Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor who became known worldwide for helping to track and capture Nazi war criminals following World War II, died Sept. 20 at his home in Vienna. He was 96.
Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, told The Associated Press Sept. 20 that Wiesenthal --- who lost 89 members of his and his wife's family in the Holocaust --- would be remembered "as the conscience of the Holocaust. In a way he became the permanent representative of the victims of the Holocaust, determined to bring the perpetrators of the greatest crime to justice."
Born on Dec. 31, 1908 in Buczacz, in what is now the Lvov Oblast section of the Ukraine, Wiesenthal and his wife Cyla were arrested and assigned to the forced labor camp serving the Ostbahn Works, the repair shop for Lvov's Eastern Railroad in 1941, . Though Cyla, whose blond hair allowed her to pass for non-Jew, was spirited out of the camp in the autumn of 1942, Simon endured prison life and was barely alive when U.S. soldiers rescued him at Mauthausen, Austria, on May 5, 1945.
As soon as his health was sufficiently restored, Wiesenthal began gathering and preparing evidence on Nazi atrocities for the War Crimes Section of the United States Army. Late in 1945, he and his wife, each of whom had believed the other to be dead, were reunited; Cyla died in 2003.
The evidence supplied by Wiesenthal was utilized in the American zone war crime trials. When his association with the United States Army ended in 1947, Wiesenthal and 30 volunteers opened the Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Linz, Austria, for the purpose of assembling evidence for future trials. In 1954, the office in Linz was closed and its files were given to the Yad Vashem Archives in Israel, except for one --- the dossier on Adolf Eichmann, who, as chief of the Gestapo's Jewish Department, had supervised the implementation of the "Final Solution."
A biography on the Wiesenthal Center's website says Wiesenthal "never relaxed" in pursuing Eichmann who had disappeared at the time of Germany's defeat in World War II. In 1959 his pursuit paid off when Israel was informed by Germany that Eichmann was in Buenos Aires living under the alias of Ricardo Klement. He was captured there by Israeli agents, brought to Israel for trial, found guilty of mass murder and executed on May 31, 1961.
In October 1966, 16 SS officers, nine of them found by Wiesenthal, went on trial in Stuttgart, West Germany, for participation in the extermination of Jews in Lvov. The group included Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor concentration camps in Poland. After three years of undercover work by Wiesenthal, Stangl was located in Brazil and remanded to West Germany for imprisonment in 1967. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in prison.
Contrary to belief, Wiesenthal did not usually track down the Nazi fugitives himself, but mainly gathered and analyzed information, aided by an international network of friends, colleagues and sympathizers, including German World War II veterans, appalled by the horrors they witnessed. His work earned him numerous worldwide honors including the United Nations League for the Help of Refugees Award and the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal presented to him by President Jimmy Carter in 1980.
A 1964 New York Times Magazine article offered an explanation of why Wiesenthal did what he did. He spent the Sabbath at the home of a former Mauthausen inmate, now a well-to-do jewelry manufacturer, who said, "Simon, if you had gone back to building houses, you'd be a millionaire. Why didn't you?"
"You're a religious man," replied Wiesenthal. "You believe in God and life after death. I also believe. When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, 'What have you done?', there will be many answers. You will say, 'I became a jeweler', Another will say, I have smuggled coffee and American cigarettes', Another will say, 'I built houses', But I will say, 'I didn't forget you'." |