Vienna, Austria, at the age of 96, the Simon Wiesenthal Center announced Tuesday, September 20.
"Simon Wiesenthal was the conscience of the Holocaust," said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the International Human Rights group named in Wiesenthal’s honor in a statement seen by BosNewsLife News Center in Budapest.
Overcoming "the world’s indifference and apathy," Simon Wiesenthal helped bring over 1,100 Nazi War Criminals before the Bar of Justice, the organization said.
Wiesenthal also played an important part in helping the Israeli secret service track down Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Nazis’ "Final Solution" — the extermination of Europe’s Jewish population.
EICHMANN SEIZED
Eichmann was seized by Israeli agents in Argentina and taken to Israel to be tried. He was executed there in 1961, something that would have been impossible without Wiesenthal’s
determination, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said.
"When the Holocaust ended in 1945 and the whole world went home to forget, he alone remained behind to remember. He did not forget [and] became the permanent representative of the victims, determined to bring the perpetrators of the history’s greatest crime to justice," added Rabbi Hier.
He said there was "no press conference and no president or Prime Minister or world leader announced his appointment. He just took the job. It was a job no one else wanted."
"OVERWHELMING TASK"
The rabbi noted that "the task was overwhelming [and] the cause had few friends" as "the Allies were already focused on the Cold War, the survivors were rebuilding their shattered lives and Simon Wiesenthal was all alone, combining the role of both prosecutor and detective at the same time."
Born in 1908 in the town of Buchach in what is now Ukraine, Wiesenthal practiced architecture prior to World War II, when he was twice imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, in 1941-43 and 1944-45, experts said.
Wiesenthal was freed by American soldiers from the camp at Mauthausen in central Austria in May 1945, but dozens of his family members, among them his mother, stepfather and stepbrother died in the Nazi genocide.
DOCUMENTATION CENTER
He founded the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna two years after the end of the war and in 1977 helped set up the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, to fight bigotry and anti-Semitism worldwide. Around 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, experts say, 600-thousand of which were Hungarians.
When asked why he became a Nazi hunter, he was quoted as saying that "when history looks back I want people to know the Nazis weren’t able to kill millions of people and get away with it." His work stands as a reminder and a warning for future generations, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said about its co-founder.
"Today, together with its world renowned Museum of Tolerance, it is a 400,000 member strong international center for Holocaust remembrance, the defense of human rights and the Jewish people. With offices throughout the world, the Wiesenthal Center carries on the continuing fight against bigotry and antisemitism and pursues an active agenda of related contemporary issues," the Simon Wiesenthal Center stressed.
"I have received many honors in my lifetime," Wiesenthal reportedly said. "When I die, these honors will die with me. But the Simon Wiesenthal Center will live on as my legacy." Funeral arrangements were not immediately clear, but more details were to emerge later Tuesday, September 20. (With BosNewsLife Research and BosNewsLife News Center).
