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AT: Simon Wiesenthal Passes Away Aged 96


Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor who helped track down numerous Nazi war criminals following World War II then spent the later decades of his life fighting anti-Semitism and prejudice against all people, passed away at his home in Vienna, Austria Tuesday, aged 96
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21/9/2005, 7:31 Link to this post Send Email to Atomica   Send PM to Atomica
 
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Re: AT: Simon Wiesenthal Passes Away Aged 96


Simon Wiesenthal, who devoted much of his life to tracking down fugitive Nazi war criminals, is to be honoured in a memorial service in Vienna.

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21/9/2005, 7:33 Link to this post Send Email to Atomica   Send PM to Atomica
 
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Re: AT: Simon Wiesenthal Passes Away Aged 96


Daily Telegraph, UK, 21-09-2005


Simon Wiesenthal, who died yesterday aged 96, was head of the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre, which he established in Austria after the Second World War to search for Nazi war criminals and to collect evidence against them.

Wiesenthal's purpose was to ensure, as he put it, that "no Nazi murderer, however old he may be, will be allowed to die in peace". Yet he did not feel that the importance of his work rested only on bringing criminals to justice.

"It is important for criminals to know that they are not forgotten," he said. "Even 40 years after they committed their crimes, and even though they are thousands of miles from the scene of their crimes, they should not feel safe."

Wiesenthal was instrumental in the identification and arrest of some 3,000 war criminals, most famously Adolf Eichmann, the SS "desk murderer" who turned the mass killing of Jews in the Third Reich into an organised industry. The trial and imprisonment of the former Treblinka death camp commandant Franz Strangl, and of the bestial Majdanek camp guard Hermine Braunsteiner, were among other notable successes.

Wiesenthal was not unusually vindictive by nature, but on his release from Mauthausen concentration camp in 1945 he felt that those responsible for the death camps must, if possible, be brought to account. He planned to spend two or three years helping to bring them to justice, but the undertaking proved more formidable than he expected and became his life's work.

He established his headquarters in Austria quite deliberately. "If you want to study malaria [sic]," he explained to a friend, "you go and live among tse tse." He considered that the Austrians were worse Nazis than the Germans, and half of the names on the gigantic list he eventually assembled - 22,000 men and women suspected of involvement in the Holocaust - were Austrian.

Having first put his phenomenal memory at the service of the Americans' War Crimes Unit - he provided a detailed list of 91 savage SS officers and camp guards he had encountered in the several camps to which he had been consigned during the war - he began to build up his own archive at Linz in 1947.

While some of the results of his work were dramatic, the daily routine was not. Wiesenthal's style was deliberate, cumbersome, painstaking, a matter of accumulating, sifting and classifying and, above all, checking documents from many sources in many languages. He was never prepared to accept the flood of documents emanating from Soviet sources at their face value.

By 1954, depressed by others' seeming indifference to his quest and short of funds, Wiesenthal closed the office down, sending a mountain of case files to Yad Vashem's archive in Israel.

But after the Mossad's capture of Eichmann in Argentina, and his subsequent trial in Israel, in 1960, Wiesenthal reopened his office in Vienna, in a building on the site of the Hotel Metropole, which had served as Gestapo headquarters from the time of the Anschluss in 1938.

He did not relish the role of grim avenger - though with his large frame, slight stoop and sometimes aggressive manner, he looked the part - and he often reiterated his stand that retribution was not an end in itself. "We must not forget," he said, "that what happened to the Jews could happen to any minority."

Simon Wiesenthal was born on December 31 1908 at Buczacz, Galicia, an autonomous region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where Polish was the official language. Although born before midnight on the 31st, the infant Simon was registered as the first-born Jewish boy of Buczacz in 1909 - an arrangement which his maternal grandparents believed would bring him good fortune.

Of Buczacz's population of 10,000, 60 per cent were Jews, and Simon was brought up in a traditional Jewish milieu. His father was a wholesale merchant who traded mostly in sugar; his mother was well read in the classics of German literature.

Yiddish was spoken at home, Polish in public places, and from his mother Simon learned German. Later he would add Russian, Czech and English.

From 1915 to 1917, the family was obliged to seek refuge in Vienna, when Buczacz was overrun by Jew-baiting Cossacks from Russia. They lived in the Leopoldstadt, the district occupied by Vienna's poorer, more orthodox Jews. Simon and his younger brother Hillel attended the Volksschule in Bäuerlegasse, where almost all the pupils were Jews.

When the family returned to Buczacz in 1917, Simon so missed his friends - and his brother, who had been left with their grandmother - that his mother sent him back to Vienna. He travelled by train in the charge of a soldier whose St Bernard dog rested its head on the boy's lap for much of the 25-hour journey. "I couldn't move at all," he recalled.

Six months later, with the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, all the members of his family had returned to Buczacz, at that point annexed to Poland.

But while his education continued in Polish, there were continual changes of authority: Russian Bolsheviks drove out the Poles; the Poles enlisted the aid of the brutal Ukrainian Petlyura cavalry. "We would get up without knowing what regime was in power," Wiesenthal remembered.

One day the Petlyura cavalry threatened to burn the town down unless 100 litres of schnapps were produced by nightfall. Two old Jews pushed a cart from house to house collecting any liquor anyone had.

When Simon ran across the street on an errand for his mother, a Cossack rode up and stabbed the boy in the leg, right down to the bone, with his sabre. The resulting scar was to serve as a reminder that the Nazis did not have a monopoly on wanton cruelty.

In 1923, by which time young Wiesenthal was attending the local gymnasium, his brother broke his back in an accident and later died. To the end of his days Wiesenthal kept a photograph of Hillel's gravestone in the cemetery at Buczacz, one of a few to escape desecration during the Second World War.

One of Wiesenthal's classmates at the gymnasium was Cyla Müller. The two became close and eventually, in 1936, were married at Lvov, where, after a period of study in Prague, Wiesenthal was trying to establish himself as an architect.

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21/9/2005, 7:35 Link to this post Send Email to Atomica   Send PM to Atomica
 
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Re: AT: Simon Wiesenthal Passes Away Aged 96


Hampered by increasing discrimination against Jews, it was only in 1939 that he was allowed to qualify as an "architectural engineer" after the successful construction of a tuberculosis sanitorium under his direction.

When the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin that year, Poland was partitioned; Galicia, with Lvov as its capital, was transferred to Soviet sovereignty. In September, the Red Army and the NKVD arrived and set about arresting "bourgeois" Jews.

By bribing an NKVD official Wiesenthal managed to remain at liberty with his wife and mother. Banned from his profession, he secured a factory job filling quilts with feathers.

In June 1941 the Germans invaded the Soviet part of Poland, and marched into Lvov. The Ukrainians, who had fled to Germany in 1939, returned to indulge in a three-day pogrom in which more than 6,000 Jews were killed.

SS troops under the command of Reinhard Heydrich, who produced the blueprint for the establishment of the extermination camps, followed in the Ukrainians' wake, with orders to execute the "Bolshevik intelligensia", especially the Jews.

All Jews were forced to move into the ghetto. The able-bodied, including Wiesenthal and his wife, were put to forced labour, and in the summer of 1942 those who were too old or sick to work were rounded up. Returning from work one evening, Wiesenthal found the door of the house open, and his frail mother gone - herded on to a train bound for Belzec extermination camp.

He never discovered her fate, or her grave, and despaired that he did not even have a photograph. "When I was taken from the ghetto to the concentration camp," he explained, "everything that I still possessed was taken from me. There is nothing left from my home or my family, not even a handkerchief, and I would give anything to have a picture of my mother."

In October 1942 Wiesenthal and his wife were taken to the camp at Janowska, near Lvov, but after a few weeks were transferred to a small labour camp nearby, to work in a railway repair works. Cyla polished brass and nickel; Simon worked as a signpainter, replacing Soviet insignia with swastikas.

In early 1943, Cyla, who had blonde hair and grey-blue eyes, was smuggled out with forged identity papers provided by a German works supervisor, Adolf Kohlrautz, and with the help of the Polish partisans.

Wiesenthal himself escaped a year later, and for a time was also helped to stay in hiding by the Polish underground. He was recaptured in June 1944, having been discovered during a search under the floorboards of a house in Lvov. He was beaten up and returned to Janowska, where he tried to commit suicide by cutting his wrists with a razor blade.

After five weeks in hospital, two more suicide attempts and stints in various camps, Wiesenthal was consigned to Mauthausen, near Linz, in February 1945. It was a smaller camp - a mere 350,000 victims passed through it - but one of the worst. When Wiesenthal arrived, its gas chamber was working to full capacity; smoke belched from the crematorium chimney round the clock.

Too ill to be able to work, Wiesenthal was placed in the death block, where, during March, 930 of the 1,500 inmates died. Wiesenthal was given extra food when a Kapo guard discovered that he could draw, and gave him drawing materials to produce presents for the other guards.

Secretly, Wiesenthal also drew a series of gruesome concentration camp cartoons, which, after the camp's liberation by the Americans in May 1945, were published as KZ Mauthausen.

It was perhaps his experience at Mauthausen which shaped his attitudes and determined his post-war career. The very fact of being among the Jews who survived left him with a sense of obligation to those who perished.

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21/9/2005, 7:36 Link to this post Send Email to Atomica   Send PM to Atomica
 
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Re: AT: Simon Wiesenthal Passes Away Aged 96


So he volunteered his services to the Americans' War Crimes Unit, supplying them with his list of 91 names. He was also scrupulous in recording the names of two Germans who had behaved decently, one of them being Adolf Kohlrautz.

A few days later Wiesenthal actually joined the War Crimes Unit - and soon afterwards, with the help of American friends, traced and was reunited with his wife Cyla. Within 18 months he had set up his Jewish Historical Documentation Centre, and had begun urgently to compile evidence from concentration camp survivors in the American zone before they dispersed around the world.

Among the names on the "most wanted list" drawn up by the Jewish Agency for Palestine was that of Adolf Eichmann. Rumours that Eichmann was in Austria led Wiesenthal to the village of Altaussee, where Frau Eichmann and her three children were living. But, Wiesenthal discovered, she claimed that Eichmann had died fighting in Prague in 1945, and then in 1947 she sought to have him declared dead.

Wiesenthal, knowing that Eichmann had been seen alive at Altaussee in June 1945, did not accept this, and succeeded in blocking Vera Eichmann's application.

He feared that a death declaration would bring the search to an end, and it was almost certainly due to his persistence that Israel, preoccupied with building a new state from 1947, resumed the hunt in 1957.

In 1953 it was Wiesenthal who discovered that Eichmann had fled to Argentina - as a consequence of his sole relaxation, stamp collecting. Baron Mast, a fellow philatelist, showed him a letter from a former Wehrmacht friend in Buenos Aires.

The writer recounted that he had met some acquaintances from their regiment, and continued: "Imagine whom else I saw… that dreadful swine Eichmann who commanded the Jews. He lives near Buenos Aires and works for a water company."

Wiesenthal informed the Israeli Consul General in Vienna. Five years later the Israeli Intelligence Service, the Mossad, was informed by the Frankfurt Prosecutor Fritz Bauer that Eichmann was indeed in Argentina, and in 1960 Mossad agents spirited him out of the country to Israel, where he was tried and hanged.

Apart from the Eichmann case, Wiesenthal's proudest achievement, and one for which he was wholly responsible, was the bringing to trial of Franz Strangl, the commandant of Treblinka extermination camp, commended by the Nazi leadership as "the best camp commander in Poland".

During Strangl's time in charge at Treblinka, 800,000 inmates were gassed - leaving 25 railway freight cars of women's hair, 145,000 kilos of gold wedding rings, 100 freight cars of shoes, several thousand pearl necklaces and several millions of dollars.

Earlier, Strangl had been involved with the "euthanasia programme" experiments on the mentally retarded and terminally ill at Schloss Hartheim, not far from Mauthausen, had worked at Chelmno and Belzec (where some of the first gas chambers were installed), and, before taking up the reins at Treblinka, had been commandant of Sobibor extermination camp.

Wiesenthal discovered that Strangl was living in Brazil and secured his deportation to Germany, where he was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1967. "If I have done nothing else in my life but bring this wicked man to trial," said Wiesenthal, "I will not have lived in vain."

Wiesenthal was interested in justice, not indiscriminate revenge; he consistently argued that punishment has to be individual, not collective, and that to incriminate a man on incomplete evidence is a crime in itself.

He was involved in angry exchanges with the World Jewish Congress when it suggested, on what seemed to him dubious grounds, that Kurt Waldheim was a war criminal. If Waldheim were elected President of Austria, Wiesenthal said, "it will be due to the misguided and ill-informed efforts of the World Jewish Congress". And so it proved.

Wiesenthal received no public funding for his work, and travelled the world to raise funds for his documentation centre. He and his wife and their child lived simply in a small house under constant police guard, though not all of Wiesenthal's enemies were former Nazis. His fund-raising inevitably gave rise to slanders that the money went into his own pocket.

Former Chancellor Bruno Kreisky (himself a Jew) even suggested, on the evidence of dubious information received from Polish and East German sources, that Wiesenthal had been in the pay of the Gestapo - an accusation which Kreisky retracted swiftly when served with a writ for libel.

Perhaps Wiesenthal's greatest disappointment was the escape from justice of Dr Josef Mengele, the doctor at Auschwitz notorious for performing inhuman experiments, especially on twins; he drowned swimming in Paraguay.

But nothing could divert Wiesenthal from his aim, which assumed the intensity of a sacred duty. He would go on, he said, as long as God gave him strength and friends gave him money, and he did.

"My whole life's work," he explained during a visit to Auschwitz in 1994, "is to ensure that the murderers of tomorrow - who may not even be born yet - must know that they will have no peace. Such warnings are vital for future generations." He retired in October 2001.

His books included I Hunted Eichmann (1961); The Murderers Amongst Us (1967) and Justice Not Vengeance (1989). He was depicted in the films The Odessa File and The Boys from Brazil. Wiesenthal received numerous awards and decorations and was appointed an honorary KBE in 2004.

Cyla Wiesenthal died in November 2003. Simon Wiesenthal is survived by their daughter.

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21/9/2005, 7:36 Link to this post Send Email to Atomica   Send PM to Atomica
 
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Re: AT: Simon Wiesenthal Passes Away Aged 96


Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor who did more than any single individual to bring Nazi war criminals to justice, passed away yesterday at his modest home in Vienna at the age of 96.

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