Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal dies at 96

updated 8:14 a.m. ET Sept. 20, 2005

LOS ANGELES - Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor who helped track down Nazi war criminals following World War II, then spent the later decades of his life fighting anti-Semitism and prejudice against all people, died Tuesday. He was 96.

Wiesenthal died in his sleep at his home in Vienna, said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

“I think he’ll be remembered as the conscience of the Holocaust. In a way he became the permanent representative of the victims of the Holocaust, determined to bring the perpetrators of the greatest crime to justice,” Hier told The Associated Press.

Wiesenthal, who was an architect before World War II, changed his life’s mission after the war, dedicating himself to trying to track down Nazi war criminals and to being a voice for the 6 million Jews who died during the onslaught. He himself lost 89 relatives in the Holocaust.

Wiesenthal spent more than 50 years hunting Nazi war criminals, speaking out against neo-Nazism and racism, and remembering the Jewish experience as a lesson for humanity. Through his work, he said, some 1,100 Nazi war criminals were brought to justice.

“When history looks back I want people to know the Nazis weren’t able to kill millions of people and get away with it,” he once said.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that Wiesenthal “brought justice to those who had escaped justice.”

“He acted on behalf of 6 million people who could no longer defend themselves,” ministry spokesman Mark Regev said. “The state of Israel, the Jewish people and all those who oppose racism recognized Simon Wiesenthal’s unique contribution to making our planet a better place.”

Concentration camp survivor
Calls of remorse poured into Wiesenthal’s office in Vienna, where one of his longtime assistants, Trudi Mergili, struggled to deal with her grief.

“It was expected,” she said. “But it is still so hard.”

Dragen Tatic / HBF via Reuters Simon Wiesenthal, seen here in June 2005, was born in 1908 in what is now Ukraine and helped catch major Nazi war criminals such as Adolf Eichmann and Franz Stangl, the ex-commandant of the Treblinka death camp.

Wiesenthal was first sent to a concentration camp in 1941, outside Lviv, Ukraine, according to the Wiesenthal Center Web site. In October 1943, he escaped from the Ostbahn camp just before the Germans began killing all the inmates. He was recaptured in June 1944 and sent back to Janwska, but escaped death as his SS guards retreated westward with their prisoners from the Soviet Red Army.

Wiesenthal’s quest began after the Americans liberated the Mauthausen death camp in Austria where Wiesenthal was a prisoner in May 1945. It was his fifth death camp among the dozen Nazi camps in which he was imprisoned, and he weighed just 99 pounds when he was freed. He said he quickly realized “there is no freedom without justice,” and decided to dedicate “a few years” to that mission.

“It became decades,” he added.

Even after turning 90, Wiesenthal continued to remind and to warn. While appalled at atrocities committed by Serbs against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in the 1990s, he said no one should confuse the tragedy there with the Holocaust.

“We are living in a time of the trivialization of the word ’Holocaust,”’ he told AP in 1999. “What happened to the Jews cannot be compared with all the other crimes. Every Jew had a death sentence without a date.”

Eichmann capture
Wiesenthal’s life spanned a violent century.

He was born on Dec. 31, 1908, to Jewish merchants at Buczacs, a small town near the present-day Ukrainian city of Lviv in what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire. He studied in Prague and Warsaw and in 1932 received a degree in civil engineering.

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