I seem to have missed his death somehow but RIP. Truly one of the good guys.
From The Times site
Simon Wiesenthal
December 31, 1908 - September 20, 2005
Nazi-hunter who relentlessly pursued war criminals - occasionally falling out with fellow workers in the field
SIMON WIESENTHAL devoted his life to the documentation of the murder of European Jews by the Nazis and to the pursuit of their murderers. In doing so, he became the most famous of “Nazi-hunters”, helping to apprehend Franz Stangl, the commandant of the extermination camp at Treblinka, and Hermine Braunsteiner, of that at Majdanek, along with many others of lesser infamy.
Altogether, through the network of Simon Wiesenthal centres in the US, Europe and Israel, and the Jewish Documentation Centre he established in Vienna, he was credited with bringing more than 1,000 Nazi criminals to justice. He is notably supposed to have supplied the information that was to lead to the apprehension of Adolf Eichmann by Israeli secret services, leading to his trial and execution in Israel in 1962 — though this contention has not gone unchallenged.
His unrelenting pursuit of Nazi fugitives from justice became, over the years, the stuff of thriller novels and films. Frederick Forsyth put Wiesenthal into his novel The Odessa File and Ira Levin into his The Boys from Brazil — both of which translated into huge box-office earners on the screen. A number of other films were also apparently inspired by him.
Wiesenthal did not, however, win the Nobel Peace Prize for which his work might have seemed to make him a natural candidate. And the very dedication with which he pursued his goals exposed him from time to time in his career to painful and bitter controversy.
Not surprisingly, Wiesenthal became a figure of hate for neo-Nazis. Large sums were offered to kill him. Klaus Barbie (and possibly the PLO) considered assassinating him, and in 1982 a bomb destroyed part of his house and shattered his wife’s health. Hatred from such quarters was to be expected. What distressed Wiesenthal more were quarrels with other Jews and Nazi-hunting groups and individuals who were sceptical of his record. Among these were the Mossad chief Isser Harel and the Romanian and German-born Nazi-hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld.
Simon Wiesenthal was born in 1908 at Buczacz, near Lemberg, in the province of Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His upbringing was comparatively comfortable. In the early years of the last century, a rising tide of nationalism and anti-Semitism did not as yet pose a physical threat to the Jews of Austria-Hungary. Lemberg (subsequently and successively Lwow in Poland and Lvov in the Soviet Union, now Lviv in Ukraine) was a city where a Jewish family like the one into which Simon Wiesenthal was born could prosper.
That was decidedly less true of Poland, which gained its independence after the First World War, as he grew up. Wiesenthal was educated at a local gymnasium or grammar school, where he met his future wife, Cyla. He then studied architectural engineering at the Technical University of Prague, returning to Lwow to set up in practice despite the increasingly hostile climate.
In his childhood, his family had already known all about invasion. They had fled when Galicia was conquered by the Russian armies in the opening battles of the First World War, returning with the Austrians in 1917. Then came the Ukrainians, threatening a massacre of Jews, then the Poles, then the Bolsheviks, then the Poles again.
“To survive under such circumstances is a school,” Wiesenthal once said, adding bleakly that: “Nobody could teach us anything new until a couple of liberations later, we got Hitler.”
The arrival of the Germans brought an end to the world Wiesenthal had known, and brought death to millions of Jews, among them more than 80 of his kinsmen. Any Jew who survived the horror needed rare luck. If he later became prominent, there was scope for malicious rumour spread by enemies; and Wiesenthal had many of those.
After he had been rounded up Wiesenthal was sent to a labour camp near Lwow, whose function was to service the railway. Harsh enough by the standards of any other time and place, the camp was, as he recalled, “an island of sanity in a sea of madness”. The two Germans in charge of it were almost humane, and Wiesenthal’s skills as a draughtsman helped to save him.
As the pace of the mass murder of Jews accelerated, Wiesenthal managed to get his wife out of the camp with help from the Polish resistance. He then escaped himself but was recaptured in June 1944. He ascribed his continuing survival to the belief among the SS unit which held him that guarding live prisoners would prevent its members from being sent to the horrors of the Eastern front.
Wiesenthal was then sent on a grim march westwards. By the end of the war he was in the notorious Austrian concentration camp Mauthausen, where he was liberated by the US Army on May 5, 1945, weighing barely seven stone. He was soon recovered enough to help to organise relief work for displaced persons, and as a happy result made contact with his wife, who had ended the war as a forced labourer in Germany.
The Americans also employed him in collecting evidence for war crimes prosecutions, the beginning of his life’s work. But by 1947 American interest in this task was slackening, and Wiesenthal started his own Jewish Historical Documentation Centre in Linz. He closed the Linz centre in 1954, a year after he had become an Austrian citizen, and moved its files to the Yad Vashem archives in Jerusalem.
But he later reopened the centre in Vienna which, as the Jewish Documentation Centre, was to remain his base for the rest of his life. Working out of cramped quarters, with a staff of only three, Wiesenthal painstakingly assembled his dossiers on Nazi war criminals, on the crimes they had committed and on their known or suspected movements since the end of the war.
Gradually he came to be helped by a vast network of contacts who were drawn into his work out of curiosity, a burning desire for justice or motives of revenge. In the case of Stangl he was tipped off by former Nazis with private scores to settle. One of the successes which gave him most pleasure was tracking down the SS officer Joseph Silberbauer, who had arrested the Frank family in Amsterdam in 1944.
Wiesenthal, of course, could only collect the evidence. It was for governments to act on it, and, to his frustration, they often proved dilatory in the extreme.
As Wiesenthal’s fame grew, his name was attached to another large Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles. But his relations with this were not close or, later on, even particularly amicable.
Perhaps the most famous of all the cases in which Wiesenthal was concerned was that of Adolf Eichmann, who had been in charge of executing the infamous “final solution”. He was discovered by agents of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, in Buenos Aires, abducted to Israel where he was put on trial and hanged in 1962. It had always been Wiesenthal’s position that information that he had unearthed and supplied to the Israelis had played a decisive part in this capture.
But in 1991 the former Mossad chief Isser Harel astonished the world by telling the Jerusalem Post that Wiesenthal had “had no role whatsoever” in the capture of Eichmann: “All the information supplied by Wiesenthal, and in anticipaton of the operation, was utterly worthless, and sometimes even misleading or of negative value.”
Harel implied, too, that Wiesenthal had intervened in a bungling way in the case of Josef Mengele, the infamous Auschwitz doctor, when Mossad were close to capturing him. Certainly it appeared that much of Wiesenthal’s information about Mengele was inaccurate, and in 1981 he was still insisting that Mengele was in Paraguay, though “his state of health is not good”. Mengele had in fact died of a stroke while swimming in Brazil two years earlier, though this did not become generally known until 1985.
As the years went by, a crescendo of criticism mounted against Wiesenthal, much of it from other Jewish activists and Nazi hunters. Besides Harel and the Klarsfelds these included the World Jewish Congress.
However, many of his critics were compelled to recant some of the more intemperate things they said about him. Among these, in the mid-1970s, was Bruno Kreisky, the Austria Chancellor, himself of Jewish origin but notably detached from Jewish life and interests. When he suggested that Wiesenthal “had another connection to the Gestapo”, clearly implying that he had been a collaborator, Wiesenthal sued. Kreisky was compelled publicly to back down, withdrawing his charges in parliament. A similar accusation was made by Wim van Leer in a letter to the Jerusalem Post in 1986; he too was forced to apologise.
Wiesenthal’s sharpest clash with the World Jewish Congress was over the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim, as he sought election as Austrian President in 1986. The WJC had been investigating Waldheim’s claims about his war service, and shortly before the presidential elections the Austrian weekly magazine Profil published an article claiming that he had served in the SA-Reitercorps, a paramilitary unit of the Nazi Party before the war.
Waldheim had also claimed that during the war itself he had been wounded and spent the latter part of it in Austria. Evidence suggested that he had instead served in Greece, where the record of the German military occupation for atrocities against the civilian population, though not implicating him in any crime, cast some shadow over his presidency. Though, as a result, Waldheim was declared virtually persona non grata by many nations during his presidential term, Wiesenthal defended him, claiming that the attacks on Waldheim contributed to the re-emergence of anti-Semitic sentiment in Austria. Wiesenthal castigated the WJC for what he described as its methods: “First accuse, then look for documents.”
Almost to the end Wiesenthal remained indefatigable and inexhaustible. In his energetic eighties, he renewed his attack on neo-fascism as it surfaced in many parts of Europe. He denounced mass murder in Bosnia, and claimed one last success when a Balkan war crimes tribunal on the Nuremberg model, something he had called for, was created in The Hague. Only in 2003 did he finally concede that his work of Nazi-hunting was finally complete. “I found the mass murderers I was looking for, and I have outlived them all. If there are a few I didn’t look for, they are now too old and fragile to stand trial. My work is done,” he told the Austrian magazine Format in April that year.
In February 2004 he was appointed honorary KBE for his work in bringing the perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice.
Wiesenthal’s wife died in 2003.
Simon Wiesenthal, Nazi-hunter, was born on December 31, 1908. He died on September 20, 2005, aged 96.
From The Times site
Simon Wiesenthal
December 31, 1908 - September 20, 2005
Nazi-hunter who relentlessly pursued war criminals - occasionally falling out with fellow workers in the field
SIMON WIESENTHAL devoted his life to the documentation of the murder of European Jews by the Nazis and to the pursuit of their murderers. In doing so, he became the most famous of “Nazi-hunters”, helping to apprehend Franz Stangl, the commandant of the extermination camp at Treblinka, and Hermine Braunsteiner, of that at Majdanek, along with many others of lesser infamy.
Altogether, through the network of Simon Wiesenthal centres in the US, Europe and Israel, and the Jewish Documentation Centre he established in Vienna, he was credited with bringing more than 1,000 Nazi criminals to justice. He is notably supposed to have supplied the information that was to lead to the apprehension of Adolf Eichmann by Israeli secret services, leading to his trial and execution in Israel in 1962 — though this contention has not gone unchallenged.
His unrelenting pursuit of Nazi fugitives from justice became, over the years, the stuff of thriller novels and films. Frederick Forsyth put Wiesenthal into his novel The Odessa File and Ira Levin into his The Boys from Brazil — both of which translated into huge box-office earners on the screen. A number of other films were also apparently inspired by him.
Wiesenthal did not, however, win the Nobel Peace Prize for which his work might have seemed to make him a natural candidate. And the very dedication with which he pursued his goals exposed him from time to time in his career to painful and bitter controversy.
Not surprisingly, Wiesenthal became a figure of hate for neo-Nazis. Large sums were offered to kill him. Klaus Barbie (and possibly the PLO) considered assassinating him, and in 1982 a bomb destroyed part of his house and shattered his wife’s health. Hatred from such quarters was to be expected. What distressed Wiesenthal more were quarrels with other Jews and Nazi-hunting groups and individuals who were sceptical of his record. Among these were the Mossad chief Isser Harel and the Romanian and German-born Nazi-hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld.
Simon Wiesenthal was born in 1908 at Buczacz, near Lemberg, in the province of Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His upbringing was comparatively comfortable. In the early years of the last century, a rising tide of nationalism and anti-Semitism did not as yet pose a physical threat to the Jews of Austria-Hungary. Lemberg (subsequently and successively Lwow in Poland and Lvov in the Soviet Union, now Lviv in Ukraine) was a city where a Jewish family like the one into which Simon Wiesenthal was born could prosper.
That was decidedly less true of Poland, which gained its independence after the First World War, as he grew up. Wiesenthal was educated at a local gymnasium or grammar school, where he met his future wife, Cyla. He then studied architectural engineering at the Technical University of Prague, returning to Lwow to set up in practice despite the increasingly hostile climate.
In his childhood, his family had already known all about invasion. They had fled when Galicia was conquered by the Russian armies in the opening battles of the First World War, returning with the Austrians in 1917. Then came the Ukrainians, threatening a massacre of Jews, then the Poles, then the Bolsheviks, then the Poles again.
“To survive under such circumstances is a school,” Wiesenthal once said, adding bleakly that: “Nobody could teach us anything new until a couple of liberations later, we got Hitler.”
The arrival of the Germans brought an end to the world Wiesenthal had known, and brought death to millions of Jews, among them more than 80 of his kinsmen. Any Jew who survived the horror needed rare luck. If he later became prominent, there was scope for malicious rumour spread by enemies; and Wiesenthal had many of those.
After he had been rounded up Wiesenthal was sent to a labour camp near Lwow, whose function was to service the railway. Harsh enough by the standards of any other time and place, the camp was, as he recalled, “an island of sanity in a sea of madness”. The two Germans in charge of it were almost humane, and Wiesenthal’s skills as a draughtsman helped to save him.
As the pace of the mass murder of Jews accelerated, Wiesenthal managed to get his wife out of the camp with help from the Polish resistance. He then escaped himself but was recaptured in June 1944. He ascribed his continuing survival to the belief among the SS unit which held him that guarding live prisoners would prevent its members from being sent to the horrors of the Eastern front.
Wiesenthal was then sent on a grim march westwards. By the end of the war he was in the notorious Austrian concentration camp Mauthausen, where he was liberated by the US Army on May 5, 1945, weighing barely seven stone. He was soon recovered enough to help to organise relief work for displaced persons, and as a happy result made contact with his wife, who had ended the war as a forced labourer in Germany.
The Americans also employed him in collecting evidence for war crimes prosecutions, the beginning of his life’s work. But by 1947 American interest in this task was slackening, and Wiesenthal started his own Jewish Historical Documentation Centre in Linz. He closed the Linz centre in 1954, a year after he had become an Austrian citizen, and moved its files to the Yad Vashem archives in Jerusalem.
But he later reopened the centre in Vienna which, as the Jewish Documentation Centre, was to remain his base for the rest of his life. Working out of cramped quarters, with a staff of only three, Wiesenthal painstakingly assembled his dossiers on Nazi war criminals, on the crimes they had committed and on their known or suspected movements since the end of the war.
Gradually he came to be helped by a vast network of contacts who were drawn into his work out of curiosity, a burning desire for justice or motives of revenge. In the case of Stangl he was tipped off by former Nazis with private scores to settle. One of the successes which gave him most pleasure was tracking down the SS officer Joseph Silberbauer, who had arrested the Frank family in Amsterdam in 1944.
Wiesenthal, of course, could only collect the evidence. It was for governments to act on it, and, to his frustration, they often proved dilatory in the extreme.
As Wiesenthal’s fame grew, his name was attached to another large Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles. But his relations with this were not close or, later on, even particularly amicable.
Perhaps the most famous of all the cases in which Wiesenthal was concerned was that of Adolf Eichmann, who had been in charge of executing the infamous “final solution”. He was discovered by agents of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, in Buenos Aires, abducted to Israel where he was put on trial and hanged in 1962. It had always been Wiesenthal’s position that information that he had unearthed and supplied to the Israelis had played a decisive part in this capture.
But in 1991 the former Mossad chief Isser Harel astonished the world by telling the Jerusalem Post that Wiesenthal had “had no role whatsoever” in the capture of Eichmann: “All the information supplied by Wiesenthal, and in anticipaton of the operation, was utterly worthless, and sometimes even misleading or of negative value.”
Harel implied, too, that Wiesenthal had intervened in a bungling way in the case of Josef Mengele, the infamous Auschwitz doctor, when Mossad were close to capturing him. Certainly it appeared that much of Wiesenthal’s information about Mengele was inaccurate, and in 1981 he was still insisting that Mengele was in Paraguay, though “his state of health is not good”. Mengele had in fact died of a stroke while swimming in Brazil two years earlier, though this did not become generally known until 1985.
As the years went by, a crescendo of criticism mounted against Wiesenthal, much of it from other Jewish activists and Nazi hunters. Besides Harel and the Klarsfelds these included the World Jewish Congress.
However, many of his critics were compelled to recant some of the more intemperate things they said about him. Among these, in the mid-1970s, was Bruno Kreisky, the Austria Chancellor, himself of Jewish origin but notably detached from Jewish life and interests. When he suggested that Wiesenthal “had another connection to the Gestapo”, clearly implying that he had been a collaborator, Wiesenthal sued. Kreisky was compelled publicly to back down, withdrawing his charges in parliament. A similar accusation was made by Wim van Leer in a letter to the Jerusalem Post in 1986; he too was forced to apologise.
Wiesenthal’s sharpest clash with the World Jewish Congress was over the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim, as he sought election as Austrian President in 1986. The WJC had been investigating Waldheim’s claims about his war service, and shortly before the presidential elections the Austrian weekly magazine Profil published an article claiming that he had served in the SA-Reitercorps, a paramilitary unit of the Nazi Party before the war.
Waldheim had also claimed that during the war itself he had been wounded and spent the latter part of it in Austria. Evidence suggested that he had instead served in Greece, where the record of the German military occupation for atrocities against the civilian population, though not implicating him in any crime, cast some shadow over his presidency. Though, as a result, Waldheim was declared virtually persona non grata by many nations during his presidential term, Wiesenthal defended him, claiming that the attacks on Waldheim contributed to the re-emergence of anti-Semitic sentiment in Austria. Wiesenthal castigated the WJC for what he described as its methods: “First accuse, then look for documents.”
Almost to the end Wiesenthal remained indefatigable and inexhaustible. In his energetic eighties, he renewed his attack on neo-fascism as it surfaced in many parts of Europe. He denounced mass murder in Bosnia, and claimed one last success when a Balkan war crimes tribunal on the Nuremberg model, something he had called for, was created in The Hague. Only in 2003 did he finally concede that his work of Nazi-hunting was finally complete. “I found the mass murderers I was looking for, and I have outlived them all. If there are a few I didn’t look for, they are now too old and fragile to stand trial. My work is done,” he told the Austrian magazine Format in April that year.
In February 2004 he was appointed honorary KBE for his work in bringing the perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice.
Wiesenthal’s wife died in 2003.
Simon Wiesenthal, Nazi-hunter, was born on December 31, 1908. He died on September 20, 2005, aged 96.
