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 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. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, located in Los Angeles, in the United States, is named in honor of him. Wiesenthal also wrote "The Sunflower" which describes a life-altering event he experienced when he was in the camp.

Early life and World War II

Wiesenthal was born Szymon Wiesenthal, half an hour before midnight on December 31 1908 in Buczacz, Ukrainian Galicia (at the time a part of Austria-Hungary, now a part of the Lviv Oblast section of Ukraine) to 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 Europeduring 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. Under the Poles and Ukrainians, Wiesenthal suffered vicious Anti-Semitism.

At the Humanistic Gymnasium in which Simon went to school during these years, he met his future wife Cyla Muller, whom he would marry in 1936. In 1925, Simon’s mother remarried and moved to the Carpathian Mountains with Simon’s brother. Simon opted to continue his studies in Buczacz, but visited them often.

Upon graduating from high school in 1927, he attended the Czech Technical University in Prague, which he graduated in 1932, after being denied admission to the Lwów University of Technology because of quota restrictions on Jewish students.

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 all of three years until he finished his final job a week before the German invasion, which began September 1, 1939.

Wiesenthal was living in Lwów, (at the time a part of Poland, formerly Lemberg, now called Lviv, the largest city in western Ukraine) when World War II began. As a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Lwów was occupied by the Soviet Union on September 17 1939. Wiesenthal's stepfather and stepbrother were killed by agents of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, as a part of the anti-Polish repressions designed to eliminate all Polish intelligentsia. Wiesenthal was forced to close his firm and work in a factory. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941, Wiesenthal and his family were captured.

Wiesenthal survived an early wave of executions during the Holocaust thanks to the intervention of a man named Bodnar, a Ukrainian auxiliary policeman who, on July 6, 1941, saved him from execution by the Nazis then occupying Lwów, 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 forced to work on the local railroad.

In the ghetto, Wiesenthal’s mother was crammed among other Jewish women onto a freight train to the extermination camp of Belzec, where she perished in August 1942. Around the same time, Cyla Wiesenthal found out her mother had been shot in Buczacz, on her front porch by a Ukrainian policeman as she was being evicted from her home. Cyla and Simon Wiesenthal lost 89 relatives during the Holocaust.

Members of the Home Army, the underground Polish army, helped Cyla Wiesenthal escape from the camp and provided her with false papers in exchange for diagrams of railroad junctions drawn by her husband. Cyla Wiesenthal 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. Following their surprising reunion, they quickly had their first and only child, Paulina, in 1946 (who now lives in Israel).

However, Simon Wiesenthal did not escape imprisonment so quickly. With the help of a deputy director of the camp he managed to escape from Janowska right before the Nazis executed the camp's inmates in October of 1943, and 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. After two failed suicide attempts, Wiesenthal and the 34 remaining Janowska prisoners were sent on a death march from camps in Poland (including Plaszow) and Germany to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. By the time he was liberated by American forces on May 5 [1945], he had been imprisoned in 12 different concentration camps, including five death camps, and had narrowly escaped execution on a number of occasions.

Nazi hunter

At the time of his liberation, Wiesenthal, who stood at 1.80 m (5'11"), weighed less than 45 kg (99 lb). As soon as his health improved, Wiesenthal began working for the U.S. Army gathering documentation for the Nazi war crimes trials. In 1947, he and 30 other volunteers founded the Jewish Documentation Center in Linz, Austria, in order to gather information for future trials. However, as the U.S. and the Soviet Union lost interest in further war crimes trials, the group drifted apart. Wiesenthal continued to gather information in his spare time while working full-time to help those affected by World War II.

During this time, Wiesenthal claimed to be instrumental in the capture and conviction of the main engineer of the "Final Solution," Adolf Eichmann. This was disputed by Isser Harel, the former head of the Mossad, who said that Wiesenthal not only "had no role whatsoever" in the apprehension but in fact had endangered the entire Eichmann operation. Harel's allegations have been disputed at book length, and Wiesenthal's contributions to Harel's published efforts have never been acknowledged. It should be noted, in regard to this and other accusations, that Wiesenthal's ecumenical but determined attitude toward tracking human rights abuses, represented by his comments, "justice, not vengeance," and "I am not a hater," have put him at odds with a wide variety of institutions and people over the years. Among those targeting him are those with a more narrowly Zionist orientation and a vested interest in downplaying the broader human rights implications of the Holocaust in favor of a sectarian and nationalistic Israeli call-to-arms. These critics tend to disavow the effectiveness of Wiesenthal's specific contributions, often with disputable claims, while disregarding his pioneering role in seeking investigations and prosecutions at a time when the political climate had turned strongly toward accommodation with former war criminals.

After Eichmann was executed in Israel in 1962, Wiesenthal reopened the Jewish Documentation Center, which now focused on other cases. Among his most high-profile successes was the capture of Karl Silberbauer, the Gestapo officer responsible for the arrest of Anne Frank. Silberbauer's confession helped discredit claims that The Diary of Anne Frank was a forgery. During this period Wiesenthal also located nine of the 16 Nazis later put on trial in West Germany for the murder of the Jewish population of Lwów and also captured Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor death camps, and Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan, a former Aufseherin (literally, "female supervisor") living on Long Island who had ordered the torture and murder of hundreds of children at Majdanek.

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. The Center promotes awareness of anti-Semitism, monitors neo-Nazi groups, operates the Museums of Tolerance in Los Angeles, California and Jerusalem, and helps bring surviving Nazi war criminals to justice.

Austrian politics and later life

In the 1970s he became involved in Austrian politics when he pointed out that several ministers in Bruno Kreisky's newly formed Socialist government had been Nazis when Austria was part of the Third Reich. Kreisky, himself Jewish, responded by attacking Wiesenthal as 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 many death threats. In 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." According to Simon Wiesenthal, the last major Austrian war criminal still alive is Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann's right-hand man, who is believed to be hiding in Syria under the protection of the Bashar Al-Asad regime. However, Wiesenthal was also believed to be working on the case of Aribert Heim, one of the most notorious and wanted Nazi concentration camp doctors, prior to his retirement. Only weeks after Wiesenthal died, Heim was discovered in Spain.

Wiesenthal spent his last years in Vienna, where his wife, Cyla, died of natural causes on 10 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 23 September. 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."

Criticism

Despite Wiesenthal's achievements in locating many former Nazis, aspects of his work and life were controversial.

According to many historians who specialize in The Holocaust, such as Peter Novick and Yehuda Bauer, as well as the Nobel Prize-winning writer Elie Wiesel, Wiesenthal's repeated claim that five million gentiles were murdered in The Holocaustis a fabrication. Although significantly more than five million gentiles were killed by the Nazis, far fewer than five million were killed as part of a systematic campaign of genocide.

A 7 May 1991, article in the Jerusalem Post said that former Mossad chief Isser Harelhad written an unpublished manuscript which claims that Wiesenthal,"not only 'had no role whatsoever' in Eichmann's apprehension, but infact had endangered the entire Eichmann operation and aborted the planned capture of Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele." Harel said that "[a]ll the information supplied by Wiesenthal, and in anticipation of the operation, was utterly worthless, and sometimes even misleading or of negative value."

Harel claimed that he wrote the manuscript out of frustration at the amount of credit Wiesenthal was claiming for the capture of Eichmann. Harel declined to publish his manuscript, saying that "Nazis and antisemites will be only too happy to read this about Nazi fighter Wiesenthal."

Ina subsequent opinion piece, Haim Mass argued that many of Harel's specific allegations against Wiesenthal could be disproved and that Wiesenthal had initiated the hunt for Eichmann by providing the first photograph of the SSColonel. Wiesenthal himself questioned Harel's motivation for not publishing his manuscript, asking "if he is afraid that 'Nazis and antisemites will be only too happy to read about this Nazi-fighter Wiesenthal,' why does he not hesitate to indulge in discrediting me unreservedly in the media? Does he think Nazis and antisemites read only books, not newspapers?"

Fellow Nazi hunter Tuviah Friedman,who has known Wiesenthal since 1946, accused him of numerous self-aggrandizing lies and of making himself rich from the Eichmann affair.^[1] Another Nazi hunter, Serge Klarsfeld,characterized Wiesenthal as an egomaniac, although he also praised Wiesenthal's trailblazing and often lonely efforts to find justice for the victims of The Holocaust.

OSI head Eli Rosenbaum wrote in his study of the Kurt Waldheim affair, Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up (ISBN 0-312-08219-3):

"In sum, Wiesenthal's roles in the biggest Nazi cases of all — Mengele, Martin Bormann, and in all likelihood, Eichmann as well — were studies in ineptitude, exaggeration, and self-glorification."

Rosenbaum described Wiesenthal as "a congenital liar" to Wiesenthal's biographer, Hella Pick. [2]

Rosenbaum's predecessor at OSI, Neal Sher, in response to Wiesenthal's demand that the OSI investigate suspected war criminals living in the United States, wrote that:

"few of your allegations have resulted in active ongoing investigations[;]the bottom line is that ... no allegation which originated from your office has resulted in a court filing by the OSI". [3]

The controversial[4] Ukrainian-American writer Myron B. Kuropas decried Wiesenthal's statements about the Ukrainians: "The Bolshevik troops were bad, but the Ukrainian cavalrybands were worse" and "The native Ukrainian population cooperated actively with the Gestapo and the SS", because allegedly he offered little substantiation or documentation for them [5].

Simon Wiesenthal has also been criticized in relation with his handling of the Frank Walus case.[6]

Honors

• Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire on 19 February 2004, in recognition of a "lifetime of service to humanity." The knighthood also recognized the work of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
• Presidential Medal of Freedom — U.S.
• Congressional Gold Medal of Honor — U.S.
• 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

Dramatic portrayals

Ben Kingsley portrayed Wiesenthal in the Home Box Office film Murderers Among Us: the Simon Wiesenthal Story.

Documentary

A feature-length documentary of Simon Wiesenthal's life is currently in the works. 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.

Miscellaneous

• 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.

• 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.

See also

• Nazi hunter
• Tuviah Friedman
• Serge and Beate Klarsfeld
• Yaron Svoray
• Efraim Zuroff

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

1. ^  [7], [8], [9], [10], [11]

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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