Simon Wiesenthal

Austrian educator and legal reformer

• Born: December 31, 1908
• Birthplace: Buczacz, Galicia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Buchach, Ukraine)
• Died: September 20, 2005
• Place of death: Vienna, Austria

Wiesenthal, a survivor of a dozen Nazi concentration and death camps, became the leading independent Nazi hunter. Between 1945 and 1989, Wiesenthal investigated and helped bring charges against eleven hundred Nazi war criminals. Through his highly publicized cases and publications, he added to the documentary record of the Holocaust, brought perpetrators to justice, and kept alive the historical memory of the Holocaust.

Early Life

Simon Wiesenthal (VEEZ-ehn-thahl) was the eldest of two sons of Rosa (Rapp) and Hans Wiesenthal, a prosperous wholesaler and reserve officer in the Austrian army who was killed in action during World War I. Wiesenthal grew up in the deeply anti-Semitic Lvov Oblast, a province of the Austrian Empire. His mother took Wiesenthal and his brother to Vienna while the Russians were in control of Galicia and then returned with them to the city of Buczacz, which was in a politically volatile region. During a pogrom in 1920, the twelve-year-old boy was slashed on the thigh by a mounted, saber-wielding Ukrainian officer, leaving a lifelong scar.

Wiesenthal’s mother remarried in 1925, restoring some security to the boys’ lives. In 1928, Wiesenthal graduated from the Humanistic Gymnasium (a high school). Again, he experienced prejudice when his application to the Polytechnic Institute in Lvov was rejected because of Jewish quota restrictions. In 1932, he received a degree in architectural engineering from the Technical University of Prague. Returning to Lvov, he opened an architectural office and married his wife of more than fifty years, Cyla Müller, a distant relative of Sigmund Freud. During 1934 and 1935 he worked as a building engineer, mostly in Odessa in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Moving to Lvov again in 1939, Wiesenthal practiced architecture until 1941, but the city was seized by the Soviets at the outbreak of World War II. Soldiers began a purge of Jewish merchants, factory owners, and professionals because they were considered a bourgeois anticommunist class. The secret police arrested and killed Wiesenthal’s stepfather and brother, and he had to close his business and take a job as a mechanic in a bedspring factory. Even then the Wiesenthals barely avoided exile to Siberia. When the Germans invaded Russia in 1941, Wiesenthal was arrested and again narrowly escaped execution with the help of a former employee. With Cyla, he was sent to the Janowska concentration camp, outside Lvov, and worked in the repair shop for German eastern railroads. Wiesenthal was treated decently there by the secretly anti-Nazi German director and deputy director of the shop.

By 1942, the Holocaust had begun. Through a combination of luck, skill, friendship, and bribery, Wiesenthal was able to get Cyla out of the camp; in 1943 he escaped as well. Recaptured in June, 1944, however, he was interned in more than a dozen Nazi concentration camps, escaping death on many occasions by the merest chance. At the end of the war, he arrived by forced march at the Mauthausen camp in Upper Austria, one of thirty-four prisoners of an original group of 149,000. When U.S. Army units liberated the camp in May, 1945, the six-foot-tall, thirty-seven-year-old Wiesenthal weighed less than one hundred pounds. His terrifying wartime experiences stamped his fearless character and formed the basis for his life’s work.

Life’s Work

After only a brief recovery, Wiesenthal assisted the newly arrived U.S. Army War Crimes Section in gathering and preparing evidence to prosecute Nazi war criminals. Wiesenthal worked in anger and despair during the first months of his work. He was amazed to learn that Cyla had survived, and the two were finally reunited late in 1945. They were the only survivors of their family eighty-nine other family members had perished in the Holocaust. His bitterness was softened by his reunion with Cyla and the birth of his daughter, Pauline, in 1947.

Wiesenthal soon was employed by the Office of Strategic Services and the Counter-Intelligence Corps, and he directed the Jewish Central Committee of the U.S. Zone of Austria, which provided aid and training to refugees. The evidence he assembled proved of great value for war crimes trials held in the U.S. zone. Wiesenthal initially intended to devote a few years to bringing Nazi mass murderers to justice, but in 1947, with thirty volunteers, he established the Jewish Historical Documentation Center (JHDC) in Linz, Austria, in a three-room office with a permanent staff of four. Between 1947 and 1954 he and his staff built a vast network of informants and collected documentation to help bring Nazi war criminals to justice. The center seldom tracked down suspects; instead, they passed information about them to the authorities or if the authorities refused to act, they sent information to the press. Wiesenthal learned early that publicity and public outrage were among the most potent means to overcome official complicity and silence.

After the trial of the major war criminals at Nuremberg, Germany, however, the major Western powers, under the influence of Cold War ideology, gradually lost interest in prosecution of Nazi criminals and opened their doors to thousands of Nazis as “anticommunists.” By 1954, Wiesenthal, frustrated by lack of support from government authorities, had closed the JHDC and shipped his voluminous files to the Yad Vashem Documentation Center in Israel, keeping only one file for himself that on Adolf Eichmann , the Nazi expert who supervised the genocidal destruction of the European Jews. Between 1955 and 1961, Wiesenthal held various social and welfare leadership posts in Austria, which further involved him in assisting Jewish victims of the Nazi regime. In his spare time, he searched for former Nazis, especially Eichmann.

Wiesenthal first gained international recognition for locating Eichmann in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Eichmann was captured by Israeli agents in 1960, brought to Israel for trial, convicted of mass murder, and executed in 1961. Encouraged by his success, Wiesenthal reopened his documentation center, in Vienna. Gifted with an extraordinary capacity for finding and evaluating evidence, Wiesenthal assembled, painstakingly scrutinized, analyzed, and cross-referenced every relevant document and survivor account available to him. He compiled a card index of 22,500 names on his Nazi wanted list, assembled dossiers on six thousand cases, and worked on as many as three hundred cases at a time.

In addition to Eichmann, Wiesenthal developed several other cases, including those of the following individuals: Karl Babor, a Schutzstaffel (SS) captain at the concentration camp in Breslau, Poland, who committed suicide in 1964 after being discovered; sixteen Auschwitz SS officers who were tried in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1966, the majority of whom Wiesenthal brought to trial; Josef Mengele , who selected victims to be gassed at Auschwitz and who died in Argentina before capture; Heinrich Müller, Heinrich Himmler’s successor as chief of the Gestapo; Walter Kutschmann, former Gestapo leader; and Franz Stagl, commandant of the Treblinka concentration camp.

With his strong interest in Holocaust public education, Wiesenthal published a number of works on the Nazi perpetrators and their victims, including numerous newspaper and periodical pieces. Among his books were KZ Mauthausen (1946; concentration camp Mauthausen), Grossmufti: Grossagent der Achse (1947; head mufti, agent of the Axis), Ich jagte Eichmann (1961; I hunted Eichmann), and Verjährung? (1965; statute of limitations). Through the media and through books and many articles, Wiesenthal presented the philosophy behind his work. He was animated by a deep sense of compassion for the martyrs of the Nazi Holocaust and believed that all victims Jews, Christians, Roma (gypsies), and all nationalities are one. He believed that forgiveness is a personal matter and that one has the right to forgive what was done to oneself but not what was done to others. He did not condone assassination or other radical measures. Morality, he insisted, must remain on the side of the accusers, so proper punishment can come only from the courts. Nazi crimes can never be atoned, he believed, nor will all the murderers be caught, but he pursued them relentlessly so that time would not erase their guilt.

Until the 1970’s, Wiesenthal rarely left Austria and Germany. Gradually, however, he became involved more directly in the work of Holocaust education, lecturing extensively in West Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, primarily at colleges and universities. During the 1970’s his activities became known worldwide through such films as The Odessa File (1974), for which he was a consultant, and The Boys from Brazil (1978), which glamorized the Nazi hunter. However, for two decades he resisted all efforts to depict his life in film or biography, fearing distortion. Finally, in 1987, he agreed to give television rights for a documentary based on his memoirs. The production of Murderers Among Us, for which he was the primary consultant, was presented in 1988 with Ben Kingsley playing Wiesenthal. He also agreed to the 1990 television dramatization of his 1981 book, Max und Helen (Max and Helen, 1982), which recounts the intriguing story of a Nazi killer whom Wiesenthal decided not to pursue.

In April, 1977, Wiesenthal advised in the establishment of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies and the Holocaust Museum at Yeshiva University , both in Los Angeles, with branch offices in New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Toronto, and Jerusalem. The Wiesenthal Center’s broad outreach program of Holocaust education and awareness, monitoring and combating neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic hate groups, and Nazi-hunting, reflects Wiesenthal’s desire that his work would continue, long after his own death.

In his pursuit of Nazis, Wiesenthal made many enemies. Within the Communist bloc, notably in Poland, a propaganda campaign surfaced in the 1960’s against Wiesenthal’s exposure of former fascists placed high in the Communist Party apparatus who had instigated an “anti-Zionist” crusade against Israel. Some Zionists considered his ecumenical, justice-based pursuit of former Nazis to detract from their parochial goals and sought to discredit his efforts. Additionally, he received many death threats, and in 1982 neo-Nazis detonated a bomb outside his home in Vienna. It did much damage to the house; no one was killed, but his wife’s health was affected.

Beginning in the 1970’s, Wiesenthal’s pursuit of former Nazis embroiled him in bitter disputes in his home country, threatening the future of his documentation center. In 1970, he revealed that some Socialist ministers in Austrian chancellor Bruno Kreisky’s government had Nazi backgrounds. The Socialist Party leadership responded with such vehement attacks that it was feared that the Austrian government was going to close down the JHDC. Worldwide protests were credited with having saved it. Again, in 1975, antagonisms flared when Wiesenthal accused an Austrian politician of involvement in SS crimes of mass murder. Chancellor Kreisky, who was considering that politician for a governing coalition, attacked Wiesenthal severely. Relations between the two degenerated to personal invective, until Wiesenthal finally brought a libel suit against the chancellor. Only under threat of an official parliamentary investigation of the JHDC did Wiesenthal finally settle out of court.

In 1986, Wiesenthal again became enmeshed in Austrian politics when Kurt Waldheim , the Austrian presidential candidate, was accused by the World Jewish Congress and other organizations of membership in an SS unit implicated in deporting Jews to death camps. The sensational accusations caused a furor in Austria. Wiesenthal took a cautious line in the beginning, but finally in 1987 he called on newly elected president Waldheim to resign if an international commission of historians, appointed by the Austrian government to study the case, proved that the military unit of which Waldheim was a member had been involved in war crimes.

During the 1980’s, Wiesenthal became increasingly an elder statesman of the Holocaust, traveling widely to publicize his Nazi-hunting message, while continuing to develop information on Nazi criminals. U.S. president Ronald Reagan was a strong supporter and met with him in 1984 to offer assistance. The next year Wiesenthal declined Reagan’s invitation to Bitburg, West Germany, where a controversial wreath-laying ceremony to symbolize U.S.-German reconciliation was to mark the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II. Wiesenthal declined because SS soldiers were buried in the cemetery where the ceremony took place.

In the second half of the 1980’s, Wiesenthal expressed his increasing frustration with the Canadian government, which, after twelve years, had failed to prosecute several hundred known Nazis in Canada, many of whom Wiesenthal had identified. For a decade, Wiesenthal had brought increasing pressure on the government, including boycotting visits to Canada, until twenty key Nazis were brought to trial. In 1985, the government expressed its interest in pursuing the many Nazi criminals allegedly living in Canada, and in 1988 the Toronto branch of the Wiesenthal Center presented enough evidence to the federal justice minister to indict twenty-one accused Nazi war criminals. However, a Canadian government commission appointed to study the evidence concluded that the estimates of Nazi criminals in Canada had been grossly exaggerated and had made only one arrest by 1988. Toward the end of the 1980’s, Wiesenthal and the Wiesenthal Center had generated computer lists of thousands of suspects’ names and addresses, which they presented to government authorities in Australia, Canada, England, the United States, and Sweden. These lists included police chiefs, Gestapo officials, and suspected collaborators.

Until he announced his retirement in April, 2003, Wiesenthal continued to work at the JHDC, pursuing hidden Nazis but also denouncing the global trends toward neofascism and supporting the creation of a Balkan war-crimes tribunal. At last, however, he felt satisfied that he had found the mass murderers for whom he had been searching. His wife died on November 10, 2003. Wiesenthal died in his sleep almost two years later, on September 20, 2005, at the age of ninety-six. He was survived by Paulinka Kriesberg, his daughter, and three grandchildren. Wiesenthal was buried in Herzliya, Israel.

Wiesenthal received numerous honors and awards, including the Diploma of Honor from the League of the United Nations, a special Gold Medal of the American Congress from President Jimmy Carter in 1980, the Great Medal of Merit from the president of West Germany in 1985, a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 1985, membership in the French Legion of Honor in 1986, the Dutch Freedom Medal, the Luxembourg Freedom Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton, many honorary degrees, and honorary citizenship of many U.S. cities. The state of New York declared June 13, 1984, as Simon Wiesenthal Day. During a trip to the United States in 1988, Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany paid tribute to Wiesenthal at a banquet at the Wiesenthal Center in New York. Wiesenthal was pronounced Honor Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004. In 2006 the Vienna city government renamed a street, Simon-Wiesenthal-Gasse, in his honor.

Wiesenthal always knew that he would need help in the search for war criminals and that he would never see the work completed. The West German government had more than 160,000 names in its war-crimes files, most of them never tried. In the 1980’s, it was estimated that fifty thousand Nazi criminals were at large around the world. Accordingly, Wiesenthal considered his greatest legacy to be the Wiesenthal Center because it would continue his work.

Significance

Throughout a career spanning almost fifty years, Wiesenthal dedicated his life to bringing Nazi war criminals to justice and publicizing the crimes of the Holocaust. With the patience of a great scholar, the structural sense of an architect, and the investigative genius of a keen detective, he developed a brilliant talent for investigative thinking. He brought eleven hundred Nazis to justice, making him the most successful Nazi hunter. However, some fellow Holocaust survivors and Nazi hunters, including Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, accused Wiesenthal of gross exaggeration in some of his claims, including, for example, his claim that five million gentiles died in the Holocaust.

Wiesenthal was motivated by a deep sense of outraged justice, a desire to keep faith with the millions of victims of the Holocaust, a desire that the murderers of eleven million Jews and Gentiles not be allowed “to get away with it,” a desire to deter future anti-Semitism and genocide, and a fear that the world would forget the Holocaust. He was a master investigator, avenger, prophet of justice, and a remarkable sleuth. Few have become such symbols in the name of justice and loyalty to the victims of the Holocaust. This sense of justice, perseverance, and success evoked admiration and puzzlement, and the media sometimes cultivated the legendary figure of a Jewish James Bond, scourge of Third Reich fugitives.

In 1988, at a reception honoring Wiesenthal, President Reagan hailed him as “one of the true heroes” of the twentieth century and saluted the Nazi hunter for his “unswerving commitment to do honor to those who burned in the flames of the Holocaust by bringing their murderers and the accomplices of their murderers to the justice of a civilized world.” Reagan then announced his intention to sign into law the international “convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide,” which had languished in the U.S. Senate for four decades.

Wiesenthal’s efforts contributed to the efforts of juridical justice to deal with genocide, the documentation of the Holocaust, Jewish self-identity, and Holocaust remembrance and education, all of which merge in his work. In a memorial statement, Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Wiesenthal Center, considered Wiesenthal the conscience of the Holocaust.

Bibliography

Ashman, Charles, and Robert J. Wagman. The Nazi Hunters: The Shocking True Story of the Continuing Search for Nazi War Criminals. New York: Pharos Books, 1988. A competent and admiring treatment of Wiesenthal’s life and work within the context of other Nazi hunters. Also presents the work of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and an appendix of selected war criminal cases.

Cooper, Abraham. “Simon Wiesenthal: The Man, the Mission, His Message.” In Genocide: Critical Issues of the Holocaust, edited by Alex Grobman and Daniel Landes. Los Angeles: Simon Wiesenthal Center and Rossel Books, 1983. This work contains a brief introduction by Wiesenthal’s close associate and director of the center in Los Angeles.

Fineberg, Michael, Shimon Samuels, and Mark Weitzman, eds. Antisemitism: The Generic Hatred Essays in Memory of Simon Wiesenthal. Portland, Oreg.: Vallentine Mitchell, 2007. A collection of tributes to Wiesenthal, with essays exploring the nature of mass hate, not only in the form of antisemitism but also as expressed toward other scapegoat groups, such as Roma and Tutsis.

Levy, Alan. Nazi Hunter: The Wiesenthal File. Rev. ed. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002. Levy recounts Wiesenthal’s crusade for justice from World War II onward, with major sections devoted to Adolf Eichmann, Franz Stengl, Bruno Kreisky, among others, and the strange case of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. Includes photographs.

Noble, Iris. Nazi Hunter: Simon Wiesenthal. New York: Julian Messner, 1979. A dramatic, accessible biography of Wiesenthal’s life, methods, and main cases, based primarily on his memoirs, for the general reader. Contains a brief bibliography of secondary sources.

Pick, Hella. Simon Wiesenthal: A Life in Search of Justice. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996. A complete biography of Wiesenthal that strives to be objective in its discussions of his conflicts with fellow Austrians, fellow Nazi hunters, and Israeli intelligence officers. Photographs and a bibliography.

Wiesenthal, Simon. The Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Memoirs. Edited by Joseph Wechsberg. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967. A detailed memorialization of the author’s life and work, told to Wechsberg, including the stories of many of the Nazi crimes that inspired Wiesenthal’s searches. Contains illustrations and a biographical profile of Wiesenthal by Wechsberg.