Simon Wiesenthal

File:S Wiesenthal.jpg

Simon Wiesenthal

Simon Wiesenthal, Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE), (Buczacz), December 31, 1908 – (Vienna), September 20, 2005, was an Austrian-Jewish architectural engineer who became a Nazi hunter after surviving the Holocaust. Following four and a half years in the concentration camps of Janowska, Kraków-Płaszów and Mauthausen-Gusen during World War II, Wiesenthal dedicated most of the remainder of his life to tracking down, hunting and gathering information on fugitive Nazis so that they could be brought to justice for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

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 and lived 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. [3]

Known as the deputy for the dead and avenging archangel of the Holocaust, Mr. 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. To many, his name was a symbol of human conscience.

Controversial during his life, he 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.

A former Mauthausen inmate, later a well-to-do jewelry manufacturer, discovered Wiesenthal's motivation in an after-dinner conversaton; "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 didn't forget you'." (Clyde Farnsworth in the New York Times Magazine (February 2, 1964). [4]

In 1977, Rabbi Marvin Hier named his Jewish human rights center after him. The Simon Wiesenthal Center is located in Los Angeles, California.

Early life

Born Szymon Wiesenthal, on December 31 1908 in Buczacz, Ukrainian Galicia (at the time a part of Austria-Hungary, now a part of the Lvov Oblast section of Ukraine), his was a Jewish merchant family. He enjoyed a relatively pleasant early childhood, in which his father, Asher Wiesenthal, a 1905 refugee from the pogroms of czarist Russia, became an established citizen in Buczacz, trading in sugar and other wholesale commodities.

With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 however, his father, as a Military reserve in the Austro-Hungarian Army was called to active duty and died in combat on the Eastern Front in 1915. With Russian control of Central Europe during this period, Wiesenthal and his remaining family (mother and brother) fled to refuge in Vienna, Austria.

Wiesenthal and his brother went to school in Vienna until the Russian retreat from Galicia in 1917. After moving back to Buczacz, this area of Galicia constantly changed leadership, with numerous ‘liberations’ by surrounding nations, at various times being under Cossack, Austrian, Ukrainian, Polish, and Soviet rule.

In 1925, Simon’s mother remarried and moved to the Carpathian Mountains with his brother. Simon opted to continue his studies in Buczacz. At the Humanistic Gymnasium where Simon went to school during this time, he met his future wife Cyla Mueller, whom he would marry in 1936.

Turned away from the Lwów University of Technology because of quota restrictions on Jewish students, he went instead to the Technical University of Prague. He graduated in 1932 with a degree in architectural engineering.

In 1934 and 1935, Wiesenthal apprenticed as a building engineer in Soviet Russia, spending a few weeks in Kharkov and Kiev, but most of these two years in the Black Sea port of Odessa under Stalin.

Returning to Galicia at the end of his Russian apprenticeship, Wiesenthal was allowed to enter the Lwów University of Technology for the advanced degree that would allow him to practice architecture in Poland. The Poles were again in power, and Wiesenthal was again treated as a subordinate citizen. He opened his own architectural office in Lwów following his marriage, despite not having a Polish diploma in hand. He specialized in elegant villas, which wealthy Polish Jews were building despite the threats of Nazism to the west. His career spanned three years, until the German invasion, which began September 1, 1939.

World War II - The Holocaust

Wiesenthal and his wife were living in Lvov, the largest city in western Ukraine when World War II began. As a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the "non-aggression" pact signed between Germany and Russia, Lvov was occupied by the Soviet Union on September 17 1939.

Soon after began the Red purge of Jewish merchants, factory owners and other professionals. In this purge of "bourgeois" elements that immediately followed the Soviet occupation, designed to eliminate all Polish intelligentsia, 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.

Wiesenthal was forced to close his business and 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. [5]

Wiesenthal survived an early wave of executions thanks to the intervention of a former employee of his, a man named Bodnar, by then a Ukrainian auxiliary policeman who, on July 6, 1941, saved him from execution by the Nazis then occupying Lvov, as recalled in Wiesenthal's memoir, The Murderers Among Us, written with Joseph Wechsberg. Wiesenthal and his wife were first imprisoned in the Janowska Street camp in the suburbs of the city, where they were assigned to forced labor 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 the Warsaw Ghetto, Wiesenthal’s mother was crammed along with other Jewish women onto a freight train to the extermination camp of Belzec, where she perished in August 1942. By September of that year, most of his and his wife's relatives were dead; a total of eighty-nine members of both families perished. [6]

Members of the Home Army, the Polish Underground, helped Cyla Wiesenthal escape from camp and provided her with false papers in exchange for diagrams of railroad junction points made by her husband for use by saboteurs. She was able to hide her Jewish identity from the Nazis because of her blonde hair and survived the war as a forced-laborer in the Rhineland. Until the end of the war, Simon believed she had perished in the Warsaw Uprising.

Simon Wiesenthal did not escape imprisonment as quickly as his wife. With the help of a deputy director of the camp he escaped from Janowska just before the Nazis began eliminating all inmates in October of 1943. He escaped into the Polish underground (for his expertise in engineering and architecture would help the Polish Partisans with bunkers and lines of fortification against German forces).

He was recaptured in June of the following year, 1944, by Gestapo officers 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 kept the few remaining inmates alive. With thirty-four 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. [7]

By the time he was liberated by American forces on May 5 1945, Wiesenthal had been imprisoned in 12 different concentration camps, including five death camps, and had narrowly escaped execution on a number of occasions. 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.

Wiesenthal, believing survival unlikely, twice attempted suicide. He later reported the turning point to be a conversation with an SS corporal one day toward the end of the war. The man bet him that no one would ever believe the truth of what had occurred in the concentration camps Their exchange, Wiesenthal said, brought him the will to live through the war.

Nazi hunter

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 an American armored unit 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. He passed this information on to Israel through the Israeli embassy in Vienna. However, it was not until 1959 that Israel responded to information from 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.

Wiesenthal did not 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. [8]

Austrian politics and later life

In the 1970s Wiesenthal became involved in Austrian politics when he pointed out that several ministers in the newly formed Socialist government had been Nazis when Austria was part of the Third Reich. Wiesenthal was in turn accused of being a Nestbeschmutzer (someone who dirties their own nest). In Austria, which took decades to acknowledge its role in Nazi crimes, Wiesenthal was ignored and often insulted. In 1975, after Wiesenthal had released a report on FPÖ party chairman Friedrich Peter's Nazi past, Chancellor Bruno Kreisky suggested Wiesenthal was part of a "certain mafia" seeking to besmirch Austria and even claimed Wiesenthal collaborated with Nazis and Gestapo to survive, a charge that Wiesenthal labeled ridiculous.

Over the years Wiesenthal received numberous death threats. In June 1982, a bomb placed by German and Austrian neo-Nazis exploded outside his house in Vienna, Austria.

Even after turning 90, Wiesenthal spent time at his small office in the Jewish Documentation Center in central Vienna. In April 2003, Wiesenthal announced his retirement, saying that he had found the mass murderers he had been looking for: "I have survived them all. If there were any left, they'd be too old and weak to stand trial today. My work is done." He has been credited with ferreting out 1,100 of Adolf Hitler's killers.

Wiesenthal spent his last years in Vienna, where his wife, Cyla, died of natural causes in November 2003 at the age of 95. Wiesenthal died in his sleep at age 96 in Vienna on September 20, 2005, and was buried in the city of Herzliya in Israel on September 23. He is survived by his daughter, Paulinka Kriesberg, and three grandchildren.

In a statement on Wiesenthal's death, Council of Europe chairman Terry Davis said, "Without Simon Wiesenthal's relentless effort to find Nazi criminals and bring them to justice, and to fight anti-Semitism and prejudice, Europe would never have succeeded in healing its wounds and reconciling itself... He was a soldier of justice, which is indispensable to our freedom, stability and peace."

Despite Wiesenthal's achievements in locating many former Nazis, aspects of his work and life were controversial. Still, he is considered a hero to many of the Jews who endured and survived the Holocaust.

Wiesenthal Center

The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles

In 1977, a Holocaust memorial agency was named in his honor as the Simon Wiesenthal Center. In dedicating the Center to him, founder Rabbi Marvin Hier stated; "I think he'll be remembered as the conscience of the Holocaust. In a way he became the permanent representative of the victims of the Holocaust, determined to bring the perpetrators of the greatest crime to justice."

The Center is an international Jewish human rights organization which claims a multifaceted mission generating changes through the Snider Social Action Institute. The Center provides education through promoting awareness of anti-Semitism, hate and terrorism, monitors neo-Nazi groups, promotes human rights and dignity, stands with Israel, defends the safety of Jews worldwide, and teaches the lessons of the Holocaust for future generations.

It operates the Museums of Tolerance in Los Angeles, California and Jerusalem, and helps bring surviving Nazi war criminals to justice. With a constituency of over 400,000 households in the United States, it is accredited as an NGO at international organizations including the United Nations, UNESCO, and the Council of Europe. Headquartered in Los Angeles, the Simon Wiesenthal Center maintains offices in New York, Toronto, Palm Beach, Paris, Buenos Aires and Jerusalem. [9]

Honors

• Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, presented on February 19, 2004, in recognition of a "lifetime of service to humanity." The knighthood also recognized the work of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
• United States Presidential Medal of Freedom
• Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, presented by President Jimmy Carter in 1980
• Légion d'honneur - France
• Dutch Freedom Medal
• Luxembourg Freedom Medal
• Austrian Cross of Honor of the Sciences and Arts
• Decorations from Austrian and French resistance groups
• Polonia Restituta - Poland
• Israel Liberata- Israel
• United Nations League for the Help of Refugees Award

Books and Films

• Writing under the pen name of Mischka Kukin, Wiesenthal published Humor behind the Iron Curtain in 1962. This is the earliest known compendium of jokes from the Soviet Bloc countries published in the west.

• Ben Kingsley portrayed Wiesenthal in the HBO film Murderers Among Us: the Simon Wiesenthal Story.

• The character of Yakov Lieberman (called Ezra Lieberman in the film) in Ira Levin's novel The Boys from Brazil is modeled on Wiesenthal.

• Wiesenthal was portrayed by the Israeli actor Shmuel Rodensky in the film adaptation of Frederick Forsyth's The Odessa File providing information to a German journalist attempting to track down a Nazi war criminal.

• In 1990, Martin Landau played Wiesenthal in the TV movie Max and Helen.

A feature-length documentary of Simon Wiesenthal's life is in the works (as of November 2006). It is being produced by Moriah Films, the Academy Award-winning media subdivision of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The film is to be narrated by Academy Award-winning actress Nicole Kidman.

External links

• A biography at the Wiesenthal Center
• Simon Wiesenthal at the Internet Movie Database
• Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story at the Internet Movie Database
• Simon Wiesenthal: Holocaust Survivor and Famed Nazi-hunter — Holocaust Select Resources
• The Art of Remembrance: Simon Wiesenthal; documentary by Hannah Heer & Werner Schmiedel
• BBC News on Wiesenthals Death 20 September 2005
• Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service
• Simon Wiesenthal Center announcement of death
• Simon Wiesenthal 1908-2005
• Audio of Simon Wiesenthal and from his commemoration
• Obituary: Simon Wiesenthal 1908-2005

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