Simon Wiesenthal was a Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer. Having lost most of his family to the death camps of the Holocaust, he spent the years following the war tracking down and seeking the conviction of Nazi war criminals.
Background
Wiesenthal was born on 31 December 1908, in Buczacz (Buchach), Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, then part of Austria-Hungary, now 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 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 family returned to Buczacz in 1917 after the Russians retreated. The area changed hands several more times before the war ended in November 1918.
Simon's brother, 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.
Education
In 1917, Simon's family returned to their hometown of Buczacz, where he attended the Humanistic Gymnasium. He graduated from high school in 1928 and applied to study architecture at the Politechnika Lwowska, but was turned away because the school had met its quota of Jewish students. He attended the Czech Technical University in Prague instead and graduated in 1932. He received his degree in architectural engineering.
At the outset of World War II in 1939, the Soviet Union occupied the Lvov region. The Russians immediately set out to purge society of its "bourgeois" elements. The results were devastating for the Wiesenthal family. Simon's step-father was arrested by the Soviet secret police and eventually died in prison. His stepmother was shot. Wiesenthal was forced to close his architecture business and barely avoided deportation to Siberia.
When the Germans displaced the Soviets in 1941, Wiesenthal escaped execution through the intervention of a former employer who was collaborating with the Nazis. But he was sent to the Janowska concentration camp. Later both he and his wife were assigned to a forced labor camp, where inmates worked servicing and repairing Lvov's Eastern Railroad. Compared to other Jews, those in the Ostbahn work camp were treated humanely by its German director, who did not adhere to the murderous anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis.
After invading the Soviet Union, Germany executed over 1.5 million civilians, mostly Jews, in captured Soviet territory. In the late summer and fall of 1942, Wiesenthal's mother, along with most of his and Cyla's relatives, were deported and murdered. In all, 89 members of their families perished in the Holocaust. In late 1942 Wiesenthal secured his wife's safety by persuading the Polish underground to provide her with "Aryan" papers identifying her as "Irene Kowalska." She lived in Warsaw and later was a forced laborer in Germany, but her true identity was never revealed.
The "island of sanity," as Wiesenthal described the Ostbahn camp, crumbled in late 1943. Wiesenthal escaped before the camp was liquidated, but was detained again in June 1944 at Janowska. As the Eastern Front moved closer to Lvov, 200 retreating Nazi SS guards took Wiesenthal and 33 other prisoners westward, the only survivors of an original camp population of 149,000. Eventually, the few survivors were brought to the infamous Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. There, on May 5, 1945, Wiesenthal, little more than a 90-pound skeleton, was liberated by a U.S. Army armored unit.
As his health and strength were restored, Wiesenthal began to help the war crimes section of the American army pursue Nazi war criminals.
In 1947, after working for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services and Army Counter Intelligence Corps, Wiesenthal headed the Jewish Central Committee of the U.S. Zone of Austria, a relief and welfare organization for Holocaust survivors.
When reflecting back on his initial period of "Nazi hunting," Wiesenthal said he never thought that gathering and preparing evidence on Nazi atrocities would occupy him all his life. But the Cold War rapidly became the focus of the former Allies, and many war criminals, including Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, and Klaus Barbie, escaped to South America.
Wiesenthal and 30 volunteers established the Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Linz, Austria, to gather data for future trials. By 1954 the frustrations of the staff over the inaction and apathy of world governments led Wiesenthal to close the center. Its documents were sent to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel, except the dossier on Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the blueprint used to destroy six million Jews. It was the one case which continued to interest Wiesenthal throughout the 1950s, even as he worked for refugee relief and welfare agencies. Eichmann was eventually located, kidnapped by Israeli agents, tried, and hanged in Israel. Wiesenthal characterized the hunt for Eichmann as a "mosaic to which many contributed," including himself.
Buoyed by the renewed interest in Nazi war criminals which the Eichmann trial generated, Wiesenthal reopened the Jewish Documentation Center, this time in Vienna. By the end of the 1960s "Holocaust deniers" and neo-Nazis had launched an intensive propaganda campaign to whitewash the crimes of the Nazi era. Dutch fascists attacked the Diary of Anne Frank as a hoax, claiming that Anne Frank never had lived. That lie was exposed by Wiesenthal in 1963, when he located and confronted Karl Silberbauer, who was then serving as a police inspector of Austria. Silberbauer confessed, saying, "Yes, I arrested Anne Frank."
Wiesenthal's efforts also helped bring to trial in 1966 in Stuttgart, West Germany, nine major SS participants in the mass murder of Jews in his native region of Lvov. In 1967 Wiesenthal tracked down Franz Stengl, the commandant of two of the most notorious death camps, Treblinka and Sobibor, who was hiding in Brazil. He was extradited to West Germany for trial. Other major criminals apprehended through his efforts included Franz Murer, the "Butcher of Wilno," and Erich Rajakowitsch, who was in charge of transporting Jews from Holland to Nazi death camps.
During one of his earliest visits to the United States, Wiesenthal revealed that Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, a murderer of several hundred children at Majdanek, was living in Queens, New York. It took several years, but in 1973 she was returned to Germany, tried, and jailed. Through the efforts of Weisenthal and others, Americans were confronted with the fact that the United States had become a haven for thousands of Nazi criminals. As a result, in the late 1970s the U.S. Department of Justice established a special office to identify and deal with Nazi war criminals.
The most notorious criminal pursued by Simon Wiesenthal since Eichmann was Josef Mengele, the infamous Auschwitz doctor wanted for the murder of 200,000 to 400,000 people. For many years Wiesenthal was the only public figure to raise the issue of Mengele's continued freedom in South America. In 1979 he led the successful effort to pressure Paraguay into revoking Mengele's citizenship. In June 1985 came the startling revelation that Mengele had lived since 1961 as a recluse in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and had apparently died in 1979. After receiving reports from forensic experts, Wiesenthal concluded that Mengele had died. "Although I know there is no proper man-made punishment for Mengele, it is unfortunate that his crippled victims could not face him in a court of law," Wiesenthal said. "But God has chosen to close the case."
Although Wiesenthal fought a lonely battle for many years in helping to bring more than 1,100 Nazi war criminals to justice, he touched the lives of millions of people throughout the world through his writings, lecture tours, and meetings with world leaders.
With a reputation as a storyteller, Wiesenthal was the author of several memoirs containing 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.
Simon Wiesenthal founder went down in history as a head of the Jewish Documentation Centre in Vienna. During World War II Wiesenthal was a prisoner in five Nazi concentration camps, and after the war he dedicated his life to the search for and the legal prosecution of Nazi criminals and to the promotion of Holocaust memory and education.
Nominated twice for the Nobel Peace Prize, Wiesenthal was decorated by the Austrian and French resistance movements and received the Dutch and Luxembourg Medals of Freedom, the Diploma of Honor from the United Nations, and many other awards. In 1980 President Jimmy Carter presented him with the U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor on behalf of the American people.
In 1977, in recognition of his humanitarian work, the Simon Wiesenthal Center was established in Los Angeles. It became the largest institution in North America dedicated to the study of the Holocaust and its contemporary implications.
Quotations:
"For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing."
"Humour is the weapon of unarmed people: it helps people who are oppressed to smile at the situation that pains them."
"God must have been on leave during the Holocaust."
"The combination of hatred and technology is the greatest danger threatening mankind."
"Technology without hatred can be a blessing. Technology with hatred is always a disaster."
Membership
He was elected a Honorary member of the University of Applied Arts Vienna in 1989.
He was elected a Honorary Member of the Academy of Science, Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1994.
He was elected a Honorary Member of the French Institut de Recherches de Psychotherapie.
He was elected a Honorary Member of the Dutch Resistance.
He was elected a Honorary Member of the Danish Association of Freedom Fighters.
He was elected a Member of the International Council of Yad Vashem, Jerusalem in 1980.
University of Applied Arts
,
Vienna
1989
Academy of Science
,
Ljubljana
1994
French Institut de Recherches de Psychotherapie
Danish Association of Freedom Fighters
Personality
When he was liberated from the Nazi Labour Camp, he weighed less than one hundred pounds. He detailed two suicide attempts during his internment and considered it his obligation to make his survival meaningful on a grand scale.
Connections
Wiesenthal married his high school sweetheart, Cyla Müller in 1936. They were separated in 1941 during Nazi detention and were reunited in 1945. They had one daughter, Paulinka, who was born in 1946.
