Nazi hunter calls it quits
2003-04-18 20:55
Vienna - Famed Nazi hunter and concentration camp survivor Simon Wiesenthal told an Austrian magazine on Friday he is retiring from a nearly 60-year career chasing those responsible for the Holocaust.
"My work is done. I found the mass murderers I was looking for. I survived all of them. Those whom I didn't look for are too old and sick today to be pursued legally," the 95-year-old Wiesenthal told the Austrian weekly Format.
For years Wiesenthal aided the Israeli secret service, the Mossad, who was then able to kidnap Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1961 and try him in Israel, where he was executed.
As head of the Gestapo's Jewish department, Eichmann directed the Final Solution, Hitler's plan to wipe out European Jewry.
But Eichmann was only the most celebrated former Nazi - his Wiesenthal Centre hunted more than 3 000, and more than 1 000 were brought to justice - whom the tireless human rights advocate tracked down.
Simon Wiesenthal was born in 1908 in the Lvov region of the Ukraine, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and got a degree in architectural engineering from the Technical University of Prague in 1932.
Labour camps
In 1941, Hitler's troops invaded Ukraine, and a year later he and his wife Cyla were in a forced labour camp. His mother meanwhile died in the Belzec concentration camp.
Eighty-nine other members of his and his wife's families were soon to die in camps.
In 1944, he was in the Janwska labour camp just outside Lvov, which was evacuated by Nazi guards on a westward march through the Gross Rosen, Buchenwald and Mauthausen camps, the last in upper Austria, where he was liberated by US soldiers on May 5, 1945.
He managed to find his wife, who had survived the war in several other labour camps, passing as a Polish Catholic.
Soon thereafter, he began collecting information on Nazi war criminals for the US army, and opened a documentation centre in Linz, Austria to collect evidence for future trials.
As the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union intensified, both sides lost interest in prosecuting Nazi war criminals. He closed the centre in 1954, but continued his quest to find and bring Eichmann to justice.
Encouraged by Eichmann's capture in 1961, he opened the Jewish Documentation Centre in Vienna.
Six years later came his next major coup: the arrest in Sao Paulo of the former commander of the Treblinka concentration camp, Franz Stangl, who was put on trial in Duesseldorf and later died in prison.
Most famous criminal
The most famous war criminal to escape him was an Austrian, Alois Brunner, who reportedly escaped to Syria and enjoyed the protection of the Syrian government.
Brunner was an early commander of the Drancy transit camp north of Paris, from where a majority of the 75 000 deported French Jews were sent to death camps.
He then organised the mass deportation of the Greek Jewish community, 90% of which was killed.
Wiesenthal made a point of distinguishing between war criminals and simple Nazi party members.
In his autobiography, Justice and Not Vengeance, he wrote, "The Nazi Party included about 10 million members. At most, 150 000 of them carried out criminal activities."
He was criticised for refusing to call former Austrian President Kurt Waldheim a war criminal, saying only that Waldheim knew of atrocities committed, which the former president denied.
According to Format, the head of the Jerusalem Centre, Ephraim Zuroff, could become the new director of the worldwide organisation, which today has its headquarters in Los Angeles.