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Simon Wiesenthal (31 December 1908 – 20 September 2005) was a Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer. He studied architecture, and was living in Lwów at the outbreak of World War II.
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.
- Overview
- Early life
- “Nazi hunter”
- Vision
- Conflicts
- Honours and writings
Simon Wiesenthal (born December 31, 1908, Buczacz, Galicia, Austria-Hungary [now Buchach, Ukraine]—died September 20, 2005, Vienna, Austria) founder (1961) and head (until 2003) of the Jewish Documentation Centre in Vienna. During World War II Wiesenthal was a prisoner in five Nazi concentration camps, and after the war he dedicated his life to the...
Wiesenthal studied architectural engineering at the Technical University of Prague and in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), where he settled with his wife in the mid-1930s. Although he ardently supported the Zionist movement, he stayed in Lwów, later explaining, “During that period we never took [Adolf] Hitler seriously.” Following the German occup...
Soon after his liberation, Wiesenthal handed the U.S. Army a list of Nazi criminals and subsequently helped American intelligence organizations gather evidence in preparation for the first trials against war criminals, in Dachau and Nürnberg (see Nürnberg trials). Settling in Linz, Austria, where he worked in the displaced persons camps for two Jewish welfare organizations—the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Organization for Rehabilitation and Training—Wiesenthal continued his own efforts to ferret out former Nazis. In 1948 he participated in an abortive attempt made by three Israeli agents to apprehend Adolf Eichmann in Austria. In March 1953 he informed the Israeli consul general in Vienna, Aryeh Eshel, that Eichmann was hiding in Argentina, where Israeli agents abducted him in 1960. Eichmann’s final identification was based in part on information supplied by Wiesenthal, but Wiesenthal did not accompany the Israeli agents to Argentina. After his abduction, Eichmann was taken to Israel, put on trial, convicted, and executed in 1962. In a private letter, Wiesenthal expressed his objection to Eichmann’s execution, arguing that he should be kept alive and used as a witness in the trials of other Nazi criminals.
In 1960 Wiesenthal and his wife and daughter moved to Vienna, and the following year he opened the Jewish Documentation Centre in Vienna. In the following years, Israel’s secret intelligence agency, the Mossad, supported Wiesenthal’s work, covering part of his expenses. Searching for thousands of SS and Gestapo members, Wiesenthal worked mostly by himself, in a tiny office, using historical documents, old address books, and telephone directories as his sources and only rarely sending agents and detectives to do field work. In 1963 Wiesenthal identified Karl Silberbauer, an Austrian policeman serving in Amsterdam who in 1944 had participated in the arrest of Anne Frank and her family.
Wiesenthal rejected the concept of collective guilt and objected to out-of-court acts of vengeance. A strong believer in the liberal system of justice, he insisted that each case be proved in court, and he regarded the trials not only as acts of justice but also as exercises in moral and political education. In 1968 Wiesenthal produced a book called The Sunflower, a comprehensive symposium on guilt and forgiveness based on what Wiesenthal described as a real experience he had had during the war. According to his account, he was taken to a mortally wounded SS man who asked Wiesenthal to forgive him for his war crimes so that he would be able to die in peace. Wiesenthal did not forgive him. Subsequently, Wiesenthal wrote up a detailed account of the incident and sent it to leading statesmen and intellectuals, asking them what they would have done in his place. The Sunflower appeared in numerous languages, and among those whose reflections were included were Herbert Marcuse, Cynthia Ozick, Desmond Tutu, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, and the Dalai Lama; it has been used as reading material in schools worldwide, reflecting Wiesenthal’s educational efforts. In 1977 Wiesenthal lent his name to the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, but he was involved only indirectly in that centre’s activity.
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Wiesenthal advocated a broad humanistic approach to the Holocaust, describing the extermination of the Jews as a crime against humanity and Holocaust memory not merely as a moral obligation to the dead but primarily as a tool in the struggle against further war crimes and racism. According to Wiesenthal, the extermination of the Jews can be properly understood only in the context of the persecution of other groups, such as Roma, the mentally ill, homosexuals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and he compared the Holocaust to acts of genocide that occurred after World War II (such as those in Cambodia, the Balkans, and Rwanda).
In 2002 Wiesenthal formulated his educational vision for the future in a response to a letter from schoolchildren in Highland Park, New Jersey:
What we experienced during the war was such a nightmare, that it is little wonder so many young people tend to look away and say, that’s a part of history and has nothing to do with us today. But that is where we, the survivors, have to step in and tell them over and over again, that all this really did happen and that it is more important for all of you than you can imagine. For you are used to living in freedom, but you should recognize the danger that lies in fast changes, that can take away your freedom before you even realize it. Freedom is like health, I always tell young people; you don’t recognize its value until you’ve lost it. Freedom is not a gift from the heavens, you have to fight for it every day of your life.
Wiesenthal’s outlook on the Holocaust led to an angry dispute with the writer Elie Wiesel, who would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Wiesel accused Wiesenthal of playing down the singular nature of the Holocaust, which Wiesel saw in the fact that although “not all victims of the Nazis were Jews, all Jews were victims.” Respected by many a...
Wiesenthal’s legendary image as a “Nazi hunter” (a term he detested) inspired several filmmakers, and among the actors who portrayed him were Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir Ben Kingsley. Wiesenthal received numerous honorary doctorates and awards in various countries, including the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal (1980) and the French Legion of Honour (1986). In 2004 he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
He also wrote several novels, including Max und Helen (1981; Max and Helen), and other books, such as KZ. Mauthausen (1946; “Concentration Camp Mauthausen”), Ich jagte Eichmann (1961; “I Hunted Eichmann”), Verjährung (1964; “Statute of Limitations”), The Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Memoirs (1967), Segel der Hoffnung (1972; Sails of Hope), Every Day Remembrance Day: A Chronicle of Jewish Martyrdom (1986), and Justice, Not Vengeance (1989).
- Tom Segev
The Simon Wiesenthal Center is a Jewish global human rights organization researching the Holocaust and hate in a historic and contemporary context.
Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor, dedicated his life to raising public awareness of the need to hunt and prosecute Nazis who have evaded justice. After liberation, Wiesenthal worked for the War Crimes Section of the United States Army, and in 1947 he opened the Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Austria.
Feb 28, 2001 · Longtime studio exec and producer Sam Wiesenthal, responsible with Carl Laemmle Jr. for bringing about Universal’s classic “All Quiet on the Western Front” as well as “Frankenstein” with...
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May 29, 2018 · Simon Wiesenthal >Simon Wiesenthal (born 1908) was a Ukrainian Jew caught in the horrors of >World War II [1]. Having lost most of his family to the death camps of the >Holocaust, he spent the years following the war tracking down and seeking >the conviction of Nazi war criminals.
