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Simon
Wiesenthal on Hitler and Stalin
[PHOTO
SOURCE: http://izquotes.com/quote/197822]
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There is no denying that Hitler and Stalin are alive today... they are waiting for us to forget, because this is what makes possible the resurrection of these two monsters.
AUTHOR: 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.
