Simon Wiesenthal, the controversial Nazi hunter who pursued hundreds of war criminals after World War II and was central to preserving the memory of the Holocaust for more than half a century, died Tuesday at his home in Vienna. He had a kidney ailment and was 96.
Called the “deputy for the dead” and “avenging archangel” of the Holocaust, Wiesenthal after the war created a repository of concentration-camp testimonials and dossiers on Nazis at his Jewish Documentation Center.
The information was used to help lawyers prosecute those responsible for some of the 20th century’s most abominable crimes.
Wiesenthal spoke of the horrors first hand, having spent the war hovering near death in a series of labor and extermination camps. Nearly 90 members of his family perished.
After the Nuremberg Trials of the late 1940s, Wiesenthal remained a persistent and lonely voice calling for war-crimes trials of former Nazis.
This was later considered by many a remarkable achievement, coming during the Cold War when the major world powers were recruiting former Nazis to help govern countries along the Iron Curtain. There was little political will to relive World War II, and few cared to challenge that perspective.
Martin Mendelsohn, a Washington lawyer who in the late 1970s helped establish the Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations within the U.S. Justice Department, said Wiesenthal “kept the memory of the Holocaust alive when everyone wanted it to go away.”
Wiesenthal said trials of Nazis would provide moral restitution for the Jews and help prevent anti-Semitism.
“I’m doing this because I have to do it,” he once said. “I am not motivated by a sense of revenge. Perhaps I was for a short time in the very beginning. … Even before I had had time to really think things through, I realized we must not forget. If all of us forgot, the same thing might happen again, in 20 or 50 or 100 years.”
His targets included Adolf Eichmann, one of the foremost planners of Jewish extermination; Fritz Stangl, commandant of two death camps; Gestapo officer Karl Silberbauer, who arrested Anne Frank in her Amsterdam hideout; and Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, who helped process the murders of women and children at a camp in Poland and later was found living as a homemaker in Queens, N.Y.
Wiesenthal never doubted his motivation. In a New York Times article in 1964, he described attending Sabbath services with a fellow camp survivor who had become a wealthy jeweler.
The man asked why Wiesenthal had not resumed architecture – his pre-war trade – for it would have made him rich.
“You’re a religious man,” Wiesenthal told his friend. “You believe in God and life after death. I also believe.
“When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, ‘What have you done?’ there will be many answers. You will say, ‘I became a jeweler.’ Another will say, ‘I smuggled coffee and American cigarettes.’ Another will say, ‘I built houses.’
“But I will say, ‘I didn’t forget you.”‘
