Books: Intercontinental Op

THE MURDERERS AMONG US: THE WIESENTHAL MEMOIRS edited by Joseph Wechsberg. 340 pages. McGraw-Hill. $6.95.

Most survivors of Hitler's death camps want nothing more than nepenthe: to forget the horror of the war years and leave revenge to God or Israeli agents. Not so Vienna-based Simon Wiesenthal, 59, the dogged detective of genocide who, since he walked out of the Mauthausen concentration camp in May 1945, has run to earth 800 Nazi war criminals, including Adolf Eichmann and, most recently, the wartime commander of the Treblinka and Sobibor death camps, Franz Stangl (TIME, March 10). In this calmly chilling memoir, Wiesenthal contrasts monstrous murderers with gumshoe detective techniques in a manner as spare and striking as anything Dashiell Hammett wrote. Where Hammett's world was big-city crime, Wiesenthal's is the broad scope of human injustice and horror: he becomes a kind of Intercontinental Op.

His first target was Franz Murer, "the Butcher of Wilno," under whose aegis the Jewish population of the Lithuanian town was reduced from 80,000 to 250. Wiesenthal found him quite by accident in 1947; the ex-SS commissar was living on his prewar farm near Linz. Alerted by Jewish ex-partisans that a big Nazi was in the neighborhood, Wiesenthal checked with the local gendarmery. "The post commander was an old man with a drooping white mustache, probably a relic from the good old Habsburg days. We asked about the big farm on the hill. 'Belongs to Murer. He was in Poland and Russia during the war. He's very popular around the village.' " Wiesenthal managed to get Murer shipped back to Russia for a seven-year prison term.

Complicated Clients. The pursuit of other targets was always complicated by the expertness with which ODESSA—the Nazi escape apparatus set up and financed by the SS—slipped fugitives out of Europe after the war. One who did not go far was Erich Rajakowitsch, who in 1942 headed Eichmann's Section IV B4 ("death transports") in Holland: Wiesenthal finally found "Raja" in Italy, where he was heading a firm that traded profitably in oil pipelines and engines with the East bloc. Sentenced in Vienna to 2½ years, Raja was quietly released six months later.

Wiesenthal himself is not upset by the short prison terms that his "clients" receive. He is more concerned that the world—particularly the postwar generation of Jews and Germans who find Hitler's genocide hard to believe—realize that there were, and still are, SS killers at large. He believes that young Germans, wary of the sentimentality in the Anne Frank story, were unconvinced that the entire tragedy really happened until he located Karl Silberbauer, the SS sergeant who arrested Anne Frank, and identified him as an inspector in the Viennese police department. Silberbauer readily admitted his role. Asked if he had read the diary, he told a reporter: "Bought the little book last week to see if I'm in it. But I'm not."