The passing of an honourable man

Nazi-hunter Wiesenthal dies, aged 96
From: The Australian
September 21, 2005

SIMON Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor who devoted his life to hunting down escaped Nazis across the world, has died aged 96.

Wiesenthal died in his sleep at his home in Vienna, according to Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles.
“He’ll be remembered as the conscience of the Holocaust,” Rabbi Hier said.

“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.”

Wiesenthal was an architect before World War II, but the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of 89 members of his family, including his mother, stepfather and stepbrother, changed his life’s mission.

After the war, Wiesenthal dedicated himself to tracking down Nazi war criminals and to being a voice for the 6 million Jews who died in the genocide.

In his 50 years hunting war criminals, Wiesenthal estimated 1100 Nazis were brought to justice. Among the most notorious were Fritz Stangl, the former commandant of the Treblinka death camp in Poland, Franz Murer, known as The Butcher of Wilno, and Adolf Eichmann, the SS official chiefly responsible for implementing Hitler’s Final Solution.
Eichmann was seized by Israeli agents in Argentina and taken to Israel to be tried. He was executed there in 1961.

But Wiesenthal’s contribution to history was far more complex. For years, especially during the Cold War, when many wanted to forget the Holocaust, Wiesenthal was an insistent reminder that the evil acts of Hitler and his supporters had to be remembered and accounted for. He frequently called himself a “deputy for the dead”.

In the early 1980s, he clashed with the World Jewish Congress over the disputed war record of Austrian statesman Kurt Waldheim, when the former UN secretary-general ran for the Austrian presidency.

Waldheim served in the German army during World War II and the WJC said he took part in Nazi atrocities against the Jews.

But Wiesenthal refused to condemn Waldheim as a war criminal, saying his investigation did not uncover any evidence that Waldheim had been in a top Nazi organisation or responsible for mass killings.The position fuelled a WJC campaign to discredit him. But Wiesenthal was unrepentant.

“When history looks back, I want people to know the Nazis weren’t able to kill millions of people and get away with it,” he once said. He warned on many occasions: “If we pardon this genocide, it will be repeated, and not only on Jews. If we don’t learn this lesson, then millions died for nothing.”

His life’s quest began after the Americans liberated the Mauthausen death camp in Austria, where he was a prisoner, in May 1945. After years in concentration camps, Wiesenthal weighed just 45kg when he was freed. He said he quickly realised there was no freedom without justice, and decided to dedicate “a few years” to seeking justice.

“It became decades,” he said.

Wiesenthal was lionised and mythologised in books, films and television. But he made it clear that he was not a “Jewish James Bond” engaging in acts of derring-do. Instead, using a photographic memory and extraordinary tenacity, he investigated elaborate disappearances and brought to book many men and women who had committed unspeakable acts.

“The crusade he was on – hunting down war criminals – symbolically gave a sense of immediacy and contemporaneity to the Holocaust,” historian Peter Novick told the Los Angeles Times.

Novick said Wiesenthal’s efforts to snare villains from New York to Buenos Aires made the Holocaust “a living event, rather than something to be memorialised”.

A character in The Odessa File, Frederick Forsyth’s 1972 novel about hunting down former SS officers, offered an accurate description of Wiesenthal: “He lives in Vienna. Jewish chap, came from Polish Galicia originally. Spent four years in a series of concentration camps, 12 in all.

“Decided to spend the rest of his days tracking down wanted Nazi criminals.

“No rough stuff, mind you. He just keeps collating all the information about them that he can get; then, when he’s convinced he’s found one, usually living under a false name – not always – he informs the police.

“If they don’t act, he calls a press conference and puts them in a spot. Needless to say, he’s not terribly popular with officialdom in Germany or Austria.”

Wiesenthal helped set up the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles with its Holocaust Museum and its extensive educational program.

He rejected the concept of collective guilt and saw war crimes trials as an affirmation of the individual’s responsibility for their actions. As he told US president Jimmy Carter when he was presented with the Congressional Gold Medal in 1980: “I am not a hater, and the word revenge has no meaning for me.”

Wiesenthal’s chief legacy, said Robert J. Lifton, author of The Nazi Doctors, “wasn’t so much his identifying particular Nazi criminals, because that could be exaggerated and oversimplified”.

Rather, Lifton told the Los Angeles Times, “it was his insisting on an attitude of confronting what happened and constantly keeping what happened in mind, and doing so at times when a lot of people would have preferred to forget it”.

He “bullied, cajoled and massaged” officials and ordinary people to confront those horrors, said Hella Pick, author of Simon Wiesenthal: A Life in Search of Justice. But he “never swerved from his conviction that an essential part of the process of coming to terms with the Holocaust is to catch the mass murderers and give them fair trials”.

“He deserves to be counted as one of the handful of individuals who have helped to condition moral and ethical attitudes during a period of great upheaval and self-doubt.”

His wife of 67 years, Cyla, who once said that living with the Nazi hunter was like being “married to thousands, or maybe millions, of dead”, died in November 2003. Wiesenthal is survived by their daughter Paulinka.

His funeral will be held in Israel on Friday.