Austrian Jewish survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, born in Buczacz, W Ukraine (formerly Poland). He dedicated his life to tracking down and prosecuting former Nazis who had organized the persecution of the Jews during World War 2. He directed the Jewish Documentation Centre in Linz (194754) and Vienna (from 1961), and founded the Simon Wiesenthal Centres in Los Angeles and Jerusalem. His most famous case was probably his contribution towards the capture of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. He also successfully brought Franz Stangl, commandant at Treblinka, to justice in West Germany in 1967. In 2003 he announced his retirement, at age 94. He received an honorary knighthood in 2004.
Simon Wiesenthal, KBE, (Buczacz, December 31, 1908 – Vienna, September 20, 2005) was an Austrian-Jewish architectural engineer who became a Nazi hunter after surviving the Holocaust. Wiesenthal dedicated most of his life to tracking down, hunting and gathering information on fugitive Nazis so that they could be brought to justice for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, located in Los Angeles, in the United States, is named in honor of him.
Early life and World War II
Wiesenthal was born Szymon Wiesenthal, half an hour before midnight on 31 December 1908 in Buczacz, Ukrainian Galicia (at the time a part of Austria-Hungary, now a part of the Lviv Oblast section of Ukraine) to a Jewish merchant family.
Wiesenthal and his brother went to school in Vienna until the Russian retreat from Galicia in 1917.
In 1934 and 1935, Wiesenthal apprenticed as a building engineer in Soviet Russia, spending a few weeks in Kharkov and Kiev, but most of these two years in the Black Sea port of Odessa under Stalin.
Returning to Galicia at the end of his Russian apprenticeship, Wiesenthal was allowed to enter the Lwów University of Technology for the advanced degree that would allow him to practice architecture in Poland.
Wiesenthal was living in Lwów, (at the time a part of Poland, formerly Lemberg, now called Lviv, the largest city in western Ukraine) when World War II began. Wiesenthal's stepfather and stepbrother were killed by agents of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, as a part of the anti-Polish repressions designed to eliminate all Polish intelligentsia. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941, Wiesenthal and his family were captured.
Wiesenthal survived an early wave of executions during the Holocaust thanks to the intervention of a man named Bodnar, a Ukrainian auxiliary policeman who, on 6 July 1941, saved him from execution by the Nazis then occupying Lwów, as recalled in Wiesenthal's memoir, The Murderers Among Us, written with Joseph Wechsberg. Wiesenthal and his wife were first imprisoned in the Janowska Street camp in the suburbs of the city, where they were forced to work on the local railroad. Around the same time, Cyla Wiesenthal found out her mother had been shot back in Buczacz on her front porch by a Ukrainian policeman as she was being evicted from her home. Cyla and Simon Wiesenthal lost 89 relatives during the Holocaust.
Members of the Home Army, the underground Polish army, helped Cyla Wiesenthal escape from the camp and provided her with false papers in exchange for diagrams of railroad junctions drawn by her husband. Cyla Wiesenthal was able to hide her Jewish identity from the Nazis because of her blonde hair and survived the war as a forced-laborer in the Rhineland.
However, Simon Wiesenthal did not escape imprisonment so quickly. After two failed suicide attempts, Wiesenthal and the 34 remaining Janowska prisoners were sent on a death march from camps in Poland (including Plaszow) and Germany to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.
Nazi hunter
At the time of his liberation, Wiesenthal, who stood at 1.80 m (5'11"), weighed less than 45 kg (99 lb). As soon as his health improved, Wiesenthal began working for the U.S. Army gathering documentation for the Nazi war crimes trials. Wiesenthal continued to gather information in his spare time while working full-time to help those affected by World War II.
During this time, Wiesenthal claimed to be instrumental in the capture and conviction of the main engineer of the "Final Solution," Adolf Eichmann. This was disputed by Isser Harel, the former head of the Mossad, who said that Wiesenthal not only "had no role whatsoever" in the apprehension but in fact had endangered the entire Eichmann operation. Harel's allegations have been disputed at book length, and Wiesenthal's contributions to Harel's published efforts have never been acknowledged. These critics tend to disavow the effectiveness of Wiesenthal's specific contributions, often with disputable claims, while disregarding his pioneering role in seeking investigations and prosecutions at a time when the political climate had turned strongly toward accommodation with former war criminals.
After Eichmann was executed in Israel in 1962, Wiesenthal reopened the Jewish Documentation Center, which now focused on other cases. During this period Wiesenthal also located nine of the 16 Nazis later put on trial in West Germany for the murder of the Jewish population of Lwów and also captured Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor death camps, and Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan, a former Aufseherin (literally, "female supervisor") living on Long Island who had ordered the torture and murder of hundreds of children at Majdanek.
Wiesenthal Center
In 1977, a Holocaust memorial agency was named in his honor as the Simon Wiesenthal Center. In Austria, which took decades to acknowledge its role in Nazi crimes, Wiesenthal was ignored and often insulted. In 1975, after Wiesenthal had released a report on FPÖ party chairman Friedrich Peter's Nazi past, Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, suggested Wiesenthal was part of a "certain mafia" seeking to besmirch Austria and even claimed Wiesenthal collaborated with Nazis and Gestapo to survive, a charge that Wiesenthal labeled ridiculous.
Over the years Wiesenthal received many death threats.
Even after turning 90, Wiesenthal spent time at his small office in the Jewish Documentation Center in central Vienna. According to Simon Wiesenthal, the last major Austrian war criminal still alive is Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann's right-hand man, who is believed to be hiding in Syria under the protection of the Bashar Al-Asad regime. However, Wiesenthal was also believed to be working on the case of Aribert Heim, one of the most notorious and wanted Nazi concentration camp doctors, prior to his retirement.
Wiesenthal spent his last years in Vienna, where his wife, Cyla, died of natural causes on 10 November 2003, at the age of 95.
In a statement on Wiesenthal's death, Council of Europe chairman Terry Davis said, "Without Simon Wiesenthal's relentless effort to find Nazi criminals and bring them to justice, and to fight anti-Semitism and prejudice, Europe would never have succeeded in healing its wounds and reconciling itself...
Criticism
Despite Wiesenthal's achievements in locating many former Nazis, aspects of his work and life were controversial.
According to many historians who specialize in The Holocaust, such as Peter Novick and Yehuda Bauer, as well as the Nobel Prize-winning writer Elie Wiesel, Wiesenthal's repeated claim that five million gentiles were murdered in The Holocaust is a fabrication.
Harel claimed that he wrote the manuscript out of frustration at the amount of credit Wiesenthal was claiming for the capture of Eichmann. Harel declined to publish his manuscript, saying that "Nazis and antisemites will be only too happy to read this about Nazi fighter Wiesenthal."
In a subsequent opinion piece, Haim Mass argued that many of Harel's specific allegations against Wiesenthal could be disproved and that Wiesenthal had initiated the hunt for Eichmann by providing the first photograph of the SS Colonel. Wiesenthal himself questioned Harel's motivation for not publishing his manuscript, asking "if he is afraid that 'Nazis and antisemites will be only too happy to read about this Nazi-fighter Wiesenthal,' why does he not hesitate to indulge in discrediting me unreservedly in the media?
Fellow Nazi hunter Tuviah Friedman, who has known Wiesenthal since 1946, accused him of numerous self-aggrandizing lies and of making himself rich from the Eichmann affair.
OSI head Eli Rosenbaum wrote in his study of the Kurt Waldheim affair, Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up (ISBN 0-312-08219-3):
"In sum, Wiesenthal's roles in the biggest Nazi cases of all — Mengele, Martin Bormann, and in all likelihood, Eichmann as well — were studies in ineptitude, exaggeration, and self-glorification."Rosenbaum described Wiesenthal as "a congenital liar" to Wiesenthal's biographer, Hella Pick.
Rosenbaum's predecessor at OSI, Neal Sher, in response to Wiesenthal's demand that the OSI investigate suspected war criminals living in the United States, wrote that:
"few of your allegations have resulted in active ongoing investigations[;] the bottom line is that ... Kuropas decried Wiesenthal's statements about the Ukrainians: "The Bolshevik troops were bad, but the Ukrainian cavalrybands were worse" and "The native Ukrainian population cooperated actively with the Gestapo and the SS", because allegedly he offered little substantiation or documentation for them .Simon Wiesenthal has also been criticized in relation with his handling of the Frank Walus case. The knighthood also recognized the work of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Presidential Medal of Freedom — U.S. Congressional Gold Medal of Honor — U.S. Légion d'honneur — France Dutch Freedom Medal Luxembourg Freedom Medal Austrian Cross of Honor of the Sciences and Arts Decorations from Austrian and French resistance groups Polonia Restituta - Poland Israel Liberata- Israel
Dramatic portrayals
Ben Kingsley portrayed Wiesenthal in the Home Box Office film Murderers Among Us: the Simon Wiesenthal Story.
Documentary
A feature-length documentary of Simon Wiesenthal's life is currently in the works. It is being produced by Moriah Films, the Academy Award-winning media subdivision of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
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