Obituary: Simon Wiesenthal

Simon Wiesenthal helped to track down Adolf Eichmann, the one-time SS leader who organised the extermination of the Jews. Picture / Reuters

* Simon Wiesenthal, hunter of Nazi war criminals. Died aged 96.

Simon Wiesenthal waged an untiring campaign to track down Nazi war criminals and keep alive the memory of six million Jews killed in the Holocaust.

Wiesenthal, a Jew and former concentration camp inmate, was best known for helping with the discovery in Argentina of Adolf Eichmann, the man Adolf Hitler entrusted with carrying out the Nazi genocide against the Jews.

The man who helped to trace some 1100 Nazis from his small, file-crammed Vienna office, died this week. He will be buried in Israel.

"Simon Wiesenthal acted to bring justice to those who had escaped justice," Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said. "In doing so, he was the voice of six million."

Altogether the Nazis are estimated to have murdered at least 11 million civilians, including six million Jews, during World War II. The Israeli institute named after Wiesenthal is still trying to track down some 1200 Nazis it suspects to be still alive and at large in 16 countries including Austria, Spain and Croatia.

"Wiesenthal's personal mission has ended, and there are others who are carrying on with the work," said Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Israel.

Born in 1908 in what is now Ukraine, Wiesenthal travelled the world into his old age, lecturing on the Holocaust and until last year came into his office, the Jewish Documentation Centre in Vienna. He maintained that his motivation was not anger but justice. "I am someone who seeks justice, not revenge," he said. "My work is a warning to the murderers of tomorrow, that they will never rest."

Apart from Eichmann, he helped to find the SS officer who in Amsterdam arrested Anne Frank, the teenage author of the Anne Frank Diaries, and the head of the Treblinka extermination camp. His quest for Nazi doctor Josef Mengele ended when Mengele was found dead in Brazil in 1985.

The Germans detained Wiesenthal in Lvov in Galicia in 1941 and he passed through 12 concentration camps before US soldiers liberated him in Mauthausen camp in Austria.

Eighty-nine members of his family perished in the Holocaust but his blonde wife escaped from a camp by pretending she was Polish, not Jewish. Wiesenthal said his own survival was a privilege which committed him to action.

"What touched me was the fact that despite his personal experience, he never became bitter, and carried on in an admirable and just manner," said former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

Wiesenthal said he began memorising perpetrators' names during his detention. A job at the War Crimes Office of the US Army, where he helped prepare evidence against war criminals in 1945, was the beginning of a mission that spanned six decades.

Wiesenthal founded the Jewish Documentation Centre in 1947, which opened its office in Vienna in 1961. He financed his investigations through donations, and by the sale of his books.

But Austria, which was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938 and likes to portray itself as a country that was Germany's victim, was ambivalent for a long time about its famous citizen.

Although Wiesenthal rejected the notion of the collective guilt of a people, he pointed out that a disproportionate number of Nazi war criminals were Austrians.

"Eichmann and 70 per cent of his troupe as well as two-thirds of the commandants of the concentration camps were Austrians," Wiesenthal said. "And after all, Hitler was no Eskimo either."

Hitler was born in Braunau, Austria, in 1889.

Hated by neo-Nazis, Wiesenthal received threats throughout his life. After a bomb was placed outside his home in 1982, police always stood guard.

But when former German Army officer and Austrian presidential candidate Kurt Waldheim came under fire by the Jewish World Congress in 1986, Wiesenthal condemned the congress for rousing anti-Semitism with its campaign.

While judging Waldheim a liar for glossing over his service during World War II, Wiesenthal didn't accuse him of war crimes.

Wiesenthal did not pursue specific cases in his late years but helped younger co-workers. "Should history repeat itself, my example will repeat itself too ... and not once, but 50-fold."

- REUTERS