72 Friday, October 29, 1976 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS Simon Wiesentha Summarizes Year of Nazi Hunting Editor's Note: Simon Wiesenthal, the Vienna- based Nazi hunter, has is- sued a summary of the work carried on by his Jewish Documentation Center during the past year: The Friedrich Peter Case for two months at the end of 1975 occupied press and politicians in Austria. Based on docu- ments, we found out in the middle of September -1975 that Peter, the chairman of the Austrian Freedom Party, in his biography suppressed an important fact, namely that he had been a member of the 1st SS In- fantry Brigade for 20 months. This brigade, in fact, was a murder brigade, which, on an in- struction of Himmler, was not brought into ac- tion on the front, but was used behind the front lines for the liquidation of the civilian population, as Russians, Jews and Gyp- sies. We learned that Peter, who at this time was SS Unterscharfuhrer, re- ceived a medal — the Iron Cross II — and was selected for an instruc- tion course as SS officer. He later passed that course and joined the SS Division 'Das Reich' which fought in France. At the end of the war he was SS Obersturmfuhrer. When the Documenta- tion Center completed the Peter file, Austria was just in the middle of the election campaign which -took place Oct. 5, 1975. Wiesenthal decided to publish the case only after the elections. As the Socialist Party won the elections with a 50.04 per cent vote, the possibility of a coalition government with the Freedom Party did no longer exist. Therefore Wiesenthal, at a press conference on Oc- tober 9, 1975, revealed the so far unknown member- ship of Peter with the 1st SS Infantry Brigade. This caused a big politi- cal sensation in Austria. Peter had to admit his membership with the Brigade, but denied ever to have shot at civilians. The next day Chancel- lor Bruno Kreisky strongly attacked Wie- senthal and claimed • these disclosures, in truth, were directed against him. The attacks climaxed in personal in- sults and insinuations. Wiesenthal, as a con- sequence, sued Kreisky for libel. In the meantime, the search for documents on the activities of the brigade continued. It was found out that the 5th Company of the 2nd Bat- tallion, of which Peter was a member, took part in numerous massacres of the population. The number of victims of the 1st SS Infantry Brigade lies somewhere at several thousand people. Within the Freedom Party Peter was urged to sue Wiesenthal, which he did. Meanwhile, the con- flict with Kreisky was settled, Peter sued Wie- senthal and the case is pending. Based on the testimony of survivors, we started our search for Viktor Arajs in 1949. Arajs re- mained vanished. Several of his collaborators in the liquidation of Jews in Lat- via, as Hasners, Leipnjeks and Maiskowskis, now live in the United States. The Majdanek trial started at Dusseldorf Dec. 2, 1975. One of the de- fandants is Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan. We traced Hermine B-raun- steiner to New York in 1964. But it took nine years until witnesses were heard, and docu- ments were found, so that she lost her American citizenship and was ex- tradited to Germany. The trial will last at least one year, as more than 200 witnesses will be heard. The Documentation Center has investigated the case of the killings of Lvoy professors for a long time. Some of the exe- cuted professors were known to Wiesenthal who had studied at Lvov. We discovered that the man responsible for the execu- tions was SS Un- tersturmfuhrer Dr. Wal- ter Kutschmann. This man was also responsible for an action against Jews in Brzezany and Podhajce in the summer of 1942, where several thousand Jews were killed. But Kutschmann remained vanished. Since his last home was Berlin, the West Berlin justice authorities were responsible for the case. After a long search, one of our collaborators traced Kutschmann. In 1944, when he was stationed in France and no longer be- lieved in a German vic- tory, he escaped to Spain. From there he emigrated with forged papers on the name Pedro Ricardo Olmo to Argentina in 1946. It is interesting to note that he mixed there in many Jewish circles. He became director for public relations and then sales manager of the Osram-Argentina firm, where he had many Jewish customers. SIMON WIESENTHAL It took us some time to prove that Kutschmann and Olmo were the same man. The Argentinian weekly "Vision" reported the Kutschmann case June 30, 1975, and pub- lished old and new photos of the man. Nevertheless, Kutschmann was brought to the police, which, for 12 hours, waited for a reaction of the German Embassy. Although there existed a German warrant, the German Embassy first asked the Bonn foreign ministry. This office con- tacted the Ministry of Justice, which in turn asked the Berlin justice department. This took several days. Meanwhile, the Argen- tinian police released Kutschmann, but knew where he was and waited for an extradition request of the West German Fed- eral Republic. But the West Germans did not hurry and said there was no extradition agreement existing with. Argentina; therefore they could not get Kutschmann. Thus the case was shelved. Kutschmann still is in Argentina; he now lives in La Plata. We discovered a doc- tor's thesis of a Dr. Josef Muller, written in 1940. This started a search for the man, as the thesis on the development of anti- Semitism was an outspo- ken anti-Semitic pam- phlet. We also discovered that Dr. Muller was SS Obersturmfuhrer and a Gestapo member. A further search revealed that the same man now is the director of a high school at Kelkheim in Germany. His name now is Dr. Josef Muller- Asmus. We wrote a letter to the Education Minister of Hessen, added the thesis and informed him on the situation. No response has been received. An Estonian, who now lives in Sweden, informed us of a military correction camp in Wyrytsa, 100 kilometers south of Leningrad. Prisoners were brought to this camp to be executed. In this con- nection, the name of a German Lieutenant Bubinger was mentioned. We could not clarify the identity of this man. We will continue our search. The Union of Airmen of the Royal Air Forces asked the Documentation Center to investigate the fate of the men responsi- ble for the killing of 50 Al- lied airmen who escaped from the Stalag Luft III March 24, 1944. The air- men were recaptured and executed. The union wanted this information for a memorial book is- sued at the 30th anniver- sary of the end of the War. The , Documentation Center agreed and in- formed the union on the fate of the men responsi- ble for the killings. Several of these people were extradited to the Soviet Union, as they also committed crimes there. The others were sen- tenced by German courts between 1957 and 1968. The Documentation Center received material on the activities of Fritz Merdsche which it passed on to the Zentral Stelle in Cologne. The Cologne Public Prosecutor is in- vestigating against Merdsche, who in absten- tia had been sentenced to death by a French milit- ary court at Lyons. We are searching for Dachau concentration camp inmates, who were there in 1938 and 1939 and know something about the activities of SS Hauptscharfuhrer Ar- nold Metzdorf, born in 1920. Hans Gogl was acquitted Dec. 3, 1975, although eye witnesses reported on the U.S. Pursues Nazi Prosecutions NEW YORK — In- creased attention is being focused on the renewed efforts of the U.S. Immig- ration and Naturaliza- tion Service to deport 80 alleged Nazi war crimi- nals who entered the U.S. ANDRIJA ARTUKOVIC after World War II. The men who may be the best known, with the most serious charges of massive crimes against them, are Romanian Bishop Valerian D. Trifa of Grass Lake, Mich., and Andrij a Artukovic of Surfside, Calif. The U.S. can only pro- secute the alleged crimi- nals for entering the country under false pre- tenses, which in Trifa's case includes hiding his association with the fas- cist Iron Guard and al- legedly leading a pogrom in 1941. Artukovic, a former offi- cial of Nazi-controlled Croatia, has avoided de- portation for more than 20 years on the grounds that he would be politically persecuted if he were re- turned to Yugoslavia. Trifa's case is currently before the Federal Dis- trict Court in Detroit, but has been delayed several times this year because of Trifa's health. VALERIAN TRIFA murder of prisoners and Dutch airmen of the Royal Air Forces who had been arrested and brought to Mauthausen. Following an informa- tion of an inmate, we started an investigation on the conditions in Camp Bolzano. There existed a camp for men and another for women. It op- erated from October 1944 until the end of April 1945 and was under the juris- diction of the Commander of the Security Police in Italy. We discovered a docu- ment which revealed that a special scientific de- partment existed in the Plaszow (Krakov) con- centration camp, where Jewish inmates worked together with German scientists of the "Insti- tute for German Work in the East". The discovered document is a letter of SS Obergruppenfuhrer Koppe addressed to Hein- rich Himmler. We sent copies of this document to cooperating institutes. The readers of our bul- letin know about the Manfred Roeder case. We reported that we sued Roeder for instigation in connection with his neo- Nazi writings. Roeder, in the preface of his booklet "The Lie of Au- schwitz" claimed that Jews were neither killed or gassed in either Au- schwitz or anywhere else. They all had died natural deaths,-he said. The trial was scheduled to take place at Bensheim Aug. 27, 1975. Roeder mobilized his followers who appeared with post- ers with anti-Jewish slo- gans. He requested that two Nazis who live in - Buenos Aires should be heard as witnesses. The judge closed the hearing without Wiesenthal's tes- timony. A later hearing of the Darmstadt lawyers committee decided on a psychiatric examination of Roeder. SS Oberfuehrer Horst Bender was the legal ad- viser to Himmler. He is re- sponsible for a series of crimes. As Bender gave orders to SS courts, we filed a suit against this man at the Stuttgart Pro- secutor in 1974. Because of his position and because of discovered documents Bender came under the suspicion to have taken part in SS crimes. Bender now works as a lawyer in Stuttgart. We have named three witnesses who worked as aides to Him- mler and one of his sec- retaries, who now live in West Germany. We passed informa- tions on Imre Finta, the commander of Szeged concentration camp to the Canadian Embassy in October 1974. We also in- formed the press. The case caused much ex- citement in Canada. Meanwhile we tried to find new witnesses. We also asked several Jewish organizations in Canada to intervene with the Canadian Government to strip him of his citizen- ship (Finta had been sen- tenced in Hungary in ab- sentia after the War) and expel him from Canada. A Canadian journalist vis- ited Hungary to contact witnesses on the spot. He published a report, but without results. We started investiga- tion on the murder o Jewish orphans i; Konigsberg at th Reichskristallnacht 193 two years ago. The r( sults of these investiga- tions are available now. They reveal that the Jewish orphanage was part of the synagogue and the Jewish Community Center. They were burned down in the night of Nov. 9-10, 1938. The question now is whether we can prove that Jewish orphans were killed in this fire. We al- ready possess the names of the responsible people, but we cannot prove the RAOUL WALLENBERG death of the Jewish chil- dren, as we do not have witnesses from Konigs- berg. Witnesses are being sought. Anton Malloth was sen- tenced to death for his crimes in Theresienstadt in 1949. The official papers say he was executed. How- ever, we found Malloth alive, living with his family in Merano, Italy, with a German passport. We collected considera- ble witness material and sent it to the Zentrale Stelle in Ludwigsburg demanding that West Germany should ask the extradition from Italy. We also sent a book writ- ten by Prague Rabbi Dr. Richard Feder to the pro- secutor, which describes the activities of Malloth. As in previous years we tried again in 1975 to ob- tain informations on the fate of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved the lives - f :thousands of Je Hungary. He later ished in the Soviet Union. Wiesenthal took part in the Sakharov hearing in Copenhagen in October where he met several emigrants from the Soviet Union. They were persons who were held in Soviet camps. But he could find no witnesses who met Wallenberg of knew something about him. Weisenthal also tried to interest the American public in the Wallenberg case. He wrote a letter to Henry Jackson to explain the case. The search for in- formation on the fate of Wallenberg will be con- tinued.