Holocaust Survivor and Nazi Hunter,
Simon Wiesenthal, passed away on this date, September 20, 2005. He was a man
who inspired us to fight against evil. We will post information about him from
Wikipedia and other links.
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Dr. Simon Wiesenthal at the Centre for
Information and Documentation Israel (CIDI) symposium "Zionism as a
response", at the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam, October 18, 1982
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Born
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31
December 1908
Buczacz, Kingdom of Galicia, Austria-Hungary (now in Ukraine) |
Died
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20
September 2005 (aged 96)
Vienna, Austria |
Cause of
death
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Natural
causes
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Resting
place
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Herzliya,
Israel
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Nationality
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Austrian
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Occupation
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Nazi
hunter, writer
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Known for
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Religion
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Judaism
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Spouse(s)
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Cyla
Müller
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Children
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Paulinka
Kreisberg
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Parents
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Asher
and Rosa Wiesenthal
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Website
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Simon Wiesenthal, KBE (31 December
1908 – 20 September 2005) was an Austrian writer and Nazi hunter. He was a
Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor who became famous after World War II for his
work as a Nazi hunter.
He studied architecture and was living
in Lwów at the
outbreak of World War II. After being forced to work as a slave labourer in Nazi concentration camps such as Janowska, Plaszow, and Mauthausen during the war,
Wiesenthal dedicated most of his life to tracking down and gathering
information on fugitive Nazi war criminals so that they could be brought to trial. In
1947 he co-founded the Jewish Historical Documentation
Center in Linz,
Austria, where he and others gathered information for future war crime trials
and aided refugees in their search for lost relatives. He opened the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna in 1961 and
continued to try to locate missing Nazi war criminals. He played a small role
in locating Adolf Eichmann, who was captured in Buenos Aires in 1960, and
worked closely with the Austrian justice ministry to prepare a dossier on Franz
Stangl, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1971.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Wiesenthal was
involved in two high-profile events involving Austrian politicians. Shortly
after Bruno Kreisky was inaugurated as Austrian chancellor in April 1970,
Wiesenthal pointed out to the press that four of his new cabinet appointees had
been members of the Nazi Party. Kreisky, angry, called Wiesenthal a
"Jewish fascist" and likened his organisation to the Mafia. He later
accused him of collaborating with the Nazis. Wiesenthal successfully sued for
libel; the suit was settled in 1989. In 1986, Wiesenthal was involved in the
case of Kurt Waldheim, whose Nazi past was revealed in the
lead-up to the 1986 Austrian presidential elections. Wiesenthal, embarrassed
that he had previously cleared Waldheim of any wrongdoing, suffered much
negative publicity as a result of this event.
With a reputation as a storyteller,
Wiesenthal was the author of several memoirs that contain tales that are only
loosely based on actual events. In particular, he exaggerated his role in the
capture of Eichmann in 1960. Wiesenthal died in his sleep at age 96 in Vienna
on 20 September 2005, and was buried in the city of Herzliya in Israel. He was
survived by his daughter, Paulinka Kreisberg, and three grandchildren. The Simon
Wiesenthal Center, located in Los Angeles, is named in his honour.
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As a young man in Buczacz, Poland, Simon
Wiesenthal (centre) led a group of Boy Scouts, only one of whom survived the
war. Pic: Simon Wiesenthal Center.
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/4263198.stm]
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Early life
Wiesenthal was born at 11:30 pm on 31
December 1908, in Buczacz, Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria (then part of
Austria-Hungary, now Buchach, Ternopil Oblast, in Ukraine). His father, Asher
Wiesenthal, was a wholesaler who had emigrated from the Russian Empire in 1905
to escape the frequent pogroms, violent campaigns against Jews. A reservist in
the Austro-Hungarian Army, Asher was called to active duty in 1914 at the start
of World War I. He died in combat on the Eastern Front in 1915. The remainder
of the family—Simon, his younger brother Hillel, and his mother Rosa—fled to
Vienna as the Russian army took control of Galicia. The two boys attended a
German-language Jewish school. The family returned to Buczacz in 1917 after the
Russians retreated. The area changed hands several more times before the war
ended in November 1918.
Wiesenthal and his brother attended
high school at the Humanistic Gymnasium in Buczacz, where classes were taught
in Polish. There Simon met his future wife, Cyla Müller, whom he would marry in
1936. Hillel fell and broke his back in 1923 and died the following year. Rosa
remarried in 1926 and moved to Dolyna with her new husband, Isack Halperin, who
owned a tile factory there. Wiesenthal remained in Buczacz, living with the
Müller family, until he graduated from high school—on his second attempt—in
1928.
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He married his wife Cyla in 1936, and lived
together in Vienna until her death in 2003. Pic: Simon Wiesenthal Center.
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/4263198.stm]
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With an interest in art and drawing,
Wiesenthal chose to study architecture. His first choice was to attend the Lwów
Polytechnic (Polish: Politechnika Lwowska), but he was turned away because the
school's Jewish quota had already been filled. He instead enrolled at the Czech
Technical University in Prague, where he studied from 1928 until 1932. He was
apprenticed as a building engineer through 1934 and 1935, spending most of that
period in Odessa. He married Cyla in 1936 when he returned to Galicia.
Sources give differing reports of what
happened next. Wiesenthal's autobiographies contradict each other on many
points; he also over-dramatised and mythologised events. One version has
Wiesenthal opening an architectural office and finally being admitted to the
Lwów Polytechnic for an advanced degree. He designed a tuberculosis sanitorium,
along with some residential buildings during the course of his studies and was
active in a student Zionist organisation. He wrote for the Omnibus, a
satirical student newspaper, and graduated in 1939. Author Guy Walters states
that Wiesenthal's earliest autobiography does not mention studies at Lwów.
Walters quotes a curriculum vitae Wiesenthal prepared after World War II
as stating he worked as a supervisor at a factory until 1939 and then worked as
a mechanic in a different factory until the Nazis invaded in 1941.
Wiesenthal's 1961 book Ich Jagte Eichmann ("I Hunted
Eichmann") states that he worked in Odessa as an engineer from 1940 to
1941. Walters says that there is no record of Wiesenthal attending the
university at Lwów, and that he does not appear in the Katalog Architektów i
Budowniczych (Catalogue of Architects and Builders) for the appropriate
period.
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Lwow
Ghetto, set up in late 1941 by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland, with 106,000
residents. By May 1942 (pictured), only 84,000 Jewish inmates remained
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World War
II
In Europe, World War II began in
September 1939 with the Nazi invasion of Poland. As a result of the
partitioning of Poland under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and
the Soviet Union, the city of Lwów (now Lviv) was annexed by the Soviets and
renamed Lvov. Wiesenthal's stepfather, still living in Dolina, was arrested as
a capitalist; he later died in a Soviet prison. Wiesenthal's mother came to
live with Wiesenthal and Cyla in Lvov. He bribed an official to prevent his own
deportation under Clause 11, a rule that prevented all Jewish professionals and
intellectuals from living within 100 kilometres (62 mi) of the city, which
was under Soviet occupation until the Germans invaded in June 1941.
By mid-July
Wiesenthal and other Jewish residents had to register to do forced labour.
Within six months, the Nazis had constructed a ghetto
using Jewish forced labour. All Jews had to give up their homes and move there,
a process which took several months. Several thousand Jews were murdered in
Lvov by Ukrainian nationals and German Einsatzgruppen that
June and July. In his autobiographies, Wiesenthal tells how he was arrested on
6 July but saved from execution by his former foreman, a man named Bodnar, who
was now a member of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police.
There are several versions of the story, which may be apocryphal.
In late
1941, Wiesenthal and his wife were transferred to Janowska concentration camp
and forced to work at the Eastern Railway Repair Works. He painted swastikas
and other inscriptions on captured Soviet railway engines, and Cyla was put to
work polishing the brass and nickel. In exchange for providing details about
the railways, Wiesenthal obtained false identity papers for his wife from a
member of the Armia Krajowa, a Polish underground organisation. She travelled
to Warsaw, where she was put to work in a German radio factory. She spent time
in two different labour camps as well. Conditions were harsh and her health was
permanently damaged, but she survived the war. The couple was reunited in 1945,
and their daughter Paulinka was born the following year.
Every few
weeks, the Nazis staged a roundup in the Lvov ghetto of people unable to work.
These roundups typically took place while the able-bodied were absent doing
forced labour. In one such deportation, Wiesenthal's mother and other elderly
Jewish women were transported by freight train to Belzec extermination camp and
killed in August 1942. Around the same time, a Ukrainian policeman shot Cyla's
mother to death on the front porch of her home in Buczacz while she was being
evicted. Cyla and Simon Wiesenthal lost 89 relatives during the Holocaust.
Forced
labourers for the Eastern Railway were eventually kept in a separate closed
camp, where conditions were a little better than at the main camp at Janowska.
Wiesenthal prepared architectural drawings for Adolf Kohlrautz, the senior
inspector, who submitted them under his own name. To obtain contracts,
construction companies paid bribes to Kohlrautz, who shared some of the money
with Wiesenthal. He was able to pass along further information about the
railroads to the underground and occasionally left the compound to obtain
supplies, even clandestinely obtaining weapons for the Armia Krajowa and two
pistols for himself, which he took along when he escaped in autumn 1943.
According
to Wiesenthal, on 20 April 1943, Second Lieutenant Gustav Wilhaus, second in
command at the Janowska camp, decided to shoot 54 Jewish intellectuals in
celebration of Hitler's 54th birthday. Unable to find enough such people still
alive at Janowska, Wilhaus ordered a roundup of prisoners from the satellite
camps. Wiesenthal and two other inmates were taken from the Eastern Railway
camp to the execution site, a trench 6 feet (1.8 m) deep and 1,500 feet
(460 m) long at a nearby sandpit. The men were stripped and led through
"the Hose", a six- or seven-foot wide barbed wire corridor to the
execution ground. The victims were shot and their bodies allowed to fall into
the pit. Wiesenthal, waiting to be shot, heard someone called out his name. He
was returned alive to the camp; Kohlrautz had convinced his superiors that
Wiesenthal was the best man available to paint a giant poster in honour of
Hitler's birthday.
On 2
October 1943, according to Wiesenthal, Kohlrautz warned him that the camp and
its prisoners were about to be liquidated. Kohlrautz gave Wiesenthal and fellow
prisoner Arthur Scheiman passes to go to town, accompanied by a Ukrainian
guard, to buy stationery. The two men escaped out the back of the shop while
their guard waited at the front counter.
Wiesenthal
did not mention either of these events—or Kohlrautz's part in them—when
testifying to American investigators in May 1945, or in an affidavit he made in
August 1954 about his wartime persecutions, and researcher Guy Walters
questions their authenticity. Wiesenthal variously reported that Kohlrautz was
killed on the Soviet Front in 1944 or in the Battle of
Berlin on 19 April 1945.
After
several days in hiding, Scheiman rejoined his wife, and Wiesenthal was taken by
members of the underground to the nearby village of Kulparkow, where he
remained until the end of 1943. Soon afterwards the Janowska camp was
liquidated; this made it unsafe to hide in the nearby countryside, so
Wiesenthal returned to Lvov, where he spent three days hiding in a closet at
the Scheiman's apartment. He next moved to the apartment of Paulina Busch, for
whom he had previously forged an identity card. He was arrested there, hiding
under the floorboards, by two Polish detectives on 13 June 1944 and taken back
to the remains of the camp at Janowska. Wiesenthal tried but failed to commit
suicide to avoid being interrogated about his connections with the underground.
In the end there was no time for interrogations, as Soviet forces were
advancing into the area. SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer
Friedrich Warzok, the new camp commandant, rounded up the remaining prisoners
and transported them to Przemyśl, 135 miles (217 km) west of Lvov, where he put
them to work building fortifications. By September Warzok and his men were
reassigned to the front, and Wiesenthal and the other surviving captives were
sent to the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp.
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After most of his family died in Nazi death
camps, a barely-alive Wiesenthal was liberated from the Mauthausen camp in
Austria in 1945. Pic: Simon Wiesenthal Center.
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/4263198.stm]
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By October
the inmates were evacuated to Gross-Rosen concentration camp,
where inmates were suffering from severe overcrowding and a shortage of food.
Wiesenthal's big toe on his right foot had to be amputated after a rock fell on
it while he was working in the quarry. He was still ill in January when the
advancing Soviets forced yet another evacuation, this time on foot, to Chemnitz.
Using a broom handle for a walking stick, he was one of the few who survived
the march. From Chemnitz the prisoners were taken in open freight cars to Buchenwald,
and a few days later by truck to Mauthausen concentration camp, arriving in
mid-February 1945. Over half the prisoners did not survive the journey.
Wiesenthal was placed in a death block for the mortally ill, where he survived
on 200 calories a day until the camp was liberated by the Americans on 5 May
1945. Wiesenthal weighed 90 pounds (41 kg) when he was liberated.
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Liberated prisoners in the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz,
Austria, give rousing welcome to Cavalrymen of the 11th Armored Division. The
banner across the wall was made by Spanish Loyalist prisoners. (6 May 1945)
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After the war Wiesenthal dedicated himself to
tracking down former Nazis.
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/4263198.stm]
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Simon
Wiesenthal on discovering witness
[PHOTO
SOURCE: http://izquotes.com/quote/197809]
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Nazi
hunter
Within three weeks of the liberation
of Mauthausen, Wiesenthal had prepared a list of around a hundred names of
suspected Nazi war criminals—mostly guards, camp commandants, and members of
the Gestapo—and
presented it to a War Crimes office of the American Counterintelligence Corps
at Mauthausen. He worked as an interpreter, accompanying officers who were
carrying out arrests, though he was still very frail. When Austria was
partitioned in July 1945, Mauthausen fell into the Soviet-occupied zone, so the
American War Crimes Office was moved to Linz. Wiesenthal went with them, and
was housed in a displaced persons camp. He served as vice-chairman of the
area's Jewish Central Committee, an organisation that attempted to arrange
basic care for Jewish refugees and tried to help people gather information
about their missing family members.
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Simon
Wiesenthal on survival.
[PHOTO
SOURCE: http://izquotes.com/quote/197816]
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Wiesenthal worked for the American Office of Strategic Services for a
year, and continued to collect information on both victims and perpetrators of
the Holocaust. He assisted the Berihah, an underground organisation that smuggled Jewish
survivors into the British Mandate for Palestine.
Wiesenthal helped arrange for forged papers, food supplies, transportation, and
so on. In February 1947, he and 30 other volunteers founded the Jewish Historical Documentation
Center in Linz to gather information for future war crimes trials. They
collected 3,289 depositions from concentration camp survivors still living in
Europe. However, as the US and the Soviet Union lost interest in conducting
further trials, a similar group headed by Tuviah
Friedman in Vienna closed its office in 1952, and Wiesenthal's closed in
1954. Almost all of the documentation collected at both centres was forwarded
to the Yad
Vashem archives in Israel. Wiesenthal, employed full-time by two Jewish
welfare agencies, continued his work with refugees. As it became clear that the
former Allies were no longer interested in pursuing the work of bringing Nazi
war criminals to justice, Wiesenthal persisted, believing the survivors were
obligated to take on the task. His work became a way to memorialise and
remember all the people that had been lost. He told biographer Alan Levy in
1974:
When the Germans first came to my city in Galicia, half the population was Jewish: one hundred fifty thousand Jews. When the Germans were gone, five hundred were alive. ... Many times I was thinking that everything in life has a price, so to stay alive must also have a price. And my price was always that, if I lived, I must be deputy for many people who are not alive.
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The Red Cross identity
document Adolf Eichmann used to enter Argentine under the fake name Ricardo
Klement in 1950, issued by the Italian delegation of the Red Cross in Genova,
Italy. (14 July 1950)
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Adolf
Eichmann
Main article: Adolf Eichmann § Capture in Argentina
Though most of the Jews still alive in
Linz after the war had emigrated, Wiesenthal decided to stay on, partly because
the family of Adolf Eichmann lived a few blocks away from him. Eichmann had been
in charge of the transportation and deportation of Jews in the Nazi Final
Solution to the Jewish Question: a plan, finalised at the Wannsee Conference—at which Eichmann took the
minutes—to exterminate all the Jews in Europe. After the war, Eichmann hid in
Austria using forged identity papers until 1950, when he left via Italy and
moved to Argentina under an assumed name. Hoping to obtain information on
Eichmann's whereabouts, Wiesenthal continuously monitored the remaining members
of the immediate family in Linz until they vanished in 1952.
Wiesenthal learned from a letter shown
to him in 1953 that Eichmann had been seen in Buenos Aires, and he passed along
that information to the Israeli consulate in Vienna in 1954. Fritz Bauer,
prosecutor-general of the state of Hesse in West Germany, received independent
confirmation of Eichmann's whereabouts in 1957, but German agents were unable to
find him until late 1959. When Eichmann's father died in 1960, Wiesenthal made
arrangements for private detectives to surreptitiously photograph members of
the family, as Eichmann's brother Otto was said to bear a strong family
resemblance and there were no current photos of the fugitive. He provided these
photographs to Mossad
agents on 18 February. Zvi Aharoni, one of the Mossad agents responsible for
Eichmann's capture in Buenos Aires on 11 May 1960, said the photos were useful
in confirming Eichmann's identity. On 23 May Israeli Prime Minister David
Ben-Gurion announced Eichmann was under arrest and in Israel. The next day
Wiesenthal, while he was being interviewed by reporters, received a
congratulatory telegram from Yad Vashem. He immediately became a minor
celebrity, and began work on a book about his experiences. Ich jagte
Eichmann: Tatsachenbericht (I Chased Eichmann: A True Story) was published
six weeks before the trial opened in spring 1961. Wiesenthal helped the
prosecution prepare their case and attended a portion of the trial. Eichmann
was sentenced to death and hanged in 1962.
Meanwhile both of Wiesenthal's
employers terminated his services in 1960, as there were too few refugees left
in the city to justify the expense. Wiesenthal opened a new documentation
centre in Vienna in 1961. He became a Mossad operative, for which he received
the equivalent of several hundred dollars per month. He maintained files on
hundreds of suspected Nazi war criminals and located many, about six of whom
were arrested as a result of his activities. Successes included locating and
bringing to trial Erich Rajakowitsch, responsible for the deportation of Jews
from the Netherlands, and Franz Murer, the commandant of the Vilna
Ghetto. In 1963 Wiesenthal read in the newspaper that Karl
Silberbauer, the man who had arrested famed diarist Anne Frank, had been
located; he was serving on the police force in Vienna. Wiesenthal's publicity
campaign led to Silberbauer being temporarily suspended from the force, but he
was never prosecuted for arresting the Frank family.
In spite of Wiesenthal's protests, in
late 1963 his centre in Vienna was taken over by a local community group, so he
immediately set up a new independent office, funded using donations and his
stipend from the Mossad. As the 20-year statute of limitations for German war
crimes was about to expire, Wiesenthal began lobbying to have it extended or
removed entirely. In March 1965 the Bundestag deferred the matter for five
years, effectively extending the expiration date. Similar action was taken by
the Austrian government. But as time went on, it became more difficult to
obtain prosecutions. Witnesses grew older and were less likely to be able to
offer valuable testimony. Funding for trials was inadequate, as the governments
of Austria and Germany became less interested in obtaining convictions for
wartime events, preferring to forget the Nazi past.
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Simon
Wiesenthal on destroying evil.
[PHOTO
SOURCE: http://izquotes.com/quote/197810]
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Franz Stangl
Main
article: Franz Stangl § Post-war escape
Franz
Stangl was a supervisor at the Hartheim Euthanasia Centre, part of Action T4,
an early Nazi euthanasia programme that was responsible for the deaths of over
70,000 mentally ill or physically deformed people in Germany. In February 1942,
he was commander at the Sobibor extermination camp and in August
of the same year he was transferred to Treblinka.
During his time at these camps, he oversaw the deaths of nearly 900,000 people.
While in U.S. detention for two years, he remained unidentified as a war
criminal because so few witnesses had survived Sobibor and Treblinka that
authorities never realised who he was. He escaped while on a roadwork detail in
Linz in May 1948. After he made his way to Rome, the Caritas relief agency
provided him with a Red Cross passport and a boat ticket to Syria. His family
joined him there a year later and they emigrated to Brazil in 1951.
It was
probably Stangl's brother-in law who informed Wiesenthal of Stangl's
whereabouts in 1964. Concerned that Stangl would be warned and escape,
Wiesenthal quietly prepared a dossier with the assistance of Austrian Minister
of Justice Hans Klecatsky. Stangl was arrested outside his home in São Paulo on
28 February 1967 and was extradited to Germany on 22 June. A month later
Wiesenthal's book The Murderers Among Us was released. Wiesenthal's
publishers advertised that he had been responsible for locating over 800 Nazis,
a claim that had no basis in fact but was nonetheless repeated by reputable
newspapers such as the New York Times. Stangl was sentenced to life in
prison and died of heart failure in June 1971, having confessed his guilt to
biographer Gitta Sereny the previous day.
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Simon
Wiesenthal on history repeating.
[PHOTO
SOURCE: http://izquotes.com/quote/197820]
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Hermine
Braunsteiner
Main
article: Hermine Braunsteiner § Discovery
Known as
"the Mare of Majdanek", Hermine Braunsteiner was a guard who served
at Majdanek
and Ravensbrück
concentration camps. A cruel and sadistic woman, she earned her nickname for
her propensity to kick her victims to death. She served a three-year sentence
in Austria for her activities in Ravensbrück, but had not yet been charged for
any of her crimes at Majdanek when she emigrated to the United States in 1959.
She became an American citizen in 1963.
Wiesenthal
was first told about Braunsteiner in early 1964 via a chance encounter in Tel
Aviv with someone who had seen her performing selections at Majdanek—deciding
who was to be assigned to slave labour and who was to immediately be killed in
the gas chambers. When he returned to
Vienna he had an operative visit one of her relatives to clandestinely collect
information. Wiesenthal soon traced Braunsteiner's whereabouts to Queens, New
York, so he notified the Israeli police and the New York Times. In spite
of Wiesenthal's efforts to expedite the matter, Braunsteiner was not extradited
to Germany until 1973. Her trial was part of a joint indictment with nine other
defendants accused of killing 250,000 people at Majdanek. She was sentenced to
life imprisonment in 1981 and died in 1999.
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Simon
Wiesenthal on crimes against humanity
[PHOTO
SOURCE: http://izquotes.com/quote/197815]
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Josef Mengele
Josef Mengele was a medical officer assigned to Auschwitz
concentration camp from 1943 until the end of the war. As well as making
most of the selections of inmates as they arrived by train from all over
Europe, he performed unscientific and usually deadly experiments on the inmates.
He left the camp in January 1945 as the Red Army approached and was briefly in
American custody in Weiden in der Oberpfalz, but was released. He took work as
a farm hand in rural Germany, remaining until 1949, when he decided to flee the
country; he acquired a Red Cross passport and left for Argentina; he set up a
business in Buenos Aires in 1951. Acting on information received from
Wiesenthal, West German authorities tried to extradite Mengele in 1960, but he
could not be found; he had in fact moved to Paraguay in 1958. He moved to
Brazil in 1961 and lived there until his death in 1979.
Wiesenthal claimed to have information
that placed Mengele in several locations: on the Greek island of Kythnos in
1960, Cairo in 1961, in Spain in 1971, and in Paraguay in 1978, the latter
eighteen years after he had left. In 1982, he offered a reward of $100,000 for
Mengele's capture and insisted as late as 1985—six years after Mengele's
death–that he was still alive. The Mengele family admitted to authorities in
1985 that he had died in 1979; the body was exhumed and its identity was
confirmed. Earlier that year Wiesenthal had served as one of the judges at a
mock trial of Mengele, held in Jerusalem.
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Simon Wiesenthal Center, Los Angeles
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Simon
Wiesenthal Center
The Simon Wiesenthal Center in
Los Angeles was founded in 1977 by Rabbi Marvin Hier using large donations from
philanthropists Samuel Belzberg
and Joseph Tennenbaum. Hier's organisation paid Wiesenthal an honorarium for
the right to use his name. The center helped with the campaign to remove the
statute of limitations on Nazi crimes and continues the hunt for suspected Nazi
war criminals, but today its primary activities include Holocaust remembrance,
education, and fighting antisemitism. The
center's Holocaust museum, the largest in the United States, opened in 1993.
Moriah Films, the center's media division, has won two Academy Awards,
including one for the documentary Genocide (1982). Wiesenthal was not
always happy with the way the center was run. He thought the museum was not
dignified enough and that he should have a larger say in the overall
operations. He even wrote to the Board of Directors requesting Hier's removal,
but in the end had to be content with being a figurehead.
Austrian
politics and later life
Bruno Kreisky
Main article: Kreisky–Peter–Wiesenthal affair
Shortly after Bruno Kreisky was inaugurated as Austrian
chancellor in April 1970, Wiesenthal pointed out to the press that four of his
new cabinet appointees had been members of the Nazi Party. In an address in June,
Kreisky's Minister of Education and Culture Leopold Gratz characterised Wiesenthal's Jewish
Documentation Center as a private spy ring, invading the privacy of
innocent parties. In an interview a week later, Kreisky himself described
Wiesenthal as a "Jewish fascist", a remark he later denied making.
Wiesenthal discovered that he would be unable to sue, because under Austrian
law Kreisky was protected by parliamentary
immunity.
When his re-election in 1975 seemed unsure, Kreisky
proposed that his Social
Democratic Party should form a coalition with the Freedom Party,
headed by Friedrich Peter.
Wiesenthal was in possession of information proving that Peter had been a
member of the 1 SS Infantry
Brigade, a unit that had exterminated over 13,000 Jewish civilians
in Ukraine in 1941–42. He decided not to reveal this information to the press
until after the election, but forwarded his dossier to President Rudolf
Kirchschläger. Peter denied having participated in, or having
knowledge of, any atrocities. In the end, Kreisky's party won a clear majority
and did not form the coalition.
In a press conference a short time after the
election and Wiesenthal's revelations, Kreisky said Wiesenthal used "the
methods of a quasi-political Mafia." Wiesenthal filed a libel lawsuit
(although Kreisky had the power to declare immunity if he so chose), and when
Kreisky later accused Wiesenthal of being an agent of the Gestapo, working with
the Judenrat in Lvov, these accusations were
incorporated into the lawsuit as well. The suit was settled in Wiesenthal's
favour in 1989, but after Kreisky's death nine months later his heirs refused
to pay the settlement. When the relevant archives were later opened for
research, no evidence was found that Wiesenthal had been a collaborator.
Kurt Waldheim
When Kurt
Waldheim was named secretary-general of the United Nations in 1971,
Wiesenthal reported—without checking very thoroughly—that there was no evidence
that he had a Nazi past. This analysis had been supported by the opinions of
the American Counterintelligence Corps and Office of Strategic Services when
they examined his records right after the war. However, Waldheim's 1985
autobiography did not include his war service following his recuperation from a
1941 injury. When he returned to active duty in 1942, he was posted to
Yugoslavia and Greece, and had knowledge of murders of civilians that took
place in those locations during his service there. The Austrian news magazine Profil published a story in March 1986—during
his campaign for the presidency of Austria—that Waldheim had been a member of
the Sturmabteilung (SA). The New York Times
soon reported that Waldheim had failed to reveal all of the facts about his war
service. Wiesenthal, embarrassed, attempted to help Waldheim defend himself.
The World Jewish Congress investigated the issue,
but the Israeli attorney general concluded that their material was insufficient
evidence for a conviction. Waldheim was elected president in July 1986. A panel
of historians tasked with investigating the case issued a report eighteen
months later. They concluded that while there was no evidence that Waldheim had
committed atrocities, he must have known they were occurring, yet did nothing.
Wiesenthal unsuccessfully demanded that Waldheim resign. The World Jewish
Congress successfully lobbied to have Waldheim barred from entering the United
States.
Nobel Peace
Prize nomination
Wiesenthal was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, the fortieth
anniversary of the end of the war. Rumour had it that the Nobel Committee would
give the prize to a Holocaust-related candidate. Fellow Holocaust survivor and
author Elie Wiesel, also nominated, began a
campaign in hopes of winning the prize, travelling to France, Ethiopia and Oslo
for speaking tours and humanitarian work. Rabbi Hier of the Wiesenthal Center
urged Wiesenthal to lobby for the prize as well, but other than delivering a
lecture in Oslo, Wiesenthal did little to promote his candidacy. When Wiesel was
awarded the 1986 prize, Wiesenthal claimed the World Jewish Congress must have
influenced the Committee's decision, a claim the WJC denied. Biographer Tom Segev speculates that the loss may have
been because of the negative publicity over the Waldheim affair.
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Simon Wiesenthal's grave, Herzliya
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Retirement
and death
Wiesenthal received many death threats
over the years. After a bomb placed by neo-Nazis exploded outside his house in
Vienna on 11 June 1982, police guards were stationed outside his home 24 hours
a day. Cyla found the stressful nature of her husband's career and the
dragged-out legal matters regarding Kreisky to be overwhelming, and she
sometimes suffered from depression.
Wiesenthal spent time at his office at
the Jewish Documentation Center in central Vienna even as he approached his
ninetieth birthday. The last Nazi he had a hand in bringing to trial was Untersturmführer Julius Viel, who was convicted
in 2001 of shooting seven Jewish prisoners. Cyla died on 10 November 2003, at
age 95. Wiesenthal retired shortly afterward. "I have survived them all.
If there were any left, they'd be too old and weak to stand trial today. My
work is done," said Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal died on 20 September 2005, at
age 96, and was buried in Herzliya, Israel. He is survived by his daughter,
Paulinka Kreisberg, and three grandchildren.
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. He was a soldier of justice, which is indispensable to our freedom, stability and peace."
In 2010 the Austrian and Israeli
governments jointly issued a commemorative stamp honouring Wiesenthal. He
had been a lifelong stamp collector, and his collection sold at auction for
nearly €500,000 after his death.
Dramatic
portrayals
Wiesenthal was portrayed by Israeli
actor Shmuel Rodensky in the film adaptation of Frederick
Forsyth's The Odessa File (1974). After the film's
release, Wiesenthal received many reports of sightings of the subject of the
film, Eduard Roschmann, commandant of the Riga Ghetto.
These sightings proved to be false alarms, but in 1977 a person living in
Buenos Aires who saw the movie reported to police that Roschmann was living
nearby. The fugitive escaped to Paraguay, where he died of a heart attack a
month later. In Ira Levin's novel The Boys from Brazil, the
character of Yakov Liebermann (called Ezra Liebermann and played by Laurence
Olivier in the film) is modelled on Wiesenthal. Olivier visited Wiesenthal,
who offered advice on how to play the role. Wiesenthal attended the film's New
York premiere in 1978. Ben Kingsley portrayed him in the Home
Box Office film Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story
(1989).
Wiesenthal has been the subject of
several documentaries. The Art of Remembrance: Simon Wiesenthal was
produced in 1994 by filmmakers Hannah Heer and Werner Schmiedel for River
Lights Pictures. The documentary I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life and
Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal, narrated by Nicole
Kidman, was released by Moriah Films in 2007.
Autobiographical
inconsistencies
Wiesenthal wrote a number of books,
some of which contain conflicting stories and tales, many of which were
invented. Several authors, including Segev and British author Guy Walters,
feel that Wiesenthal's autobiographies cannot be considered reliable sources of
information about his life and activities. For example, Wiesenthal would
describe two people fighting over one of the lists he had prepared of survivors
of the Holocaust; the two look up and recognise each other and have a tearful
reunion. In one account it is a man and wife, and in another telling it is two
brothers. Wiesenthal's memoirs variously claim he had spent time in as many as
eleven concentration camps; the actual number was five. A drawing he made in
1945 that he claimed was a scene he witnessed in Mauthausen had actually been
sketched from photos that appeared in Life
magazine that June. He particularly over-emphasised his role in the capture of
Eichmann, claiming that he prevented Veronika Eichmann from having her husband
declared dead in 1947, when in fact the declaration was denied "at the
instigation of the authorities." Wiesenthal said that he had retained his
Eichmann file when he sent his research materials to Yad Vashem in 1952; in
fact he sent all his materials there, and it was his counterpart, Tuviah
Friedman in Vienna, who had retained materials on Eichmann. Isser Harel,
director of the Mossad at the time, has stated that Wiesenthal had no role in
the capture of Eichmann.
Walters found many inconsistencies
among the three main biographies and between these books and historical
documents. "Wiesenthal’s scant regard for the truth makes it possible to
doubt everything he ever wrote or said," remarks Walters. British
journalist and editor of The Times Daniel Finkelstein describes Walters' research
as "impeccable", and reports that Ben Barkow
of the Wiener Library supported the need to re-evaluate
Wiesenthal's contributions. Finkelstein said that "accepting that
Wiesenthal was a showman and a braggart and, yes, even a liar, can live
alongside acknowledging the contribution he made".
List of
books and journal articles
Books
- Ich jagte Eichmann: Tatsachenbericht (I Chased Eichmann: A True Story). Gütersloh: S. Mohn (1961)
- Writing under the pen name Mischka Kukin, Wiesenthal published Humor hinter dem Eisernen Vorhang ("Humor Behind the Iron Curtain"). Gütersloh: Signum-Verlag (1962)
- The Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Memoirs. New York: McGraw-Hill (1967)
- Sails of Hope: The Secret Mission of Christopher Columbus. New York: Macmillan (1973)
- "Mauthausen: Steps beyond the Grave". In Hunter and Hunted: Human History of the Holocaust. Gerd Korman, editor. New York: Viking Press (1973). pp. 286–295.
- The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness New York : Schocken Books (1969)
- Max and Helen: A Remarkable True Love Story. New York: Morrow (1982)
- Every Day Remembrance Day: A Chronicle of Jewish Martyrdom. New York: Henry Holt (1987)
- Justice, Not Vengeance. New York: Grove-Weidenfeld (1989)
Journal
articles
- "Latvian War Criminals in USA". Jewish Currents 20, no. 7 (July/August 1966): 4–8. Also in 20, no. 10 (November 1966): 24.
- "There Are Still Murderers Among Us". National Jewish Monthly 82, no. 2 (October 1967): 8–9.
- "Nazi Criminals in Arab States". In Israel Horizons 15, no. 7 (September 1967): 10–12.
- Anti-Jewish Agitation in Poland: (Prewar Fascists and Nazi Collaborators in Unity of Action with Antisemites from the Ranks of the Polish Communist Party): A Documentary Report. Bonn: R. Vogel (1969)
- "Justice: Why I Hunt Nazis". In Jewish Observer and Middle East Review 21, no. 12 (24 March 1972): 16.
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