Simon Wiesenthal

Simon Wiesenthal, honorary KBE, (December 31, 1908 – 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 Centers are named after him.

Early life and World War II

Wiesenthal was born Szymon Wiesenthal in Buczacz, Polish Galicia occupied by Austria-Hungary, now a part of the Lviv Oblast section of Ukraine, to a Jewish merchant family. He graduated from the Technical University of Prague in 1932 after being denied admission to the Polytechnic University of Lwów because of quota restrictions on Jewish students. In 1936, he married Cyla Müller, and they had a daughter, Paulina, who lives in Israel.

Wiesenthal was living in Lwów, Poland (now called Lviv, the largest city in Western Ukraine), when World War II began. As a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Lwów was occupied by the Soviet Union on September 17, 1939. Wiesenthal's stepfather and stepbrother were killed by agents of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. Wiesenthal was forced to close his firm and work in a factory. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941, Wiesenthal and his family were captured.

Simon Wiesenthal survived the Holocaust thanks to the intervention of a man named Bodnar, a Ukrainian auxiliary policeman who, on July 6, 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 camp in the suburbs of Lwów (now Lviv), where they were forced to work on the local railroad. Members of the Polish resistance movement 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 was not as fortunate; although he escaped from Janowska camp in October 1943 (just before the Nazis began killing all of the camp's inmates) he was recaptured in June and after two failed suicide attempts was sent with the 34 remaining prisoners at Janowska camp on a death march through camps in Poland and Germany to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. By the time he was liberated, he had been imprisoned in a total of 12 concentration camps (five of which were death camps) and had barely escaped execution on a number of occasions. Together, Cyla and Simon Wiesenthal lost 89 relatives during the Holocaust.

Nazi hunter

Wiesenthal was liberated by American forces from Mauthausen on May 5, 1945. When the Americans found Wiesenthal (who was then six feet tall), he weighed less than 100 pounds (45 kg). As soon as his health improved, Wiesenthal went to work for the U.S. Army gathering documentation for the Nazi war crimes trials. In 1947, he and 30 other volunteers founded the Jewish Documentation Center in Linz, Austria in order to gather information for future trials. However, as the U.S. and the Soviet Union lost interest in further war crimes trials, the group drifted apart. Wiesenthal himself 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.

After Eichmann was executed in Israel in 1962, Wiesenthal reopened the Jewish Documentation Center, which went to work on other cases. Among his most high-profile successes was the capture of Karl Silberbauer, the Gestapo officer responsible for the arrest of Anne Frank. Silberbauer's confession helped discredit claims that The Diary of Anne Frank was a forgery. 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. The Center promotes awareness of anti-Semitism, monitors neo-Nazi groups, operates the Museums of Tolerance in Los Angeles, California and Jerusalem, and helps bring surviving Nazi war criminals to justice.

Austrian politics and later life

In the 1970s he became involved in Austrian politics when he pointed out that several ministers in Bruno Kreisky's newly formed Socialist government had been Nazis when Austria was part of the Third Reich. Kreisky, himself Jewish, responded by attacking Wiesenthal as a Nestbeschmutzer (someone who dirties their own nest). In Austria, which took decades to acknowledge its role in Nazi crimes, Wiesenthal was ignored and often insulted. In 1975, 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. In 1982, a bomb placed by German and Austrian neo-Nazis exploded outside his house in Vienna, Austria. Even after turning 90, Wiesenthal spent time at his small office in the Jewish Documentation Center in central Vienna. In April 2003, Wiesenthal announced his retirement, saying that he had found the mass murderers he had been looking for: "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." 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 believed to be working on the case of Aribert Heim, one of the most wanted and notorious Nazi concentration camp doctors, prior to his retirement. Heim is still believed to be alive and in hiding.

Wiesenthal spent his last years in Vienna, where his wife, Cyla, died on November 10, 2003, at the age of 95 from natural causes. Wiesenthal died in his sleep at age 96 in Vienna on September 20, 2005, and was buried in the city of Herzliya in Israel on September 23. He is survived by his daughter, Paulina Kriesberg.

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."

Criticism

Despite Wiesenthal's achievements in locating many former Nazis, aspects of his work and life were very controversial.

According to Peter Novick and Yehuda Bauer, Wiesenthal fabricated the number of "non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust", five million.^[1]

A May 7, 1991, article in the Jerusalem Post said that former Mossad chief Isser Harel had written an unpublished manuscript which claims that Wiesenthal, "not only 'had no role whatsoever' in Eichmann's apprehension, but in fact had endangered the entire Eichmann operation and aborted the planned capture of Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele." ^[2] Harel said that "[a]ll the information supplied by Wiesenthal, and in anticipaton of the operation, was utterly worthless, and sometimes even misleading or of negative value."[3]

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? Does he think Nazis and antisemites read only books, not newspapers?" ^[4]

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.^[5] Another Nazi hunter, the famed Serge Klarsfeld, characterized Wiesenthal as an egomaniac.[6]

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:

"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. [7]

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 ... no allegation which originated from your office has resulted in a court filing by the OSI". [8]

The controversial[9] Ukrainian-American writer Myron B. Kuropas decried Wiesenthal's statements about the Ukrainians: "The Bolshevik troops were bad, but the Ukrainian cavalry bands 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 [10].

Simon Wiesenthal has also been criticized in relation with his handling of the Frank Walus case.[11]

Honors

Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire on February 19, 2004, in recognition of a "lifetime of service to humanity." 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

Dramatic portrayals

Ben Kingsley portrayed Wiesenthal in the Home Box Office film Murderers Among Us: the Simon Wiesenthal Story.

Miscellaneous

The character of Ezra Lieberman in Ira Levin's novel The Boys from Brazil is modeled on Wiesenthal, and Wiesenthal makes an appearance as a minor character in Frederick Forsyth's The Odessa File, providing information to a German journalist attempting to track down a Nazi war criminal.

Wiesenthal may not have visited Canada due to the country's poor record in tracking and prosecuting Canadians who have committed war crimes, particularly Croatians and Ukrainians. However he did visit Canada at least once between 1975 and 1978. A Wikipedia reader heard him give a talk in Winnipeg, Manitoba and was afterwards asked by Wiesenthal for information about a certain local individual, probably Ukrainian, living in the South part of the city.

References

^ [12], [13],[14]
^ Schachter, Jonathan "Isser Harel Takes On Nazi-Hunter. Wiesenthal 'Had No Role' In Eichmann Kidnapping." The Jerusalem Post 7 May 1991
^ Mass, Haim, "Wiesenthal: Redressing the Balance" The Jerusalem Post 10 May 1992
^ [15], [16], [17], [18], [19]

External links

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