Simon Wiesenthal: Relentless Crusader for justice
By D. B. S. Jeyaraj
The greatest twentieth - century crime against humanity was the holocaust
implemented by the German Nazi regime headed by Adolf Hitler. Around six million of
nearly twelve million people incarcerated in European concentration camps were
exterminated cold blood idly in a precise systematic fashion as part of what is termed
"clinically" as the "final solution". The victims were overwhelmingly those of the Jewish
faith but non - Jewish nationals of more than twenty countries were also executed.
The enormity of this horrible atrocity is unbelievably Appalling. It was sheer genocide.
There has been a concerted campaign by vested interests to deny the holocaust.
There are some who refuse to believe this gruesome example of mans inhumanity to
man and underplay it. Others trivialise it by comparing lesser crimes to the holocaust.
Surviving victims of that tragedy however are incensed over such comparisons. No
crime against humanity can be equated with that of the holocaust they say. There is
much truth in that claim.
One such Jewish victim who survived was a man called Simon Wisenthal an architect
who survived along with his wife. Life was never the same for him again. Instead of
pursuing his profession or turning to some other profitable venture as many of his
people did Simon Wiesenthallife's a crusade for justice his life's goal.. From 1946 to
the end of his days Wisenthal made hunting down Nazi war criminals and bringing
them to justice his life - long mission. He passed away in sleep peacefully in Vienna
on September 20th.
Simon Wiesenthal was one of my heroes. I have never met the man but was
impressed and inspired by his mission for justice from the time I first read about it in
my school days. I have devoured a lot that was written by him and about him. He was
praised by many and reviled by some. He was not perfect and made many mistakes.
One accusation against him was that he exaggerated his accomplishments and was a
publicity hunter. But warts and all he was to me a very great man and inspirational
figure. It is easy to conjure up an image of the man as one pursuing a vendetta. But to
me he was not a symbol of vengeance but that of justice and the unvanquished
human spirit.
I once met a holocaust survivor from Poland in Boston. She was the grandmother of a
friend. The prisoner number etched on her forearm remained still. She made no
attempt to remove, change or diminish it. She said that she gazed at it intently each
day while bathing. It reminded her of the past and instilled a feeling that such a
tragedy must never happen again. She had turned her back on that terrible
experience and had made a new life in a new land. But she needed to be reminded of
the past regularly because humanity must not forget she said.
She was a highly educated and cultured lady very knowledgeable about international
affiairs. She knew about the Sri Lankan situation and the Tamil predicament. I
remember my friend being surprised by the swift rapport established between her
grandmother and myself. I think the old lady communicated easily due to two reasons.
One was the shared empathy of minority victim consciousness. The second was that
like her dead husband my name too was David.
She opened up to me about her experiences as a teen - ager in the concentration
camp. What she related was almost unbelievable. Hitlers Nazis boasting of Aryan
ancestry and a great culture and civilization had conducted themselves in beastly
fashion. This authentic first - hand account gave me a vivid insight into that horror. I
may not have believed it had I heard it from any other than this unimpeachably
sincere source.
This then was the enormity and gravity of the holocaust. It was so vast, so inhumane,
so terrible that few would have believed it possible. Yet it was true and should we
forget that such crimes are not possible we are condemned to relive such genocidal
tragedies again and again. This is what Rwanda, Bosnia, Sudan, Nigeria , India , Sri
Lanka and a host of countries remind us. Until and unless justice is done to the
perpetrators such crimes against humanity will be replicated and duplicated. But as I
mentioned earlier none of the present day crimes against humanity compare in scope
and scale with the holocaust.
This then was the formidable task before Wiesenthal when he embarked on his
vocation of seeking justice for victims of the holocaust. Interestingly enough
Wiesenthal in his memoirs has written of an incident during his days of
incarceration.In the final paragraph of his memoirs, he quotes what an SS corporal
told him in 1944: "You would tell the truth [about the death camps] to the people in
America. That's right. And you know what would happen, Wiesenthal? They wouldn't
believe you. They'd say you were mad. Might even put you into an asylum. How can
anyone believe this terrible business - unless he has lived through it?"
He certainly lived through suffering terrible ordeals.. He was kept in twelve different
camps by both the Russians and Germans. He lost 89 relatives including his mother,
step father and step brother. He himself escaped from one camp but was rearrested
in a few months. Once he was on the execution list awaiting death on a Sunday but
the German soldiers stopped their work half - way to attend a church service and so
gained a reprieve. He also attempted suicide twice by slashing his wrists and hanging.
During the tail - end of the war he was forced to march westwards with other prisoners
on a long journey that all but killed him. When he was finally liberated by the
Americans on May 5th 1945 at Mauthausen in Upper Austria Wisenthal weighed only
99 pounds.
After recovery Simon embarked on what was to be his life vocation thereafter. As he
was to write in his second book of memoirs " Survival is a privilege which entails
obligations. I am forever asking myself what I can do for those who have not survived.
The answer I have found for myself (and which need not necessarily be the answer for
every survivor) is: I want to be their mouthpiece, I want to keep their memory alive, to
make sure the dead live on in that memory".
So Simon and some others began initially helping the American war crimes unit in
targeting Nazi war criminals After work was wound up in 1947 Wiesenthal and 30
other volunteers set up a documentation center in Linz, Austria to assemble evidence
for future trials. With the cold war hotting up both big powers lost interest in pursuing
Nazis. Frustrated volunteers drifted away and the center was shut down in 1954.
Wiesenthal began working in relief and welfare while continuing to collect information
privately. What reinvigorated Wiesenthal was the capture of Adolf Eichmann the
seemingly inconspicuous technocrat who, as chief of the Gestapo's Jewish
Department, had supervised the implementation of the "Final Solution."
It is said that "while continuing his salaried relief and welfare work, including the
running of an occupational training school for Hungarian and other Iron Curtain
refugees, Wiesenthal never relaxed in his pursuit of the elusive Eichmann who had
disappeared at the time of Germany's defeat in World War II. In 1953, Wiesenthal
received information that Eichmann was in Argentina from people who had spoken to
him there. He passed this information on to Israel through the Israeli embassy in
Vienna and in 1954 also informed Nahum Goldmann, but the FBI had received
information that Eichmann was in Damascus, Syria. It was not until 1959 that Israel
was informed by Germany that Eichmann was in Buenos Aires living under the alias of
Ricardo Klement. He was captured there by Israeli agents and brought to Israel for
trial. Eichmann was found guilty of mass murder and executed on May 31, 1961".
Encouraged by the capture of Eichmann, Wiesenthal reopened the Jewish
Documentation Center, this time in Vienna, and concentrated exclusively on the
hunting of war criminals. The work to be done was enormous. Germany's war
criminal files contained more than 90,000 names, most of them of people who have
never been tried. Thousands of former Nazis, not named in any files, were also known
to be at large, often in positions of prominence, throughout Germany. Aside from the
cases themselves, there was the tremendous task of persuading authorities and the
public that the Nazi Holocaust was massive and pervasive
The Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna was a simple , sparsely furnished
three-room office with a staff of four, including Wiesenthal. Contrary to belief,
Wiesenthal did not usually track down the Nazi fugitives himself. His chief task was
gathering and analyzing information. In that work he was aided by a vast, informal,
international network of friends, colleagues, and sympathizers, including German
World War II veterans, appalled by the horrors they witnessed. He has even received
tips from former Nazis with grudges against other former Nazis. It was said that when
former Nazis quarrelled in the beer halls of Germany they would threaten each other
of tipping off Wiesenthal about the past.
A special branch of his Vienna office documented the activities of right-wing groups,
neo-Nazis and similar organizations. Wiesenthal culled painstakingly every pertinent
document and record he could get and listened to the many personal accounts told
him by individual survivors. His methodical working style was once described thus -
" With an architect's structural acumen, a Talmudist's thoroughness, and a brilliant
talent for investigative thinking, Wiesenthal pieces together the most obscure,
incomplete, and apparently irrelevant and unconnected data to build cases solid
enough to stand up in a court of law. The dossiers are then presented to the
appropriate authorities. When, as often happens, they fail to take action, whether from
indifference, pro-Nazi sentiment, or some other consideration, Wiesenthal goes to the
press and other media, for experience has taught him that publicity and an outraged
public opinion are powerful weapons".
Wiesenthal kept on working till his 94th year. He retired only in 2003 the year that he
lost his childhood sweetheart wife of 67 years. The last two years saw him leading a
quiet life of reading, correspondence and philately.
The man depicted as the greatest nazi hunter of them all claims to have aided and
assisted in bringing more than 1100 Nazi fugitives to justice. These figures are
disputed by others. There is however no denying that the number brought to justice
through the efforts of Wisenthal was high both in quantity and quality.
One of his high profile cases was Karl Silberbauer, the Gestapo officer who arrested
Anne Frank, the fourteen year-old German-Jewish girl who was murdered by the Nazis
after hiding in an Amsterdam attic for two years. Dutch neo-Nazi propagandists had
been discrediting the authenticity of Anne Frank's famous diary until Wiesenthal
located Silberbauer, then a police inspector in Austria, in 1963. "Yes," Silberbauer
confessed, when confronted, "I arrested Anne Frank."
In October 1966, sixteen SS officers, nine of them found by Wiesenthal, went on trial
in Stuttgart, West Germany, for participation in the extermination of Jews in Lvov. High
on Wiesenthal's most-wanted list was Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka
and Sobibor concentration camps in Poland. After three years of patient undercover
work by Wiesenthal, Stangl was located in Brazil and remanded to West Germany for
imprisonment in 1967. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in prison.
Let me quote some extracts from an article written by Ralph Bluementhal in the "New
York Times: after Wiesenthal's death. The excerpts provide great insight into the
positives and negatives of the man -
" Mr. Wiesenthal, a bulky figure with a clipped mustache who sometimes laughed that
people mistakenly saw him as harmless, pressed his searches despite vilification and
threats of death and kidnapping made against him, his wife, Cyla, and their daughter,
Paulinka. In 1982 his house in Vienna was damaged by a firebomb, but he escaped
unharmed. (German and Austrian neo-Nazis were charged, and one went to jail.) Yet
he rejected entreaties to move, insisting that there was a symbolic purpose in doing
his work from a longtime redoubt of Nazism and anti-Semitism where, he once said, his
efforts were "unhappily tolerated."
Calling himself "the bad conscience of the Nazis," he vowed to continue his efforts
"until the day I die." His goal, he said, was not vengeance but ensuring that Nazi
crimes "are brought to light so the new generation knows about them, so it should not
happen again."
It was a matter of pride and satisfaction, he said in 1995, as he approached his 87th
birthday, that old Nazis who get into quarrels threaten one another with a vow to go to
Simon Wiesenthal.
He wrote grippingly of the German killing industry, cataloging at one point a list of
property sent to Berlin from the Treblinka death camp between October 1942 and
August 1943: "Twenty-five freight cars of women's hair, 248 freight cars of clothing,
100 freight cars of shoes," along with 400,000 gold watches, 320,000 pounds of gold
wedding rings and 4,000 carats of diamonds "over 2 carats."
In recent years he spoke out in favor of war crimes trials for genocide in the former
Yugoslavia, and lent his name to a Holocaust study center and Museum of Tolerance
in Los Angeles.
Sometimes he taught his lessons with an acerbic wit. Failing to sway a Jewish lawyer
who persisted in defending the right of neo-Nazis to march even through a Jewish
neighborhood, Mr. Wiesenthal offered a final rebuke: "A Jew may be stupid, but it's
not obligatory."
Once, in West Germany, he related, he defused a harangue by a speaker who
accused him of dining on Nazis for breakfast, lunch and dinner. "You are mistaken,"
he replied. "I don't eat pork."
He became embroiled in Austrian politics, feuding bitterly with the Socialist chancellor,
Bruno Kreisky. He was also assailed for siding with Kurt Waldheim, the former United
Nations secretary general and Austrian president who concealed his wartime service
with a German intelligence unit implicated in atrocities in the Balkans.
Critics challenged Mr. Wiesenthal's claims to have played a role in the seizure of Adolf
Eichmann, who directed the transport of European Jews to Hitler's death camps and
was kidnapped by the Israelis from Argentina in 1960, then tried, convicted and
hanged.
He also promulgated many false sightings in the bungled hunt for Josef Mengele, the
Auschwitz death camp doctor who fled to South America and drowned in Brazil in 1979.
.
Mr. Wiesenthal was credited with a crucial role in many other cases. His investigations
in São Paulo, Brazil, led to the arrests of Franz Stangl, former commandant of the
Treblinka and Sobibor death camps in Poland, who was extradited to West Germany
in 1967 and died three years later while serving a life sentence, and Gustav Franz
Wagner, a former deputy commandant at Sobibor, who died during extradition
proceedings in 1980. He was instrumental in the arrest and extradition from Argentina
of Josef Schwammberger, an SS officer convicted in the killings of prisoners and slave
laborers at camps in Poland and sentenced to life in prison in Germany in 1992.
Mr. Wiesenthal tracked down Karl Silberbauer, at the time a Vienna policeman, who
had been the Gestapo aide responsible for arresting Anne Frank and her family in
their secret annex in Amsterdam, a feat of sleuthing that buttressed the credibility of
Anne's diary in the face of neo-Nazi claims that it was fabricated.
He unmasked Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan, a whip-wielding guard at the Maidanek
death camp who was living in Queens and who received a life sentence in West
Germany. And he put a reporter for The New York Times on the trail of Valerian D.
Trifa, a leader of the fascist Iron Guard in Bucharest, Romania, who fomented a
massacre of the Jews, later found refuge in Michigan as archbishop of the Romanian
Orthodox Episcopate in the United States and was deported in 1984, to Portugal,
where he died three years later.
Mr. Wiesenthal penetrated veils of secrecy shrouding the Nazi euthanasia program
and doctors who conspired in killing "useless eaters." He also traced the escape
routes of SS criminals and other Nazis, documenting the underground network known
from its German initials as Odessa. And as much as tracking down fugitive Nazis
himself, he took it as his mission to goad governments around the world not to drop
their pursuit and prosecution of war criminals.
But his efforts in the hunt for Eichmann and Mengele, two of Nazi Germany's most
heinous criminals, were disputed.
One of the most rancorous episodes in Mr. Wiesenthal's postwar career pitted him
against Chancellor Kreisky, who was also Jewish and whom Mr. Wiesenthal accused in
the 1970's of pursuing a politically expedient alliance with former Nazis to strengthen
his Socialist Party. Mr. Kreisky fired back with intimations that Mr. Wiesenthal had
collaborated with the Gestapo, a charge that Mr. Wiesenthal labeled ludicrous, and
that was never backed up.
That fracas was followed a decade later by Mr. Wiesenthal's dispute with the World
Jewish Congress over the Waldheim affair.
In early 1986, when the former secretary general ran as the conservative party
candidate for president, the Jewish Congress investigated his wartime record,
uncovering evidence that he had not sat out most of the war, as he had always
claimed. Instead he had apparently served as a lieutenant with a German Army
intelligence and propaganda unit that had carried out deportations and atrocities in
the Balkans, and had initialed reports of "severe" measures to be taken against
captives.
From the outset Mr. Wiesenthal took issue with the allegations, but not for reasons of
politics, he asserted.
"The truth was simpler," he wrote in his book, "Justice, Not Vengeance." "I was not
prepared to attack Kurt Waldheim as a Nazi or a war criminal because from all I knew
about him and from all that emerged from the documents, he had been neither a Nazi
nor a war criminal."
In 1993 Eli M. Rosenbaum, former general counsel of the World Jewish Congress and
later director of the Justice Department Office of Special Investigations, a Nazi-hunting
task force, linked Mr. Wiesenthal to a Waldheim cover-up.
For his part, Mr. Wiesenthal contended that he had correctly informed the Israelis that
Mr. Waldheim had not been a Nazi party member nor in the SS, the elite guard, and
that the World Jewish Congress was unfairly trying for its own purposes to brand Mr.
Waldheim a war criminal. While he faulted Mr. Waldheim's credibility, Mr. Wiesenthal
defended his own conduct. In a world where people believe in Jewish conspiracies, he
told an interviewer, "accusations from Jewish sources must be able to stand up to all
tests of credibility."
Although a reviewer for The New York Times took issue with "Betrayal" for appearing
to equate Mr. Wiesenthal and Mr. Waldheim in villainy, its documentation was widely
praised, winning a jacket endorsement from Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and
writer".
Whatever the criticism and controversy surrounding Wiesenthal there is no doubt that
he was a man with a mission and an idealist par excellence. He had a keen sense of
humour and one person who associated with him in a trip to Canada years ago wrote
to the "Toronto Star: that Wiesenthal related many "corny" jokes at night. It was this
sense of humour that helped him survive nazism and sustain his anti - nazi drive.
Disappointed with Ottawas lethary in tracking down ex - nazis Wiesenthal vowed then
that he would never vist Canada again. He never did. There are seven cases pending
ex - nazis in Canada now.
Wiesenthal's first book of memoirs, The Murderers Among Us, was published in 1967.
During a visit to the United States to promote the book, Wiesenthal announced that he
had found Mrs. Hermine Ryan, nee Braunsteiner, a housewife living in Queens, New
York. According to the dossier, Mrs. Ryan had supervised the killings of several
hundred children at Majdanek. She was extradited to Germany for trial as a war
criminal in 1973 and received life imprisonment.
His second book of memoirs published in 1989 was "Justice Not Vengeance". In 1981,
came the Academy Award-winning documentary, Genocide, narrated by Elizabeth
Taylor and the late Orson Welles, and introduced by Simon Wiesenthal. He was also
consultant for the movie "Odessa File" based on the Frederick Forsythe novel. The
Boys from Brazil (Twentieth Century Fox, 1978), a major motion picture based on Ira
Levin's book of the same name, had Sir Laurence Olivier starring as Herr Lieberman,
a character modelled on Wiesenthal.
Wiesenthal won many awards and honours but the one prize he coveted the Nobel
peace prize eluded him. What gratified him most was the Simon Wiesenthal Center an
international Jewish human rights organization dedicated to preserving the memory of
the Holocaust by fostering tolerance and understanding through community
involvement, educational outreach and social action. The Center confronts important
contemporary issues including racism, antisemitism, terrorism and genocide and is
accredited as an NGO both at the United Nations and UNESCO. With a membership of
over 400,000 families, the Center is headquartered in Los Angeles and maintains
offices in New York, Toronto, Miami, Jerusalem, Paris and Buenos Aires.
Established in 1977, the Center closely interacts on an ongoing basis with a variety of
public and private agencies, meeting with elected officials, the U.S. and foreign
governments, diplomats and heads of state. Other issues that the Center deals with
include: the prosecution of Nazi war criminals; Holocaust and tolerance education;
Middle East Affairs; and extremist groups, neo-Nazism, and hate on the Internet.
Simon Wisenthal was born on December 31st 1908 in Buczacz, in what is now the
Lvov Oblast section of the Ukraine.He studied at the Technical University of Prague,
from which he received his degree in architectural engineering in 1932. In 1936,
Simon married Cyla Mueller his childhood sweetheart and worked in an architectural
office in Lvov till 1939 when the Second World war erupted . Thereafter his life along
with millions of other jews was shattered and uprooted. During the war years both
were separated and after one point each believed that the other was dead. They were
reunited in late 1945 and in 1946 their daughter Pauline was born. She lives in Israel
now the mother of three children.
Wiesenthal was often asked to explain his motives for becoming a Nazi hunter.
According to Clyde Farnsworth in the New York Times Magazine (February 2, 1964),
Wiesenthal once spent the Sabbath at the home of a former Mauthausen inmate, now
a well-to-do jewelry manufacturer. After dinner his host said, "Simon, if you had gone
back to building houses, you'd be a millionaire. Why didn't you?" "You're a religious
man," replied Wiesenthal. "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 have smuggled coffee and American cigarettes',
Another will say, 'I built houses', But I will say, 'I didn't forget you'."
A portrait of
Simon Wiesenthal
and his wife Cyla,
1936.
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