Nazi-hunter Wiesenthal dies at 96
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 yesterday at his home in Vienna, Austria. He had a kidney ailment. Called the ",deputy for the dead", and ",avenging archangel", of the Holocaust, Wiesenthal after the war created a repository of concentration camp testimony 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.
Following the principle ",justice, not vengeance,", Wiesenthal said trials of Nazis would provide moral restitution for the Jews and offer 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 Adolf 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 select women and children at a camp in Poland who were sent to the gas chamber and later was found living as a housewife in Queens, N.Y. His most celebrated early case concerned Eichmann, who had vanished after the war. He said Eichmann was the essence of the ",desk murderer,", a bureaucrat whose policies condemned to torture or death tens of thousands of people at a time.
In 1947, Eichmann`s wife sought to have the Nazi official declared dead. Wiesenthal was able to prove that the alleged witness to the death was Eichmann`s brother-in-law, preventing the death certificate from being approved. Wiesenthal, who knew many SS men who remarried their own ",widows,", said his greatest contribution was ",destroying the legend", that Eichmann had died. By keeping the file active, he helped launch an international manhunt that resulted in Eichmann`s capture by Israeli intelligence. In 1960, Mossad agents kidnapped Eichmann from a street in Buenos Aires. He stood trial in Jerusalem, Israel and was hanged in 1962.
In a New York Times article from 1964, he described attending Sabbath services with a fellow camp survivor who had become a wealthy jeweler. The man asked why Wiesenthal had not resumed architecture, his prewar trade, for it would have made him rich. ",You`re a religious man,", Wiesenthal told his friend. ",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 smuggled coffee and American cigarettes.` Another will say, `I built houses.` But I will say, `I didn`t forget you.` ",
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