Media phenomenon: Coke-snorting beats Nazi-hunting to the front pages

MANY have noted it, but it was this column, in this paper, which named it.

The Princess Di/Mother Teresa Phenomenon. It manifests itself most frequently when two people die around about the same time, as did Di and Mother Theresa. It is rooted in unwritten media laws. Laws which hold that younger is more interesting than older, that the worthless, if pretty, outweighs the significant, if not pretty. Laws which decide that ineffective damaged goods trailing clouds of vicious vulnerabilities are more worthy of attention than focused achievers with a coherent ideology.

In the most recent case of the syndrome, one of the participants didn’t even have to die. All she had to do was be filmed snorting cocaine.

The other participant did die. He died three quarters of a century after he tried to kill himself. He died covered in honours and loneliness.

The honours came from his relentless, life-long mission to capture war criminals responsible for the torture and death of six million Jews. Simon Wiesenthal figured it was his duty, a duty for which he had been singled out for survival. A reasonably successful but not inspired architect, Wiesenthal was hauled off to the Nazi death camps because he was a Jew. It was then that his great networking capacity first came into play, as he negotiated with the Polish underground to help his wife, who was also Jewish but hadn’t been spotted as a Jew, to escape the clutches of the Nazis.

As the war drew on, Wiesenthal’s situation worsened. His wife was lost, presumed dead. An escape from Janowska concentration camp ended in recapture and the promise of extermination. Unlike many of the Jews who walked into the “shower rooms” in the extermination camps in the fond belief that they were simply undergoing a sanitation process, Wiesenthal knew full well what was going on and what faced him. He tried to kill himself, not once but thrice. He failed.

The crazed logistics of the Final Solution saw him shifted from camp to camp until he had been imprisoned in eleven of them, ending in Mauthausen, where he was so weak that he could not work. So weak was he that the camp guards figured they could save themselves some of the lethal gas pellets required to kill off camp inmates. They put him in a hut along with a few others expected to die within hours. He didn’t.

When the Americans liberated the camp, the GI’s who walked into it were sickened to see skeletons in striped pyjama uniforms who moved, who were alive, who - against all the odds and against all appearances - believed themselves to be as human as their liberators.

Wiesenthal, one of the skeletons, was given food and clothing. Believing his wife to be dead, he persuaded the American officer in charge of Mauthausen that his experience in so many of the camps would allow him to be helpful to the Allies’ attempt to capture those who had operated those camps. It was a glimpse of what he believed was a fore-ordained future.

But then, his wife turned out not to be dead at all. They were reunited.

She became pregnant. His skills as an architect were in demand in a Europe devastated by war. It was time to forget the horrors of the past and to return to normality. Hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors did just that.

Wiesenthal couldn’t. Each of us has a notion that the random occurrences scattered through every life have a magical significance when they appear in our own life story: events happened in order to show us a new route or release within us a particular insight or strength.

Wiesenthal had an advanced case of that egocentric interpretation of the haphazard. He believed he had been forced to survive in order to fulfill a purpose chosen by God, and neither the wishes of his wife nor the comforts of post-war living, ever deflected him from that purpose.

Reporters who visited his offices in Linz, in Austria, were always surprised by how sparse they were. The effective world centre of Nazi-hunting contained bentwood chairs, cluttered paper files, a secretary and an occasional volunteer. Yet close to a thousand major war criminals were brought to justice by the operations of this run-down office.

In the process, Wiesenthal effectively invented human tracking in modern societies.

Some cultures, such as the Native Americans, had always been able to track an individual across a continent, using footprints, disturbance of plant life, evidence of eating and sleeping. What Wiesenthal proved - in advance of computers - was that the same process was possible and productive in societies riven by displacement and chaos. He stored details in his own head and managed to link them over time so that a profile of an escaped criminal would build up, together with traces of their post-war movements.

LONG before Israeli intelligence swooped on Eichmann, Wiesenthal had worked out that the Nazi apparatchik was a) alive, despite Eichmann’s wife’s claims to the contrary, and b) living in Argentina.

Like any single-issue obsessive, Wiesenthal became a much-praised pain in the ass. Post-war, the Allies lost interest in Nazi-hunting, particularly those countries which had perfectly reconstructed former Nazi scientists helping their space programmes. Post-war, the World Jewish Congress often competed, rather than co-operated with Wiesenthal. His low-tech methods of investigation seemed increasingly quaint when compared with file-sharing across the Internet. Like Ralph Nadar, he became a kind of living shrine: the personification of a noble attempt.

Unlike Ralph Nadar, he never allowed himself to be seduced into any diversification: Wiesenthal’s core business never changed. He was out to find and bring to court men and women who had tortured and murdered Jews.

The narrowness of his focus infuriated others, who pointed out that the Nazis had also tortured and murdered gentiles, particularly gypsies and homosexual men. It didn’t seem to strike his attackers that if they felt strongly enough about the massacre of gypsies and gay people, Wiesenthal had invented a system worth copying for the identification and pursuit of perpetrators, and that nothing was stopping them from setting up parallel systems to capture the Nazis responsible for the atrocities Wiesenthal didn’t deal with. To this day, no group pursues the murderers of the gay men and the gypsies who died in the concentration camps with anything like the effectiveness of Simon Wiesenthal.

Yet, these last few days, Wiesenthal was a mention, whereas Kate Moss was a shout. Kate Moss had lost the Burberry contract. Omigod, how would she manage? The answer to that question is probably to be found in Willie Nelson’s response to a journalist who asked him about the trauma dealt him by a departing wife who was awarded half his earnings in perpetuity.

“Livin’ on half what I earn ain’t bad,” Willie observed.

Livin’ on half what Kate Moss earns ain’t bad, either. Yet she’s front-paged as a human tragedy representing the vulnerability to drugs caused by the trauma of sudden-onset riches. Simon Wiesenthal’s consigned to the obituaries pages.

It’s the quintessential Princess Di/ Mother Theresa Phenomenon: a century of passionate, effective human endeavour losing out to a pretty face personifying a parvenu decade.