At the end of World War II, thousands of Nazis who participated in
the systematic murder of some 6,000,000 Jews and millions of Gypsies,
Poles and other "inferior" peoples, slipped through the Allied net and
escaped to countries around the globe, where many still live in
freedom.
Simon Wiesenthal, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, dedicated his
life to documenting the crimes of the Holocaust and to hunting down the
perpetrators still at large. "When history looks back," Wiesenthal
explained, "I want people to know the Nazis weren’t able to kill
millions of people and get away with it." His work stands as a reminder
and a warning for future generations.
As founder and head of the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna, the
freelance Nazi hunter, usually with the cooperation of the Israeli,
Austrian, former West German and other governments, ferreted out nearly
1,100 Nazi war criminals, including Adolf Eichmann, the administrator of
the slaughter of the Jews; Franz Murer, "The Butcher of Wilno," and
Erich Rajakowitsch, in charge of the "death transports" in Holland.
Accounts of his grim sleuthing are detailed in his memoirs, The
Murderers Among Us (1967). His other books include, Sails of Hope
(1973), Sunflower (1970), Max and Helen" (1982), Krystyna (1987), Every
Day Remembrance Day (1987), and Justice Not Vengeance (1989). In 1989, a
film based on Mr. Wiesenthal’s life entitled, Murderers Among Us: The
Simon Wiesenthal Story was produced by Home Box Office and starred
Academy Award-winning actor Ben Kingsley as Simon Wiesenthal.
Simon Wiesenthal was born on December 31, 1908 in Buczacz, in what is
now the Lvov Oblast section of the Ukraine. When Wiesenthal's father was
killed in World War I, Mrs. Wiesenthal took her family and fled to
Vienna for a brief period, returning to Buczacz when she remarried. The
young Wiesenthal graduated from the Gymnasium in 1928 and applied for
admission to the Polytechnic Institute in Lvov. Turned away because of
quota restrictions on Jewish students, he went instead to the Technical
University of Prague, from which he received his degree in architectural
engineering in 1932.
In 1936, Simon married Cyla Mueller and worked in an architectural
office in Lvov. Their life together was happy until 1939 when Germany
and Russia signed their "non-aggression" pact and agreed to partition
Poland between them; the Russian army soon occupied Lvov, and shortly
afterward began the Red purge of Jewish merchants, factory owners and
other professionals. In the purge of "bourgeois" elements that followed
the Soviet occupation of Lvov Oblast at the beginning of World War II,
Wiesenthal's stepfather was arrested by the NKVD (People's Commissariat
of Internal Affairs - Soviet Secret Police) and eventually died in
prison, his stepbrother was shot, and Wiesenthal himself, forced to
close his business, became a mechanic in a bedspring factory. Later he
saved himself, his wife, and his mother from deportation to Siberia by
bribing an NKVD commissar. When the Germans displaced the Russians in
1941, a former employee of his, then serving the collaborationist
Ukrainian Auxiliary police, helped him to escape execution by the Nazis.
But he did not escape incarceration. Following initial detention in the
Janowska concentration camp just outside Lvov, he and his wife were
assigned to the forced labor camp serving the Ostbahn Works, the repair
shop for Lvov's Eastern Railroad.
Early in 1942, the Nazi hierarchy formally decided on the "Final
Solution" to the "Jewish problem" -- annihilation. Throughout occupied
Europe a terrifying genocide machine was put into operation. In August
1942, Wiesenthal's mother was sent to the Belzec death camp. By
September, most of his and his wife's relatives were dead; a total of
eighty-nine members of both families perished.
Because his wife's blonde hair gave her a chance of passing as an
"Aryan," Wiesenthal made a deal with the Polish underground. In return
for detailed charts of railroad junction points made by him for use by
saboteurs, his wife was provided with false papers identifying her as
"Irene Kowalska," a Pole, and spirited out of the camp in the autumn of
1942. She lived in Warsaw for two years and then worked in the Rhineland
as a forced laborer, without her true identity ever being discovered.
With the help of the deputy director, Wiesenthal himself escaped the
Ostbahn camp in October 1943, just before the Germans began liquidating
all the inmates. In June 1944, he was recaptured and sent back to
Janowska where he would almost certainly have been killed had the German
eastern front not collapsed under the advancing Red Army. Knowing they
would be sent into combat if they had no prisoners to justify their
rear-echelon assignment, the SS guards at Janowska decided to keep the
few remaining inmates alive. With 34 prisoners out of an original
149,000, the 200 guards joined the general retreat westward, picking up
the entire population of the village of Chelmiec along the way to adjust
the prisoner-guard ratio.
Very few of the prisoners survived the westward trek through Plaszow,
Gross-Rosen and Buchenwald, which ended at Mauthausen in upper Austria.
Weighing less than 100 pounds and lying helplessly in a barracks where
the stench was so strong that even hardboiled SS guards would not enter,
Wiesenthal was barely alive when Mauthausen was liberated by the 11th
Armored Division of the Third U.S. Army on May 5, 1945.
As soon as his health was sufficiently restored, Wiesenthal began
gathering and preparing evidence on Nazi atrocities for the War Crimes
Section of the United States Army. After the war, he also worked for the
Army's Office of Strategic Services and Counter-Intelligence Corps and
headed the Jewish Central Committee of the United States Zone of
Austria, a relief and welfare organization. Late in 1945, he and his
wife, each of whom had believed the other to be dead, were reunited, and
in 1946, their daughter Pauline was born.
The evidence supplied by Wiesenthal was utilized in the American zone
war crime trials. When his association with the United States Army ended
in 1947, Wiesenthal and thirty volunteers opened the Jewish Historical
Documentation Center in Linz, Austria, for the purpose of assembling
evidence for future trials. But, as the Cold War between the United
States and the Soviet Union intensified, both sides lost interest in
prosecuting Germans, and Wiesenthal's volunteers, succumbing to
frustration, drifted away to more ordinary pursuits. In 1954, the office
in Linz was closed and its files were given to the Yad Vashem Archives
in Israel, except for one - the dossier on Adolf Eichmann, the
inconspicuous technocrat who, as chief of the Gestapo's Jewish
Department, had supervised the implementation of the "Final Solution."
While continuing his salaried relief and welfare work, including the
running of an occupational training school for Hungarian and other Iron
Curtain refugees, Wiesenthal never relaxed in his pursuit of the elusive
Eichmann who had disappeared at the time of Germany's defeat in World
War II. In 1953, Wiesenthal received information that Eichmann was in
Argentina from people who had spoken to him there. He passed this
information on to Israel through the Israeli embassy in Vienna and in
1954 also informed Nahum Goldmann, but the FBI had received information
that Eichmann was in Damascus, Syria. It was not until 1959 that Israel
was informed by Germany that Eichmann was in Buenos Aires living under
the alias of Ricardo Klement. He was captured there by Israeli agents
and brought to Israel for trial. Eichmann was found guilty of mass
murder and executed on May 31, 1961.
Encouraged by the capture of Eichmann, Wiesenthal reopened the Jewish
Documentation Center, this time in Vienna, and concentrated exclusively
on the hunting of war criminals. One of his high priority cases was
Karl Silberbauer, the Gestapo officer who arrested Anne Frank, the
fourteen year-old German-Jewish girl who was murdered by the Nazis after
hiding in an Amsterdam attic for two years. Dutch neo-Nazi
propagandists were fairly successful in their attempts to discredit the
authenticity of Anne Frank's famous diary until Wiesenthal located
Silberbauer, then a police inspector in Austria, in 1963. "Yes,"
Silberbauer confessed, when confronted, "I arrested Anne Frank."
In October 1966, sixteen SS officers, nine of them found by
Wiesenthal, went on trial in Stuttgart, West Germany, for participation
in the extermination of Jews in Lvov. High on Wiesenthal's most-wanted
list was Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor
concentration camps in Poland. After three years of patient undercover
work by Wiesenthal, Stangl was located in Brazil and remanded to West
Germany for imprisonment in 1967. He was sentenced to life imprisonment
and died in prison.
Wiesenthal's book of memoirs, The Murderers Among Us, was published
in 1967. During a visit to the United States to promote the book,
Wiesenthal announced that he had found Mrs. Hermine Ryan, nee
Braunsteiner, a housewife living in Queens, New York. According to the
dossier, Mrs. Ryan had supervised the killings of several hundred
children at Majdanek. She was extradited to Germany for trial as a war
criminal in 1973 and received life imprisonment.
The Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna was a nondescript, sparsely
furnished three-room office with a staff of four, including Wiesenthal.
Contrary to belief, Wiesenthal did not usually track down the Nazi
fugitives himself. His chief task was gathering and analyzing
information. In that work he was aided by a vast, informal,
international network of friends, colleagues, and sympathizers,
including German World War II veterans, appalled by the horrors they
witnessed. He even received tips from former Nazis with grudges against
other former Nazis. A special branch of his Vienna office documented the
activities of right-wing groups, neo-Nazis and similar organizations.
Painstakingly, Wiesenthal culled every pertinent document and record
he got and listened to the many personal accounts told him by individual
survivors. With an architect's structural acumen, a Talmudist's
thoroughness, and a brilliant talent for investigative thinking, he
pieced together the most obscure, incomplete, and apparently irrelevant
and unconnected data to build cases solid enough to stand up in a court
of law. The dossiers were then presented to the appropriate authorities.
When, as often happens, they failed to take action, whether from
indifference, pro-Nazi sentiment, or some other consideration,
Wiesenthal went to the press and other media, for experience taught him
that publicity and an outraged public opinion are powerful weapons.
The work yet to be done was enormous. Germany’s war criminal files
contained more than 90,000 names, most of them of people who have never
been tried. Thousands of former Nazis, not named in any files, are also
known to be at large, often in positions of prominence, throughout
Germany. Aside from the cases themselves, there is the tremendous task
of persuading authorities and the public that the Nazi Holocaust was
massive and pervasive. In the final paragraph of his memoirs, he quotes
what an SS corporal told him in 1944: "You would tell the truth [about
the death camps] to the people in America. That's right. And you know
what would happen, Wiesenthal? They wouldn't believe you. They’d say you
were mad. Might even put you into an asylum. How can anyone believe
this terrible business - unless he has lived through it?"
Among Mr. Wiesenthal's many honors include an Honorary Knighthood of
the British Empire from Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, the
Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Clinton, decorations from
the Austrian and French resistance movements, the Dutch Freedom Medal,
the Luxembourg Freedom Medal, the United Nations League for the Help of
Refugees Award, the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal presented to him by
President Jimmy Carter in 1980, and the French Legion of Honor which he
received in 1986. Wiesenthal was a consultant for the motion picture
thriller, The Odessa File(Paramount, 1974). The Boys from Brazil
(Twentieth Century Fox, 1978), a major motion picture based on Ira
Levin's book of the same name, starring Sir Laurence Olivier as Herr
Lieberman, a character styled after Wiesenthal.
In November 1977, the Simon Wiesenthal Center was founded. Today,
together with its world renowned Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and
the New York Tolerancenter, it is an international center for Holocaust
remembrance, the defense of human rights and the Jewish people. With
offices throughout the world, the Wiesenthal Center carries on the
continuing fight against bigotry and antisemitism and pursues an active
agenda of related contemporary issues. "I have received many honors in
my lifetime," said Mr. Wiesenthal. "When I die, these honors will die
with me. But the Simon Wiesenthal Center will live on as my legacy."
In 1981, the Wiesenthal Center produced the Academy AwardTM-winning
documentary, Genocide, narrated by Elizabeth Taylor and the late Orson
Welles, and introduced by Simon Wiesenthal.
Wiesenthal lived in a modest apartment in Vienna and spent his
evenings answering letters, studying books and files, and working on his
stamp collection. He lived there with his wife Cyla until her death on
November 10, 2003.
Simon Wiesenthal received numerous anonymous threats and insulting
letters. In June 1982, a bomb exploded at the front door of his house
causing a great deal of damage. Fortunately, no one was hurt. After
that, his house and office were guarded by an armed policeman. One
German and several Austrian neo-Nazis were arrested for the bombing. The
German, who was found to be the main perpetrator, was sentenced to five
years in prison.
Wiesenthal was often asked to explain his motives for becoming a Nazi
hunter. According to Clyde Farnsworth in the New York Times Magazine
(February 2, 1964), Wiesenthal once spent the Sabbath at the home of a
former Mauthausen inmate, now a well-to-do jewelry manufacturer. After
dinner his host said, "Simon, if you had gone back to building houses,
you'd be a millionaire. Why didn't you?" "You're a religious man,"
replied Wiesenthal. "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 have smuggled coffee and American cigarettes,’ Another will say, ‘I
built houses,’ But I will say, ‘I did not forget you’."
On September 20, 2005, Simon Wiesenthal died peacefully in his sleep
at his home. After a service at Vienna’s Central Cemetery attended by
Austrian Prime Minister Wolfgang Schuessel, government officials,
diplomats and leaders of religious communities, he was taken to Israel
and laid to rest in Herzliya.
In his eulogy, Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon
Wiesenthal Center said, "As you go to your eternal repose, I am sure
there is a great stirring in heaven as the soul of the millions murdered
during the Nazi Holocaust get ready to welcome Simon Wiesenthal, the
man who stood up for their honor and never let the world forget them."
http://www.wiesenthal.com
What is the secret of great writing? For David Foster Wallace, it was about fun. For Henry Miller, about discovery. Susan Sontag saw it asself-exploration. Many literary greats anchored it to their daily routines. And yet, the answer remains elusive and ever-changing.
