   For all Wiesenthal's evocation of "memory" and his ruthless delving into others' pasts, he has been hazy about aspects of his own career, and for much of his life very careful about revealing himself to biographers. The lingering suspicion that has most often found expression by his critics, whether Austria's late social democratic premier Bruno Kreisky or opponents on the far right, is that he collaborated with his captors from the Gestapo. It is all the more strange, therefore, that in a sworn statement given to a U.S. interrogator in 1948 and in two recent, friendly biographies by Wiesenthal intimates, there emerges strong indication that Simon Wiesenthal:

• "apprenticed as a building engineer" for a period of twenty-one months in Soviet-ruled Kiev and Odessa in 1934-35;
• was "a Soviet chief engineer" in Lviv and Odessa in 1939-1941;
• and served as a major in a Soviet-controlled partisan force in 1943-44.

   Evidence for the above is supplied by a recent, friendly biography of Simon Wiesenthal, The Wisenthal File (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993), by Alan Levy, with whom the famed Nazi-hunter closely cooperated, as well as by a 1948 interrogation of Wiesenthal first noted by The Journal of Historical Review a decade ago.

Continued on page three