Obituraries: Simon Wiesenthal

Simon Wiesenthal Simon Wiesenthal, the most famous of ‘Nazi-hunters’, has died at the age of 96. Born in Buczacz, near Lemberg (Lwow), he was educated at a local gymnasium, studied architectural engineering at Prague’s Technical University, and returned to Lwow To set up in practice. With Poland under Nazi occupation, he was sent to a labour camp near Lwow. At the end of the war he was in the Mauthausen concentration camp, which was liberated by the US Army. He organised relief work for displaced persons and the Americans also employed him to collect evidence for war crimes prosecutions. In 1947 he started his own Jewish Historical Documentation Centre in Linz. He closed it in 1954, moving its files to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. He later re-opened the centre in Vienna. As the Jewish Documentation Centre, it was to remain his base for the rest of his working life. Helped by a network of contacts, he painstakingly assembled dossiers on Nazi war criminals. Wiesenthal is said to have been responsible for tracking down over 1,000 Nazi war criminals. Perhaps the best known of the cases with which he was concerned was that of Adolf Eichmann. His role in providing the information leading to Eichmann’ s capture was vigorously disputed by the Israeli authorities. In the mid-1970s he sued when Chancellor Bruno Kreisky implied he had been a collaborator. Kreisky backed down, withdrawing his charges in parliament. In the late 1970s Wiesenthal entered into an uneasy relationship with the California backers of Rabbi Marvin Hier, who set up the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. In well-publicised disputes he clashed with, among others, the World Jewish Congress, in this instance over WJC charges that former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, who sought election as Austria’s president in 1986, was a war criminal. In 2003 he conceded that his work of Nazi-hunting was finally complete. In 2004 he was appointed honorary KBE for his work in bringing the perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice.