[Mb-civic] Nazi Hunter Simon Wiesenthal Dies at 96 - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Nazi Hunter Simon Wiesenthal Dies at 96

By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 20, 2005; 3:55 AM

Simon Wiesenthal, 96, the controversial Nazi hunter who 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, died today in 
Vienna, Austria, his base of operations.

Dubbed the "deputy for the dead" and "avenging archangel" of the 
Holocaust, Wiesenthal created after the war a repository of 
concentration camp testimonials and dossiers on Nazis at his Jewish 
Documentation Center. The information was used to help professional 
lawyers prosecute those responsible for some of the 20th century's most 
abominable crimes.

Impassioned, at times intemperate, Wiesenthal spoke of the horrors 
first-hand, having spent the war hovering near death in a series of 
labor and extermination camps. Nearly 90 members of his family perished.

After the Nuremberg Trials of the late 1940s, Wiesenthal remained a 
persistent and lonely voice calling for war crimes trials of former 
Nazis. This was later considered by many a remarkable achievement, 
coming during the Cold War when the major world powers were recruiting 
former Nazis to help govern countries along the Iron Curtain. There was 
little political will to relive World War II, and few cared to challenge 
that perspective.

Martin Mendelsohn, a Washington lawyer who in the late 1970s helped 
establish the Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations within the 
U.S. Justice Department, said in an interview that Wiesenthal "kept the 
memory of the Holocaust alive when everyone wanted it to go away. When 
Jewish groups wanted it to go away, he wanted to keep it alive. That is 
his signal accomplishment."

Following the creed "justice, not vengeance," Wiesenthal said trials of 
Nazis would provide moral restitution for the Jews and have the best 
chance of preventing the anti-Semitism that defined the first half of 
his life.

"I'm doing this because I have to do it," he once said. "I am not 
motivated by a sense of revenge. Perhaps I was for a short time in the 
very beginning. ... Even before I had had time to really think things 
through, I realized we must not forget. If all of us forgot, the same 
thing might happen again, in 20 or 50 or 100 years."

His targets included Adolph Eichmann, one of the foremost planners of 
Jewish extermination; Fritz Stangl, commandant of two death camps; 
Gestapo officer Karl Silberbauer, who arrested Anne Frank in her 
Amsterdam hideout; and Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, who helped process the 
murder of women and children at a camp in Poland and later was found 
living as a housewife in Queens, N.Y.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/20/AR2005092000201.html
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