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caught the disease from a Jewish
prostitute before World War I. Though Dr Ronald gave Wiesenthal the name of his source, the young doctor from Graz later settled in the US and has not proved traceable.
    In 1977, there was a medical debate over whether Hitler was sterile or impotent and Dr Ronald wrote from Bordighera, Italy, to the
International Herald Tribune
that
    Hitler was rather unlucky in his sexual affairs. He caught – according to Dr Anwyl-Davies, the eminent London venereologist – syphilis from a Jewish prostitute
     in Vienna in 1910 and had to have anti-syphilitic treatment on and off for the next twenty years and it is not certain that he [was] ever completely cured.
    Dr Ronald, who subsequently died, went on to note that Hitler’s love affair with his Viennese niece, Angela ‘Geli’ Raubal, ended with her unexplained suicide
in 1931 at the age of twenty-three. Wiesenthal suspects she killed herself after her uncle infected her with syphilis.
    Wiesenthal’s work on Christopher Columbus had been more concentrated and productive. ‘In my research on anti-Semitism throughout history,’ he explained,
‘when I concentrated on the Spanish Inquisition, I discovered an amazing coincidence. The two most important events of 1492 – both of which determined the entire future of Spanish
history and much of world history – were the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and the discovery of America. All Jews had to be off Spanish soil by midnight of August second.
    ‘Now Columbus didn’t sail for “India”, as they called all of Asia in those days, until August third, as scheduled. But his sailors had orders to report on the night of
the second. This was not customary: a sailor’s last night in port was sacred to him and was usually spent with his family or girlfriend before he came on board next day. I asked myself
why.
    ‘The tides weren’t right for an earlier departure. And why did Columbus personally supervise the roll-call? So I began to look at the roll he called. One tenth of his crew was Jews;
some of them, I learned later, may have been rabbis. But, even though nine-tenths of the crew wasn’t Jewish, there was no priest aboard. Very unusual at sea!
    ‘Then I am looking into the financing of his voyage. This business of Queen Isabella hocking her jewels to pay for it is all legend. With the help of
Marrano
ministers of hers,
the mission was entirely financed by Jewish money.’ A
Marrano
(from the Spanish word for ‘pig’ or ‘damned’) was a Jew who, in Wiesenthal’s words,
‘outwardlypretended to be a Christian, but secretly remained a Jew’, while a
Converso
was ‘a convert who broke off all relations with Jews and
assimilated’. Both were suspect. It had been the discovery of
Marranos
partaking of a Passover seder in 1478 that led to the creation of the Spanish Inquisition, which used the rack,
the pyre, the wheel, branding-irons and blinding-rods as well as bizarre pure-blood laws (direct ancestors of Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws of racial purity) to get to the very bottom of a
victim’s religious beliefs.
    ‘I began to ask myself,’ Simon went on, ‘why the Jews financed Columbus when all others had refused for years. Who was he and what did the Jews want from him?’
    Cristoforo Colombo (1451–1506), an Italian mariner known to Spaniards as Christóbal Colón, came from a family of ‘Spanish Jews settled in Genoa’, according to his
contemporary biographer, Salvadore de Madariaga, who believes the Colóns converted to Christianity during Spanish persecutions in the fourteenth century. Around 1479, Columbus married a
Portuguese noblewoman of
Marrano
descent. After some preliminary study, Wiesenthal went to Spain to examine materials preserved in the Biblioteca Columbina (Columbus Library) in Seville.
In the archives, Simon found a dozen intimate letters from Columbus to his son, Diego. All of them bore not just the obligatory cross at the top, but also a strange