Simon Wiesenthal survived World War II and dedicated the rest of his life to bringing Nazis to justice. His death yesterday stills the voice of a tireless champion for those who perished in the Holocaust.
Wiesenthal, who died in Vienna at 96, had been in a series of Nazi concentration camps until he was liberated from Mauthausen in Austria by Allied soldiers. From 1945, he fought prejudice in all its forms.
Initially working with the U.S. Army and then starting his own independent Jewish Documentation Center in 1947, Wiesenthal helped track down hundreds of Nazi fugitives who had been responsible for the deaths of 6 million European Jews and countless others. Wiesenthal turned the evidence he gathered over to officials of various governments.
Among those Wiesenthal helped expose were Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who oversaw the logistics of mass murder; Fritz Stangl, commandant of two death camps; Karl Silberbauer, the Gestapo officer who arrested Anne Frank and her family; and Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, a whip-toting guard in the Maidenek camp who became a housewife in Queens.
Critics have questioned his claim to have discovered Eichmann’s hiding place in Argentina, or that he exposed as many as 1,100 Nazis. But there is no question that Wiesenthal made an enormous contribution in postwar justice.
He also outlasted most of those he hunted. “I found the mass murderers I was looking for, and I have outlived them all. … My work is done,” he told an Austrian magazine in 2003.
“I am doing this because I have to do it,” Wiesenthal said on another occasion. “I am not motivated by a sense of revenge. Perhaps I was for a short time in the beginning. … Even before I 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.”
He was right – we must never forget.
