Simon Wiesenthal - The Murderers Among Us: The Wiesenthal Memoirs

I got this book last year at a used book sale, and I had been meaning to read it for a while. Most of the book is a collection of stories by Simon Wiesenthal about his hunt for various Nazi war criminals, while the rest is a brief biography of Wiesenthal written by editor Joseph Wechsberg.


One of the things that really stuck out for me in the book was Wiesenthal's emphasis on the idea of shades of grey, and how guilt is not always as clear-cut as it might seem. He illustrates this by telling the story of a number of SS men who found themselves in situations that they could not stomach and who did their best to help the Jews that they were supposed to be killing. On the flip side of that, he cites a number of examples of civilians in occupied countries volunteering to help persecute the Jews when they could have stayed out of it without fear of consequences. His perspective is interesting as well in that he condemns Jewish collaborators alongside the perpetrators. Unlike some Holocaust work I have read, Wiesenthal also rejected the idea of collective guilt on the part of the German population. This is because, as he says, the idea of collective guilt has been used for centuries to persecute Jews. To his mind if it is an invalid charge against the Jewish community then it is an equally invalid claim against the German population. Finally, I definitely appreciated the perspective of the book. It was published in 1967, which means that at that time a lot of the major war criminals (Josef Mengele, Klaus Barbie, and more) were still alive and at large and the fate of others (like Martin Bormann) was still unknown. Reading accounts of the ongoing efforts to find and capture these men added a lot to the interest of the book.

I did have a couple of criticisms of the book. One is the acceptance of the ODESSA network as fact. While Wiesenthal was convinced of its existence, and Nazi aid and smuggling networks certainly did exist, it has never been proven that a single all-encompassing network such as ODESSA was active. That being said, reading about it from Wiesenthal's perspective certainly was interesting. Another criticism was in the structure of the memoir. In it, Wiesenthal quoted enormous sections of dialogue between himself and others, sometimes from conversations over twenty years old. While I'm certain that the conversations took place, I couldn't help but wonder whether or not Wiesenthal would have been able to remember those conversations word-for-word. That relates to my final criticism, which is Wiesenthal's penchant for exaggeration. Over the course of his life he made a number of claims that have been proven to be untrue (such as the number of concentration camps he was in), which call into question whether or not some of the more minor details of the memoir are completely true to life.

None of that, however, takes away from what is otherwise an excellent book. It is a fascinating look into the post-war hunt for war criminals, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.